Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Myth, Metaphor &

Morality
Preface
This eBook collects a series of posts I wrote at
[Link] If you don’t want to shell out the
money to buy this book, you can read the contents for free at that site. I plan
to leave it up for a while.
Each chapter consists of a separate post. The chapters will differ slightly
from the original posts – I’ve made a few minor edits for clarity and caught
some typos. I also added a few points that occurred to me after I posted
them. More important is the fact that in the course of posting the individual
essays, I got some excellent comments and corrections from readers, to
whom I owe a collective “Thank You”. I’ve incorporated their comments
into the book at various places. If you read this book and want to contribute
to the dialogue, feel free to post your thoughts to the relevant episode page
at the site. I get notice of those comments and I’ll respond there.
If you’re a reader who likes to sample chapters in advance, feel free (within
the limits of what Amazon permits). The Introduction, which is long,
outlines my theory of the series. If you’ve seen the show and can’t be
spoiled, I’d suggest sampling Some Assembly Required, Lie to Me, Amends
(also long), Gingerbread, Choices, Graduation Day, The Initiative,
Goodbye Iowa, or The Gift. Those chapters probably have the most intrinsic
interest and give you a good idea of how I see the show.
I also owe a great deal of thanks to my daughter Allison. She’s the one who
asked me to watch this new show with her, and she kept me watching until I
became obsessed on my own. Additional “thank yous” go to all the posters
at All Things Philosophical on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, etc.
([Link] They taught me more about the show than I
had dreamed of watching it on my own. There are too many to thank
individually, but they know who they are.
 Introduction

I originally created the web site for two purposes: to comment on and
analyze the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer; and to post the
annotations I’ve made to certain specific references in the text of the
transcripts. The second of these goals got modified along the way, mostly
because it proved cumbersome. I actually have transcripts, and I’ve
annotated them via footnotes and hyperlinks as described below. I ended up
not posting them because I don’t own the transcripts I have – I’ve copied
them from other sites and I feel a bit uncomfortable about using them.
They’re also long and in different formats; cleaning them up to be uniform
would be a lot of trouble even if length were no issue.
What I’ve done instead of providing annotated transcripts is add a series of
“trivia notes” at the end of each episode post. These are the most interesting
of the annotations which I have here on my computer and I’ll refer to them
as such below.
Both the essays and the annotations/trivia notes require some explanation
about the choices I made when I embarked on this project, so I need to
begin by describing how and why I divided the project as I have.
Annotations to any literary work – and I include television and movies as
literary works, just like plays – can take many forms. In general, the editor
is trying to supply information s/he thinks the reader may need in order to
understand the text. The trouble is, the phrase “understand the text” is
vague. Understand what about the text, specifically? The meaning of
words? Cultural references? Jokes? Metaphors? The author’s intent? How
the original audience reacted?
Let me give one example to underscore the difficulty and the choices
annotators have to make. The scene is just after the credits in Episode 28,
Bewitched, Bothered & Bewildered:
“Sunnydale High School …. Cordelia walks up the steps from the street.
She sees her friends sitting on a wall and heads over to them. When they
see her coming they all stand up and make their way toward the main
entrance, [moving quickly].
Cordelia: Wait up. Hey, wait up! (jogs to catch up) Excuse me! Where's the
fire sale?”
Consider the dialogue here. “Fire sale” is a reasonably familiar term. It
means a sale which takes place after a business suffers a fire. The
merchandise may have suffered some damage, but there may be good deals
to be had as well. Similarly, the idiomatic expression “where’s the fire?”
means that someone is rushing off as if in an emergency. There’s no direct
connection between the two expressions, yet it works in this dialogue for
the simple reason that we, the viewers, know that Cordelia’s friends are
superficial twits; they would never rush off to rescue anyone from a fire, but
would elbow their way through a crowd if they thought they could get a
good deal on some clothing. The line is funny because the context makes
the unique juxtaposition of the phrases appropriate.
Now, imagine that someone tried to explain every witticism in any TV
show or other text, particularly one noted for its sophisticated word play (as
BtVS is). The annotations would be infinite. Well, at least they’d be
extensive; by the count of Emily Dial-Driver and Jesse Stallings there are
over 4000 allusions made during the course of the show. I can’t even be
sure I caught them all.
Different annotations treat these issues in different ways. A reader of
Chaucer probably needs more help with the meaning of words than does a
reader of Shakespeare. Both could probably use some help with cultural
references, but the editor has to make arbitrary decisions in both cases:
which words are more likely to be unfamiliar, and which references no
longer resonate? Worse yet, these factors change over time; an annotation
made in 1860 would make different choices than an annotation in 2013.
Now to the choices. I adopted a 3-part solution to the problem. First, I
decided that analysis takes up too much space to work well with footnotes.
The really sophisticated annotations of classical literature – an example
would be Charles Singleton’s 6 volume edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy –
end up longer than the text itself. Most of the time, people who watch the
show don’t want to search through that volume of analysis to find the
specific reference they want. They just want to know, for example, what
Shakespeare play was the source of the Master’s greeting in The Wish. (He
said, “What news on the Rialto?”; the reference is to The Merchant of
Venice, Act III, Scene 1.)
My analysis is contained in the episode essay. The trivia notes mention
information about the cultural references, whether Shakespeare or Star
Wars. I use links much of the time because they’re less disruptive to the
reader. Be aware that the link won’t necessarily take you to the precise
information – you might have to read the page or make an inference from
the information supplied in the link. On rare occasions, when I think some
explanation of the text is necessary or when I can’t find a good link, I add
the explanation in the notes.
Most of the links go to Wikipedia. That’s not because it’s necessarily the
best source, but because it’s the easiest for the reader. Also, I can count on
such links being available in the future, which isn’t always the case for
smaller sites. I tried to avoid commercial sites for references to specific
products – it just seemed tacky to link there.
I tried to use the trivia notes sparingly. With the exceptions mentioned
above, they serve as cross-references when the characters refer back to
events in an earlier episode. For example, at the beginning of the episode
Angel, Xander asks Buffy to dance. She responds, “Rain check?” Xander
eventually does get his dance, though not quite the way he expected, in
When She Was Bad. These internal references within the show add, I think,
to the literary value of the show, and the writers clearly expected the
audience to remember the original scenes and relate them to the later ones.
I chose not to annotate word meaning except in cases when I thought an
idiom was unusual or peculiarly American, and in that case I hyperlinked in
most cases. I did not annotate the many English slang terms used by Giles
and Spike – in general they express emotion, so no exact “translation” is
necessary to get the idea.
The decision not to annotate meaning may seem odd given the purpose of
this site. “Buffyspeak” has always struck viewers as one of the most
noteworthy features of the show, and was creative enough to attract the
attention of linguists (see Slayer Slang: A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Lexicon
and Neologize Much?). Some of the dialogue requires a fairly sophisticated
understanding of English. Take, for example, this passage from The Prom:
“Buffy: Then what? What's with the dire?
Angel: It's uh, it's nothing.
Buffy: No, you have 'something' face.
Angel: I think we need to talk, but not now and not here.
Buffy: No. No, if you have something to say, then say it. (silence) Angel,
drop the cryptic.”
A footnote wouldn’t really do justice to this passage. Words like “dire” and
“cryptic” aren’t given unusual definitions, they’re just used in unusual ways
(an adjective as a noun). My judgment is that I can expect native English
speakers to understand the dialogue today. If and when that changes in the
future, it may be necessary to include explanations of meaning.
I’m fully aware that my distinction between word meaning and cultural
reference is artificial. Pretty much all nouns have a real world referent. The
distinction I’m drawing (very subjectively) is between those which have
long usage and those which refer to more ephemeral things or events which
would have been recognized by many viewers at the time of the original
broadcast, but are now dated (or carbon dated, to use a Buffyism).
I had to make other judgment calls as well. Take spoilers, for example. If I
cross-reference an earlier episode with a later one, I run the risk of
disclosing plot points to people reading for the first time. I’ve therefore only
cited the earlier episode in the later one and not vice versa. The same holds
true in the episode essays (see below) – no spoilers for future episodes.
Words or phrases with multiple meanings also pose a judgment call. This
tends to be especially true for titles, where the writers tried to express
multiple themes very compactly. What I generally did was link the most
unusual meaning and assume the reader would understand the others from
the context of the episode. In a few cases I noted a second meaning.
Then there’s the problem of continuity. BtVS ran 7 seasons and each
episode built on the previous ones. The writers could reasonably expect the
audience to keep track of basic plot points and characterization. For this
reason, I’ve noted references to characters or general events only when at
least one episode intervened and tried to use common sense on what
constitutes a “reference” and what is merely continuity. When the allusion
is to a specific statement or event, I note it even if it occurred in the
previous episode, but not if it happened in the current one.
Lastly there’s the perhaps related problem of multiple usages of terms. Take
the word “Scooby”, for example. It appears in many episodes, often several
times in a particular one. Should I annotate only the first time it appears?
Only the first time in each episode? I’ve compromised somewhat and
adopted the former approach. As Buffy herself would say (and did say),
“Life is short.”
Having limited hyperlinks and footnotes this way leaves plenty of room for
my third strategy, namely essays and comments on each episode and on the
season as a whole. It’s in these essays that I’ll talk about all the other
features of BtVS which made it such a powerful and important show. I guess
that means I should now explain what I understand to be those features.

B. The Importance of Buffy the Vampire Slayer

“Buffy remains the most intensely studied television series by television

critics and scholars in the history of television. *** Seven years after the
final episode of Buffy there seems to be no end in sight of books and essays
and academic conferences covering every conceivable aspect of the series.
Even critically acclaimed series like The Sopranos and The Wire receive
only a small percentage of the critical attention that Buffy [has]. The reason,
I believe, lies in this rich subtext undergirding the show. We can say so
much about Buffy because it says so much on so many levels.”
Robert Moore, [Link]
spotlight-on-joss-whedon/ [Note: PopMatters has taken down its essays
from which I’ve quoted and has reissued them as a book. The links were
correct originally but aren’t any more.]
Actor James Marsters says, “I am not surprised at all that the show in any
form continues to live on. It's a very potent metaphor. I don't want to
oversell this but it's the same theme as Catcher in the Rye, it's the same
theme as Hamlet; how do you get through adolescence? How do you get
through the period from childhood to adulthood when you realize the world
is not a perfect place? How do you care about the world, how do you not
give up on the world, how do you accept the fact that it is a corrupt
environment and still engage it? I think that's an important thing to talk
about, I think that artists should go back there more often, and I'm really
glad Joss was able to find a metaphor to talk about something that is a
serious subject with so much humor.”
[Link]
James-Marsters-(Buffy-the-Vampire-Slayer,-Angel).htm
We can evaluate the importance of literature (broadly defined to include
theater, movies and television) in many ways, e.g., by its theme, its social
impact, its subtext, or its creative use of language. I’m going to touch on all
these factors in explaining why I wrote the essays. I’ll begin with perhaps
the least significant, namely the social impact of the show.

1. Social Impact

There’s no rule that says works of great art or literature need to have any
significant impact on the culture of their own day – there are many famous
stories of artists unappreciated in their own lifetimes – but it’s certainly a
consideration. Buffy the Vampire Slayer had a social importance out of
proportion to the number of its viewers.
One reason for that was its relation to the internet. The show debuted in
March 1997, just as the internet was beginning to come into widespread
use. It was, to the best of my knowledge, the first TV show to set up its own
internet site, complete with a posting board (called, appropriately enough,
The Bronze). Fans of the show took full advantage of the internet access;
Buffy discussions took on an importance on the net which they probably
never had in everyday life. There’s even a book about the show’s internet
impact.
In addition, the internet created new options for the genre of “fanfic”. For
those of you unfamiliar with the term, an author of “fanfic” takes an
incident from a book, movie, or TV show and explores an issue which
never happened in the original. It might be a character issue, a relationship,
or a plot device. While the term “fanfic” is new, the concept is not. A great
deal of literature consists of “fanfic”. The Aeneid, for example, is really just
“fanfic” on the Iliad. Same with much of Greek tragedy. I don’t mean to
suggest that Buffy fanfic rises to this level, I just mean that the basic idea
has a long pedigree.
What’s important about Buffy fanfic is the sheer quantity. There’s a web
site, [Link] which collects fanfic on every
imaginable show. Even today, almost 10 years after the series finale, there’s
more Buffy fanfic than there is for any other TV show ever except Glee and
Supernatural. Other sites can be found following this link and searching the
page for the word “fanfic”. BtVS was also a popular source for songfic.
Buffy impacted popular culture in other important ways as well. My saying
this will be controversial among some fans, for reasons I’ll explain in an
essay on the episode Seeing Red, but Buffy was a pioneering show in how it
handled gay relationships. It’s perhaps too early even now to be sure if the
standards it set will be matched by television more generally, but the
potential is there.
While these social impacts make the show worthy of consideration, they
aren’t the focus of my analysis, though I’ll certainly mention them along the
way. I intend to concentrate on literary and thematic analysis. Before I get
to that, I first need to back up a minute and talk about the general topic of
analyzing literary texts.
2. How do we decide what a TV show is “about”?
I suppose that, by now, it’s a commonplace that every viewer watches a
different show. Each viewer processes an episode through the lens of his or
her previous life experience. That means a focus on different portions of the
episode, a different regard for the various characters, a different
understanding of the metaphors, a different take on the morality of a
character’s actions. It’s impossible to avoid this problem; I’m not going to
pretend that my analysis is “objective”. I am, though, going to pretend that
my analysis is thoughtful. I’ve given it a lot of thought, anyway, some
might say too much thought (quick, which character have I quoted?). In
addition, I’m going to supplement my own analysis with comments from
elsewhere on the internet (again, with attribution) so that each essay should
reflect different points of view.
Why, someone might ask, am I devoting all this work to a TV show, much
less one with the silly title of Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Maybe it’s the title,
but lots of people dismissed Buffy out of hand without ever watching it (or
watching very little). On its surface, the show might appear to be nothing
more than a female Steven Seagal movie – the main character uses martial
arts to defeat the bad guys. That certainly does describe the show; it’s just
not the only way to see it. I don’t insist that my way of seeing the show is
the only way, or even the best way. I do think, though, that it’s an important
way, one fully justified by the text.
You could also watch Hamlet just for the cool sword fights. That wouldn’t
be wrong so much as incomplete. The question with every work of
literature is not “what’s the least sophisticated way to understand the
work?”, it’s “what’s the most sophisticated way?”. Think of it like this – we
don’t judge a composer like Mozart on the basis of his worst composition,
but on his greatest. What separates Mozart from the ordinary composer is
not his weakest pieces, ones an ordinary composer might even write, but his
strongest ones, the ones no other person could have written. That should be
the way we judge literature as well.
So, can Buffy be seen as something more than a story about a pretty girl
who kicks ass? Obviously I think it can. It’s a story about friendship and
family, forgiveness and redemption, and about duty, sacrifice and courage.
There’s humor, including brilliant satire on high school, and there’s tragedy.
If Buffy really is “about” these themes, and if those themes are handled
well, that makes it worth our attention. Worth our attention in the way a
novel or play can be? Yes.
3. Why Buffy is Important
In my view, the great art form of the twentieth century was the movie, of
which I consider TV a sub-class. This doesn’t mean that it was the only art
form; obviously, novels and paintings, plays and sculpture, music and
architecture all remained important. It also doesn’t mean that every movie
made was great, any more than every canvas painted during the
Renaissance was great or all music written during the lifetime of J. S. Bach
was great. It does mean that, at their best, movies were artistic
masterpieces. If I’m right about this, that means Los Angeles is an artistic
capital equivalent to Florence or Rome in the 15th and 16th Centuries. I’m
not sure Americans have appreciated the artistic output of the 20th Century
to this extent, but I think we should.
TV, I’m sorry to say, hasn’t lived up to standard of the movies. There are, I
think, some good reasons for this. Many of the most popular TV shows
have been sit-coms. This genre simply doesn’t last as long as drama. A
great deal of humor derives from the social context. To illustrate with a
well-known example, in Shakespeare’s day the words “debt” and “death”
were pronounced the same. This allowed Shakespeare to make puns which
we no longer hear. Moreover, at that time sexual climax was referred to as a
“little death”. Thus, a “small debt” in Shakespeare’s plays might refer not to
a small amount of money owed, but to something else entirely (another
Buffy reference; recognize it?).
When the cultural context changes, as it has in the case of the Shakespeare
example and as it inevitably does, the audience loses the ability to “get” the
joke; they need it explained, and then they don’t laugh. In extreme cases,
they no longer find it funny even when it is explained. For a good
explanation of this process, read Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre.
I don’t mean to write off all television shows. Some of them have been
well-done, serious efforts. It’s just that, in general, TV shows have failed to
demonstrate the staying power of movies, and I think one important reason
for that is the reluctance of the producers to treat serious issues in a
sophisticated way. To put it in the language of showbiz, drama, even
tragedy, has longer legs than comedy. We can still appreciate the Greek
tragedies 2500 years after they were written because the issues they raise
still seem familiar today. We can understand that Antigone faces a serious
moral dilemma when she must choose between obeying the law of her city
and carrying out her family obligation. Though we can still appreciate
Shakespeare’s comedies, it’s the tragedies which everyone remembers as
his greatest works. Same reason – the serious issues tend to be those which
people of all eras recognize.
Critic Robert Moore identifies Buffy as the moment in which TV became
art:
“This was the decade in which television became art. So argues Emily
Nussbuam in a recent New York Magazine essay, “When TV Became Art”.
She certainly makes a strong case that 2000-2009 was a pivotal age for TV
and I strongly recommend her essay to anyone interested in the
development of television over the past decade. I agree that this was, all in
all, the finest decade for great television. Others have argued that TV had
arisen as an art form in earlier decades, some (though in dwindling
numbers) arguing for the fifties …. But Nussbaum has numbers on her side;
it is difficult to argue against the sheer quantity of very fine shows that
emerged in the past ten years. The number of truly great series from the past
ten years is so substantial that it might surpass the number of great shows
from all previous decades combined.
Nonetheless, I want to take issue with Nussbaum. I think that chopping the
overall picture up into decade-sized blocks obscures the reality. I believe
that one can point at a precise point where TV became art, and that point
was the debut of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. No one questions the enormous
influence that Joss Whedon’s quirky series exerted on other shows, but I do
not believe that many people realize the degree to which it altered the TV
landscape. TV was not art before Buffy, but it was afterwards. … To be fair,
Nussbaum does mention Buffy and Joss Whedon frequently in her essay,
obviously crediting both the show and the creator for much of the best that
the decade had to offer, but she seems to imply that TV as art was a work in
progress as the decade began and it most definitely was not.
Although many realize just how revolutionary Buffy was as a series and the
impact that it made on the medium (many TV creators site it as their
favorite show while others acknowledge its direct influence), not everyone
is aware of how groundbreaking the series was or of the number of concrete
changes it wrought on television. It was not merely a great TV series in its
own right, it helped redefine what TV could do.”
[Link]
owe-to-buffy/

Let’s consider some of the reasons why Buffy is important.

a. Minor Factors

A good show, like a good play, requires good acting and directing; these
days, it needs good quality special effects; and if it includes good music
choices, that’s a real plus. I’m not going to discuss these factors at length,
but I’ll say a few words here in this Introduction and then leave these alone
(mostly) in the individual episode comments. I need to emphasize that I’m
not here discussing the interpretive aspects of these factors, but only the
general quality of production values.

i. Acting

In my personal opinion – and it can’t be much more than that when it comes
to the quality of acting – the actors on BtVS were very good. I thought three
of the regular cast members (Sarah Michelle Gellar, Alyson Hannigan, and
James Marsters) were outstanding, others very good, and that many of the
guest stars contributed very significantly to the quality of the show.

ii. Innovation

Many of the episodes were innovative. The show made use of unreliable
narrators to great effect. One of the best episodes had no dialogue for 35 of
the 42 minutes. Another, one of the finest hours of television ever created,
deliberately dispensed with the background music which provides the
expected emotional cues in order to highlight the struggle of the characters
to understand what had happened. A musical episode – often voted the best
of the series by fans (a remarkable accomplishment for the 107th episode) –
wasn’t a gimmick, but an integral link in the overall story. The mix of
humor and horror has no competition in American television or cinema.
In addition, “Buffy reinvented what television could do with genre, breaking
down the barriers that separated one form another, blending them all
together, and then employing the elements of each as needed. The series
was a high school drama, a comedy, a horror/fantasy show, and, in one
memorable episode, a musical, all at once. I can’t think of a series before
Buffy that would routinely have you laughing your guts out one minute, on
the edge of your seat the next, and emotionally devastated soon after within
the confines of a ten-minute segment. This fluidity that Buffy introduced has
allowed television a degree of flexibility not found on shows of the past.”
Moore, supra.
 iii. Special Effects

The special effects varied in quality. BtVS generally had a relatively small
budget and it often showed in the special effects and other production
values, especially in the early years; some fans find Season 1 cheesy,
perhaps because it was a mid-season replacement on a shoestring budget,
perhaps because the actors were all still “finding” their characters and
because so many aspects of the show needed to be explained for future
purposes. Some viewers may find the low quality special effects distracting,
but for me at least they don’t affect the intrinsic value of the themes
presented.

iv. Suspension of Disbelief

Mention of special effects naturally brings up the related issue of the

suspension of disbelief. Most movies or plays require this to some extent.
BtVS draws on several existing genres and expects that you’ll understand
the conventions of those genres when it comes to suspending disbelief. Joss
Whedon, the creator of Buffy, explained that the show had its genesis in
horror movies:
“Where did the idea [for BtVS] come from? There’s actually an incredibly
specific answer to that question. It came from watching a horror movie and
seeing the typical ditzy blonde walk into a dark alley and getting killed. I
just thought that I would love to see a scene where the ditzy blonde walks
into a dark alley, a monster attacks her and she kicks its ass.”
Horror movies do follow certain conventions. People do stupid things
which put them in danger. That happens on BtVS too, but as the Whedon
quote demonstrates, the show also subverts those conventions. Part of the
sophistication and fun of watching it comes from recognizing that you’ve
been fooled by those conventions into expecting something very different
from what happened. The very first scene in the very first episode subverts
your expectations built upon past experience with the horror genre. It tells
you what the show intends to do.
In a show starring a superhero like Buffy, which also takes themes from
Westerns – she’s the sheriff in town, of course – the laws of physics and
experience will be violated on a regular basis: how many shots does a six
shooter hold? How many punches does it take to knock that guy out? The
truth is, all television (like all movies) uses stylized conventions which are
“unreal” and yet evoke an actual event. Take sex scenes, for example. Even
in most movies, the actors aren’t actually having sex. We know this, and yet
we’re willing to overlook it and say to ourselves “they’re having sex”.
Bullets on TV aren’t real, blood isn’t real, surgery isn’t real, courtroom
scenes aren’t real. I could add literally hundreds of examples. At some
level, we’re willing to suspend our disbelief and allow the story to take us
to the thematic or emotional conclusion.
This factor is even more prominent in the superhero genre, where heroes
like Superman, Batman, or Buffy regularly do physically impossible things.
Characters use witchcraft and super powers. Those will bother some people;
they just can’t get past the “unreality” of it. (Of course, the same is equally
true of the appearance of the ghost in Hamlet or of the gods in the Iliad ….)
This reaction can often be entirely irrational. For example, I’m a lawyer and
it drives me crazy to watch courtroom scenes because I immediately spot
the flaws, and that can wreck my enjoyment of the scene. But why should I
be perfectly content to watch Superman fly – violating the law of gravity –
while being angry if he gets the hearsay rule wrong? It makes no sense.
Anyone who wants to appreciate any show needs to be able to put all these
issues aside, just as they put aside “unreal” scenes in every movie, and
understand that we’re simply to say to ourselves “they’re having sex” or
“that’s magic” or “that’s surgery” even if it doesn’t look real. Those who
can’t do that probably won’t like the show.
There’s also the issue of how tightly we demand that the writers plot the
story. Every narrative leaves out some events. Nobody wants to watch the
characters sleeping for 8 hours straight, eating a full meal, etc. Even the
most tightly constructed plot lines might be criticized for leaving a gap in
the story. This is no less true of Buffy than it is of any other show, and
perhaps it’s more true – Joss Whedon has made it clear in interviews that
he’s prepared to sacrifice strict plotting in order to reveal an important
emotional truth (as all art does). In any case, BtVS does require a
willingness to suspend your disbelief, to lay aside niggling plot concerns for
the thematic or emotional punch. Here’s how one internet poster expressed
the attitude necessary to appreciate not just Buffy, but most literature:
“I'm not really interested in filling (or excavating) plot holes here, because
frankly, this show is myth to me, and if I fell into every plot hole in every
myth, I'd never have time for anything else. I willing[ly] suspend my
disbelief
in the face of greater revealed truth.”
v. Plot Structure and Continuity

The writing in any work of literature depends not just on cleverness of

phrase, but on how well the author develops the themes and characters over
time. Buffy meets very high standards on this score. Fans of the show
lament how difficult it is to show a new viewer a single episode to get them
interested – much of the show’s impact depends on having seen all the
previous ones. We may not understand the full import of an episode at the
time, because only later do all the implications become apparent.
Quoting Robert Moore again,
“One of the most important changes that Buffy brought about was a new
understanding of long story arcs on TV. … For most of the history of
television, the format of series was episodic. On almost all shows
(excepting soap operas), no matter what happened on one episode of a
series, the next week would witness a complete reset….
Buffy the Vampire Slayer changed TV narrative. Unlike the soaps and the
Hill Street Blues-type series, it established, beginning with the
extraordinary second season, an approach in which a season consisted of a
long story arc that had a beginning, a middle, and an end. Always leery of
cancellation, Whedon structured his arcs in season-long segments, though
he also began setting up major events seasons ahead of time. … Buffy made
it possible for television to tell a story, as opposed to a bunch of stories, a
story that came to a conclusion, as opposed to stories with no end. It still
had plenty of standalone episodes, but even in the middle of those, small
scenes would move the central arc forward, a technique employed by a host
of shows today, from Fringe to Chuck to Dexter. Damon Lindelhof, during
the first season of Lost, had his writing team watch Buffy a model of how he
wanted to the central narrative of the show to proceed. It is fascinating that
a huge number of TV creators and producers have cited Buffy as either a
major influence or actually worked under Whedon on one of his shows.”
The writers of Buffy (mostly Joss Whedon) understood this point very
consciously and were willing to wait a long time for events to play out for
maximum impact. Just to give one example, the key plot point of Episode
13, When She Was Bad, explains Buffy’s actions in Episode 33, Becoming I
– one of the great scenes in television history, which most fans can probably
quote by heart – and to a great extent explain Xander’s behavior at a key
moment in Episode 34, Becoming II. What Xander did was one of the most
controversial actions in the show’s history, generating countless debates on
the internet (which the writers knew).
Nevertheless, the writers waited 4 full seasons, until episode 127, Selfless,
to reference this sequence again. This wasn’t done in any artificial way,
with the writers self-consciously knowing of the prior episode and bringing
it up for no good reason. It was, to the contrary, something which could
have been brought up any number of times in the intervening years, but was
held for maximum impact at exactly the right moment. I personally jumped
out of my seat and shouted at the television when they finally used it.

vi. Music

Most viewers, I think, considered the music on the show to be outstanding,

sometimes inspired (see Music, Sound and Silence in Buffy the Vampire
Slayer). Just for some examples, I can’t think of another show or movie
which would choreograph a fight scene to a live Aimee Mann performance
or feature “Tales of Brave Ulysses” in two different episodes, one
hilariously funny, the other touching and poignant. Or one which would set
one of the most shocking and tragic scenes in the history of television to the
duet “O soave fanciulla” from Puccini’s “La Boheme”. In addition, the
music produced for the show itself by Christophe Beck was consistently
outstanding, Beck himself winning an Emmy for his work.
One of the fortunate consequences of a limited budget was that the show
made a concerted (pun intended) effort to find lesser known bands from the
Los Angeles club and college scene to play at the Bronze. This led to some
very creative and interesting choices in the music. I’ve heard, though I can’t
confirm, that this practice has been very influential for other shows and for
college radio stations. If so, that adds to Buffy’s cultural influence.
Another factor in the show’s use of music is that the lyrics almost always
relate directly to the characters shown or the episode themes in some way.
This requires a good deal of thought to achieve on a consistent basis.

b. Major Factors

As you can see from my comments about the subsidiary factors, I don’t
argue that BtVS is in any sense a perfect show. Nor do the dialogue and
metaphor rise to the level of Shakespeare. Over 7 seasons, BtVS aired 144
episodes. Most were very good; perhaps 20 or so were not. Even the good
episodes sometimes had their weaker moments, just as even the weaker
ones had a good scene or two.
In general, BtVS demonstrated good quality on the basic production values.
That makes it eligible to be treated as important, but it doesn’t, by itself,
make it important. Now let me get back to those factors which do move the
show into that higher category.
1. Growing Up

Buffy “brought character development to a new level. Typically on most

previous series, characters never really changed, never realistically retained
memories of traumas that they had suffered, never truly evolved. On
Buffy…, characters changed radically.” Moore, supra.
Glenn Brown described this process in detail:
“Quality and substance in storytelling tend to succumb to the weight of
their own seriousness, leaving behind the lighter fare and less morbid
cousins of popular culture in order to continue on in their overly serious
need to prove that they do indeed have something worthwhile to say. Where
the seemingly sillier stories are assumed to reside in that other, more
popular world, usually occupied by soap operas and other shallow vessels
of mindless fun, there are exceptions that prove the rule. Joss Whedon is
one of those exceptions. Pain, sacrifice, and the overwhelming need
constantly to grow and change in a way that actually makes us care, are
qualities necessarily of neither style, but which when aligned in the focus of
Joss Whedon, are made to converge into a glorious melding of allegory,
emotion, and maybe even, guilty pleasure.
Regardless of the dynamics of any particular group of characters in a Joss
Whedon story, the freedom afforded both the characters and the fictional
world to draw upon whatever inspiration makes sense for that character or
that moment, and the corresponding ripple effect it might bring to the rest of
the story, is a deeply woven ingredient in all the works of Joss Whedon,
amounting to a deep and scathing disregard for the status quo. This quality
has become one of the most identifiable marks of a Joss story, and has made
his fictional worlds seem as fully destructible as the one we live in, with
nothing and no one immune from change, or able to escape fully the orbital
pull of those around them. His stories exist within a construct that borrows
heavily from real life in the sense that, there is a consequence to every
action, which requires a constant cycle of consequence and change for
people, places, and even, in some cases, objects. This is a theme which
remains consistent throughout his works, not only elevating his stories
beyond the surface pop-culture reference point of which they are so much a
part but also serving to help keep his stories grounded in a reality that reacts
and responds very much like the one we experience every day, as
sometimes painful and heart-wrenching as it is. Partly because of this, the
fantastical worlds of vampires, demons, mind-wiping tech, and post-civil
war space adventurers, can become as real, compelling, and believable, as
the world we live in today.
For the simple reason that he had more time to fully develop his characters
and the world they lived in, due to the seven seasons it was on…, this
culture of change is perhaps most recognizable in the television series,
Buffy the Vampire Slayer. As Buffy progressed from the ordinary teenage
high school student that she started as (her first words to her Watcher after
sucking on her lollipop were a clueless, “Huh?”), to a Vampire Slayer who
had no equal (“Apocalypse? We’ve all been there/The same old trips/Why
should we care?”), she watched her world become increasingly dangerous
while fighting, among other things, personal as well as real demons,
transforming herself into almost a completely different person in response
to this. Buffy changed, her friends changed, and the world around her
changed, and the effect was seen in a slow progression over each season in
how she dealt with her enemies and her friends. By the end of the series,
almost nothing was as it had been when the show had started….
It is this permanency which has helped make Joss’s stories almost infinitely
rewatchable. We feel what the characters are feeling each time through,
gaining a deeper understanding of their motivations, and why they react as
they do. When something changes in a Joss Whedon story, it usually
changes for good with no turning back; there is no magical “reset” button
which brings the world or characters back to where they stood before the
episode started…. There is no easy escape; the only way out is to continue
forward, painful step by painful step. What the characters become as they
forge ahead, is a direct response to what it is they are going through, or
have gone through. The consequences are displayed in the personality and
actions of every character, in every way, requiring them and those around
them to change along with it….
Joss Whedon does in fact have something serious to say, serious enough
that his stories can be picked apart and debated like any good work of
fiction. Through the use of consequence and change, he has fashioned a
style of storytelling that manages to strike that elusive chord within us
where things that matter find a way to resonate in the same way they do in
our own lives. Things like character, story, and most importantly, the
common thread of allowing the consequences of actions and events to
change substantively his stories and characters. This is a theme that has
given his works a foundation that is rare in any medium, and also runs
counter to the less honest and adventurous styles. It’s a theme that, more
than any other, has come to define what a Joss Whedon story is really all
about, even more than his ability with characterization, plotting, or big
ideas. And the consequence of this is that he has produced a legacy of
works which have impacted pop-culture far more than it would seem they
should.” [Link]
change-in-the-works-of-joss-whedon-and-why-it-matter/
We first meet Buffy in her sophomore year of high school. Buffy gets older,
of course. In the seven seasons, she ages from 16 to 22. That means she
grows up. We’d expect to see real changes in her during that time, and in
fact we do see them. Since Buffy’s the hero of the show – the greatest hero
in American literature in my opinion – we’d also expect her to grow up in
the right way. As I’ll explain in more detail in the individual essays, the
show repeatedly challenges the viewer to think about what it means to
“grow up”, to become an adult. What distinguishes a teenager from an
adult? Buffy gives us some answers to those questions. Even when it
doesn’t give direct answers, it forces us to think about the issues.

In literature, there’s a name for works which describe the growing up

process. A novel which explores this theme is called by the German word
“bildungsroman”. The reason it’s a German word is that the term was first
applied to some works by the great German poet and novelist Goethe. The
word means, essentially, “coming of age novel”. BtVS is a bildungsroman.
You don’t need to take my word for the fact that the writers intended to
show this progression. Take it straight from Joss Whedon’s mouth (from an
AOL live chat, November 10, 2002): “"Buffy" is hard [to write] because it
is completely grounded in human experience. Every episode has to be about
what, you know, what it feels like to go through a certain period in your
life. In the rite of passage that is your life. We can never do an episode that
is purely fantastical and exciting because the show is about growing up.”
More recently (February 8, 2012) he reiterated this in an interview with
USA Today: “"Buffy was always about the arc of a life, and it wasn't ever
going to be one of those shows where they were perpetually in high school
and never asked why," Whedon says. "It was about change. So there's never
a time when Buffy's life isn't relevant."
The dialogue tells us many times that this is happening. Take, for example,
this passage from the end of Lie to Me:
“Buffy: Nothing's ever simple anymore. I'm constantly trying to work it
out. Who to love or hate. Who to trust. It's just, like, the more I know, the
more confused I get.
Giles: I believe that's called growing up.”
Growing up involves choices, making decisions about what kind of person
we want to be. Buffy has to make those choices; pretty much every episode
presents Buffy with decisions only she can make and the consequences of
her decisions. The choices she makes (that we all make) don’t just reveal
who she is right now, they shape what she will become in the future. Not
only is Buffy “the Chosen One”, the very last episode bears the title
“Chosen”, intending both the passive (to be chosen) and active (to choose)
meanings of that word. I can’t, obviously, prove this claim here by
describing this process for each of 144 episodes, but that’s part of what I’ll
be doing in the individual essays.

2. Metaphor

Placing BtVS into a fancy literary genre doesn’t, by itself, make the show
important. The substance of the discussion makes the show important, and
I’ll talk more about that. For now, let me move on to the way BtVS tells its
story. The significant factor here is metaphor. The extensive use of
metaphor on Buffy requires a careful reading of the text in order to fully
appreciate the story. “[Creator Joss] Whedon … credits his viewers with a
high degree of intelligence and assumes that they are capable of absorbing a
considerable degree of detail. He assumes a high level of literacy on the
part of viewers, such as making nods to highbrow films and movies.”
Robert Moore, [Link]
spotlight-on-joss-whedon/P1
When I was in college I had a particular English teacher who overdid
metaphor. He carried it so far that everything ended up a metaphor. That
drove me nuts at the time, and it made me forever cautious about claims to
see X as a symbol of Y. The metaphors that I’ll mention on the show are
either blatantly obvious or even expressly mentioned by the writers.
Quoting again from Joss Whedon’s AOL interview, “Buffy is made by a
bunch of writers who think very, very hard about what they are doing in
terms of psychology and methodology. … When somebody says there is a
philosophy behind "Buffy" that is the truth. When they say there is
symbolism and meaning in what we're doing, that's true too.”
A metaphor, in literature, is when a word (or, in the case of television, an
image) which literally looks like one thing is used to suggest something else
instead. In BtVS the use of metaphor is inherent in the show. Most of the
demons Buffy fights are metaphors. If the writers want to show Buffy
struggling with lust, they create a lust demon and have Buffy defeat it
(that’s an example one of the writers actually gave). The demons are
demons of the mind, personal demons that people commonly struggle with.
The most important such metaphor is Buffy herself. She’s the hero of the
show; we – the audience – are supposed to identify with her. When she feels
pain, we should also; when she’s sad, we should feel her sadness. Buffy is
us and we are her. That’s what I call the Central Metaphor for the show.
When Buffy faces a dilemma, we learn from her experience because we are,
in some sense, her. We feel (or should feel) what she feels: joy at her
triumphs, grief at her distress, gratitude towards her friends, anger at those
who betray her.
This brings up an important, related issue. Buffy’s a girl (duh). She faces
many of her issues as a girl. There’s a definite feminist message here – the
female as superhero. That doesn’t make her any less “us” than if she were
male. Nobody doubts that we should identify with male heroes in literature;
the fact that Buffy’s “just a girl” doesn’t change this. The message is
universal even if gender can only be particular.
If Buffy is us, and if the demons stand as metaphors for our flaws and our
fears, then what do vampires represent? Put another way, why is the show
titled Buffy the Vampire Slayer rather than Buffy the Demon Slayer?
To answer this question, we need to consider one of the most basic facts
about vampires in the genre: they never age. Vampires are frozen in time. In
School Hard, when Angel tells Spike (a vampire) that “things change”,
Spike responds angrily, “Not us! Not demons!” Or this from Smashed:
“[Vampire]: A man can change. Buffy: You’re not a man.”
Why are they frozen in time? Because they can’t make moral choices.
Within the show, vampires lack a soul. According to Joss Whedon, the soul
as it’s depicted in the show serves as a “moral compass”. With vampires,
that compass is pointing the wrong direction – their choices are governed
by selfish motives, so they can’t develop morally.
Think about what this means – that vampires can never grow up. But the
whole story of Buffy is, as I said before, about growing up. Being the
Slayer allows her to slay demons which are metaphors for her personal
demons that might prevent her from growing up. Thus, she slays vampires –
those who can’t grow up – as a metaphor for her own path to adulthood.
Vampires also can’t see themselves in the mirror. The mirror test is a
measure of self-awareness: “The test gauges self-awareness by determining
whether an animal can recognize its own reflection in a mirror as an image
of itself.” Since vampires can’t see their reflection, that’s a sign to the
viewers that vampires aren’t self-aware. We’re meant to contrast Buffy with
the vampires – she is, or at least is becoming (a key word in the show) self-
aware.
Vampires also bite; that’s been part of vampire lore since at least Bram
Stoker. BtVS adopts this lore, along with other aspects of the tradition
(wooden stakes to the heart, holy water, etc.). In this tradition of vampire
literature, the vampire’s bite generally serves as a metaphor for sexual
intercourse. Vampires reproduce by biting. As Buffy explains in the very
first episode, Welcome to the Hellmouth, “To make you a vampire they have
to suck your blood. And then you have to suck their blood. It's like a whole
big sucking thing.” But a vampire’s bite is also just a way to kill you. This
means you need to be conscious of which metaphor they’re using. Or, as
Freud said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. But do consider the
implications of using a stake…
This brings up an important point: metaphors are common on BtVS, but
they aren’t universal. Some demons serve no metaphorical purpose (e.g.,
Clem in Seasons 6-7). Don’t make the mistake my former English teacher
made of looking for metaphor in all the wrong places. Do be sensitive,
though, to the principal metaphors that I’ve just described.
Buffy herself and the vampires and demons don’t exhaust the list of
metaphors on the show. Buffy’s friends, Willow and Xander, and her
mentor, Giles, are also metaphors sometimes. Willow is Buffy’s spirit,
Xander her heart, Giles her mind. Often this is obvious in a particular
episode, but in any case the show made the equation explicit in the episodes
Primeval and Restless. As is true with vampires and sex, this is true
sometimes but not all the time; you need to evaluate the actions of the
characters and think about how they play out as both metaphor and in “real”
life.
Using other characters as metaphors for aspects of Buffy herself raises
interesting issues. One that gets debated on the internet a lot is whether the
show is “all about Buffy”, or whether it’s best seen as an ensemble show
with supporting characters who lead independent lives and have their own
story lines. (The writers were aware of this debate and even refer to it in the
dialogue.) I lean towards the “all about Buffy” side, but really there’s no
reason that both can’t be true. To the extent that other characters do
function, at times, as metaphors for aspects of Buffy, it’s essential that they
demonstrate their own characteristics and develop over time. The best
metaphors, after all, work both as metaphor and as straight story. Thus, we
can appreciate Xander’s attraction to demon women as part of his own life
story, but also see in it a reflection of Buffy’s attraction to “bad boys” (since
Xander represents Buffy’s heart). Part of the sophistication of the show is
that it forces us to think about these issues and reflect on what we see on-
screen. That’s what good literature does.
Magic is a metaphor too, sometimes. Principally so in Seasons 4-5-6,
though the metaphor changes during that time (with not always happy
results in my view). So is Buffy’s house. Other metaphors get used
episodically.
When we think of important works of literature, we expect them to use
language in creative ways and to make good use of metaphor. BtVS
qualifies on both counts. But the real test for literature is that it
communicates an important message. BtVS does that as well.
3. Themes

If I were asked to identify the single most important message

communicated by BtVS, my response would be this: accept responsibility.
This theme appears early in the very first episode, Welcome to the
Hellmouth:
“Buffy: Oh, why can't you people just leave me alone?
Giles: Because you are the Slayer. (comes down the stairs) Into each
generation a Slayer is born, one girl in all the world, a Chosen One, one
born with the strength and skill to hunt the vampires...”
If Buffy didn’t accept her responsibility as The Slayer, there’d be no story
to tell. That’s why the Prologue to every episode in Season 1 recites that “In
every generation there is a Chosen One. She alone will stand against the
vampires, the demons and the forces of darkness. She is the Slayer.” (My
emphasis.)
Note that word, “alone” and its complements, “One” and “the”. That’s
responsibility, all right. There’s nobody who can take her place, no higher
power to aid her:
“Buffy: (exhales) You don't have anything useful to tell me, do you? What
are you, just some immortal demon sent down to even the score between
good and evil?
Whistler: (impressed) Wow. Good guess. (grins)
Buffy: (steps up to him) Well, why don't you try getting off your immortal
ass and fighting evil once in a while? 'Cause I'm sick and tired of doing it
myself.” Becoming 2.
Buffy stands for the world. Consider what this means in the context of the
show’s metaphors. Each time Buffy acts, she’s implicitly telling us how we
should act if we face a similar dilemma. If Buffy is us, then by identifying
with her, we put ourselves in that same position of having to act to save the
world. She’s acting in metaphor; we’re supposed to take that lesson into real
life. The show not only forces us to think about how to grow up, it gives us
insight into what adult – that is, moral – behavior consists of: We are to act
as if the whole world depended on our actions. That’s a boatload of
responsibility all right, even if, unlike Buffy, we don’t face more
apocalypses than birthdays.
Don’t get the impression that BtVS is an After School Special. Only rarely
do the writers fall into the trap of dropping anvils in order to send a
message (it does happen a few times). The vast majority of the time they
succeed in provoking discussion and reflection, seldom making the mistake
of becoming wearyingly pompous like Polonius in Hamlet. And whenever
the show runs the risk of being melodramatic, some humor undermines the
self-importance: “It's like you've got to have at least one moment that says
"No, no, no, no. We're not taking ourselves that seriously." (Joss, Lessons
DVD commentary.)
Buffy learns by making creative choices, ones that force the viewer to think.
Sometimes she learns by making the wrong choice, sometimes the choice is
so difficult that there simply is no obvious answer and the internet erupts in
screaming debates. The point of the show is not to drive the message into
your head with a railroad spike, it’s to force you to think about the kinds of
dilemmas we all might face.
Growing up involves making all sorts of moral decisions. When are we
mature enough for sex? Who should our role models be? What mistakes do
adults make which we should recognize so that we don’t make the same
ones? How should we act in ethical dilemmas? I could go on, but I believe
the point is clear. Buffy faces all of these problems and many more on her
road to adulthood. She’s telling us how to think about growing up, even if
we’re already “adults”. As Xander puts it in The Freshman, “Let me tell
you something, when it's dark and I'm all alone and I'm scared or freaked
out or whatever, I always think, 'What would Buffy do?'”
Don’t get me wrong – Buffy has flaws, some of them significant. She
would have been boring without them. Joss Whedon put it this way: “The
idea was, let’s have a feminist role model for kids. What's interesting is you
end up subverting that. If she's just an ironclad hero - "I'm a woman hear
me constantly roar" - it gets dull. Finding the weakness and the vanity and
the foibles makes it fun.” What fascinates us about the character of Buffy is
that she has to struggle to reach the right decision. Just as we all do.
The case for treating BtVS as important literature rests, essentially, on these
three grounds: it forces us to think about an important topic and treats
important themes via the creative use of language and metaphor.

C. Episode Essays

As I said, I wrote and published all of the following essays on my blog.

Many of the S5-7 commentaries were first written as comments to the
reviews of Buffy episodes by Noel Murray of the AV Club (his reviews start
at [SPOILERS at link] [Link]
vampire-slayer,45/3/), who not only wrote insightful reviews of every
single episode, but tolerated people like me who used his reviews as an
excuse for their own commentary. I’ve expanded those comments quite a
bit. There are no spoilers in my episode comments unless clearly labeled. I
will on occasion quote from the DVD commentaries. Avoid those if you
want to remain unspoiled. Many of the commentaries were recorded much
later, and the writers often mention subsequent events.
I don’t want you to think that everything I write is original to me. Of course
it’s not. I’ve read a huge amount of internet commentary on the show and a
number of books as well. Sometimes other people stated more clearly what
I already was thinking, sometimes what they said was new to me but I’ve
incorporated it into my viewing so thoroughly that I can’t separate it any
more. It’s more accurate to say that what I’ve done is synthesize all of that
reading.
The majority of discussion I’ve read comes from the forum of a site called
All Things Philosophical on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel the Series.
It’s still a live board, though not active; I definitely recommend that you
read the forum archives and the annotations on the Board itself. Full
disclosure: I was one of the posters on that Board, using the name Sophist. I
don’t always agree with myself, so if I seem to have changed my mind,
that’s because I have.
While I can’t really sort out all the influences on my current thinking, I do
need to say that one poster at ATPO did influence me more than any other
single person. His name was manwitch and you can read his original posts
at the ATPO forum. I don’t always agree with him, but he was responsible
for articulating what I call the Central Metaphor of the show, namely that
Buffy is us. I had always viewed the show through a Buffy-centric lens, but
had never conceptualized it that way until manwitch pointed it out. Any
extensions of his insight are my responsibility, not his, of course.
 SEASON ONE
Welcome to the Hellmouth and The Harvest
The opening scene of WTTH demonstrates that BtVS intends to subvert the
viewer’s expectations. By the all the standards of horror genre, we know
that the nervous blonde is destined to be the victim. Darla plays on those
expectations, both with her “date” and with the audience, until the reveal
that she is actually the vampire.
This scene, like the teaser in every episode, also tells us something
important about the episode, whether in plot (early episodes) or in theme
(later episodes). In this case, the blonde girl does the opposite of what we
expect. That’s the theme of the opening two-parter, but it’s also the theme
for the whole series. I quoted this from Joss in the Introduction, but it bears
repeating: “Where did the idea [for BtVS] come from? There’s actually an
incredibly specific answer to that question. It came from watching a horror
movie and seeing the typical ditzy blonde walk into a dark alley and getting
killed. I just thought that I would love to see a scene where the ditzy blonde
walks into a dark alley, a monster attacks her and she kicks its ass.”
I won’t mention it very often, but when you’re watching, always pay
particular attention to the teaser.
Note the other metaphor in the very beginning of that first scene: a vampire
and her victim break into the science room. Why the science room? To me
it represents the intrusion of the bewitched world into our rational, scientific
one. Metaphor is critical to the story and it’s established right there at the
start.
Much of the early episodes necessarily consists in setting the stage for the
show, or at least the events of S1. The audience – most of whom had not
seen the movie – needs to learn who Buffy is, why she’s in Sunnydale, the
new characters she meets, etc.

What do we learn about Buffy? She’s The Slayer, but she doesn’t want to
be. She walks out on Giles at the first mention of vampires, and she tells
him straight out why she won’t accept her calling: “Prepares me for what?
For getting kicked out of school? For losing all of my friends? For having
to spend all of my time fighting for my life and never getting to tell anyone
because I might endanger them? Go ahead! Prepare me.”

Being the Slayer isolates Buffy. She’s the Chosen One. Singular, one girl in
all the world. We’ll see her sense of isolation as a consistent theme
throughout every season. It’s not just Buffy who feels alone, of course. In
some sense we all do, notwithstanding friends and family. There’s always a
lingering feeling that others don’t fully understand us or realize what we’re
going through. This is particularly true of teenagers, who seem to be
alienated from just about everyone. Buffy’s isolation may stem from her
unique powers, but it’s a feeling we all can identify with.
Buffy rejects the role of Slayer, but Giles challenges her, appealing to her
human sense of responsibility: “Then why are you here?” The question has
two meanings: why is she in the school, but more significantly, why is she
in Sunnydale? Perhaps even more generally, it might mean “what is your
purpose in life?”.
When I reframe the question this way, it suggests that the role of Slayer
may be seen in part as metaphor, and of course I think it is. In my reading of
the show, Buffy’s destiny is to grow up, to become an adult just as all
teenagers have to do. In rejecting the role of Slayer, I see Buffy as rejecting
the idea of becoming an adult. She wants the adult world – “you people” –
to leave her alone.
Buffy doesn’t want to face the question of her purpose in life, so she denies
her destiny. She may have been Chosen (passive sense), but she hasn’t yet
herself chosen (active sense) that role; Buffy is clear from the beginning
that her powers may have been thrust upon her unasked, but she retains the
choice to use them “against the vampires, the demons, and the forces of
darkness”. That power to choose is what alone makes her free; without it,
she’s nothing but a tool in the hands of others.
And she does choose to use her powers. In The Harvest she accepts
responsibility for Jesse:
Xander: Except for one thing: how do you kill them?
Buffy: You don't, I do.
Xander: Well, Jesse's my...
Buffy interrupts: Jesse is my responsibility. I let him get taken.
I said in the Introduction that accepting responsibility was the most
important theme in the series, so this is a key moment. And it’s not just that
she takes the responsibility, she insists that it’s hers alone:
Xander: So, what's the plan? We saddle up, right?
Buffy: There's no 'we', okay? I'm the Slayer, and you're not.
We also learn something else very important about Buffy, namely that she’s
a good person. She immediately recognizes Cordelia’s mistreatment of
Willow and actively seeks Willow out shortly afterward. It’s that human
side of her character to which Giles successfully appeals in getting her to
act as the Slayer at least this one time.
In reaching out to Willow, Buffy takes an important step for any new
student: she finds new friends. These are friends who, it turns out, can help
on her way to accepting the burdens of Slayerhood. Xander helps with his
courage when he accompanies her to find Jesse. Giles, it turns out, can help
with knowledge. And Willow may be wavering and uncertain, just as Buffy
is wavering and uncertain about her destiny, but she wants to help in her
own way.
The role of vampires as a metaphor for adolescence is likewise established
in these two episodes. Note Darla’s Catholic school girl outfit and Thomas’s
dated clothes which tell Buffy that he’s a vampire. “Live in the now”, she
tells him. These vampires are frozen in time.
The Master is obviously the most important vampire, so naturally I think he
plays a symbolic role in addition to his storyline one. His symbolic role will
become clear in the episode Nightmares, so I’ll hold off talking about it
until then.
Has Buffy fully and unreservedly committed to being the Slayer (i.e., to
growing up) by the end of The Harvest? She did accept responsibility for
Willow and Jesse and later for stopping the Harvest, but those were cases
where she felt her responsibility was personal. That leaves open the longer
term issue of her responsibility to the world. I’ll leave it open at this point
whether she’s made that larger commitment or not.
Finally, let’s talk about a literary concept called magical realism. Rather
than getting into formal definitions, I’ll use the example of Franz Kafka. In
one of Kafka’s novels, The Metamorphosis, a person, Gregor Samsa, turns
into a giant bug. This serves as a metaphor for how Samsa thinks the world
sees him. In some sense, Samsa causes his own transformation by the way
he interprets himself in the world.
How does this apply to Buffy? Giles suggests that she herself is the reason
why the vampires have appeared at Sunnydale High: “You think it's
coincidence, your being here? That boy was just the beginning…. The
influx of the undead, the... supernatural occurrences, it's been building for
years. There's a reason why you're here and a reason why it's now!” One
way to see the events on screen is that Buffy herself has caused them. The
demons are her subconscious fears and weaknesses made manifest on the
screen for her to battle as she grows up.

Trivia notes: (1) Principal Flutie mentioned that Buffy had previously
attended Hemery High in Los Angeles. Hemery High was the name of the
high school Buffy attended in the original movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
(2) The classroom lesson will always be related to the theme of the episode.
Here, the subject is the Black Death and what are vampires but a plague on
humanity? And what is the Harvest but an event which will kill all the
humans? Luke even reverses the theme by referring to humans as a “plague
of boils”. (3) Just as the classroom lesson will always relate to the episode
in some way, so will the music at the Bronze. Here are the lyrics we hear as
Buffy enters; they describe her uncertainty regarding her destiny: “Oh, I just
want to believe / Can you hear me? / Can you see me? / What's inside of
me? / Oh, I just want to believe / If my life can have a purpose / Help me to
believe / Oh, I just want to believe / Can you hear me? / Can you see me? /
What's inside of me? / Oh, I just want to believe / If my life can have a
purpose / Help me to believe/Everybody wants to find the circle / The line of
truth that has no end / Because so many nights I've slept with the feeling of
empty / And I say, right now I'm ready to believe”. Buffy is ready to believe
when she realizes what’s happened to Willow. (4) The Master tells his
minions “you are all weak”. That same line was spoken by the character
Doug Niedermeyer in the movie Animal House. Mark Metcalf, who plays
the Master, played Niedermeyer. (5) Joss said that he adopted the traditional
methods of slaying vampires, but added the dusting because he didn’t want
to have to deal with the bodies all the time. The vamp face makes it easy to
tell when Buffy’s dusting someone evil. (6) Why is it Angel who brings her
messages? The word “angel” comes from the Greek and means
“messenger”.
 Witch
One of the great things about BtVS is that it can be watched on multiple
levels. The episode Witch begins a three year run of episodes satirizing high
school. Joss Whedon had, as we say, issues with high school, and one theme
of the show is that high school is Hell, in Buffy’s case literally. Many of the
first 56 episodes make fun of the stereotypes of high school life, as Witch
does here regarding cheerleading. I’m not going to talk much about this
aspect of the show. It’s not that I think it’s wrong to watch Buffy for this
reason – it certainly isn’t; I personally think the satire is hilarious – it’s that
I don’t think I have anything to add.
When I first watched Witch I thought it wasn’t very good. The production
values, as in all of S1, are sub-par, and I was disappointed that we seemed
to have dropped the story about the Master. I’ve come to see that there’s
actually a lot going on that I didn’t appreciate at first. Among other things,
learning about the Master isn’t the goal of the show, learning about Buffy is.
And Witch teaches us, in metaphor, about Buffy.
Let’s start with the title. Lots of people, even on Buffy web sites, have it as
“The Witch”. That’s wrong – the title is just the one word “Witch”. It’s a
pun: witch = which, meaning “which is it, Amy or her mother?” Maybe it’s
even a question for Buffy: “which direction will you go?”.
Witch introduced an important structural feature of BtVS, namely the “Little
Bad”. In the language of the Buffyverse, there is always a Big Bad who
poses a challenge for Buffy throughout the season. “Little Bads” last only
an episode or maybe a few episodes. It’s usually the case that Buffy’s defeat
of the various Little Bads will set the stage for her confrontation with the
Big Bad. I see Catherine Madison as the first of the Little Bads, though I
suppose you could also see Luke as the first.
As I explained in the Introduction, the bad guys on Buffy are generally
metaphors. If Buffy defeats a lust demon, then the point of the episode is to
show that she has defeated the challenge posed by lust. So what does
Catherine Madison tell us, in metaphor, about Buffy? Well, Catherine, like
vampires, is frozen in time. She’s an adult, but wants to remain forever in
the body and role of a teenager. Note particularly the contrast with Joyce:
“BUFFY: Y'know, there's this girl, Amy, and, um, she trains with her mom,
like, three hours a day. JOYCE: Uh-huh. BUFFY: Sounds like her mom's
pretty into it. JOYCE: Sounds like her mom doesn't have a lot to do.”
Joyce’s reaction may seem harsh, but grown-ups should be interested in
their children’s lives, not trying to live them.
Cordelia is so awful to everyone in her relentless pursuit of cheerleading
glory that we should also consider this as another clue that Cordelia’s path
may be the wrong one for Buffy. We’ve seen enough of Cordy by now to
realize that she’s not a very good role model for anyone. Cordy represents
the path not taken, or perhaps the path which should not be taken.
Buffy’s goal of being a cheerleader plays off the movie, in which she was
depicted as a shallow cheerleader until called as the Slayer. Her desire to
recapture her role as a “normal teenager”, which she enjoyed at Hemery,
just as Catherine tries to recapture her own youth, is actually a distraction
from her calling as the Slayer, as Giles tells her straight out in the teaser:
“This is madness! What can you have been thinking? You are the Slayer!
Lives depend upon you! … You have a sacred birthright, Buffy. You were
chosen to destroy vampires…” And since, in my view, Buffy’s commitment
to being the Slayer is, in part, a metaphor for her commitment to growing
up, Giles warned Buffy that cheerleading was a distraction from that goal.
Joyce drives home the lesson at the end by distinguishing herself from
Catherine Madison: “Buffy: Do you ever wish you could be sixteen again?
Joyce: Oh, that's a frightful notion. (exhales) Go through all that again? Not
even if it helped me understand you.” Joyce’s example confirms Buffy’s
choice of which route to take: “Amy: (to Buffy) Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot that
you wanted to be on the squad. Buffy: Oh, hey, that's okay. Cheerleading's
just a little too hairy for me these days.”
And note the metaphor for Catherine’s end. Buffy doesn’t kill her. No, she
shouts “Grow up!” and shows Catherine her own reflection, which forever
traps her in the statue of a cheerleader. Frozen.
There’s a final reason why Witch is more significant than I originally
realized: the events and/or characters of this episode will be referenced at
least once in every single remaining season. One of the great things about
the show is that it expects its audience to remember the events of previous
episodes, and it builds on them. I obviously can’t say any more about the
details of these future episodes because of spoilers.
Trivia notes: (1) Charisma Carpenter, who plays Cordelia, was herself a
cheerleader for the San Diego Chargers. (2) The plot of the episode seems
loosely based on the story of Wanda Holloway, the Texas woman who hired
a hit man to kill the mother of her daughter’s rival for the cheerleading
squad. (3) The biology/chemistry class of course mirrors the witch’s
cauldron.
 Teacher’s Pet
Teacher’s Pet is widely considered one of the weaker episodes in the whole
history of the show, an opinion I share. Still, and consistent with my view
that all of S1 was carefully planned to lead us to the conclusion we’ll see in
Prophecy Girl, let’s see if perhaps there’s at least some small point in its
favor.
In Witch we saw that Buffy had to understand the type of adult she needed
to try to become. It wouldn’t do any good for her to get older without
actually leaving childhood behind. Catherine Madison was the metaphor
through which (heh) Buffy came to this understanding.
Teacher’s Pet presents us with another form of false maturity, one that all
teenagers struggle with: sexuality. The fake Natalie French was
aggressively sexual, to the point that she was about to destroy Xander,
Buffy’s friend and metaphorical heart. We see here in metaphor that Buffy
has doubts about what becoming an adult might mean for her sexual
behavior. Why is Buffy so concerned about sexuality in this episode? I
think we can figure that one out:
“Cut to the Bronze. Buffy is at the bar wearing Angel's jacket. Angel comes
up behind her. Buffy senses him and looks up at him.
Angel: (smiles) I heard a rumor there was, uh, one less vampire walking
around making a nuisance of himself.
Buffy: There is. Guess I should thank you for the tip.
Angel: Pleasure's mine.
Buffy: Course, it would make things easier if I knew how to get in touch
with you.
Angel: I'll be around.
Buffy: Or who you were?
Angel just smiles and moves around to the other side of her.
Buffy: Well... Anyway, you can have your jacket back.
Angel: It looks better on you.
He turns and leaves. Buffy stares after him. Angel gives another look back
and disappears into the crowd.
Buffy: (to herself) Oh boy!”
If Buffy’s going to reach her destination, she has to head in the right
direction. By defeating the challenges posed in Witch and Teacher’s Pet, she
knows that she can reject those distorted versions of adulthood.
Trivia notes: (1) This is the only episode which mentions Xander’s middle
name. (2) It’s possible that Dr. Gregory got his name from Gregor Samsa,
the protagonist of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, which I mentioned in my
comments on WTTH/The Harvest. (3) The real Miss French was played by
Jean Howard, Ron Howard’s mother.
 Never Kill A Boy On The First Date
The show is still very early, but it’s establishing themes which will last
throughout its entire run and which you need to keep in mind as we go
along. NKABOTFD demonstrates again that Buffy hasn’t really accepted
her slayer role – she wants a normal life and she’d rather be dating or going
to the Bronze than “going into battle” with Giles. Her desire to be a “normal
teenager” means that various diversions from her destiny tempt her to leave
the Chosen path. This is the first episode to offer such a diversion, but it
won’t be the last.
Twice already, first in Witch and now here, we see that Cordelia and Buffy
have parallel tastes/desires. Both wanted to be cheerleaders, both want to
date Owen, both find Angel full of salty goodness. This therefore seems
like good place to make explicit something that the show will continue to
hint at and will eventually tell us directly: Cordelia is Buffy’s “shadow
self”, i.e., roughly speaking, her weaknesses or shortcomings. Cordelia is
what Buffy would be were it not for her destiny as the Slayer and her
willingness to accept responsibility for her powers. I’ll talk about this in
more detail when we get to Out of Mind, Out of Sight, so for now just take it
that this is one way I see Cordy’s role.
For this reason, as was true in Witch, the fact that Cordelia wants to date
Owen is itself a message that Buffy shouldn’t.
Buffy recognizes at the end that “normality” is unattainable in this case.
Owen himself told her “there's a lot more important things in life than
dating”. I think the lesson is even more specific than that – she must not
allow Angel to interfere with her destiny. I say this because Owen is a
“type” of Angel: he’s tall, dark, and broody. It would be hard to find a
closer analogy to Angel, and we, like Willow, can already see the chemistry
there. Owen himself won’t do – he was judged and found wanting.
We learn something else about Buffy in this episode that will be a consistent
theme throughout the series. Her desire for normality alienates her from her
destiny as the Slayer, creating an almost split personality: “Owen: It's
weird. Buffy: What is? Owen: You! One minute you're right there. I've got
you figured. The next, it's like you're two people.” Buffy will always, to
some extent, see herself as having a Slayer side and a human side.
A question for you to consider: why is the Anointed One, the Master’s
“great warrior”, a child? I’ll explain my own interpretation when we get to
the season finale.
Trivia notes: (1) The phrase “here endeth the lesson”, used by the Master, is
used to end a Bible reading in the Anglican service. It was famously used in
the movie The Untouchables. The phrase will be used twice more in the
series. (2) Contrary to the implicit advice in the episode title, Buffy does
kiss Owen. (3) “Shall We Gather At The River?” – something Andrew says
in his raving – is a Christian hymn written by Robert Lowry. It was played
in a number of Westerns, prominently those of the famous director John
Ford. Joss is a big fan of Westerns and of Ford in particular. (4) Emily
Dickinson lived a notoriously introverted and secluded life, and as Owen
says, was obsessed by death. Again, the parallel to the story line is
deliberate. (5) Buffy says that Owen wants to be Danger Man, a play on the
cartoon series Danger Mouse.
 The Pack
Someone told me it’s all happening at the zoo.
I watched BtVS because my then-nine year old daughter wanted to watch
and was worried that it would be too scary. I thought the first few episodes
were cute and funny, oblivious to metaphors or growing up or anything
else. The Pack was the episode which made me sit up and think there might
be something more to this show. It’s really a dark episode – the male lead,
someone we like, actually attempts to rape the heroine. Now, it’s done in
metaphor, there’s an excuse given, and Buffy euphemizes Xander’s attack
by calling it “felony sexual assault”, but I saw it as a daring and dark
episode for a show which seemed so light in the beginning. I mean really –
they ate the nice Principal Flutie?
Buffy will get darker and darker as the series continues; this was the first
real hint of something deeper.
Let’s consider Xander’s actions in the context of the show. We learned from
Giles in The Harvest that a vampire “isn’t a person at all”. Rather, a demon
sets up shop in the human; the person is “infected by the demon’s soul”.
That sounds a lot like Xander’s situation. He was infected by a hyena, but
the net result was pretty much the same. Jesse became infected by a demon,
but his basic view of the world remained very similar to what it had been
before: he went to the Bronze, he wanted Cordelia, he resented not getting
what he wanted. It seems that the demon may be in control, but that
elements of Jesse’s memory and personality remained. Only the moral
restraints were lifted.
Similarly, Xander became cruel to others, but like the human Xander he
remained obsessed with Buffy. Let’s face it – hyenas don’t sexually assault
human women. That came from Xander, not the demon possessing him.
This raises all kinds of interesting moral issues. It is, for one thing, a
comment in metaphor about the evil potential inside all of us. Xander isn’t a
bad person. He just has dark sides to him which he keeps in restraint and
which we’d never have seen if the demon hadn’t released them. Given
Xander’s “Everyman” role on the show, this seems like a commentary on
all of us. And it probably is more true than we’d like to admit about
ourselves.
So does this mean Xander was at fault, that he was morally culpable for the
attack on Buffy? I have my own view of this, though I won’t give it now.
But you should be thinking about it because this same issue is going to arise
at critical moments throughout the show in some of the very best episodes.
Since I’m of the view that every episode is all about Buffy in some way, I
need to explain how I think that factors in to an episode which seems to be
very much about Xander (like Teacher’s Pet). There’s an interesting fact
about hyenas: they are female dominant. The reason why they’re female
dominant is even more interesting: the females produce an unusually high
concentration of androgens (male hormones), including testosterone.
The way I see the episode is that Buffy is the dominant character. She’s
stronger than everyone else and she’s in control in some ways even when
she’s taking Giles’ advice. Thus, the message for Buffy seems to me a
simple one of “this (Xander) could be you”. It’s not about bashing males for
“testosterone poisoning” or anything superficial like that, it’s about not
abusing a position of dominance, about caring for the weak (as Buffy does
in the dodge ball game) rather than preying on them.
I should add that I thought this episode used a number of dramatic devices
to add to the effect. The silence of the Pack, interrupted by laconic phrases
and cruel laughter; the power walk; the image of Willow watching the
documentary so that we don’t actually see them eat the pig. And Nick
Brendan was terrific as the possessed and dangerous Xander.
 Angel
Angel is the first of many “payoff” episodes. By “payoff” I mean that
themes and plot points have been introduced in previous episodes and we
now can understand that these were building up to what happens here.
There’s a lot to discuss.
I’ll start with the first major twist we’ll see in the series, namely the reveal
that Angel is a vampire. The opening scene of the show involved a minor
plot twist, letting us know that the show would feature them, but this is the
first (though hardly the last) major one. Here, Angel’s past as a vampire ties
the story back to Darla, the very first voice we heard in WTTH and the key
to that first minor twist. It can’t be much of a surprise that Angel and Darla
had a relationship as vampires – Angel clearly has a “type” and Buffy and
Darla both fit. Darla’s choice of a schoolgirl outfit is even more disturbing
when you think about the implications.
What does it mean to be a vampire, not as metaphor but within the story
line? Angel tells us the distinction: it’s the difference between having a soul
and not. Joss explained later that he saw the soul as a conscience, that is,
something which would enable the possessor to choose right from wrong.
It’s not that souled individuals necessarily choose well – very often in this
show they won’t – but that they are able to make a choice. An unsouled
creature simply can’t distinguish between right and wrong, so will be much
more likely to make a selfish or wrong choice.
Buffy fans call this the “soul canon”, and it’s one of the most contentious
issues in all of fandom. I’m not going to try to explain it in any more detail
here because it’s going to come up multiple times in the future. What I can
do here is talk about the way the issue has been treated so far.
As I mentioned in discussing The Pack, it makes sense to see the “demonic
possession” as building on the “dark side” of the “infected” (Giles’ term)
person. As Giles phrases it here, a vampire “may have the movements, the,
the memories, even the personality of the person that it took over…”. That’s
why Xander could predict that Jesse would go to the Bronze in The Harvest
and why HyenaXander was obsessed with Buffy.
I should add that Xander’s “infection” was “treated” quickly, but a
vampire’s is permanent except, we learn here, in the unique case of Angel.
For this reason, it makes sense for Buffy to slay vampires but to have tried
the “reverse trans-possession” for Xander and the others. Xander’s
possession in The Pack thus sets up the idea that Angel’s situation might be
seen in a somewhat similar way – the gypsy curse can be seen as a “reverse
trans-possession”. Angel’s soul was restored, just as Xander’s self-control
was restored.
Then again, in Xander’s case the demon is gone, while in Angel’s case the
demon remains but is controlled by his soul. Does that mean Xander’s
“better” in some way? Well, maybe. If what the demon did in The Pack was
release Xander’s subconscious dark side, then those dark aspects are always
part of him. In that sense, Angel’s demon, now under the control of his
restored soul, seems very similar. The Pack prepared us to think about this
issue and how we should react to Angel.
In comments, anonymous pointed out another important factor: “There is
another difference between removing the possession of Xander and killing
vampires. When the hyena is removed from Xander, he returns to his old
normal self, no super enhanced animal like powers. However, even when a
vampire has his/her soul returned they retain all of their vampire-fueled
abilities, super speed and strength (and those martial arts move they all
seem to know), so even with a soul you have someone with enhanced super
human abilities and no way of knowing if they will use those abilities for
good or evil. Thus there is an inherent difference and a danger to allowing
vampires to live (with some exceptions) while the same cannot be said for a
de-possessed human.”

Teacher’s Pet also now has direct relevance to the Buffy/Angel (“Bangel”
for those new to the show) relationship. Buffy was concerned about her
sexuality precisely because she felt an attraction for Angel which she makes
express here: “that whole fantasy part has nothing to even do with you at
all...” And then she kisses him, only to have Angel lose control of his
emotions and vamp out. This is not to say that Buffy’s sexuality is the only
one on parade here. Angel clearly has been seducing her – his flirtation at
the end of Teacher’s Pet, especially the look on his face, makes that clear.
But like all relationships, both parties have to deal with their subconscious
issues, and Teacher’s Pet showed us Buffy’s. More on Angel’s below.
In short, the episodes Teacher’s Pet and The Pack were building a storyline
in which we saw key elements prefigured, only to have a structurally
similar issue arise in a very unexpected way here. This is very characteristic
of the show. In fact, in every season the early episodes will introduce key
elements of the season plot, but they’ll do it so subtly that you don’t even
realize it, not even now that I’ve told you they’re doing it.
Angel hiding in the closet seems a pretty clear metaphor for his as-yet
undisclosed vampirism. In the scene where Darla offers an unconscious
Joyce to Angel, there is an addiction metaphor, which we see from Angel’s
obvious temptation to “drink” and resistance; Darla pushing Angel to drink
both literally and figuratively; and the “Just Say Yes” comment by Darla
which references the Nancy Reagan anti-drug slogan.
These metaphors, I think, help explain why Angel vamps out when they
kiss and when Darla offers Joyce to him in the kitchen. Angel is barely able
to control his inner demon even with a soul; the demon side is constantly
struggling with him for mastery and temptation makes his control much
shakier.
Buffy’s sarcastic question to Angel about the curse – “what, they were all
out of boils and blinding torment?” – raises the question whether the curse
serves any real purpose. In my view, it does. Angel gives us the answer: he
cares about what he did, i.e., he suffers remorse. Is that enough to justify
calling it a curse? Let’s ask someone who wrote the book. Adam Smith,
better known for writing The Wealth of Nations, wrote an earlier book
called The Theory of Moral Sentiments in which he discussed remorse:
“The violator of the more sacred laws of justice can never reflect on the
sentiments which mankind must entertain with regard to him, without
seeing all the agonies of shame and horror, and consternation. When his
passion is gratified, and he begins coolly to reflect on his past conduct, he
can enter into none of the motives which influenced it. They appear now as
detestable to him as they did always to other people.
By sympathizing with the hatred and abhorrence which other men must
entertain for him, he becomes in some measure the object of his own hatred
and abhorrence. The situation of the person who suffered by his injustice,
now calls upon his pity. He is grieved at the thought of it; regrets the
unhappy effects of his own conduct, and feels at the same time that they
have rendered him the proper object of the resentment and indignation of
mankind, and of what is the natural consequence of resentment, vengeance
and punishment. The thought of this perpetually haunts him, and fills him
with terror and amazement. He dares no longer look society in the face, but
imagines himself as it were rejected, and thrown out from the affections of
all mankind. He cannot hope for the consolation of sympathy in this his
greatest and most dreadful distress. The remembrance of his crimes has shut
out all fellow-feeling with him from the hearts of his fellow-creatures. The
sentiments which they entertain with regard to him are the very thing which
he is most afraid of.
Everything seems hostile, and he would be glad to fly to some inhospitable
desert where he might never more behold the face of a human creature, nor
read in the countenance of mankind the condemnation of his crimes. But
solitude is still more dreadful than society. His own thoughts can present
him with nothing but what is black, unfortunate, and disastrous, the
melancholy forebodings of incomprehensible misery and ruin. The horror
of solitude drives him back into society, and he comes again into the
presence of mankind, astonished to appear before them, loaded with shame
and distracted with fear, in order to supplicate some little protection from
the countenance of those very judges, who he knows have already all
unanimously condemned him.
Such is the nature of that sentiment, which is properly called remorse, of all
the sentiments which can enter the human breast the most dreadful. It is
made up of shame from the sense of the impropriety of past conduct; of
grief for the effects of it; of pity for those who suffer by it; and of the dread
and terror of punishment from the consciousness of the justly provoked
resentment of all rational creatures.” [Slightly edited for readability.]
Yeah, true remorse is a real curse. It explains why Angel is so socially
awkward, why he was stumped when Buffy asked him if he knew what
friends were (The Harvest) and why, as Darla says, “for a hundred years
[he’s] not had a moment's peace…”. I think it also explains why Angel was
willing to let Buffy kill him. He knew he had nearly given in to temptation
when Darla offered him Joyce (and think about the implications of that in
the context of vampires and sex!), so he felt that he still deserved
punishment.
I confess that I’m a complete sap for the ending of this episode. I think they
just nailed the scene, and I can watch it over and over; I have Sophie
Zelmani’s song on my mp3 player. That said, it’s worth asking if Buffy was
right to walk away from Angel. She loves him, at least in a high school
sophomore kind of way. But should she?
Willow and Xander give us both sides. Willow’s more than a bit of a
romantic, which is understandable given her unrequited crush on Xander.
“If you love someone, you love someone,” she says. Xander’s more
pragmatic: “You’re in love with a vampire? What, are you outta your
mind?” Of course, Xander has a pretty obvious conflict of interest on this
subject.
Notwithstanding my general love for Willow and my view that Xander’s
being a jealous jerk in telling Buffy that her duty is to slay Angel, there’s a
lot to be said for Xander’s position. Angel may have a soul, but he’s still a
vampire, as Darla demonstrated when she opened his refrigerator. He’s also
much older than Buffy, as Joyce notes. Not just because he’s lived lots of
vampire years, but because he was older at the age he became a vampire.
It’s a good thing Angel was a “perfect gentleman” when he spent the night
in Buffy’s room, because it would have been a felony in California if he
hadn’t been.
Even Willow recognizes some of the problems: “it is kinda novel how he'll
stay young and handsome forever, although you'll still get wrinkly and die,
and... Oh, and what about the children?” This isn’t all, by any means: he
hasn’t been honest with Buffy, not only when he denies following her, but
particularly when he’s evasive about his parents and about whether he
snores – he knows he doesn’t because vampires don’t breathe, not because
nobody’s in a position to tell him.
As I see it, therefore, because she walked away at the end, Buffy is still on
track for her destiny. She hasn’t let herself be diverted by love.
Trivia notes: (1) There were subtle clues in previous episodes that Angel
was a vampire: he always appeared at night or indoors; he knew too much
about the vampires; and most particularly, at the end of the The Harvest he
said, “She did it. I’ll be damned!”. Yes he will. (2) As is so often the case,
the school subject taught in the episode relates to the episode’s theme.
Willow tutors Buffy about the Civil War, and there is a Civil War going on
between Angel and his former “family”, including Darla. More directly,
Angel himself is undergoing a “reconstruction” since he got his soul back.
(3) Julie Benz, who plays Darla, auditioned for the role of Buffy. (4)
Angel’s tattoo is a griffin, an animal which is part lion and part eagle, just
as Angel is part vampire and part human. (5) Darla’s reference to “ruling in
the Master’s court for a thousand years” is presumably a twisted reference
to the Christian Millenium.
 I Robot, You Jane
After waxing enthusiastic about The Pack and Angel, I can’t find much
good to say about I Robot, You Jane. It’s generally rated as one of the very
weakest episodes by most fans, and I concur. Still, we should see what we
can get from it.
Moloch was the name of an ancient Canaanite god whose worship featured
the sacrifice of children by burning them alive. Worship of Moloch became
a stereotype for the worship of pagan idols generally, which, in the Bible,
distracted the Hebrews from worship of the true God. Moloch is the
paradigmatic false idol.
The person seduced by the false idol is Willow. She’s seduced away from
Buffy and Xander, in this case by the internet. I don’t think it has to be the
internet per se; that’s just the particular venue for the seduction which
would affect Willow. More generally, Moloch the idol represents any
distraction which pulls someone away from the true path.
Mapping this onto Buffy, Willow is Buffy’s metaphorical spirit. Thus, the
message of the episode is warning Buffy to maintain her focus on her true
destiny and not to let herself be diverted from her destiny by the pursuit of
false idols.
Why does this episode appear at this point in the season? Well, Willow’s
love for Xander is unrequited. She lets herself be seduced by Moloch in an
effort to escape the pain of that. Since Buffy just walked away from Angel,
she’s at risk of sublimating herself into something or someone else, as
Willow did, and needs to be warned against that.
Well, maybe that’s what’s intended anyway.
Even the weakest Buffy episodes usually have some nice scenes, and IRYJ
is no exception. The interplay between Giles and Ms. Calendar is fun,
particularly her “that’s not where I dangle it”. The ending scene is terrific.
Trivia notes: (1) The title is a play on the “Me Tarzan, You Jane” joke first
uttered by Johnny Weissmuller (the original movie Tarzan). It may refer
also to the Isaac Asimov series I, Robot. (2) The name of the character
Dave was probably taken from the character Dave Bowman in the movie
2001: A Space Odyssey. Some aspects of the plot bear a vague resemblance
to Kubrick’s masterpiece. (3) The monk who gathers the circle to bind
Moloch at the beginning is named Thelonius, a play on the famous jazz
composer Thelonius Monk. (4) It’s probably too obvious to be considered
trivia, but Giles’ suggestion of using a computer virus to disable Moloch
comes from the movie Independence Day.
 The Puppet Show
After a series of episodes telling Buffy what she should not do, because
false steps will impede her progress towards her destiny, we now get the
first of three episodes which tell her the affirmative steps she needs to take.
The metaphor in The Puppet Show is pretty straightforward once Buffy
discovers the plot twist: Sid, the dummy, is a demon hunter, ergo he stands
for Buffy. The metaphor is the message.
Putting aside his “horny” shtick, Sid is very dedicated to his profession.
He’s willing to sacrifice his own life to eliminate the final demon. He may
have seemed a puppet, trapped by powers and circumstances beyond his
control, but in the end he wasn’t a puppet at all because he chose his fate.
There are other metaphors here which I can’t discuss because of spoilers.
I’ll have to cut this short and talk about this episode in more detail when we
get to Prophecy Girl. I’ll only say that I don’t think the reference to
Oedipus for the hilarious closing scene was accidental.
There are a couple of little things I love about this episode: Principal Snyder
and the irony of Cordelia’s song choice.
Trivia notes: (1) The episode takes its inspiration from the movie Child’s
Play. (2) Xander had the dummy “say” the word “redrum”. “Redrum” is the
word “murder” spelled backwards, and comes from the movie The Shining.
Nick Brendan adlibbed the line. (3) Xander asked if anyone else felt like
“they’d been Keyser Soze’d”. Keyser Soze is (duh) from the movie The
Usual Suspects. (4) Alyson Hannigan adlibbed Willow running off-stage.
(5) Although I really like this episode, it was the lowest rated episode in the
show’s history.
 Nightmares
Nightmares is the second episode with a positive message for Buffy, this
time in the form of Billy. The solution to Billy’s nightmares was, of course,
to face his fears. Xander, Buffy’s metaphorical heart, showed the way on
this when he turned around and punched out the clown.
Along the way, we learn about Buffy’s fears: that she’s a bad student; being
buried alive; and, most important, that her father doesn’t love her, and
worse, that he doesn’t love her because of her own faults. I’m going to
focus on the last of these because it’s the real crux of the episode. I say this
not just because it’s the most troublesome for Buffy but because Billy’s fear
is also reinforced by the belief that it was all his own fault: “It was my fault.
… I missed a ball and I should have caught it. … He said it was my fault.”
The parallel, and thus the metaphor for Buffy, seems pretty clear.
When Buffy does knock out the Ugly Man, she realizes that she herself
can’t pull the mask off. It’s Billy’s fear, so it’s his responsibility. She
learned that from Sid in The Puppet Show. Once Billy rips off the mask, it
frees him just like Xander was freed when he punched the clown. We
therefore need to consider what Buffy fears and what she ultimately faces in
the episode.
Buffy expressed her fear to Willow at the beginning of the episode:
“Willow: … Do you know why your folks split up?
Buffy: (opens her locker) I didn't ask. They just stopped getting along. I'm
sure I was a really big help, though, with all the slaying and everything. I
was in so much trouble. I was a big mess.”

Then the nightmare version of her father tells her the same thing:

“Hank: I came early because there's something I've needed to tell you.
About your mother and me. Why we split up.
Buffy: Well, you always told me it was because...
Buffy: Then what was it?
Hank: It was you.
Buffy: Me?
Hank: Having you. Raising you. Seeing you every day. I mean, do you have
any idea what that's like?
Buffy: What?
Hank: Gosh, you don't even see what's right in front of your face, do you?
Well, big surprise there, all you ever think about is yourself. You get in
trouble. You embarrass us with all the crazy stunts you pull, and do I have
to go on?”

Buffy fears that being the Slayer is the cause of her problems, that her
father doesn’t (or won’t) love her if she commits to her destiny. He may be
like the Master – old, wrinkly, appalling in every way. If her nightmare
father had a “Picture of Dorian Gray” somewhere, we can imagine he’d
look very like the Master. She can’t commit to her destiny until she’s sure
her father’s ok with it.
But her father isn’t really a monster; he only appears that way because of
Buffy’s fear. “I [the Master, i.e., a monster] am free because you fear it.
Because you fear it, the world is crumbling. Your nightmares are made
flesh.” Thus, meeting her father at the end means she’s learned that, as the
Master said, “If I can face my fear, it cannot master me.” Once the fear is
gone, so is the monster.
We also see the flip side of this coin with Giles. His words in the graveyard
specifically tell us that what we’re seeing there is not Buffy’s nightmare, it’s
his. It’s not Buffy who fears becoming a vampire, it’s Giles who fears that
for her. He’s Buffy’s putative father in Hank’s absence. Like every parent,
Giles fears that his own flaws have left his child unprepared for the trials of
adulthood: “I should have been more c... cautious. Taken more time to train
you.” Parents have to face their own fears of their children’s journey to
adulthood.
Xander’s fears tell us something about Xander, of course. His fear of being
naked is a classic: he fears that there’s nothing to him, that he’ll be revealed
as that in front of everyone. The clown was, Xander tells us, not funny. And
Xander, who’s always joking, fears that he’s really just boorish and
unfunny.
One part of Willow secretly believes that she’s great – “the world's finest
soprano” – but she subconsciously fears that she’ll be exposed as a fraud if
ever asked to perform. Note that while Xander confronted his fear, Willow
seems merely to have escaped hers. This will be very characteristic of
Willow’s personality.
I should comment on one other point from this episode. When Buffy first
faces the Ugly Man, she barely escapes and limps away. This came
immediately after the terrible scene with her father, and it establishes a key
point which will be repeated throughout the show: Buffy can’t fight as well
when she’s emotionally distraught. If you’re ever wondering why Buffy
seems off her game in a fight, chances are this is the reason.
Trivia notes: (1) SMG is somewhat claustrophobic and absolutely hated the
buried alive scene. Joss promised her she’d never have to do it again. (2)
Willow is dressed as Cio-Cio-San, the title character of the opera Madame
Butterfly. (3) The first line Aldo sings to Willow is “Child, from whose eyes
shines witchery…”. This will be relevant in future episodes. (4) The
Master’s sarcastic line to Buffy – “A dream is a wish your heart makes” –
comes, of course, from Cinderella. (5) Billy’s lines upon waking up (“I had
the strangest dream. And you were in it, and you...”) are essentially
identical to those of Dorothy at the end of The Wizard of Oz.
 Out of Mind, Out of Sight
Out of Mind, Out of Sight rarely gets trashed like Teacher’s Pet or IRYJ, but
I don’t get the impression it’s anyone’s favorite either. It’s just a standard,
average S1 episode, a satirical look at the way high school cliques and
cruelty can devastate outsiders.
It won’t be a surprise that I think there’s another reading, but it took me a
long time to find it. I couldn’t figure out what the larger point was, or if
there even was one, nor could I understand why it’s located just before the
season finale. I now think I can explain it.
As I see it now, the point of the episode is to reconcile Buffy with Cordelia,
her shadow self. I mentioned this shadow self view previously in my post
on NKABOTFD, but I’ll go into it in more detail in this post. Here’s an
explanation of the concept in Jungian psychology from Wikipedia (see link
above):
“"The shadow personifies everything that the subject refuses to
acknowledge about himself"…. If and when 'an individual makes an
attempt to see his shadow, he becomes aware of (and often ashamed of)
those qualities and impulses he denies in himself but can plainly see in
others — such things as egotism, mental laziness, and sloppiness; unreal
fantasies, schemes, and plots; carelessness and cowardice; inordinate love
of money and possessions….”
This is an uncharitable but roughly accurate picture of Cordelia as we see
her in S1. If I’m right that she’s in part a metaphor for Buffy’s shadow, then
these are qualities which could be characteristic of Buffy if she let them,
and we saw in Witch and NKABOTFD that Buffy shares with Cordelia
similar desires which turn out to be shallow: to be a cheerleader or to date
Owen or Angel. There’s additional evidence here: Buffy, like Cordy, was
May Queen at Hemery. Willow and Xander, her metaphorical heart and
spirit, immediately say, “Well, you know, you don't need that anymore. You
got us!”. Buffy can’t accept this yet because Xander and Willow proceed to
share memories which leave her feeling like an outsider. She later looks on
wistfully as Cordy is being fitted for her dress. Some part of Buffy wants
what Cordelia wants.
There will be more evidence for this in later seasons, so let’s assume it for
now and consider what it means to reconcile one’s shadow self. We first
need to understand why this is necessary. The basic answer is that we can’t
really avoid our shadow selves; they’re part of us, like it or not. Accepting
that is part of growing up. In fact, we may need some of those less pleasant
aspects of our character to function as grownups. That would be regrettable
in a perfect world, but it’s a fact of life in this one.
Under Jungian theory, the process of becoming one’s true self – what I
would somewhat loosely call becoming an adult – requires a merger of the
conscious mind with the underlying dark impulses. Quoting from Wikipedia
again,
“… the struggle is to retain awareness of the shadow, but not identification
with it. 'Non-identification demands considerable moral effort...prevents a
descent into that darkness'; but though 'the conscious mind is liable to be
submerged at any moment in the unconscious... understanding acts like a
life-saver. It integrates the unconscious' - reincorporates the shadow into the
personality, producing a stronger, wider consciousness than before.
'Assimilation of the shadow gives a man body, so to speak', and provides
thereby a launching-pad for further [growing up].”
Now let’s see how this plays out during the episode. It takes a while, but
Buffy connects the dots and realizes that Cordelia is Marcie’s target. Buffy
then realizes she has to protect Cordelia, which is inevitable given the
metaphor because Cordelia is a part of Buffy. Cordy is the one who
approaches Buffy for help. Consider her words: “I know that you share this
feeling that we have for each other, deep down...”
Buffy then has her conversation with Cordelia and begins to understand her:
“Cordelia: (stops Buffy) Hey! You think I'm never lonely because I'm so
cute and popular? I can be surrounded by people and be completely alone.
It's not like any of them really know me. I don't even know if they like me
half the time. People just want to be in a popular zone. Sometimes when I
talk, everyone's so busy agreeing with me, they don't hear a word I say.
“Buffy: Well, if you feel so alone, then why do you work so hard at being
popular?
Cordelia: Well, it beats being alone all by yourself.
She continues down the hall. After considering that for a moment Buffy
quickly follows.”
Buffy and Cordelia are then both rendered unconscious – heh! – and
brought together under the word “Learn”. Marcie threatens to make Cordy
visible in a way no one will ever forget, which is a metaphorical way of
calling everyone’s attention to Buffy’s flaws.
If you see it this way, the focus of the episode is not Marcie; she’s just a
mechanism by which Cordelia’s (and Buffy’s) faults are made visible (pun
intended) so that Buffy is forced to confront them. Buffy recognizes the
need to take control. She first tries to reason with Marcie (“I just want to
talk to you”), but eventually concludes that she has to assert control more
forcibly (“You're a thundering loony!”). In order to defeat Marcie she tells
Cordelia, her shadow, to shut up so that she can hear. Only then can she at
last “see” Marcie – “I see you,” Buffy says – and bring her under control.
At the end of the episode, Cordelia and Buffy have reached a new
understanding and Cordelia seems to have accepted Buffy’s special role – in
metaphor, the shadow (Cordy) has accepted its limits and will now work
together with the conscious mind (Buffy): “You really helped me out
yesterday, and you didn't have to. So, thank you.”
I’ll explain my understanding of the reason for the placement of OOM,
OOS at this point in the season when I post my Prophecy Girl essay on
Monday.
Trivia notes: (1) I won’t always mention the classroom lesson, but the study
of The Merchant of Venice seems pretty obvious in its connection to the
episode theme. (2) Buffy’s description of demons as “crush, kill, destroy”
comes from the ‘60s TV show Lost in Space. (3) Marcie’s line “I see right
through you” is not only ironic, it expresses the theme of the episode: that
same loneliness which Cordelia just expressed causes all of us to feel
invisible. (4) Cordy’s reference to Helen Keller is also, of course, consistent
with the theme that people don’t see others. (5) Willow wore a Scooby Do
shirt in this episode. This will be relevant later.
 Prophecy Girl
BtVS began as a mid-season replacement show. All 12 episodes of S1 were
shot before it aired, giving Joss the chance to go back and change or add
scenes. However, he didn’t know until they were done shooting that the
show would be renewed for a second season. He therefore made the
decision, which he repeated every year until S6 (when he had a 2 year
contract), to end the season in such a way that it could serve as a series
finale if necessary. He wrote Prophecy Girl, as he wrote all season finales
except S6, with that aim in mind.
Because it wrapped up the season so completely, I’m going to discuss both
the episode itself and how the whole season led up to it. I’ll begin with what
I see as the key scene: Buffy’s power walk to confront the Master. I’ll say
right up front that I love this scene, cheesy though it may be. That’s not why
I think it’s important, though. It’s important because I see this as
highlighting the fact that Buffy has finally committed to her destiny, that is
to growing up. That’s why, as I see it, the Buffy theme music plays over her
walk; it’s the only time in the whole series where that music is heard during
an episode. It signifies that this is Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
The immediate trigger for this commitment was her death. Buffy died in the
storyline. In metaphor, though, I see it as the death of her childhood. Not
necessarily the child within us – that perhaps never dies – but childhood.
When she revived, her newfound strength – “I feel strong” – stems from her
now-demonstrated commitment to her destiny. Buffy’s no longer Chosen
(passive), she has chosen (active).
The way I see S1, the entire season has led her to this point. Buffy first had
to be called to her destiny, which Giles did in WTTH. She started out on the
road thanks to her friends, but her steps were halting and uncertain. She had
the fear of bad examples to overcome in Catherine Madison and Ms.
French, fears that she might become the wrong kind of adult. She had
seductive distractions along the way like Owen and Angel, who might keep
her trapped in fairytale (i.e., child-like) romance. But she also had good
examples, too.
Sid was not just an exemplar in terms of his commitment to killing demons
even at the cost of his life, prefiguring Buffy in Prophecy Girl. There’s
another metaphor as well, namely that Sid leaves behind his existing state in
order to move on to the next one. Indeed, the contrast between Sid, who’s
willing to move on, and the demon, who’s trying to stay forever young,
couldn’t be stronger. Buffy, by committing to being the Slayer in Prophecy
Girl, has committed to growing up. She may feel like she’s trapped by her
Slayer identity, controlled by others like Giles. But just as Sid the puppet
demonstrated his own freedom from control by others, Buffy’s prepared to
make the choice to leave childhood behind and take the necessary steps
towards becoming an adult. She has a ways to go, as we’ll see in the
remaining seasons, but she’s now on the road.
Just to clean up a point I left open earlier, I mentioned in discussing The
Puppet Show that the dramatic reading from Oedipus was deliberate. The
key component of that story is that Oedipus, by trying to avoid his fate,
actually caused the disastrous sequence in which he fulfilled the prophecy
made at his birth, killing his father and marrying his mother. Similarly, in
Prophecy Girl (this is no accident, people!) Buffy at first rejected her
destiny, but because she had the courage to reconsider her choice and go
meet the Anointed One, she avoided what surely would have been a worse
fate.
In my post on NKABOTFD, I asked you to think about why the Anointed
One was a child. The word “anointed” means “chosen by … divine
election.” In other words, the Anointed One is himself a Chosen One. But
just as the Master’s “family” was a perverted mirror image of a true human
family, so the vampire Chosen One is a perverted mirror image of Buffy.
When she tells the Anointed One, “I know who you are”, she’s recognizing
Him as her (perverted) destiny – perpetual childhood – if she doesn’t face
her fear.
Thus, Buffy had another good example in Billy, who prefigured Buffy’s
confrontation of her fear when she faced the Master in his lair. What was
that fear? The Master symbolizes everything awful about adulthood. He’s
old, he’s wrinkled, he’s controlling. Buffy doesn’t want to be an adult if
that’s the consequence; who would? She may be dead, but she’s still pretty.
Her fear was subconscious; that’s why the Master is at the Hellmouth, a
metaphor for her subconscious. By facing her fear, though, she was able to
master it: “We are defined by the things we fear. (goes to the large cross)
This symbol, these two planks of wood, it confounds me. Suffuses me with
mortal dread. But fear is in the mind. (puts his hand on the cross and holds
on while it burns) Like pain. It can be controlled. (lets go) If I can face my
fear, it cannot master me.” When she freed the Master, Buffy took her fear
out of her subconscious and into the world where she could and did master
it.
For this final step, she needed help from all of her attributes, not just her
conscious mind. By recognizing and coming to terms with Cordelia, her
shadow, she could, in Jungian terms, create a wholly integrated personality
from her conscious mind and her subconscious. She needed Cordelia’s
determination and ruthlessness to face and defeat the Master.
Now let’s get to a few details of Prophecy Girl itself. In my view it’s the
first great Buffy episode, meaning it’s in my top 20 or so. I’d rate it that
high just for the scene when Buffy overhears Giles and Angel talking about
the prophecy. Her reaction – “I’m 16 years old; I don’t want to die.” – and
SMG’s delivery are like a knife in my gut. But it’s also great because it so
wonderfully culminates the season and allows us to understand the meaning
and purpose of the preceding 11 episodes.
Another great detail, and a consistent theme for Joss, is Buffy’s moral
judgment. Sure, she showed great moral courage overcoming her fear of
death. But her reason for acting is even more important. It was Willow who
caused her to act. Buffy wasn’t making any grand gesture when she went
back to the library after her conversation with Willow. She didn’t
necessarily even go to save the world. She went for a much more personal
reason: to save Willow. A world without Willow in it just wouldn’t be
worth living in. Xander, her metaphorical heart, expresses this same moral
sentiment: “Ms. Calendar: Hey! Once the Master gets free, the Hellmouth
opens, the demons come to party, and everybody dies. Xander: Uh, uh, I
don't care. I'm sorry, I don't. Right now I gotta help Buffy.”
And Xander does help Buffy. While I think he would be wrong for her, I
can’t help but feel for him in this episode. He’s a real hero when he puts
aside his disappointment to rescue Buffy anyway.
The portents, especially the earthquake, are traditional portents for the end
of the world, but if you want to see them as reflecting events in Buffy’s
subconscious, I wouldn’t say you were wrong. The religious imagery is also
pretty obvious, what with her wearing her virginally white dress; being
reborn after baptism; and the Master telling her she’s the lLamb. In
addition, Isaiah 11:6 is generally seen in Christian hermeneutics as
foretelling the reign of the Messiah:
“By nature the wolf preys upon the lamb, and the leopard upon the kid, and
the adder is venomous, and the bear, and the cow, and the lion, and the ox,
cannot live together. But if a state of things should arise, where all this
hostility would cease; where the wild animals would lay aside their ferocity,
and where the feeble and the gentle would be safe; where the adder would
cease to be venomous, and where all would be so mild and harmless that a
little child would be safe, and could lead even the most ferocious animals,
that state would represent the reign of the Messiah.”
To sum up, the entire season is, in my view, a very carefully constructed
outline, in metaphor, of the steps a teenager takes along the road to
adulthood. If the show had ended here, Joss would have told the story he
wanted to tell; it’s a realization, in outline form, of his entire vision. Buffy
fans often rate S1 among their least favorite seasons, but I think it’s tightly
constructed and that it’s remarkable Joss could accomplish so much in just
12 episodes (Firefly, anyone?). As luck would have it, there will be 6 more
seasons for him to elaborate on the themes raised in S1.
Trivia notes: (1) As a resident of Southern California, I can attest that the
first thing everyone does after an earthquake is try to guess the magnitude.
The scene is hilarious if you’ve experienced this. (2) Xander first asked
Buffy to dance in Angel. He asks again here. It’s coming Xander, it’s
coming. (3) I have no idea who was fascinated with Cortona, Italy. First
IRYJ, now here. (4) Buffy rejected Giles’ offer to face the Master just as Sid
rejected Buffy’s offer to kill the last demon. (5) The prophecy read by the
Master in NKABOTFD stated, in part “And the Slayer will not know
him….” How, then, could Buffy tell the Anointed One, “I know who you
are.”? Because the prophecy had already come true in NKABOTFD. Buffy
didn’t know Collin then and mistook Andrew Borba for the Anointed One.
(6) I probably don’t need to explain Star Trek references to Buffy fans, but
Locutus of the Borg is a reference to Star Trek: The Next Generation. (7)
The Hellmouth demon has 3 heads, like Cerberus, the guardian of the
underworld in Greek mythology. (8) The Master’s line “Where are your
jibes now?” is a quote from Hamlet, part of the passage which begins “Alas
poor Yorick…” (9) It’s hard to hear, but as the group walks out of the
library, Buffy says “I’m hungry. … Is anybody else hungry? … I'm really,
really hungry.” Keep this in mind.
 SEASON TWO
When She Was Bad
While Joss got to tell his story in outline form in S1, beginning with S2 he
will pick up on themes which first appeared in S1 and expand on them. This
adds both depth to the story and sophistication to Buffy’s journey to
adulthood. When She Was Bad transitions us from the clear but relatively
simple outline we saw in S1 to the profound and deeply moving experience
of S2. If Buffy was the show which made television great, to paraphrase
Robert Morgan from the Introduction, Season 2 was the season which made
Buffy great.
In my experience, Buffy fans tend to underrate the season openers. I think
there’s a simple explanation for this: the openers are setting the stage for the
rest of the season and contain important clues to other episodes. On first
watch, we don’t realize this. Since our first impression tends to stay with us
even after we’ve watched them a second time (or a…. well, manyth time for
some of us), they never get their due.
WSWB is perhaps my favorite season opener, partly on its own and partly
because it sets in motion events which will have ramifications throughout
the entire series. What’s remarkable about this is that I can tell a new viewer
this and it isn’t a spoiler because that new viewer will have no idea what the
important points are. Joss (who wrote this and most other openers) weaves
the story together so subtly that you don’t even realize it.
The straight story line makes perfectly good sense, with one caveat I’ll note
below. Buffy really did die in Prophecy Girl, even if only for a few minutes,
and anyone who suffers such an experience is bound to have a few “issues”
about it, as Giles says. If nothing else, it would tend to isolate you from
your friends who haven’t undergone such trauma, all the more so if the
reason it happened was something unique to you: being the Slayer. Making
matters worse, Buffy can’t tell her parents that she’s the Slayer, so it’s not
surprising that her father would find her “distant. Not brooding or sulking,
just... there was no connection. The more time we spent together, the more I
felt like she was nowhere to be seen.”
Similarly, the events of Prophecy Girl brought home to Buffy in a very
direct way the risks she, like every Slayer, runs. Xander, Willow, and Giles
have taken some chances so far, but none have faced the prospect of death
every single night. Post-traumatic stress disorder is a very real
phenomenon, and we see some here with Buffy. This will naturally isolate
her even from her friends.
This isolation interacts with her friends’ inability to grasp emotionally what
Buffy goes through nightly, which we see most acutely in Xander’s reaction
when Buffy returns to the library. Xander had the right to be angry with
Buffy for her attitude – and I’m not even counting the dance he finally got
that didn’t really work out for him – but his reaction was over the top. First,
while everyone had recognized the note as a trap, all of them thought the
trap was for Buffy: “It is a trap. … It just isn’t for her.” Xander’s angry
reaction suggests that Buffy could have avoided the problem if “she’d
worked with [them]”, but that’s not really true because no one realized the
nature of the trap (nor could they have).
Second, Xander completely failed to show any understanding of Buffy’s
emotional state. His reaction – “If they hurt Willow I’ll kill you.” – was
indefensible. I mean, let’s get real here. Kill her? This was the first time I
got angry with Xander, but it won’t be the last. There’s always going to be
some distance between Buffy and her friends simply because she’s
following such a different path.
Now let’s consider Buffy’s situation in metaphor. She made the
commitment in Prophecy Girl to face her fear of adulthood and to grow up.
She can’t tell her parents that; it’s just not what a child does. In fact, parents
are often reluctant for it to happen, and the child thinks the consequence
will be losing her parents. Hence the commitment to growing up means that
you become more distant from your parents, just as Hank described.
It also has consequences for Buffy’s friends. They haven’t yet made that
commitment, or at least she doesn’t sense that from them; she even tells
Willow to “grow up”, while Xander is childish with his “bitca”. As a result,
she’s feeling isolated from them. Then too, the push for her to make the
commitment came from Giles, her metaphorical mind. While Giles
therefore is the most insightful now in explaining her situation to others,
Buffy sees him (in her dream) as the one who killed her childhood.
Worse yet, her heart (Xander) and her spirit (Willow) don’t understand the
consequences of Prophecy Girl and may not be all that sure about this
decision. In her dream they ignore her as she struggles with Giles/The
Master. She sees them as not understanding her situation and lashes out at
them in return. I’ll hint for the season that it’s no accident that Xander bears
the brunt of her anger in the painful but brilliant dance scene.
Her shadow self makes matters worse (h/t Cherrycoke), which is what the
shadow often does. Cordy’s first words in the episode are “it was a
nightmare, a total nightmare.” She’s not talking about Prophecy Girl, or is
she? Practically the first thing Cordy says when she sees Buffy brings back
the worst memories: “I'm talking about big squiggly demons that came from
the ground? Remember? Prom night? With all the vampires. … it was all so
creepy. That Master guy? And all the screaming? I don't even like to think
about it.” This could be Buffy talking to herself.
Of course, the shadow didn’t really like the effect of all that on Buffy’s
conscious self and later tells Buffy to knock off the Joan Collins ‘tude. The
shadow really doesn’t need the competition.
Why is it that Buffy is so upset about the Master’s bones? The obvious
reason is that it leaves open the possibility that her fears of adulthood are
buried but not destroyed like she thought. Only at the end, with the catharsis
of grinding him into talcum powder, can she be certain that her fears are
gone forever.
Trivia notes: (1) The title of the episode comes, of course, from the Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow poem: “There was a little girl, who had a little
curl/Right in the middle of her forehead,/And when she was good, she was
very, very good,/But when she was bad she was horrid.” (2) The presence
of the Master’s bones requires a little comment. It’s the only time we ever
see a vampire’s bones survive dusting, and it’s never really explained. This
drives some people crazy. As I mentioned in the Introduction, though, Joss
doesn’t really worry about plot details when he’s trying to get at an
emotional truth, which is the whole point of art. This is a perfect example.
(3) While I haven’t mentioned the song lyrics in every essay, and don’t plan
to, it’s worth noting how perfectly Alison Krause’s lyrics capture Buffy’s
emotions in the car ride: “You've been on a road… Don't know where it
goes or where it leads….” The Cibo Matto lyrics similarly fit the scene.
 Some Assembly Required
Some Assembly Required is, I get the impression, viewed by most fans as a
light, funny, but not very good or important episode. I half agree with this –
it’s light and funny, but, per usual, I think it’s also telling us something
important.
There’s a strong couples theme to the episode, so let’s start with that. Giles
wants to date Jenny; Jenny subtly asks Giles out; Angel approaches Buffy,
but is insecure enough to worry about Xander; Cordy hits on Angel, yet
again; Xander’s still jonesin’ for Buffy and likewise Willow for him. That
all sounds pretty normal and natural.
The dialogue tells us that at least some of this attempted coupling is the
result of not wanting to be left out. Fittingly enough, Xander, Buffy’s
metaphorical heart, explains it at the end:
“Xander: Well, I guess that makes it official. Everybody's paired
off. Vampires get dates. Hell, even the school librarian sees more
action than me. You ever think that the world is a giant game of
musical chairs, and the music's stopped and we're the only ones
who don't have a chair?
Willow: All the time. ”
There can be good reasons for being left out – I left out the passage where
Cordelia tries to thank Xander and he blows her off – but nobody wants to
be left out even if they’re at fault.
Ok, so what does this have to do with Chris, our Doctor Frankenstein, or his
monster, Daryl? The way I see it, Chris and Daryl are, in metaphor, one
person. Chris is the ego and Daryl the id. Consider this dialogue in that
light:
“Chris: Maybe you could... you could go out...
Daryl: No!
Chris: Let people know.
Daryl: They can't see me. Chris, you've always been smarter than
me. You were always the brains. You're the only one who can help
me now.”
Chris is the smart one, the ego – what could possibly be more egotistical
than believing it’s ok to raise the dead? Daryl is hidden away in the
basement (duh!), deformed and unseen. Daryl’s power was in his physical
expression, not his mind. Chris, being all ego, needed and wanted Daryl,
just as we all need our own id: “He always looked out for me. Stood up for
me.” And the id is what’s telling the ego that it doesn’t want to be alone:
“He's all alone. Everybody loved him. And now he's all alone.”
The Freudian analysis has a third component as well, a superego, which
“comprises that organized part of the personality structure, mainly but not
entirely unconscious, that includes the individual's ego ideals, spiritual
goals, and the psychic agency (commonly called "conscience") that
criticizes and prohibits his or her drives, fantasies, feelings, and actions.
‘The Super-ego can be thought of as a type of conscience that punishes
misbehavior with feelings of guilt.’”
Chris and Daryl have gotten this far because there’s no superego keeping
them under control. That role should be played by their mother, but she’s
absent because she has given herself over to the id. She’s spending all day
watching reruns of Daryl’s football career.
If mother/Chris/Daryl are the metaphorical superego, ego and id of a single
person, then we should, as always, understand that metaphor as being about
Buffy in some way. Daryl’s “love” for Cordelia was twisted and wrong. In
order to get the object of its desire, the id would actually kill the object of
its “affection” and unleash yet another monster on the world. In this case,
the message is pretty clear: don’t let the id take control of the situation.
This is the theme of the season. That’s right – an episode often described
as a “standalone” episode – is actually laying out the season theme for the
viewer in metaphor. Part of the show’s brilliance is this subtle prefiguring,
which lays the groundwork for the events to come. It’s actually doing more,
too. There are plotlines set up which will come to fruition later, but I won’t
mention those in order to avoid spoilers.
Trivia notes: (1) SAR seems loosely based on the movie Bride of
Frankenstein (1935). (2) Cyrano de Bergerac was famous for his ability to
charm women with his words, which he used for the benefit of a friend in
Edmund Rostand’s eponymous play. The reference is perfect because Buffy
is telling Giles what to say in order to ask Jenny out.
 School Hard
Spike and Dru. They’re favorites of most Buffy fans, including me, and
their entrance into Sunnydale and Buffy’s life makes School Hard a very
popular episode. It’s certainly one of my personal favorites for re-watching.
Every minute with Spike on the screen is mesmerizing, but there are lots of
great moments. “How much sugar did you add?” might be my favorite.
I think we can read the episode on multiple levels, but the problem is I can’t
explain the details without spoiling possibly the biggest plot twist of the
entire series. Let’s see if I can talk around the problem. That will involve
talking about Spike, while I leave it to you to consider what or who Drusilla
might represent.
The first thing we learn about Spike is that he’s arrogant and self-centered.
He’s ready to challenge any vampire present, he loves to brag about the way
he killed two Slayers, he promises to kill Buffy, first to the Anointed One,
then to Buffy herself. It’s part of what makes him so fascinating.
For me, the most important scene in the episode is the very popular one at
the end where Spike dusts the Annoying Anointed One. In my reading of
S1, the Anointed One was a twisted mirror image of Buffy. He would stay a
child forever, which is the future she risked if she didn’t commit to follow
her destiny. Because she’s made that commitment, the Anointed One no
longer serves any purpose. That problem is in the past and Spike and Dru
represent the future: “Me and Dru, we’re movin’ in.”
I also think it’s important that it’s Spike who destroys the child. My
explanation for this, though, takes us into spoiler territory, so I’ll leave it for
later.
Spike and Dru are the first vampire couple we’ve seen, though we were told
about Angel and Darla. Are they in love? That’s a tricky question indeed,
and you’ll get a lot of arguments from Buffy fans about whether vampires
can love. My own view is that they can, but their love is selfish and
obsessive because they lack a soul. That’s a form of immaturity, too. Maybe
it’s easiest to think of it as lust rather than love.
Indeed, Spike and Dru are overtly sexual. Their opening scene in front of
the other vamps screams it. Besides their actions, we get Spike’s reference
to “biggest wrinklies” and his promise that “I’ll do your Slayer for you.”
When Spike watches Buffy at the Bronze, the music and the scene suggest a
sexual predator. Note that Xander goes to get her stake and pulls out a yo-
yo (representing Buffy’s childhood), a tampon (representing her sexual
maturity), and finally the stake, representing her destiny, i.e., adulthood.
Spike searches for Buffy by calling “here kitty, kitty”. And when Buffy
finally confronts him in the corridor, every line consists of double
entendres:
“Spike: Fe, fi, fo fum. I smell the blood of a nice ripe (turns to face Buffy)
girl.
Buffy: (holding the ax) Do we really need weapons for this?
Spike: I just like them. They make me feel all manly.
He drops the pole and slowly steps toward Buffy. She drops the ax.
Spike: The last Slayer I killed... she begged for her life.
Buffy slowly walks to the middle of the hall, watching him intently.
Spike: You don't strike me as the begging kind.
Buffy: You shouldn'ta come here.
Spike: No. I've messed up your doilies and stuff. But I just got so bored.
(smirks) I'll tell you what. As a personal favor from me to you I'll make it
quick. It won't hurt a bit.”

Spike refers to Buffy’s menstrual blood, his pole is an obvious phallic

symbol, redolent of rape, other slayers begged him, and he promises the
virgin girl that “it won’t hurt”. Spike nearly wins, but Buffy is rescued by
her mother. Lots of sexual themes in this episode. Sigmund Freud would
have a field day with it.
“A Slayer with family and friends.” That is new.
Trivia notes: (1) The episode title takes its name from the movie Die Hard,
and some of the scenes play off the movie. (2) Spike’s promise to Dru that
“I’ll chop her into messes” quotes Othello, Act IV, sc. 1. (3) “What’s a
sire?”, Xander asks. A sire, as we’ll soon learn, is the vampire who creates
another vamp.
 Inca Mummy Girl
Inca Mummy Girl doesn’t require very much of us in order to spot the
metaphor. Ampata is a “Chosen One” like Buffy. If we needed more, other
details reinforce the comparison: Xander’s instant attraction to her, just as
he was attracted to Buffy; Ampata’s desire, which she tells Buffy, to lead “a
normal life”, which has been Buffy’s desire from the very beginning; and,
perhaps beating us over the head with the point, Ampata telling Buffy “You
remind me of someone from very long ago: the Inca Princess…. They told
her that she was the only one. That only she could defend her people from
the nether world…. Out of all the girls in her generation... she was the only
one... chosen.”
Ampata’s death at a young age may have been more certain, but Buffy’s
own life expectancy as the Slayer isn’t all that much to brag about. It’s
natural, therefore, that we’d be sympathetic to Ampata, seeing her both as a
victim and as a stand-in for Buffy’s situation. Note the way the Guardian
describes her situation: “You are the Chosen One. You have no choice.”
We’ve forgotten all about poor Rodney Munson and the real Ampata
Gutierrez.
Ah, but then events bring them back to mind. Ampata tries very hard to
escape her Guardian, and we’re on her side because he seems pretty brutal
and her situation so unfair. Then she kills him, and the truth becomes more
complicated. She describes her plight in affecting terms: “Who knows what
she had to give up to fulfill her duty to others? What chance at love?” But
Ampata doesn’t just seek love, she continues to suck the life out of other
people, ending with her attempt to kill Xander, the supposed object of her
affection.
That’s one level. On another level, we can see Ampata as representing
Buffy’s view of her own situation. She’s trapped by a destiny which will kill
her and hemmed in by a Guardian – perhaps seen as Giles, but maybe better
seen as her conscience – who is forcing her to fulfill her destiny. The
dialogue just after the teaser tells us that this is how Buffy sees her
situation:
“Buffy: So, can I go?
Giles: I think not….
Buffy: (pouts) How come?
Giles: Because you are the Chosen One.
Buffy: Mm. Just this once I'd like to be the Overlooked One.
Giles: Well, I'm... afraid that is not...
Buffy kicks the pad hard, making Giles stagger back a few steps.
Giles: You have responsibilities that other girls do not.
Buffy: Oh! I know this one! Slaying entails certain sacrifices, blah, blah,
bity blah, I'm so stuffy, gimme a scone.”

Other comments and facial expressions throughout the episode reinforce

Buffy’s sense of being trapped, and it’s clear she’s resenting the restraint.
But eliminating the Guardian leads to yet worse consequences. Without her
Guardian, Ampata is just a super-powered danger to everyone, sucking the
life out of even those she loves. Buffy may chafe under the constraints of
her situation, distraught at what she has to give up to fulfill her destiny and
concerned that her situation leaves her no chance at love, but escaping those
constraints would be deadly.
The parallel between Guardian and Watcher/conscience also expresses a
fundamental point. The Watcher/conscience may seem cruel, forcing Buffy
to adhere to her path without diversion, and leading eventually to her death.
At the same time, though, the alternate scenario of Ampata and her
Guardian suggests that Giles/her own conscience serves an essential
function, one which certainly protects the world and in some sense protects
Buffy from herself.
Buffy has committed to following the path to adulthood, but there are going
to be diversions and distractions along the way. She’s risking her own
destiny, as well as the lives of others, if she ignores what her conscience is
telling her.
Uh, could you please pass me one of those scones?
Trivia notes: (1) The name Ampata comes from the Spanish word
“amparar”, which means “to defend”. Thus, her name means “Defender”, a
very clever additional connection to Buffy. (2) The storyline here was taken
from a National Geographic article about the discovery of an adolescent girl
mummy at the summit of Nevado Ampato (!) in Peru. (3) The plot is
somewhat loosely based on the 1932 film The Mummy. (4) Xander, dressed
like Clint Eastwood in the Dollars Trilogy, says he’s from the country of
“Leone”, a joking reference to the Italian director of those films, Sergio
Leone. (5) The band at the Bronze, which we see here for the first time but
not the last, is known on screen as “Dingoes Ate My Baby”. This is a
reference to the movie A Cry in the Dark. In real life, the band is Four Star
Mary. (6) Danny Strong, the actor who plays Jonathan, read for the part of
Xander. (7) Seth Green (Oz) appeared with Alyson Hannigan in My
Stepmother Was An Alien and actually had an uncredited role in the Buffy
movie.
 Reptile Boy
Reptile Boy, whether in spite or because of its heavy-handed, sexually
charged theme and metaphor, is ranked consistently down there with IRYJ
among the least liked of the series. Perhaps we can find a nugget if there’s a
way to reconcile text and subtext.
Let’s start with what I’m calling subtext, though it’s just barely disguised.
Buffy has been having dreams about sex with Angel. Just after the break we
get this dialogue:
“Willow: You dreamed about Angel again?
Buffy: Third night in a row.
Willow: What did he do in the dream?
Buffy: Stuff. [Her tone of voice here says it all.]
Willow: (smiles wide) Oh! Stuff! (Buffy smiles) Was it one of those vivid
dreams where you could feel his lips and smell his hair?
Buffy: It had surround sound. I'm just thinking about him so much lately.”

Then, in the graveyard with Angel, Buffy makes it even more explicit :
“Angel: I knew this was gonna happen.
Buffy: What? What do you think is happening?
Angel: You're sixteen years old. I'm two hundred and forty-one.
Buffy: I've done the math.
Angel: You don't know what you're doing, you don't know what you want...
Buffy: Oh. No, I, I think I do. I want out of this conversation. (starts to
walk past him)
Angel: (bumps into her) Listen, if we date you and I both know one thing's
gonna lead to another.
Buffy: One thing already has led to another. You think it's a little late to be
reading me a warning label?
Angel: I'm just tryin' to protect you. This could get outta control.
Buffy: Isn't that the way it's supposed to be?
He grabs her by the shoulders and pulls her closer. She draws a startled
breath.
Angel: This isn't some fairy tale. When I kiss you, you don't wake up from
a deep sleep and live happily ever after.
Buffy: No. When you kiss me I wanna die.”

“Die” I think we should read here in the Shakespearean sense of sex/orgasm

as the “little death” (in French “petite mort”). It’s particularly meaningful
when we remember that she’s talking to a vampire, and the various
metaphors available for the vampire’s bite.

Sex is one of those things which adolescents think of as “adult”. The rest of
the episode – the text – deals with Buffy’s desire to be treated as an adult.
The scene transitions from Buffy’s conversation with Willow to Giles
telling her, very tediously, that romance is a distraction from her destiny
(another theme from S1). After Giles first criticizes Buffy for blowing off
training recently, we get this dialogue:

“Buffy: Digging on the undead doesn't exactly do wonders for your social
life.
Giles: That's exactly where, where being... different, uh, comes in handy.
Buffy: Right! Who needs a social life when you've got your very own
Hellmouth?
Giles: Yes! Y-you, you, you have a duty, a-a-a purpose, y-y-you have a
commitment in life. Now how many people your age can say that?
Buffy: We talkin' foreign or domestic? How 'bout none?
Giles: (he's had enough) Well, here's a hard fact of life: we all have to do
things we don't like! And you have hand-to-hand this afternoon and patrol
tonight. So I, I suggest you come straight here at the end of, of period six a-
and you get your homework done. And don't dawdle with your friends.”

The next transition takes us to Buffy patrolling, where she runs into Angel
and has the conversation I quoted above. I see this back-and-forth
movement between the issues as noting the connection between the two.

The remainder of the episode plays out a teenager’s sense of adulthood,

which involves acting like one but without actual responsibility. Buffy
resists Giles’ advice and ends up lying to her metaphorical conscience in
order to go to a party because the pressure of her destiny makes her “tired
of being mature”. The consequence gets spelled out via a metaphor that’s
about as subtle as an anvil but does tie text and subtext together again: she’s
nearly devoured by a snake-shaped monster living in the basement of frat
boys who worship it. Buffy then cuts the head off the snake monster. Ahem.

In the end we see that Buffy’s regained control of herself, including her
fantasies about Angel. First Cordelia, her shadow self who lured Buffy to
the party, swears off older boys, then Buffy tells Angel – who’s very much
older indeed – that she’ll “let him know” about “coffee”.

Trivia notes: (1) Sixties songs references: Buffy said there was a “kind of a
hush all over Sunnydale”. “Kind of A Hush” was by Herman’s Hermits;
Xander said, “okay boots, start walkin’”. “These Boots Were Made for
Walking” was by Nancy Sinatra. (2) Writer David Greenwalt says the name
of the demon, Machida, came from the name Makita on the drills carried by
the crew. It’s a tool company. Get it?
 Halloween
Halloween is one of my favorites, though I can say that about most of the
remaining episodes in S2. There are lots of classic moments here, the best
(for me) probably being when Willow walks through the wall into the
library and Giles’ reaction, though I could be talked into “eyeballs to
entrails”. Naturally I think we’re learning something important about Buffy
in addition to being entertained, so let’s talk about that.
Halloween tells us in no uncertain terms that the world, Buffy’s world, is
changing:
“Drusilla: Don't worry. Everything's switching. Outside to inside. (breathes
at Spike's neck) It makes her weak.

Spike: Really? Did my pet have a vision?

***
Spike: Come on, talk to Daddy. This thing that makes the Slayer weak?
When is it?

Drusilla: Tomorrow.

Spike: Tomorrow's Halloween. Nothing happens on Halloween.

Drusilla: Someone's come to change it all. Someone new.”

We then get a flash cut to Ethan invoking the god Janus. The Roman god
Janus looks forward and backward – note that Ethan’s statue has faces on
both sides – which is why the month of January marks the transition from
one year to another. In metaphor, he looks backward to Buffy’s adolescence
and forward to her adulthood, the first major step towards which she will
take in the very next episode. All Buffy fans would agree that S1 began with
a very light tone, and we’ve seen this continue so far in S2. Similarly, all
fans agree that it becomes a much darker, more adult show over time.
JMHO, but I see Halloween as marking the impending tonal shift.
Janus also represents, as Giles explains, division of self. Who is it who’s
“divided”? All the SG: Buffy is both Slayer and helpless girl; Willow is
both shy and sexy; Xander both a victim (of Larry) and a hero (as soldier);
Giles both a tweedy librarian and Ripper. The costumes reveal a fantasy self
for each of them, but that fantasy builds off a real substrate. Note that
Cordelia doesn’t change either in her costume or her personality. Cordy is
as Cordy does.
Xander gets to live out his fantasy in his costume. His “manly” side protects
Buffy from the evil pirate/would-be rapist Larry, just as we saw in his
dream at the beginning of Teacher’s Pet. Willow wants to see herself as
sexy and in charge, so she is. Giles, even if he’s not wearing a costume,
reveals to us a side we’ve never seen before. And Ethan tells us that the
Giles we’ve seen up till now was himself wearing a costume: “Ethan: Oh,
and we all know that you are the champion of innocents and all things pure
and good, Rupert. It's quite a little act you've got going here, old man.
Giles: It's no act. It's who I am. Ethan: Who you are? The Watcher,
sniveling, tweed-clad guardian of the Slayer and her kin? I think not. I
know who you are, Rupert, and I know what you're capable of. (considers)
But they don't, do they?”

Yes indeed, the world is changing.

I mentioned Buffy’s “division of self” in my post on NKABOTFD. As I see

it here, Buffy is, in essence, fantasizing whether she can give up the hard
road to her destiny and be “just a girl”. Her human side feels inadequate
after her date with Angel “misfires… due to unscheduled slayage”. She
overreacts by imagining herself as a helpless girl, one whom she thinks
Angel would find attractive. Of course, we learn that Angel isn’t attracted to
such girls at all; most likely, the picture Buffy saw in the Watcher’s Diary
was of one of Angel’s victims. Or possibly – and maybe this is worse –
Darla. [See note 2 below.]
Speaking of whom, there are some pretty unattractive consequences if
Buffy gives up on her destiny like that. By suppressing her Slayer side,
Buffy creates the conditions in which Spike can roam free and make her his
near-victim. Only when Giles, acting as her mind/superego/parent, breaks
the spell, leaving her just one direction to go, does she resume control and
send Spike fleeing. She’s moving forward from this point on.
Trivia notes: (1) Buffy’s reference to “the stuff dreams are made of” comes
from The Tempest, Act IV, sc. i. It’s a line also used famously in The
Maltese Falcon. (2) The timeline for Angel given in Halloween is
consistent with Angel and Reptile Boy but not later episodes. Based on later
chronology, Angel was a vampire in 1775 and had been for some time. In
that case the woman shown in the Watcher’s Diary could have been a
victim. The other possibility is that the book Buffy and Willow were
reading was not about Angel himself, since no one related to Angel could
have appeared in the Watcher’s Diaries while Angel was still human;
there’d have been no way to know about him. If the woman was not related
to Angel as a vampire, then she could have been another vampire such as
Darla. Joss has admitted, in response to questions about this issue, that he
sucks at math. (3) Buffy’s use of the phrase “friendly advice” when Willow
first shows her ghost costume is probably a joking reference to Casper the
Friendly Ghost. She later even refers to Willow as “Casper”. (4) Buffy has
apparently never seen The Godfather; otherwise she’d have been more
suspicious when Ethan offered to make her a deal she couldn’t refuse. (5)
Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy, referenced by Cordelia, was a circus performer
for P. T. Barnum. (6) The Buffyism “slayage” was adopted as the name for
the online Journal of Whedon Studies.
 Lie To Me
Lie to Me is almost certainly the best episode which I rarely see on Top 10
lists, including my own. In his reviews for The AV Club, Noel Murray
suggested it as the episode he’d use to introduce a new viewer to Buffy. It’s
truly a wonderful episode.
Before I get to the episode itself, I’ll note a structural point. The seasons
have a definite structure to them. The first 3 episodes lay out plot,
metaphor, and theme(s) for the season. It’s worth thinking about this while
you watch the first few episodes of each season, but it’s generally
impossible to pick out the themes except in hindsight because they’re
deliberately subtle. Episode 7 – Lie to Me is Episode 7 of S2 – is a major
episode that establishes the most important ideas for the season. Most of the
time, Episode 7 will be rated one of the top episodes of the season.
So let’s take a look at it. When Drusilla tells Angel in the teaser that “it is
just the beginning”, I relate that back to my theory that Halloween is the
transition episode symbolized by Janus. This episode very much marks the
beginning of what we’ll see for the remainder of the season, including much
more emphasis on dark settings (note the lighting). It also marks Buffy’s
first attempts to understand the adult world.
Lie to Me defines, for me anyway, the theme of the show – growing up –
and the dialogue makes it easy to see why. Like any teenager, Buffy’s
starting to wonder what growing up actually means. One thing it means is
that there aren’t any easy decisions:
“Buffy: Nothing's ever simple anymore. I'm constantly trying to work it
out. Who to love or hate. Who to trust. It's just, like, the more I know, the
more confused I get.
Giles: I believe that's called growing up.”
When Buffy says this, she’s sitting at night in a graveyard waiting for her
childhood crush to rise so she can slay him. That’s pretty clearly the kind of
thing I had in mind in the Introduction, but consider it also in the context of
Ford’s situation and his plan. Ford’s fate – to die bald and shriveled and in
pain – is a metaphor for the aging process. It’s that resistance to aging
which characterizes the vampire. Ford’s solution is to die young and stay
pretty. When she slays Ford, Buffy’s not just putting her childhood behind
her for good, she’s rejecting the very idea that there can be any permanent
childhood.
Buffy’s argument with Ford in the club is also very revealing. Ford’s
situation is dire, but his solution is worse. Aside from the fact that we all
think very highly of ourselves, and therefore are sure we’d take Buffy’s side
of the argument, there’s a good reason why Buffy can lecture him about
choices without sounding self-righteous. She herself made a very difficult
and similar choice in Prophecy Girl: she chose to die in order to do what
was right.
This seems like a good place to talk about the importance of choice in BtVS.
We saw it was an important theme in S1 – Buffy wasn’t really the Slayer
until she made the conscious choice to commit to her destiny in Prophecy
Girl. Now, in Lie to Me, which is a very important episode, we see choice
emphasized again. It is literally true that the power of choice will remain
important to the show through the very end: if you don’t know already, the
very last episode is entitled Chosen.
So where is Joss – who wrote Prophecy Girl and Lie to Me and Chosen, and
many others as well – coming from when it comes to the importance of
choice? Joss has said in the DVD commentary to the Firefly episode
“Objects in Space” that the most important book he ever read was La
Nausee. In fact, if you watch carefully, this book will make an appearance
in S3.
La Nausee was written by the French existentialist philosopher Jean Paul
Sartre. This novel is considered the seminal work for Sartre’s version of
existentialism. Joss says that he was heavily influenced by existentialism
but describes himself as an “absurdist”, which is closely related to but not
identical with an existentialist. It’s a term Sartre’s contemporary, Albert
Camus, used. I don’t want to get too technical about this, and Joss isn’t a
philosopher per se, so I’m going to treat the two schools of philosophy as
substantially identical here and just refer to existentialism.
Back to La Nausee. While Wikipedia is far from the best source for
discussing the details of philosophy, its plot summary of the ending is fair:
“In his resolution at the end of the book [the protagonist] accepts the
indifference of the physical world to man's aspirations. He is able to see that
realization not only as a regret but also as an opportunity. People are free to
make their own meaning: a freedom that is also a responsibility, because
without that commitment there will be no meaning.”
Let me try to translate this into Buffy. Buffy is in constant peril from the
world because it – that is, the vampires, the demons, and the forces of
darkness – doesn’t care about her; it’s indifferent to her at best, actively
opposed to her at worst. She therefore can’t rely on the material world to
give meaning to her life. Nor is there any higher power which might give
such meaning. Only within herself can she find that meaning, and she does
so through the power of choice. She chooses her friends, she chooses to
commit to her destiny, she chooses to accept responsibility for the world,
because in so doing she gives meaning both to herself and to the world at
large.
Some people see the world of the existentialists as very bleak, but they
actually saw it as both realistic and quite optimistic because the power to
make the world resides inside each of us. In their view, it’s only realistic to
admit that there is no power watching over us and that the natural world is
indifferent to us. That’s Ford’s situation with his cancer. What the
existentialist insists on, though, is that the power of choice always remains
to human beings. They may not have good choices, as Buffy tells Ford, but
they have them:
“A critical claim in existentialist thought is that individuals are always free
to make choices and guide their lives towards their own chosen goal or
"project". The claim holds that individuals cannot escape this freedom, even
in overwhelming circumstances. For instance, even an empire's colonized
victims possess choices: to submit to rule, to negotiate, to act in complicity,
to commit suicide, to resist nonviolently, or to counter-attack.
Although external circumstances may limit individuals..., they cannot force
a person to follow one of the remaining courses over another. In this sense
the individual still has some freedom of choice. For this reason, individuals
choose in anguish: they know that they must make a choice, and that it will
have consequences. For Sartre, to claim that one amongst many conscious
possibilities takes undeniable precedence (for instance, "I cannot risk my
life, because I must support my family") is to assume the role of an object
in the world, not a free agent, but merely at the mercy of circumstance....”
Cite.
For an existentialist, this power to make choices allows people to create
their own authentic self. Simplifying somewhat, it’s the anxiety about death
which leads us to the liberating power of choice:
“This experience of my own death, or “nothingness,” … can act as a spur to
authenticity: I come to see that I “am” not anything but must “make myself
be” through my choice. In committing myself in the face of death … the
roles that I have hitherto thoughtlessly engaged in … become something
that I myself own up to, become responsible for.” Cite.
I think it’s pretty easy to see how this fits in with Prophecy Girl. Buffy
faced her fears and made a conscious choice by committing herself in the
face of death. She therefore became responsible for her destiny. An
existentialist would say that she was true to herself, or in their word,
“authentic”.
Ford’s situation here gives us another reflection on this. He blamed the
world for his actions and refused to accept responsibility for the choice he
actually was making, even as he denied the possibility of choice to his
unwitting victims:
“Ford: Okay, well, you try vomiting for twenty-four hours straight because
the pain in your head is so intense, and *then* we'll discuss the concept of
right and wrong. (points down) These people are sheep. They wanna be
vampires 'cause they're lonely, miserable or bored. I don't have a choice.
Buffy: You have a choice. You don't have a good choice, but you have a
choice!”
To an existentialist, Ford was rejecting his own humanity when he said he
had no choice, trying to make himself an object rather than a person. That’s
the sign of someone acting in what Sartre called “bad faith”. Quoting again
from Wikipedia:
“As a human, one cannot claim his actions are determined by external
forces; this is the core statement of existentialism. ... One must not exercise
bad faith by denying the self's freedom of choice and accountability.”
Buffy’s reflections with Giles at the end show that she recognizes both the
need to make choices and the difficulty of remaining true to herself while
doing so. “This inner anguish over moral uncertainty is a central underlying
theme in existentialism, as the anguish demonstrates a personal feeling of
responsibility over the choices one makes throughout life.” Id.
Ok, that’s enough on philosophy for now. I’ll revisit some of these issues
later on. Just keep in mind that Joss has a particular view of the world
which informs the Buffy we see on the screen.
In addition to philosophy, we also learn some important facts in Lie to Me.
For one thing, we learn that Angel sired Dru. He did more than that, though
– in a very real sense, he made her. She is what she is today because of
Angel. This is a critical fact for explaining my view of what Dru represents,
which I’m holding off for a while.
Lie to Me is also important for the seasonal arc, but I can’t explain that now
because of spoilers. I’ll talk about it when we get to the end of S2.
Trivia notes: (1) The title of the song which plays when Ford first goes into
his “club” is “Neverland”. And what’s the story of Peter Pan all about? (2)
The TV movie which Ford lip synchs is the Jack Palance version of
Dracula. (3) Xander’s reference to Angel as “Dead Boy” is perhaps a
reference to the US punk band The Dead Boys. (4) Ford asking Buffy on a
date, telling her that it’s a “surprise”, parallels Jenny’s invitation to Giles.
Buffy probably would have preferred the monster trucks.
 The Dark Age
Buffy got the last word at the end of Lie to Me: “liar”. We have every
reason to think her epithet referred solely to Giles’ description of life just
preceding. This very next episode shows us that it had a much more general
application. Giles has been lying to all of us, concealing his “Ripper” past.
Like the statue of Janus in Halloween, Buffy’s word looked both backward
and forward.
Giles is, of course, relieved when Buffy’s music ends in the teaser, but his
words “the rest is silence” apply to Philip as well, as the flash cut shows the
life being choked out of him, unable to scream (see also trivia note 1).
We’ve had hints about Giles’ background for a few episodes now, but here
we learn the details. The metaphor of his rebellious years takes the form of
drug use: Giles is drinking; he looks drunk; Buffy refers to him “lost
weekending” (see trivia note 3); and we learn from Willow and Giles that
possession by the demon was a “high”:
“Willow: … Temporary possession [by Eyghon] imbues the host with a
euphoric feeling of power.'…
Giles: Yes. One of us would, um... (nervously pours a drink) go into a deep
sleep, and the others would, uh, summon him. It was an extraordinary
high!”
So Giles experimented with drugs when he was younger, and this comes
back to haunt him. But of course there’s a message for Buffy as well, and I
think the name of the demon gives us a clue: Eyghon is pronounced “I
gone”. If you let something take you over completely, you may never be
entirely free of it again. There will be two instances where this will come
into play in S2.
In comments I added some thoughts on Angel: It's interesting because
Angel isn't a "hero" at all in S1. He's helpful, but he never puts himself in
any danger except in PG (with Xander right there with him). The heroic
image is partly, well, imagery. He's shown rather heroically: mysterious,
brooding, dark, gorgeous, etc. He looks the part. His actual bravery doesn't
begin until S2, and the buildup is gradual. As of SAR, saving Cordy from an
arm was probably third on his list of actual deeds. While he did do some
fighting in PG, WSWB, School Hard, and Reptile Boy, it was peripheral to
the main action and nothing comparable to Xander in PG. This episode
showed him willing to really put himself on the line. While Buffy wasn't
sure she trusted him in Lie to Me, Angel's behavior here may have
convinced her. There’s a reason for this, and it’s coming soon.
Trivia notes: (1) When Buffy’s aggressively loud music ends, Giles says
“And the rest is silence.” That’s a quote from Hamlet, Act V, sc ii. They are
Hamlet’s last words. (2) Joss must have been feeling very Shakespearean
around this time, because Buffy thinks All’s Well That Ends Well with cute
ER doctors. (3) The Lost Weekend is a 1945 movie about a writer who binge
drinks. (4) “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” – what Eyghon says to Giles – is
a song written by Cole Porter and made famous by Frank Sinatra. (5) The
picture of “young Giles” actually superimposes a head shot of Anthony
Stewart Head onto the body of Sid Vicious.
 What’s My Line 1 & 2
What’s My Line would be a fan favorite if it had nothing else but the
Xander/Cordy basement scene, but it also has a satire on Microsoft; classic
Spike and Dru scenes; Willow, Oz, and animal crackers; and the first
reference to the group as the “Scooby Gang”, which will become the
standard from now on. “What’s the flum?” “I’m thinkin’ maybe dinner and
a movie.” “Eb diminished ninth.” “That’s me only shirt.”
Buffy’s feeling constrained by her destiny: “Y'know, if you don't like the
way I'm doing my job, why don't you find somebody else? Oh, that's right,
there can only be one. As long as I'm alive, there is no one else. Well, there
you go! I don't have to be the Slayer. I could be dead. … Either way I'm
bored, constricted, I never get to shop, and my hair and fingernails still
continue to grow. So really, when you think about it, what's the diff?” The
irony of this outburst will soon become apparent, but she’s acting
immaturely, which she basically admits to Giles.
What’s interesting about her reaction to career day is that her dissatisfaction
is not at her lack of normalcy today. After all, she’s doing exactly what all
the rest of the students are doing. No, she’s chafing at her future. That’s
where she differs from her fellow students – she’s committed to a goal and
they aren’t.
Perhaps seeking compensation for her frustration at her lack of a “normal”
life, i.e., for the way her commitment “limits” her, she turns more towards
Angel. In Lie to Me she told Angel that she loved him but wasn’t sure she
trusted him. Though Angel didn’t reciprocate her declaration of love, Buffy
finds him “the one freaky thing in my freaky world that still makes sense to
me.” Her own lack of “normalcy” leads her to find comfort in the idea that
she won’t have to be alone in that state, that someone decidedly not normal
can share it with her. Notice how this mirrors Daryl’s desire for a “mate” in
Some Assembly Required, though Buffy certainly doesn’t plan to kill
anyone to find her true love.
Thus, when Angel’s put in danger, first by Kendra and then by Spike, Buffy
reacts with her melodramatic proclamation that “nobody messes with my
boyfriend” (a word she resisted when Ford asked her in Lie to Me). She
also, in a scene Joss added, accepts Angel’s vampire side by kissing him in
vampface. This is their first on-screen kiss since Halloween and only their
second since Angel. I like this scene because WML gives us 2 ways to
interpret it: Buffy has seen past the demon to Angel’s true heart; or she is
overlooking the demon, as Kendra thinks. In reaching your own view of the
scene, I’ll suggest that it makes sense to consider the parallel kiss of Buffy’s
metaphorical heart and her metaphorical shadow self. Also consider the
possible metaphor involved in where that first X/C kiss takes place – the
basement.
Then there’s Kendra. Any time a new character gets introduced, especially
one who seems to play a significant role, we should be asking whether that
character plays a metaphorical role as well. I think Kendra does and I’ll
discuss that 3 posts from now.
Some additional thoughts:
In the end, of course, Buffy rescues Angel (with no small assist from
Kendra). But Angel, the one who created Dru, is the one who brings her,
involuntarily of course, to full strength. This is metaphorically essential for
the events to come.
At the end of School Hard, Spike complains about “A Slayer with family
and friends. That sure as hell wasn't in the brochure.” In Kendra we see
what he means.
Kendra’s decision to help rescue Angel is an interesting one. She takes the
same view of Angel that Xander does. Some questions this raises: Did
Kendra act only because her goal of stopping Spike happened to mesh with
Buffy’s goal of rescuing Angel? Whose goal is the correct one, Kendra’s or
Buffy’s? Are Kendra and Xander right or wrong about Angel?
Note the parallel between Drusilla’s forecast of the future using Tarot and
the school’s use of standardized tests. Also take note of the sexually
charged scenes in which Dru tortures Angel and Angel nearly gets Spike to
dust him. Spike’s comment that he’s “not one for the pre-show” clearly has
a double meaning. The restoration spell also can be read sexually.
In the DVD commentary, Marti Noxon states that scene in which Buffy and
Kendra argue about returning to the Watcher was staged for Willy’s benefit.
They wanted Willy, and therefore Spike, to believe that Buffy would be
coming to the church alone. As a reminder for those watching for the first
time, the commentaries after S1 do contain spoilers, sometimes major ones.
Trivia notes: (1) “What’s My Line” was the name of a popular game show
from the 50s and 60s. The contestants tried to guess the line of work of the
guest using only “yes” or “no” questions. The title obviously applies to
Buffy, but it can be read as applying to Angel as well: is he essentially
human or is he, as Kendra says, a “monster”? (2) Bianca Lawson (Kendra)
auditioned for the role of Buffy. (3) Don’t blame her for the Jamaican
accent. They decided at the last minute that Kendra should have one so
Bianca didn’t have enough chance to practice it even though they did get
her a coach. (4) One reason for the popularity of S2 is the introduction of 6
very popular secondary characters: Spike, Dru, Jonathan, Oz, Ethan, and
now Willy. (5) Buffy kisses Angel while he’s in vamp face, thereby
answering Darla’s question to him in Angel: “Did you think she would
understand? That she would look at your face... your true face... and give
you a kiss?” (6) Spike’s “By George, I think he’s got it” is a line from My
Fair Lady and presumably ironic given the nature of Dru. (7) Buffy called
Kendra “Pink Ranger”. The Pink Ranger was one of the Power Rangers.
Sarah Michelle Gellar’s stunt double at this time was also the stunt double
for Amy Jo Johnson, who played the Pink Ranger. (8) Spike referred to
Buffy as “Rebecca of Sunnyhell Farm”. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm was
a classic children’s novel. Wikipedia summarizes the novel as one in which
Rebecca “faces many trials in her young life, gaining wisdom and
understanding.” (9) After Xander spread the glue on the ground, he said
“Welcome my little pretties”, which is a line from the Wizard of Oz. (10)
Seth Green and Alyson Hannigan adlibbed the whole animal crackers scene
after the point where Oz compliments her on her smile. (11) Sarah Michelle
Gellar loves ice skating. (12) No worms were harmed in the filming of
these episodes.
 Ted
Ted is an episode which seems to generate radically different views among
fans. Some rate it near the bottom, others like it. I’m in the latter category. I
thought John Ritter was terrific as Ted, and I liked the way the episode
explored the limits a Slayer needs to observe (though, admittedly, this will
be done much better in S3). I agree with the way Myles McNutt
summarized the episode in his review:
““Ted” is just a sharp little episode: it doesn’t try to fundamentally change
the series, or explicitly create any sort of patterns, but it works hard to make
us question the show’s central premise and delivers some powerful
emotional moments that may eventually be undone but which linger on with
characters in a way that Whedon is very fond of, and which makes for a
compelling hour of television.”
The episode is also important for a key scene in the season finale of S2 and
for the turning point moment of S3. And yes, I do believe Joss had things
planned that far ahead, at least in outline. Ted will have more immediate
importance too. There’s a clue to what I mean in the scene with Buffy and
Giles in the graveyard.
Since I can’t discuss those points yet, let’s go back and consider Buffy’s
mindset when Ted attacked her and see how we should judge her behavior. I
think part of the reason she felt so guilty is that she knew she was spoiling
for a fight with Ted: “I was *so* hoping you'd do that.” Admittedly, we’re
talking about an adult man (to all appearances) in the room of a 16 year old
girl, where he had no right to be, and he physically assaulted her after
invading her privacy. He started the violence and she surely had the right to
respond in some way, but she had to think that reacting as the Slayer rather
than as a person led her to kill someone.
It could also be argued that she should have backed off once she had the
upper hand and that her anger at Ted led her to continue. Joyce pleaded with
her to stop and Buffy herself said later that she “lost control”. Plus, we have
her behavior with the vampire earlier in the episode. Slaying demons in
metaphor is fine, but taking out her emotions on a real person would be
highly dangerous.
On the other hand, Ted wasn’t human after all. She sensed something was
wrong with Ted, as she said even before they went miniature golfing, and
her instincts are very good. Those instincts may have guided her reaction.
Then too, his behavior at the golf course confirmed her suspicion that
something was wrong with him. There’s another reason I could mention
along these lines but it involves a spoiler for S6.
It’s also quite possible that Buffy used Slayer strength because Ted didn’t
react to anything less. She certainly didn’t try to kill him, but his blows
were obviously more than human judging by their impact on her (confirmed
by what we later saw in the second fight); she must have sensed that and it
does appear that she escalated the violence in response as she felt
threatened. Her hardest blows, remember, came after he knocked her to the
floor (not an easy thing to do to a Slayer) and began choking her. The blow
might well have killed an ordinary human being and the chokehold showed
a possible intent to do so.
Ultimately, in my view, Buffy’s own issues did affect her reaction, as Giles
told her earlier when he noted that the subtext was becoming text. Buffy’s at
risk of demonizing someone who’s not actually a demon simply because
she’s upset by the situation. That’s dangerous in a person, much more so in
a Slayer; in a way, this is the flip side of the coin from WML where Buffy
encouraged Kendra to use her anger as a weapon.
What really vindicates Buffy is her willingness to take full responsibility for
what she’d done. When Buffy accepted her destiny as The Slayer in
Prophecy Girl, that meant she had to accept the consequences of her actions
as the Slayer. This is the first time we see Buffy arguably misuse her power,
but she passes an important test when she takes full responsibility for her
actions.
Trivia notes: (1) Captain & Tennille, the subject of Willow’s and Xander’s
conversation in the teaser, were a pop music duo from the ‘70s. The more
interesting question, though, is just why the episode opens with this
whimsical and seemingly random dialogue about which of the two was in
control. I saw it as a reference to the end of WML, with the rise of Drusilla.
(2) Ted’s ability as a cook is probably a joke based on John Ritter’s role in
Three’s Company, where he was a cooking school student. (3) Buffy
described her mother as “like Stepford” when Ted was around. The Stepford
Wives was a book and movie about robotically happy wives who were kept
that way by their husbands as a form of control. (4) Buffy decided that she
and her mother would watch the movie Thelma and Louise. That would be
the perfect movie after a day of dealing with abusive men.
 Bad Eggs
Ted may generate widely divided opinions, but Bad Eggs doesn’t suffer
from that problem. No, it consistently appears on lists of “worst Buffy
episodes”, so I might as well admit up front that I really like it. I think it’s
hilarious, but it also plays an important role in the seasonal arc and there’s a
very good reason why it appears at this point in the season.
Thematically, it’s an episode about SEX. It screams sex; well, it screams
sex and talks softly but insistently about responsibility: “Xander: Well,
you know, it's the whole 'sex leads to responsibility' thing, which I
personally don't get.” Irony duly noted.
Speaking of sex and (ir)responsibility, we see Xander (Buffy’s heart) and
Cordelia (Buffy’s shadow self, her shallow aspect) obsessed with sex in the
biology class. Since in my view it’s All About Buffy, I see this as telling us,
in metaphor, that Buffy’s thinking about it too. And, obviously, if she’s
thinking about sex there’s only one person she’s thinking about it with, and
that’s Angel: “Angel, when I look into the future, a-a... all I see is you! All I
want is you.”
She’s gone back and forth on this for several episodes, as we saw most
obviously in Reptile Boy, an episode which certainly discouraged the idea.
In Lie to Me she told Angel that she loved him but wasn’t sure she could
trust him. The events of The Dark Age and WML seem to have encouraged
her trust. Bad Eggs, though, delivers the same message as Reptile Boy
albeit more subtly (admittedly a rather low bar).
Her heart is thinking about it, as is her selfish aspect; that latter point alone
should give her pause. Nor does the immature behavior of Xander and
Cordy in the closet, in class, or elsewhere suggest that it’s a good idea. We
also know that the X/C relationship is wrong. Xander and Cordy know it;
they talk about it the whole time they’re kissing in the closet:
“Xander: You know what? This would work a lot better for me if you didn't
talk.
Cordelia: Well, it'd work a lot better for me with the lights off.
Xander: Are you saying that you can't look at me when we do... whatever it
is we do?
Cordelia: No, it's not that I can't, it's just more... I don't want to.
Xander: That's great! That's just dandy! We're repulsed by each other, we,
(indicates the door) we hide from our friends...
Cordelia: Well, I should hope so! Please!
Xander: (nods) All in all this is not what I'd call a big self-esteem booster.
Cordelia: Tell me about it! (looks him over) Just look at you! And those
clothes. Where did you get those shoes?!
Xander: Okay, you know what? I don't need this.
Cordelia: Ditto! Like a hole in the head!”

Sex requires both maturity and responsibility. In fact responsibility is the

surface point of the episode (see trivia note 6), what with the eggs
themselves a lesson in responsibility and Joyce constantly referring to Buffy
not being responsible:
“Joyce: A little responsibility is all I ask. Honestly, don't you ever think
about anything besides boys and clothes?”
“Joyce: Oh, they're [kids] just so irresponsible.”
“Joyce: Young lady, you have to learn some responsibility, okay? Once and
for all.”
Buffy’s own behavior of blowing off her search for the Gorches to snog
with Angel – a scene very like X/C in the closet – suggests that it’s
diverting her from her destiny. The ending scene probably isn’t what Joyce
had in mind when she grounded Buffy for not being responsible. And if
we’re talking about maturity, note that Buffy’s stuffed animals are plainly
visible while she’s kissing Angel.
It’s a bit more of a stretch, but I think it’s also possible to see the Bezoar as
a metaphorical vagina dentata. It’s a mother figure, it lives in the school
basement, and it swallows Tector whole. If I’m right about this, there’s a
message here. And we’re about to see it.
Trivia notes: (1) Lyle and Tector Gorch were 2 of the characters in the
movie The Wild Bunch. Another character in the movie is named Angel. (2)
Buffy told her egg “good night Eggbert.” Speedy Eggbert was a computer
game modestly popular at the time Bad Eggs aired. (3) Xander’s “cruel to
be kind” phrase is yet another one from Hamlet, Act III, sc. iv. (4) A bezoar
– the type of demon – is an indigestible object trapped in the digestive tract.
Yeah, it’s a real word. (5) The plot for the episode could be based on either
Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters, the movie based on his book, or the
movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers. (6) I never know if stuff like this is
obvious or not, but a “bad egg” is somewhat dated slang for an
irresponsible person, a rogue. The title, like most in the show, therefore has
multiple meanings: the eggs (duh); the Gorches (rogues); Buffy, Xander and
Cordy (irresponsible, a word Joyce specifically applies to Buffy).
 Surprise/Innocence
And so, at last, we reach the end of Innocence. In his DVD commentary,
Joss describes Innocence as the “mission statement episode” of the show
and says, with the benefit of 3 years hindsight, “This episode in a sense is
and probably always will be the most important episode of Buffy that we
did.” He has rated it his favorite episode of the whole series. It’s certainly a
transcendent episode, one regularly appearing on fans’ Top 10 lists. Buffy’s
life will never be the same again, and neither will the show.
All of S2 after WSWB has been building to this point. (In case you’re
wondering, WSWB sets up different themes which we’ll see later on in S2.)
I’ll start by summarizing how Innocence weaves together the various
strands of those episodes.
Sex has been an important theme of most episodes: Daryl’s need for a mate
in SAR; Spike and Dru’s sexual charge in School Hard; Ampata ready to
suck the life out of Xander; the anvilicious metaphor of Reptile Boy; the
sexual overtones of Halloween; Giles’ and Jenny’s budding relationship,
including Eyghon’s sexual insults to Giles; Xander and Cordy’s
relationship; and pretty much all of Bad Eggs.
There’s a reason why sex has been emphasized so often. I’ve been holding
off discussing the metaphor of Spike and Dru until this point, so now I’ll
make it clear: I suggested in my post on SAR that Chris, Daryl and their
mother formed a trio representing ego, id, and superego, and that the whole
theme of S2 was that an out-of-control id would lead to disaster. School
Hard, the very next episode, introduced us to what I interpret as Buffy’s
metaphorical id (Dru) and ego (Spike).
The id is the source of our desires and the ego is what the id uses to find
ways to satisfy those desires. Buffy desires Angel. That’s the story which
the early episodes have developed in metaphor, and it’s why there’s been so
much emphasis on sex. Let’s see just how this played out.

Spike is nothing if not egotistical. He brags, he’s arrogant, he believes he’s

in charge (like Captain, only to find that the real power was Tennille). In
fact that dialogue from Ted pretty accurately describes the Freudian
understanding of ego and id, in which the ego thinks it’s in charge but is
actually just the method used by the id to obtain its desires:
“Willow: Xander, he was obviously in charge.
Xander: He was a puppet! She was using him!
Willow: He didn't seem like the type of guy who would let himself be used.
Xander: Well, that was her genius! He didn't even know he was playing
second fiddle.”
Spike’s also obsessed with Buffy and her sexual side. Spike was the one to
destroy the Anointed One because the ego believes that it has put childhood
behind even when Buffy’s still in the transitional stage of being a teenager,
a fact emphasized in School Hard itself when Xander went through Buffy's
purse.
Dru serves as the metaphor for Buffy’s desire, her id. We see this in part by
noticing her similarities to Buffy which are emphasized in Surprise: Buffy’s
birthday is Dru’s “coming out” party, meaning Dru is reborn; Dru is
wearing Buffy’s dress from Prophecy Girl in Buffy’s second dream, the
same dress Buffy is wearing in that dream, the dress which represented
Buffy’s virginal innocence in Prophecy Girl; they have prophetic dreams.
Buffy’s dream to open Surprise is one such prophetic dream, though in
metaphor: Dru is the one to kill Angel because, by allowing her id to take
control, Buffy will destroy the human being she loves most.
Dru, we learned in Lie to Me, was created by Angelus, which makes perfect
sense because it’s Angel who is the object of Buffy’s desires. It’s more than
that, though – Dru will die if Angel does, just as Buffy’s desire would die
without Angel: “Spike: Oh! Right. Right, you almost got me! Aren't you a
'throw himself to the lions' sort of sap these days. Well, the lions are on to
you, baby. See, if I kill you now you go quick, and Dru hasn't got a chance.
And if Dru dies your little Rebecca of Sunnyhell Farm and all her mates are
spared her coming-out party.”
At the beginning of the season Dru was weak and controlled, just as Buffy’s
desire for Angel was. The basic purpose of the ego in Freudian theory is to
find ways to satisfy the id’s desires. Freud expressed it very pithily: "Where
the Id was, there shall the Ego be" (h/t executrix). Spike’s goal for the
season, announced in School Hard, was to “restore Dru to health”, that is,
metaphorically, to bring the id to full strength. That’s what he did in WML.
During the “restoration spell” Angel’s essence – that which had created Dru
in the first place – poured into her, bringing her to full strength.
The ego is also supposed to remain in at least partial control of the id.
Because Spike was disabled in the fight, Buffy’s id was now unrestrained
except by her superego (see below). Bad Eggs demonstrated this in
metaphor, with Joyce (superego) harping on Buffy’s “irresponsibility” while
hormones were on parade by Buffy/Angel and Xander/Cordy. Buffy herself
put her desire in plain English just after the teaser to Surprise when she told
Willow she was going to sleep with Angel.
I promised to talk about Kendra, and I think she fits into the metaphor as
well. Kendra I see as Buffy’s virginal conscience. Remember Kendra’s
stammering shyness around Xander in WML:
“Buffy: I'm guessing dating isn't big with your Watcher either.
Kendra: I'm not permitted to speak with boys.”
And the fact that her parents gave her to her watcher when she was young,
where she was then isolated, almost like being given to a convent:
“Kendra: De tings you do and have, I was taught, distract from my calling.
Friends, school... even family.
Buffy: Even family?
Kendra: My parents, dey sent me to my Watcher when I was very young.
Buffy: How young?
Kendra: I don't remember dem, actually. I've seen pictures. But, uh, dat's
how seriously de calling is taken by my people. My modder and fadder
gave me to my Watcher because dey believed dat dey were doing de right
ting for me, and for de world.”
And most important of all, her nagging warning about Angelus, the monster
underneath whom Buffy was overlooking in favor of Angel:
“Kendra: Angel? You mean Angelus? I've read about him. He is a
monster.”
By giving into her desire, Buffy lost herself in Angel similar to the way
Giles lost himself in Eyghon. She (unintentionally) unleashed a monster on
the world, just as Daryl tried to do in SAR. Like Ted, Angel appeared to be
human but was a conscience-less killer underneath, in each case revealed
after Buffy killed the human. Buffy even signaled this similarity between
Ted and vampires in her rant in the graveyard in Ted by running vampires
together with Ted: “I mean, people are perfectly happy getting along, and
then vampires come, and they run around and they kill people, and they
take over your whole house, they start making these stupid little mini
pizzas, and everyone's like, 'I like your mini pizzas,'….”
In essence, Buffy achieved without intending it the very result which she
prevented Ampata from accomplishing deliberately: she sucked the life out
of her beloved to satisfy her own desire. The Guardian we now understand
was the superego which kept the id (Ampata) under control. Ampata
became free only when she destroyed her guardian.
The way this played out in Innocence was that the Judge metaphorically
disabled Buffy’s superego. In the real world, a judge separates the innocent
from the guilty. In Freudian theory, the superego acts like a judge because it
punishes misbehavior with feelings of guilt. In the twisted demon world, the
Judge performs the opposite function: he is “a demon brought forth to...
separate the righteous from the wicked... and to burn the righteous down.”
The Judge operates by burning the souls – in the Buffyverse, the
metaphorical conscience (Joss’s word) or superego (my gloss) – of human
beings. When Buffy made contact with the Judge despite Angel’s shouted
warning not to touch him, “it was like a sudden fever”. That disabled her
superego just enough to allow her id to take control in the emotion of their
escape. And one moment of happiness separated the righteous from the
wicked.
With this all as background, let’s consider now the nature of Buffy’s
relationship with Angel both in text and in metaphor. How should we
evaluate her decision to have sex with Angel? The title of the episode gives
us one possible answer: she was (and still is) innocent. Joss says of the title,
“Buffy is still an innocent … she hasn’t lost anything of herself.” Giles,
being the best dad ever, reinforces this at the end:
“Buffy: You must be so disappointed in me.
Giles: No. (she looks at him) No, no, I'm not.
Buffy: But this is all my fault.
Giles: No. I don't believe it is. Do you want me to wag my finger at you
and tell you that you acted rashly? You did. A-and I can. I know that you
loved him. And... he... has proven more than once that he loved you. You
couldn't have known what would happen. The coming months a-are gonna,
are gonna be hard... I, I suspect on all of us, but... if it's guilt you're looking
for, Buffy, I'm, I'm not your man. All you will get from me is, is my
support. And my respect.”
The other side of the argument can be found in my reading of the season to
this point. Joss says that Angel was designed to be Buffy’s “star-crossed
lover” (Shakespeare!) and is “exactly the wrong guy for her”. In my view,
every episode has been warning Buffy of the consequences of giving in to
her id and telling her, in metaphor, that sex with Angel was a very bad idea.
We saw this in SAR, in Inca Mummy Girl, in Reptile Boy, in Ted, and in Bad
Eggs. Lie to Me prefigured Buffy’s dilemma now. There she had to kill her
former crush because he’d become a vampire, and that’s where she is now
with Angel. “Give me time.”
This reading is reinforced by the parallel Xander/Cordy relationship. It’s
wrong, every which way it’s wrong. Their first kiss was in the basement of
Buffy’s house, the site of her metaphorical subconscious, home of her id;
there had never been a scene in the basement before that, and they built the
set for that episode. Every time Xander and Cordy talk about their
relationship they say how wrong it is. Bad Eggs could hardly have made it
any clearer that they were letting hormones get the better of them. Willow
sums it up here in Innocence: “It’s against all laws of God and man.” Note
that this perfectly describes a relationship between a Slayer and a vampire.
I obviously lean strongly to the view that Buffy made the wrong decision,
romantic though her relationship with Angel may have seemed. In my read
of the show, Buffy’s destiny is to grow up. The whole season has built off
the theme briefly explored in Angel, namely that Buffy’s relationship is a
diversion from her destiny. She’s not ready, as DreamJoyce suggests in
Surprise, and the effect is that her destiny has become secondary:
Angel: So you don't think about the future?
Buffy: No.
Angel: Never?
Buffy: No.
Angel: (swallows) You really don't care what happens a year from now?
Five years from now?
Buffy: Angel, when I look into the future, a-a... all I see is you! All I want
is you. (Reptile Boy Bad Eggs h/t anonymous.)

Some people were emotionally attached to the Buffy/Angel relationship and

disappointed at the turn of events in Innocence. The psychology of the plot,
though, is very well thought out. Adam Smith laid it out 250 years ago in
his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which I quoted in my analysis of
Angel. Smith notes that we never empathize with lovers entirely because we
never have the desire to form the same attachment they do. We form our
own attachments, of course, but not with the same person as others do.
Though their love will seem perfectly reasonable to them, it can never
appear in the same light to us because we aren’t in love with the same
person. Smith goes on:
“But though we feel no proper [empathy] with an attachment of this kind,
though we never approach even in imagination towards conceiving a
passion for that particular person, yet … we readily enter into those high
hopes of happiness which are proposed from its gratification, as well as into
that exquisite distress which is feared from its disappointment. It interests
us not as a passion, but as a situation that gives occasion to other passions
which interest us: to hope, to fear, and to distress of every kind. …
Hence it is that, in some modern tragedies and romances, this passion
appears so wonderfully interesting. It is not so much the love … which
attaches us …, as the distress which that love occasions. The author who
should introduce two lovers in a scene of perfect security, expressing their
mutual fondness for one another, would excite laughter, and not sympathy.
If a scene of this kind is ever admitted into a tragedy, it is always, in some
measure, improper, and is endured not from any sympathy with the passion
that is expressed in it, but from concern for the dangers and difficulties with
which the audience foresee that its gratification is likely to be attended.”
[Slightly edited for readability; my emphasis.]
In short, it’s the anticipation of a relationship, or concern about its ending,
which is the proper subject of drama. A quiet, uneventful relationship is of
no interest. Joss Whedon understands that: he says in the DVD commentary
that he knew Buffy and Angel would get together, and that once they did
people would become bored with them unless he did something else. Plus,
of course, we should always remember the ending of I Robot, You Jane:
“Buffy: Let's face it: none of us are ever gonna have a happy, normal
relationship.
Xander: We're doomed!
Willow: Yeah!
They all laugh. Their laughter quickly becomes nervous and stops. Only the
fountain can be heard as they each consider their plight.”
Buffy’s emotions still have a strong hold on her at the end when she’s
unable to dust Angelus. The consequences of her decision will obviously be
an issue going forward, so I’ll talk about that as we go along from here.
There are lots of other interesting issues as well. Since I’ve mentioned
Willow’s criticism of X/C, we should take a look at her reaction in more
detail. I obviously think Willow correctly identified the relationship as
wrong, and Joss agrees: “The idea that Cordelia would end up falling for
Xander … that would be a perfect romance because they are so very wrong
for each other.” That doesn’t mean Willow was right to call Xander out on
it. Her unrequited love for Xander causes her to overlook the fact that it
may be a wrong decision, but it’s his decision to make, not hers. He didn’t
owe her anything, and she seems to have forgotten her own statement in
Angel that “If you care about somebody you care about them.”
Attempting to use Oz as a form of revenge was thoughtless on her part, but
you gotta love Oz’s reaction. As Joss says in the commentary, you can see
Willow fall in love with him in that moment. And AH’s smile … well, it
doesn’t get any better than that.
Buffy’s dream about Jenny at the graveyard showed Angel standing in the
sun. I see this as meaning it was Angel’s human side, now separate from the
vampire. It was Angel, therefore, who gave her the clue about Jenny.
What about Jenny? It’s not at all clear that she did any harm in concealing
her role – she had no way to know that Angel’s curse could be lifted – but
spying on people isn’t the best way to get them to trust you. Buffy’s
reaction is probably too harsh, though I excuse her under the circumstances.
Giles is more interesting. He’s willing to sacrifice Jenny and his own
feelings in order to keep his Slayer focused in an extreme emergency. That
was essential under the circumstances, and it’s a character trait Giles will
demonstrate repeatedly.
There’s so much greatness in these two episodes that I can’t really list it all.
“Wow.” Angelus exhaling the smoke, post-coital both literally and
metaphorically (Vampire bite? Prostitute? I mean, really.). DB’s marvelous
portrayal of Angelus. The devastating scene in Angel’s apartment. Willow
getting it first: “No, I don't think you can.” “I knew it! Well, not 'knew it' in
the sense of having the slightest idea….” “Wear something trashy ... er.” Oz
and Willow in the van. Possibly my favorite comedic line in the whole
series: “I’m seventeen years old. Looking at linoleum makes me think about
having sex.” “That was then. This is now.”
One reason I rate S2 so highly is that, with all respect to Joss, I’m not at all
sure that Innocence is even the best episode of the season.
Trivia notes: (1) The lyrics we hear as Surprise opens in Buffy’s dream are
from the song “Anything”: Take me over, I'm lying down / I'm giving in to
you. (2) The monkey next to Willow in Buffy’s dream is speaking French.
The words translate as “The hippo stole his pants.”, which references back
to Willow’s conversation with Oz in WML in which he told her that all
monkeys are French and that the hippo wanted the monkey’s pants. Buffy
wasn’t present for this conversation, so it’s a signal to the audience that the
dream really is prophetic. (3) The monkey is a visual pun: it’s a capuchin
monkey and Willow is drinking a cappuccino. (4) Willow tells Buffy “carpe
diem” which means “seize the day”. Buffy told Willow to “seize the
moment” in WTTH. That worked out poorly then, just as it does here when
Willow quotes it back to her. (5) Giles told the gang, “Discretion is the
better part of valor”. That’s a cliché these days, but is from Henry IV Part 1,
Act V, sc. iv. (6) Xander said that Buffy ground the Master’s bones to make
her bread. “Grind his bones to make my bread” is from “Jack and the
Beanstalk”. (7) The song which plays at Dru’s party is called
“Transylvanian Concubine”. Well, yes. (8) Cordelia in Some Assembly
Required: “Angel saved me from an arm.” Here he saves Buffy from one.
(9) The heavy breathing in the scene of Angel and Buffy making love was
dubbed later by Joss and the sound editor. (10) The movie Buffy and Joyce
watch at the end is called Stowaway and starred Alice Faye and Robert
Young. (11) Brian Thompson, who played the Judge, was Luke in WTTH
and The Harvest. (12) Surprise was the third episode written by Marti
Noxon on her own (she collaborated writing WML 1; h/t anonymous). Marti
would go on to become the co-showrunner with Joss.
 Phases
After the sturm und drang of Innocence, we need some comic relief and
Phases provides it. Humor is very much a matter of individual taste, and I
think it’s the second funniest comedic episode in the series, after Pangs.
Even the funniest Buffy episodes, though, have a serious point, and I think
Phases does.
Let’s start with the title. It obviously refers to the phases of the moon which
affect werewolves, but it has other meanings as well. For example, the
werewolf himself has alternating phases of demon and human, which is
why Buffy won’t kill it. Willow’s “three days out of the month” can be seen
as a phase. Most significant, in my view, is this dialogue from Innocence:
“Spike: Is it really true?
Angelus: It's really true. (laughs and walks around the table)
Drusilla: (follows him with her gaze) You've come home.
Spike: No more of this 'I've got a soul' crap? (follows him)
Angelus: What can I say, hmm? (strikes a match on the table) I was going
through a phase.”
Needless to say, I don’t think this word choice is accidental. The ending of
Innocence left no doubt that Buffy was going to have to deal with the
consequences of her relationship with Angel, including her inability to stake
him. One thing Phases does, in my view, is add a layer of complexity to her
dilemma. Thus far, we’ve had the example of Xander suffering from
temporary possession by a hyena, and Buffy rightly doesn’t slay him.
Vampires (other than Angel) are permanently controlled by the demon, so
Buffy slays them on sight. Now we get Oz, who’s a demon sometimes but
not others. Oz needs to be given the opportunity to recognize his problem
and control it himself; once he takes that responsibility, Buffy won’t slay
him. The name of the werewolf hunter – Cain – hangs a lantern on this
point.
So how should Buffy think of Angelus? Is he now just a vampire again,
something to be slain on sight? Or is he unique among vampires such that
she should treat him as merely going through a demon “phase”?
Complicating her task further is the fact that, in stark contrast to Oz, Angel
doesn’t control himself during this “phase”. Oz never harmed anyone, but
Angelus has killed the prostitute, Enyos, and Theresa (at least). Buffy
accepts responsibility for Theresa’s death, adding to her sense of guilt over
the events of Surprise/Innocence. But what if Oz had been the killer, not
knowing that he was the wolf and unable to control himself? Should Buffy
then have slayed Oz?
I’m not going to answer these questions, though I intend to discuss them
later when we have more story as background. I’m not sure they have
definitive answers anyway. My point is only that Buffy’s situation can’t
necessarily be resolved simply by reciting her duty to slay vampires. I can
only say that the show is going to explore these issues going forward and
that the show is consistent in recognizing Buffy’s responsibility for the
consequences of her actions.
Now I want to return to the werewolf. The wolf needs to be controlled; on
that everyone agrees. What we need to analyze is what it is about the wolf
which makes this so important. Let’s see how Giles describes it:
“Giles: … Y-you see, uh, the-the werewolf, uh, is such a, a potent e-e-
extreme representation of our inborn animalistic traits … And it, uh, acts
on-on pure instinct. No conscience, uh, uh, predatory and, and aggressive.”
That’s kind of how I see the id. Here are some descriptions of the id taken
from the Wikipedia article, and I think they fit pretty well with what Giles
said: “The id comprises the unorganized part of the personality structure
that contains the basic drives. … It is filled with energy reaching it from the
instincts, but it has no organization, produces no collective will, but only a
striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the
observance of the pleasure principle…. The id is responsible for our basic
drives, "knows no judgments of value: no good and evil, no morality... It is
regarded as "the great reservoir of libido"….”
Libido. Now, I think, we can understand what the episode is telling us. The
wolf, as I noted, never actually kills anyone. Instead, what we see is lots of
references to sex, consistent with the season to date. The wolf is attracted to
places where there’s sexual heat: lover’s lane, the Bronze. “They're suckers
for that whole sexual heat thing. Sense it miles away.”
I see Phases as telling Buffy in metaphor that her sexual urges need to be
controlled. Not repressed, not killed, but kept under control. That’s a job for
the superego – to keep the id from getting out of hand. That’s the message
we get from Larry coming out: he’s wolfish beforehand, a considerate
person afterwards. (h/t Aeryl)
When the episode opens, Buffy’s spirit – Willow – is obsessed with desire:
“Willow: … I mean, he said he was gonna wait until I was ready, but I'm
ready. Honest. I'm good to go here. Buffy: Have you dropped any hints?
Willow: I've dropped anvils.”
But Buffy’s desire for Angel still distracts her from her destiny as Slayer,
and in Theresa we see the consequences. Not until Buffy takes
responsibility for Theresa – “Instead of not protecting Theresa from the
werewolf, I was able to not protect her from something just as bad.” – can
her spirit rally and subdue the beast. At the end, her spirit comes to terms
with her desire:
“Willow: Well, I like you. You're nice and you're funny. And you don't
smoke. Yeah, okay, werewolf, but that's not all the time. I mean, three days
out of the month I'm not much fun to be around either.
Oz: You are quite the human.
Willow: (smiles) So, I'd still if you'd still.
Oz: I'd still. I'd *very* still.
Willow: (smiles widely) Okay. (more seriously) No biting, though.
Oz: Agreed.”
Trivia notes: (1) The callback to Witch in the opening scene – Oz looking at
the cheerleader statue – is a great moment. There are also references to The
Pack, I Robot, You Jane, and Teacher’s Pet. (2) Cordelia told Xander that he
put on too much “Obsession for Dorks”. “Obsession For Men” was a Calvin
Klein perfume. (3) Buffy said that “tonight we bring ‘em back alive”. Bring
‘Em Back Alive was the title of a book written by big-game hunter Frank
Buck. I read it when I was a kid. (4) Xander mentioned Robbie the Robot,
who was from the movie Forbidden Planet. (5) Anyone else think Nick
Brendan has kind of a Matt Dillon (actor, not Sheriff) look here? (6) This
episode contains the first mention of bunnies, which will become a standing
joke in the series.
 Bewitched, Bothered & Bewildered
BB&B is one of the best beloved Buffy (heh) episodes. It’s funny, it has
great scenes – Xander’s walk down the hallway, Buffy in her raincoat – and
it makes fun of Valentine’s Day. Hard to imagine what more anyone could
want from an episode. Anything beyond that is just the cherry on top.
Giles tells us what the episode’s about: “I know it's not love. It's obsession.
Selfish, banal obsession.” It’s pretty easy, also, to identify one person who’s
obsessed: Angelus. He’s obsessed with Buffy. The reason Angelus has this
obsession begins with Buffy herself. She gave her heart to Angel, but a
magic spell converted Angel into Angelus and Angel’s love into Angelus’
obsession. In pursuit of that obsession, Angelus threatens to destroy Buffy’s
metaphorical heart, Xander:
“Angelus: I wanted to do something special for Buffy, actually to Buffy, but
this is *so* much better!
Xander knees him in the crotch, but Angelus isn't fazed. He flips Xander
over backward onto the grass again. He bends down, grabs Xander's hair
and lifts his head up.
Angelus: If it's any consolation, I feel very close to you right now.”
Mapping this onto the metaphor is easy. Amy’s spell backfired on Xander,
just as Buffy’s love has now backfired on her. The women of Sunnydale
pursue Xander like Angelus pursues Buffy. Those plotlines intersect when
Angelus realizes that he can attack Buffy through Xander. Dru is the one
who saves Xander from Angelus because the id must protect the heart – the
heart was the focus of the id’s desire and the id needs to preserve that.
I should add a comment at this point about the particularities of the love
spell. The misfire of the spell is very subtle and very revealing about what it
says about Xander (not Buffy in metaphor, just Xander). Amy recites “Let
my cries bind the heart of Xander's beloved.” The problem is, Xander pretty
much loves all women. In Phases, Willow told Cordy that “He's so busy
looking around at everything he doesn't have, he doesn't even realize what
he *does* have.” That’s Xander’s emotional state which the spell picks up –
he doesn’t really love Cordy, he’s busy looking around at everyone else. (In
fairness, the way Cordy hid their relationship created an incentive for
Xander to act that way.) Because Xander is in some sense attracted to all
women, the spell causes all women to become obsessed with him rather
than Angelus, as it might have done if the metaphor became too literal (so
to speak).
In reading more recent reviews of the shows, I see that a lot of commenters
dislike Xander in this episode because they see him as “roofie-ing” Buffy.
(h/t anonymous) My basic view is that Xander certainly didn’t intend that
result, so I cut him some slack on it. Now, I don’t think he deserves very
much credit for not taking advantage of Buffy (or others). After all, given
the circumstances it really would have been rape. The idea of giving credit
for not doing something that would have been obviously wrong is
problematic.

The way I'd phrase it is that it was nonetheless good for the show to
reinforce the point by having Buffy praise Xander. Praising someone for
doing the right thing, even when that's expected, seems like a good way to
encourage it. Still, Xander does get off pretty easy here -- his original intent
was pretty awful, but he ends up with Cordy at the end. He does get some
punishment from Giles and Willow, but we don't see it.
At the end, it’s Giles who breaks the spell Xander caused. That’s what
Buffy needs to do, namely break the spell under which she caused Angel’s
love for her to turn into the obsession of Angelus (unintentionally, just as
the effect of Xander’s spell was unintentional). Exactly how to do that is her
challenge.
Trivia notes: (1) The title comes from the show tune of the same name in
the musical Pal Joey. (2) Having Oz notice the cheerleader statute at the
beginning of Phases seems like a clever and subtle way to remind everyone
about Witch before Amy makes her reappearance here. Amy, you’ll notice,
didn’t seem to need much persuasion to perform the spell. (3) The transition
between scenes is typically clever. At the end of the scene in the warehouse
where Angelus gave Dru the still-warm heart, Dru said “Don’t worry Spike.
Angel always knows what speaks to a girl’s heart.” The episode shifted
immediately to the Bronze and we heard the music of Dingoes. The title of
the song they were playing was “Pain”, which is obviously what Dru meant.
In mid-song we broke to Buffy and her mother at home discovering the
sadistic roses Angelus left for Buffy, then it was back to the Bronze where it
picked up in mid-song and the song continued to play until Xander
approached Cordy, whereupon the song stopped and she broke up with him.
If you watch very carefully, there was a red-haired female student in the
background of the X/C scene. That student then walked past Xander in the
hallway the next day and giggled at his misfortune. The show is filled with
neat transitions like this and I haven’t mentioned any before, but this
sequence was particularly good. (4) “Say it with flowers” was an
advertising slogan for florists. Buffy used the phrase to tell Giles about
Angelus’ “gift”.
 Passion
In Noel Murray’s review of Passion at the AV Club, he said that this
episode was “as good as television ever gets.” I rate Passion higher than
Innocence; it’s on my short list for the best episode in the whole series
(along with Becoming, The Body, and OMWF), which means in the whole
history of television. Interestingly, Joss didn’t officially write it, though
rumors say he re-wrote substantial portions of it. I consider those rumors
likely true, since Ty King never wrote another episode, which would be
inexplicable if he had really produced something as stunning as Passion.
I’ll start at the top, with one of the greatest scenes television has ever
produced, one that stunned me when I first watched it and which still blows
me away no matter how often I’ve seen it (and yet which, amazingly, has
not one but two competitors for the very best in the series IMO). What
follows was originally posted at ATPO by Akita in April 2002. Apologies if
some of you have seen it before, but it’s so good it’s worth re-reading:
“One of the things I most love about BtVS is the skillful, often artful, way
music is used not only to complement, but to add depth to various scenes.
And indeed, if you pay attention, it often cuts like a knife. Of course, we
can usually understand the words of the songs that play behind the scenes . .
..

Yesterday evening, I finally got a chance to tape "Passion" -- the S2 episode

when Angelus kills Jenny Calendar. I ended up watching it several times.
Each time I grew more intrigued with the opera music playing in the scene
where Giles arrives at his apartment. As a true opera fanatic, I knew the
music, of course; it is "O soave fanciulla," a particularly glorious moment in
Puccini's ultra- Romantic, enduringly popular "La Bohème."

However, opera is not something with which I would expect the typical (be
there such a thing) BtVS fan to be very familiar. And, sure enough, when I
checked the shooting script, it says merely: "Giles hear MUSIC -
SOMETHING SOFT AND ROMANTIC - coming from an album on his
TURNTABLE."
So why choose an opera selection that few will understand? And why that
particular opera? Well, Giles (as we learn through the course of the series)
is passionate about music (many kinds of music) - - and he surely loves this
recording, because the record sounds as if it has been played often. That
seriously repressed Giles, who intellectualizes nearly every event in his life,
would love something as lush and Romantic as this opera obviously tells us
something about him -- or at least affirms what we have already suspected.
That Angelus would choose this recording as the backdrop for his sadistic
little play also says something about his own cruelty and the twisted nature
of his definition of passion. For the passion expressed in the opera scene is
a world away from passion as Angelus understands it; it is the innocent
passion of first love: it's all trembling first kisses, lovely girls bathed in
moonlight. (In the opera, Mimì -- a poor and frail young seamstress [we
learn later that she is actually dying of consumption] -- has just met the
struggling young poet Rodolfo in his moonlit garret in 19th-century Paris;
after telling each other a bit about themselves they realize they are falling in
love.)

Here's the way the music in the scene plays out (English "translations"
taken largely from William Weaver's translation of the libretto; some from
my copy of the complete score).

Earlier in "Passion", Giles and Jenny have begun to mend the break
between them; Jenny in fact has said, obviously for the first time aloud, that
she loves him. He is expecting to see her later that night, and undoubtedly
has some romantic fantasies of his own as to how the evening will turn out
(only we the audience know that Jenny is already dead). As this scene
opens, we see him walking down the stairs to his apartment. As he comes to
the door, he sees a beautiful, long-stemmed, red rose attached to it -- and we
can now hear the music swell. It is a tenor/soprano duet:

Rodolfo : Fremon già nell'anima/le dolcezze estreme (repeated 3 times)/Nel

bacio freme amore [Already I taste in spirit/The heights of tenderness/Love
trembles in our kiss]
Mimì: Ah! Tu sol commandi, amor! Tu sol commandi, amore/Oh! Come
dolci scendono/ Le sue lusinghe al core . . .[You rule alone, Oh love!/How
sweet his praises/enter my heart . . .]
(During this, GILES tenderly pulls the rose from the door, smells it, smiles,
and opens the door, hopeful, but perhaps still fearing to expect too much,
because we begin to hear a breathless, slightly awkward exchange between
the two lovers. . .)

Mimì: . . .Tu sol comandi, amor! [Love, you alone rule.] (Rodolfo kisses
her. She pulls back.) No, per pietà! [No, please.]
Rodolfo: Sei mia! [You are mine!]
Mimì: V' aspettan gli amici . . .[Your friends are waiting . . .]
Rodolfo: Già mi mandi via? [You send me away already?]

(During this, GILES enters his apartment a bit hesitantly, calls out for
Jenny, hangs up his coat, looks around, sees the wine, roses, and note, and
walks toward them.)

Mimì: Vorrei dir . . .ma non oso . . . [I daren't say . . . what I'd like . . .]
Rodolfo: Di'. [Tell me.]

(On the words "Di'/Tell me", GILES opens the note and reads -- "Upstairs."
The conjunction of the words and the act made me gasp when I first heard
it.)

Rodolfo to Mimì: O soave fanciulla, o dolce viso/Di mite circonfuso alba

lunar [Oh, lovely girl! Oh, sweet face/bathed in the soft moonlight]

(On these lines, GILES glances upward toward the bedroom, smiles
sweetly, nearly joyfully, and with great expectation grabs the wine and
starts toward the stairs.)

Rodolfo: In te ravviso il sogno . . ./Ch'io vorrei sempre sognar! [I see you in

the dream . . ./I'd dream forever!]

(GILES climbs the stairs, sees Jenny on his bed, but only when he arrives at
the bedroom door does he realize she is dead. As the champagne bottle
drops from his hand, shattering on the floor, we hear Mimì and Rodolfo
sing ecstatically:
Ah, tu sol commandi, amor! . . . [Ah! Love, you rule alone! . . .]

Oh, twist the knife. And then twist it one more time, because later as Giles
leans against the wall, as Jenny's body is removed, we hear Mimì, alone,
sing that line one more time: "Ah! Love, you rule alone! . . ." Then the
soundtrack goes briefly totally silent, as the police bring Giles irrevocably
back to what happened:

POLICEMAN: Mr. Giles, I need to ask you to come with us . . .

GILES (still dazed): Of course . . . . .yes . . . .procedure.

And lest you still think this is all coincidence, the music has been altered.
Although it sounds seamless, in fact the first part we hear (from: "Fremon
già nell'anima" to "Di'") in the scene actually comes at the end of the
aria/duet in the opera and indeed comes in again in its proper place at the
end in the TV scene itself.”

Making the scene all the more heart-rending is the irony of Giles’ words
earlier: “I know how hard this is for you. (gets a look from Buffy) All right,
I don't. But as the Slayer, you don't have the luxury of being a slave to your,
your passions. You mustn't let Angel get to you. No matter how provocative
his behavior may become.”
Passion would rate in my top 5 for that one scene alone, but it’s filled with
brilliant moments: Willow pulling the fish from the envelope; Angelus’s
confrontation with Jenny and her murder; the way we see Buffy and Willow
react to the news of Jenny’s death while Angelus narrates; Giles’
confrontation with Angelus; Buffy telling Giles she can’t do it without him.
Voiceovers are controversial – see Blade Runner – but I think they really
work here. The poetry of Angelus’ monologue conveys the devastation of
the scene where Buffy and Willow break down far better than any dialogue
could. It’s world class.
At the end, Buffy refuses to let Giles’ passion destroy him. She can’t let
him leave; she can’t do this alone. She’s not a slave to passion after all.
Some random thoughts:
The title seems ironic given the role of Angelus. He’s as cold-blooded – that
is, passionless – a killer as there ever was. “Without passion we’d be truly
dead.” Yes he is.
I’ve often thought there’s a good deal of self-interest by the Watchers in the
rule forbidding the slayer to disclose her identity. If the identity of the
slayer were widely known, the job of the Watcher would be at least as
dangerous as the job of mother.
With the focus on music above, you might note (ahem) that in both scenes
with Giles and Jenny in the classroom, a variation on the Buffy/Angel
theme plays while they speak.
BB&B showed us how love can easily become obsession. Here we get
confirmation of Angelus’ obsession with Buffy:
“Buffy: (stares into space) It's so weird... Every time something like this
happens, my first instinct is still to run to Angel. I can't believe it's the same
person. He's completely different from the guy that I knew. (looks at
Willow)
Willow: Well, sort of, except...
Buffy: Except what?
Willow: (looks at Buffy) You're still the only thing he thinks about.”
Though he doesn’t bite Jenny, there’s still a very sexual vibe when Angelus
kills her: “this is where you get off.” Angelus looks like he’s having an
orgasm. Making this implication even more distasteful, if that’s possible, is
that Giles is Buffy’s surrogate father.
Xander comes across as very self-righteous in this episode. Yes, he hated
Angel previously, but not for this reason and he obviously had no reason to
suspect the gypsy curse or its consequences. It’s an unattractive part of
Xander’s character which will increasingly annoy me personally as we go
forward.
Keep thinking about it: Who’s right, Buffy in saying that Angel is
“completely different from the guy I knew”? Or Xander, who treats Angel
and Angelus as the same? In the essay on Phases, I raised the question of
how Buffy should think of Angelus. I’m still not going to answer that yet,
but Passion obviously raises the stakes. Pun very much intended.
Trivia notes: (1) Cordelia was worried about her car because she gave
Angel a ride in Some Assembly Required. (2) Remarkably, Joyce
remembered that Buffy told her that Angel was tutoring her in history all
the way back in Angel. (3) When Willow told Buffy she was glad her
parents didn’t let her have a puppy, I think that was a deliberate reference to
BB&B, where Giles told Buffy that on one Valentine’s Day “Angel nails a
puppy to the...”. (4) Having Angelus in vamp face when he killed Jenny
was a conscious decision. Joss didn’t want to confuse viewers about who
was doing what. Keep this decision in mind when we get to S6. (5) When
Xander encouraged Buffy to kill Angelus, he used the phrase “Faster
Pussycat, Kill, Kill”, which was a 1966 movie by Russ Meyer. (6) Angelus
was toying with Jenny when he said he’d been invited in to the school. It’s a
public building and vampires don’t need an invite.
 Killed By Death
Killed by Death is another episode which gets little respect in fandom. Part
of that is its placement in the season, right after Passion and just before I
Only Have Eyes For You. That’s a tough crowd, made worse by the fact that
it’s hard to see much point to KbD. As I hope I’ve shown by now, though, I
think every episode has a purpose for it and a reason why it appears in the
season when it does.
I start at the beginning of the episode, with Buffy’s illness. This is the only
time in the whole series when we see her actually sick (as opposed to being
ill from a spell, as in Witch). The illness comes right after the terrible events
of Passion and the effect is that she’s weakened to the point where she’s
unable to carry out her duties as Slayer, which we see in the fight with
Angelus at the beginning of the episode. I think it’s reasonable, in these
circumstances, to see her illness as a metaphor for her feeling sick over the
death of Jenny. Joyce gives us a big hint that this is the case: “Buffy’s been
so down since it [Jenny’s death] happened… I mean she never gets sick….”
When we get sick, the natural thing to do is seek treatment in order to get
well. Buffy fears the hospital because she’s blaming herself and the hospital
reminds her of a previous occasion when she, in her mind, failed to act in
time. That’s how I interpret the flashbacks to her cousin – Buffy thinks she
should have done something to save Celia, just as she now knows she failed
to prevent Jenny’s murder when she had the chance.
One consequence of being sick, at least if you’re very sick, is that you
might die. Der Kindestod obviously represents this fear of death for
children. The fact that Buffy is able to see him by making herself sicker
shows us that she too is still a child in some ways even though she’s at that
in-between age of adolescence and on the road to adulthood (“Believe me,
I’m not that grown up.”). As I read it, then, Buffy is sick nearly to death
about Angelus’ murder of Jenny and prevents herself from being
overwhelmed by a sense of helplessness when she saves the children.
Cordy’s right:
“So this isn't about you being afraid of hospitals 'cause your friend died and
you wanna conjure up a monster that you can fight so you can save
everybody and not feel so helpless?”
This doesn’t mean Buffy imagined the demon. No, within the confines of
the show the demon was just as real as all the others. This is just a case of
the dialogue making sure we don’t miss the message.
That leaves us to explain why the children can see the monster but adults
can’t. The reason, I think, is that the feeling of helplessness is something
children experience all the time. Adults can, we hope, act to solve their
problems. By identifying the problem Buffy’s able to overcome the sense of
helplessness all children suffer from and resume her Slayer duties – that is,
her metaphorical road to adulthood.
The death of Jenny Calendar was Buffy’s first important failure on her road
to her destiny. A major failure at trying to be an adult is not something any
of us take lightly; it could even be enough to discourage the journey
altogether. Buffy had to move past that sense of failure before she could
resume hers.
Trivia notes: (1) Der Kindestod was obviously modeled after Freddy
Krueger of Nightmare on Elm Street. For all that I think the episode itself is
relatively weak, the monster is one of the show’s creepiest. (2) The tune
Angel was whistling as he walked into the hospital and was stopped by
Xander was the Ode to Joy from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. (3)
Cordelia’s version of “tact” – “not saying true stuff” – should remind us of
Lear’s daughter, after whom the character was named. (4) Power Girl, the
role Buffy played with Celia, is a DC comics heroine. (5) Xander’s advice
not to play chess with Death refers to the movie The Seventh Seal. And by
the way, props to Xander for standing up to Angelus in the hospital. He
behaved very badly in BB&B and Passion, but he redeems himself a bit
here. (6) This dialogue between Giles and Cordy seems to me a subtle joke
at the very premise of the show: “Cordelia: Wait, what does this one do?
(points to another) Giles: (frustrated) It asks endless questions of those
with whom it's supposed to be working so that nothing is getting done.
Cordelia: Boy, there's a demon for everything.” (7) Willow told Giles she
had “frog fear” in WML 1; here she uses it to distract the security guards.
 I Only Have Eyes For You
When I first saw I Only Have Eyes For You, I completely missed the point
and therefore didn’t originally realize how wonderful the episode is. I
thought Buffy needed to forgive Angel for what he’d done to her. I was so
certain that Buffy had done nothing wrong that it never occurred to me that
she herself thought she might have been wrong or that she might want his
forgiveness. This, in turn, left me confused about who was supposed to be
who in the James/Grace scenarios.
So, to anyone else who was as confused as I was: IOHEFY tells us that
Buffy does see herself as “guilty” in some sense, and the whole point of the
episode is to allow her to forgive herself by learning that Angel forgives
her. I’m still not sure why I missed this, because Cordy tells us this directly.
When Buffy shows her anger about James, it’s Cordy who hangs a lantern
on the fact that Buffy is blaming herself for Angelus:
“Buffy: No. James destroyed the one person he loved the most in a moment
of blind passion. And that's not something you forgive. No matter why he
did what he did. And no matter if he knows now that it was wrong and
selfish and stupid, it is just something he's gonna have to live with.
Xander: He can't live with it, Buff. He's dead.
She just looks back at them all for a moment, then stalks off into the
kitchen.
Cordelia: Okay. Overidentify much?”
Thus, Buffy sees herself as in the same situation as James; she’s the one
who “destroyed the one person [she] loved the most in a moment of blind
passion”. Think about this in the context of all the anger James expresses in
the episode: the snakes, the vortex, the wasps; if James is Buffy, then that’s
her anger too and it’s all directed at herself.
James, in turn, identifies with her, which is why we see the gender switch
when the ghosts take over: James possesses Buffy and Grace – the name is
surely deliberate – possesses Angel. It’s grace which allows Angel to
forgive Buffy and Buffy then to understand that she can let go of her guilt.
“To forgive is an act of compassion, Buffy. It's, it's not done because people
deserve it. It's done because they need it.”
So if this is the point of the episode, we need to consider why Buffy blames
herself for her role in Angel’s loss of soul/death. First, we have this
dialogue from Innocence:
Buffy: So it was me. I did it.
Jenny: I think so.
Second, consider the implications of Inca Mummy Girl. The mummy was a
chosen girl who sucked the life out of others for her own selfish purposes.
That’s exactly what Buffy sees herself as having done with Angel. In
Buffy’s view, she gave in to her selfish desire when she slept with Angel
and that sucked the (metaphorical) life out of him. She therefore sees
herself as no better than Ampata.
Third, Buffy’s decision to have sex with Angel played out in horror format
the stereotype of “girl sleeps with boy, boy rejects her in the morning”. In
this stereotype it’s often the case that the girl experiences a feeling of guilt
that she must have done something wrong, something which caused him to
stop loving her. In fact, that’s what Buffy said in Innocence: “Was it my
fault? Was I not good?”
Now let’s turn this around. The relationship between Grace and James was
one between a teacher and a student. That’s not a situation we generally
approve because the age difference and the teacher’s position of authority
make it, well, icky. James may be the one at fault for killing Grace, but
Grace was certainly at fault for the relationship generally. She should have
been the one to control her passions and not let it get out of hand in the first
place. James obviously wasn’t mature enough to handle it. The problematic
nature of the relationship would have been perhaps too obvious had the
genders been reversed, hence the Sadie Hawkins theme.
And Angel is Grace, now with the genders in the stereotypical pattern. He
was older than Buffy, not just counting his age when sired, but also the 100
odd years with a soul he spent honing his brooding skills. Like Grace, he’s
also in the position of having abdicated his adult responsibilities out of
passion. What he does – what Grace did – is assure Buffy that she may have
pulled the trigger (so to speak), but that he understood his own
responsibility for the tragedy and truly loved her even as he realized what
had happened. “It was an accident. It wasn't your fault. … I'm the one who
should be sorry…. You thought I stopped loving you. But I never did. I
loved you with my last breath.”Angel’s apology both touches the
wellsprings of Buffy’s feelings of guilt and shows her his own culpability.
IOHEFY is a great episode generally, and few scenes in the whole series are
as dramatic as Spike standing up from his wheelchair at the end. Buffy’s not
the only one who’s angry. Somehow I don’t think Spike’s blaming himself,
nor do I think that forgiveness is on his mind.
Trivia notes: (1) Angie Hart, who sings at the Bronze in the teaser, is a
friend of Joss and will appear in two more episodes later on. (2) The
classroom lesson was on the Depression, and of course Buffy is depressed
about Jenny and Angel. (3) The Hemingway book James was reading was A
Farewell to Arms. If you haven’t read it, it’s the story of a love affair which
ends tragically. (4) Xander’s “I’m dead as hell and I’m not going to take it
anymore” plays off the movie Network. (5) The scene where Cordy’s snake-
bitten face suddenly becomes rotten is similar to one in the movie
Poltergeist. (6) Xander’s “The quality of mercy is not Buffy” is from The
Merchant of Venice, Act IV, sc. 1. (7) The movie Cordy saw where “even
the priest dies” was The Exorcist. (8) The song which gives the episode its
title was a cover by The Flamingos. The episode used it anachronistically
because their version came out in 1959 but the events supposedly occurred
in 1955.
 Go Fish
If S2 is a popular favorite because of the many great episodes, it comes in
for its share of criticism due to really weak episodes like Go Fish. The fact
that Go Fish interrupts an otherwise incredible run from Surprise through
Becoming certainly doesn’t help its reputation, but it’s a regular on bottom
10 lists for the series. While I’m sure that there is a point to Go Fish, I’m
not at all sure that I’ve identified it. I struggle with this episode, as I did
with IRYJ, and what follows is my best shot. So what’s it doing here?
When the SG walked back into the library after the James got his closure in
IOHEFY, Buffy didn't seem very happy (you have to watch the way SMG
plays the scene; the transcript doesn't show her emotional state). She was
subdued, even sad, during this dialogue with Giles:
“Buffy: I still... (exhales) A part of me just doesn't understand why she
would forgive him.
Giles: Does it matter?
Buffy: No. I guess not.”
As I read it, she’s realized the point intellectually but her guilt hasn’t yet
completely dissipated. For that we need Go Fish.
What I notice about the fish monsters is that they’re internal. It’s not a case
where an external monster devours the boys, it’s something which comes
out of them. Another metaphorical case of the monster inside us all. That
leaves us with the question what caused this particular transformation.
This particular monster comes out, in three of the four cases (we don’t see
Sean change), after the boy confronted Buffy and then blamed her for the
confrontation:
(After Buffy saves Jonathan from Dodd) “Dodd: I can't believe Buffy. Man,
that girl gives me the creeps.”
“Cameron: I don't know what happened. I mean, first she leads me on, then
she goes schizo on me. … Oh, come on. (to Snyder) I mean, look at the way
she dresses.”
“Gage: You're one twisted sister, you know that? Cam told me about your
games. Go find someone else to harass. … What a psycho bitch, man.”
(And there’s more he says to Angelus.)
In each case, Buffy was wrongly blamed, since the boy either had been an
aggressor or was being protected by her.
At the end, Buffy didn’t slay the monsters; she was confident we wouldn’t
be seeing them anymore because they were going “home” as Buffy
described the sea. Her statement here should cause us to reread Cameron’s
description of the sea in the teaser: “Eternal. A true mother, giving birth to
new life and devouring old. Always adaptable and nurturing... yet...
constant... and merciless.”
The sea can stand as a metaphor for the un/subconscious and that’s what his
description reminds me of. See, e.g., the explanation of archetypes for AP
students here (pdf: “Water (and bodies of water like the sea, the river, etc.):
the mystery of creation; eternity and timelessness; birth-death-resurrection;
purification and redemption; fertility and growth. According to Jung, water
is also the most common symbol for the unconscious.”). See also here
(“Water represents the subconscious mind. Comparing the human mind to
the sea, that world in the deep waters is our subconscious, filled with
creatures we can only glimpse briefly.”), and here (“The ocean is
mysterious, uncharted territory. It can mean excitement at tapping into your
potential, or it can be a frightening symbol of your fear of what's hiding in
the deep, dark, depths of your subconscious mind.”).
The way I read the episode, then, is that the swim monsters represent
Buffy’s blame of herself for the loss of Angel’s soul. That wasn’t really her
fault; when the monsters returned to the sea, those feelings were
metaphorically absorbed back into her subconscious (“devoured the old”).
Maybe.
Trivia notes: (1) This is the last episode in which Giles narrates the “she is
the Slayer” intro. (2) Xander’s “This was no boating accident” came from
Jaws. (3) The fish monsters are based on the movie Creature From the
Black Lagoon, which Xander mentions. (4) The Blue Lagoon – the movie
Cordy confused with the Black Lagoon – was a 1980 movie starring Brooke
Shields. (5) This was David Fury’s first episode as a writer for the series
(with Elin Hampton).
 Becoming 1 & 2
If you held a gun to my head and forced me to choose just one of the top 4-
5 episodes on my personal list of best episodes, I might choose Becoming 1
& 2. Certainly they contain many of my favorite moments from the entire
series: “It’s a big rock…”; “someone wasn’t worthy”; Whistler’s voiceover
as Buffy races down the corridor; the whole extended dialogue between
Spike, Buffy and Joyce; “the police of Sunnydale are deeply stupid”; every
single thing from the moment the sword fight begins through the end of the
episode, including the best single word of dialogue in the series (“Me.”).
As I said in my post on Surprise/Innocence, S2 is an in-depth exploration of
the issues raised in S1 regarding Angel and the impact of Buffy’s
relationship on her destiny/route to adulthood. In Angel she had the strength
of character to walk away from her beloved, recognizing that “this can’t
ever work”. In Surprise she succumbed to a moment of weakness, no not a
moment, more like three months of weakness. (Those were the lyrics of the
song which played in the Bronze when Spike first observed Buffy in School
Hard: “I did a stupid thing last night / I called you / A moment of weakness
/ No, not a moment / More like three months of weakness.”) The remainder
of S2 has shown us the consequences.

What makes the season brilliant is that the entire issue is never portrayed as
one-sided. Buffy does love Angel and he does love her. Buffy, of all people,
deserves love. Many viewers see it as a fairytale romance, and it certainly
has those elements. And yet the relationship was wrong in many ways, as I
detailed in the Innocence post. Buffy wasn’t and isn’t ready for this
relationship; it threatens to divert her from her destiny.

Though neither Buffy nor Angel could have foreseen the consequences of
letting their ids take control, Buffy, correctly in my view, takes
responsibility for the consequences. Innocence gives no protection against
tragedy: the death of the unfortunate prostitute and those of Enyos
(Innocence), Theresa (Phases), a “quaint little shop girl” (BB&B), the
Magic Shop owner (Passion), Jenny Calendar, and Kendra; Xander and
Buffy nearly were killed, as was Gage; Giles was tortured and Willow put
into a coma; and the world very nearly sucked into Hell. And in the end,
Buffy herself had to destroy the man she loved. Walking away seems like it
might have been a good choice.

Now let’s back up just a bit and consider how she was forced into having to
kill Angel. Willow decided to do the spell all on her own. We could
question this from Buffy’s standpoint, but Buffy had previously asked her to
do it and her reasoning at that time still made sense. If Buffy failed, this
would be the only hope.

Willow acted at some not-insignificant risk to herself in casting the spell:

“Giles: (very concerned) W-Willow... channeling... such potent magicks
through yourself, it could open a door that you may not be able to close.”
Giles knows this all too well from his experience with Eyghon. Note his
phrasing, too. It’s not that Willow would generate the magic, it’s that she
would channel it. That seemed to have happened from what we saw – it’s as
if something took over Willow part way through the spell and completed it
for her. As we’ve seen with Buffy and Giles, losing yourself in something
may have consequences.
The other contributing factor to Buffy’s horrifying moment was Xander’s
lie to her. In fandom this is The Lie. It was, and maybe remains, an
extremely contentious issue, so I’ll explain how I see it.
I think everyone agrees that Xander’s Lie probably stemmed from mixed
motives. He no doubt thought he was doing the right thing, but his thoughts
on that score were inevitably colored by his jealousy of Angel and desire to
be vindicated about Angelus. While some of his motivation doesn’t do him
much credit, I’ll leave that aside and just consider whether he was morally
right.
The argument in Xander’s favor is what I’ll call “military necessity”. That’s
probably the wrong term (see the link), but that’s the term everybody uses
and it’s the answer Joss gave when asked about The Lie. In essence, the
argument says that Xander was saying what needed to be said in order to
get Buffy to do what she had to do: kill Angelus. Buffy had been unable to
face up to that duty for months now, and too many people had died as a
result. If she had known that Willow was going to try the restoration spell
again, Buffy might have wavered just when she needed to be determined.
I don’t buy this defense. The biggest problem is that even if the “military
necessity” argument were true – I don’t think it is, as I’ll explain below –
Xander doesn’t get to make it. Commanding officers sometimes do lie to
their subordinates in order to get them to do difficult or dangerous things.
But this is a one-way street: subordinates don’t get to lie to their
commanders. Ever. It’s the job of the commander to hear and consider all
information, not the job of the subordinate to withhold it because he thinks
the commander might flinch.
Xander is a subordinate in this situation. It wasn’t his call to make; it never
is his call to make. As Jane Espenson phrased it in the DVD commentary to
the S3 episode Earshot, “Being the Slayer also makes you General. She has
to be the one to figure out how they are going to approach all their
crises….” Sometimes Giles might make the call, the rest of the time Buffy
does. That’s inherent in the role of the Slayer. Because she’s the one to
carry out the decision to slay, it’s always going to be her final discretion.
Xander took that away from Buffy.
By taking the decision on to himself, Xander also subverted Giles’ role as
Watcher. Xander made his argument to both Buffy and Giles in the library.
Giles came down on Buffy’s side and Xander had no right to sabotage that.
I assumed above that Xander was correct about the “military necessity”. In
fact, he was wrong about it. Forget for the moment the actual course of the
fight (hardly an argument in Xander's favor, since it led to the worst
possible outcome for Buffy) because we have to judge his decision at the
time he made it. The most important factor is that the goal was not to kill
Angelus per se, it was to stop Acathla. Killing Angelus was just one of
several options. What Xander did was limit Buffy’s options going in. He
left her solely with the option of killing Angelus. The option of delay, a
distraction perhaps, might have involved less danger to Buffy. Xander
eliminated her tactical flexibility.
He did this because he was worried she might not actually kill Angelus if
she had to. While we can understand this concern, the fact is that Xander
could not have had and did not have any moral certainty about Buffy's
resolution. Only Buffy could know that, and she proved at the end that his
doubts were unfounded: she was not only willing to kill Angelus, she was
willing to and actually did run a sword through Angel himself.
The other problem is that he brought Willow into his Lie without her
permission and against her own strongly held view. We know from the
previous argument in the library that Willow favored the attempt to restore
Angel’s soul – note particularly the look on her face when Xander made his
arguments – and her determination to try again reinforced that. In fact, the
only reason Xander even went to the mansion was because Willow told him
to tell Buffy that she was going to try again: “Maybe she can stall.”
Xander’s Lie didn’t just conceal the renewed attempt at restoration at a time
when that knowledge might do some good, it seriously compromised
Willow’s relationship with Buffy. Consider how Willow must have
appeared to Buffy after the fact: Willow performed the spell to resoul
Angel, but “told” Buffy to “kick his ass”. That looks like Willow
deliberately wanted Buffy to kill Angel rather than Angelus. While that’s
not the only possibility, Buffy may wonder about it.
Worse yet, Xander put Willow to the risk of performing a very dangerous
spell to no purpose. Thus, by my analysis he betrayed Buffy, Giles and
Willow in order to achieve his own goal, not theirs.
For a strong argument in Xander’s favor, see the comments by farmgirl62 to
my post on Becoming (labeled spoilers).
Was Buffy right to run the sword through Angel? It would have been such
an easy call if they’d never discovered the disk with the restoration spell. In
that case, Angelus was a vampire, they had no hope of restoring his soul,
and he posed a clear and present danger to the whole world.

But Angel was at least quasi-human once the spell took effect. That makes
it tougher. Sure, the whole world was at stake, but would you kill the person
you loved most even to save the world? Other writers have asked similar
questions. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky has one character put
the case to another: "Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human
destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace
and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death
only one tiny creature - that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance
- and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears: would you consent to be
the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell me the truth!" It’s pretty
clear Dostoevsky’s answer was “no”.
Maybe it matters what kind of person Angel was. Unlike Dostoevsky’s
baby, Angel wasn’t innocent in any meaningful sense, even putting aside
what responsibility he may bear for the actions of Angelus in Xander’s
view. Angel had asked Darla to sire him: “Show me your world.” He may
not have known exactly what being a vampire entailed, but he didn’t ask
and he did agree to see Darla’s world. Then he fell in love with the 15 year
old Buffy on first sight (a very Lolita-ish scene, lollypop and all) and
followed her to Sunnydale with the obvious intent of wooing her, during
which he withheld some pretty important facts. Notwithstanding the
problematic nature of the relationship, which I’ve detailed in previous
posts, Angel allowed himself to lose self-control in Surprise. Note that he
had some warning of the possible consequences, too – in Angel he turned to
vamp face when he first kissed Buffy.

We can also look at her decision from the viewpoint of an existentialist.

Whistler’s voiceover expresses a very existentialist view of life, reminding
us of Joss’s worldview. The events of the world happen to us, and the world
itself doesn’t care. We can only control the choices we make thereafter:
“Bottom line is, even if you see 'em coming, you're not ready for the big
moments…. No one asks for their life to change, not really. But it does….
So what are we, helpless? Puppets? No. The big moments are gonna come.
You can't help that. It's what you do afterwards that counts. That's when you
find out who you are.”
In existentialist philosophy, one of the consequences of the freedom to
choose is that you must accept full responsibility for the consequences of
your choices regardless of what they are. In Whedon’s show Dollhouse, the
phrase “actions have consequences” is repeated twice in the very first scene
of the very first episode.

This means, in practice, that life is a series of cascading choices, each one
affected by the one before (as well as by events in the world). Buffy’s
options in Becoming were constrained by her own decision to have sex with
Angel in Surprise; her choice now depended in part on her choice then.
Difficult as her decision was, it did mean that she and Angel, the two people
most responsible for the current situation, would bear the consequences.
Perhaps that’s only fair. Or karmic.
An existentialist would, I think, approve of Buffy’s choice. Her options may
not have been good ones – and let’s face it, Buffy’s situation sucked (very
bad pun) – but it was her human responsibility to make a choice among
them. In Buffy’s case, the choices she makes affect the entire world. That’s
a metaphorical enactment of a key tenet of existentialism. To Jean Paul
Sartre, every time you choose, you should “act for the world”. What this
means is that you should act in such a way that anyone else in your situation
would agree that you made a good choice under the circumstances. In
essence, each moral choice you make is a form of teaching by example for
the world at large. Buffy stands for the world.
What her actions tell is this: Even when we’ve been deprived of everything
else – “No friends, no hope…. Take all that away... and what's left?” – we
retain our fundamental integrity. Buffy’s “Me” expressed the ultimate
existentialist authenticity:
“Authenticity thus indicates a certain kind of integrity—…that of a project
to which I can either commit myself (and thus “become” what it entails) or
else simply occupy for a time, inauthentically drifting in and out of various
affairs….
Authenticity defines a condition on self-making: do I succeed in making
myself, or will who I am merely be a function of the roles I find myself in?
Thus to be authentic can also be thought as a way of being autonomous. In
choosing “resolutely”—that is, in committing myself to a certain course of
action, a certain way of being in the world—I have given myself the rule
that belongs to the role I come to adopt.” Cite. My bold, italics in original.
In the end, it’s Buffy who is Becoming. She’s committed herself to a
particular project, namely being the Slayer (growing up in my reading). In
order to be authentic in pursuit of that role, she must act consistent with her
goal. If I’m right that Angel was a diversion from her destiny, then putting
him aside was essential.
Now let’s run through some additional points:
The image we get of Angel before his meeting with Whistler is one of an
alcoholic homeless person. Remember that the alcoholism metaphor was
emphasized in Angel, and is reinforced here by the portrayal of Angel (we’ll
later learn that his original name was Liam) as a drunken lout before his
meeting with Darla.
Before these episodes, Angelus didn’t seem to have much interest in
destroying the world. He was uninterested about the prospect in Innocence
and never tried till now. What changed, I think, was his brief ensoulment in
IOHEFY. That defeated his attempt to do to Buffy what he’d done to
Drusilla. His frustration at that defeat, IMO, explains his sudden eagerness
to awaken Acathla.
When Angel lured Buffy into fighting him in Becoming 1, he taunted her
that “you fall for it every time” (referring to WSWB). I’ve seen people
criticize Buffy for this. The trap this time is much more subtle and clever,
though, and I want to walk through it because some viewers obviously
overlooked what Joss did.
Buffy went to fight Angel, leaving her friends to be attacked by the vamps.
Seems the same as WSWB, but there are two important differences. The first
is that this time she left Kendra to guard them; leaving them in the
protection of a Slayer hardly seems negligent. The more important
difference, though, is this: that as a long as Buffy was fighting Angelus,
Acathla couldn’t be awakened. The world was safe as long as she kept him
occupied; better yet if she staked him. Her mistake here was not to confront
Angelus, but to end the confrontation and return to her friends. And the
reason she made that mistake was precisely because Angelus goaded her
into it by taunting her about making the opposite mistake in WSWB.
Angelus pulled off a double deception, using himself as bait and then using
Buffy’s previous mistake against her. Now that’s clever.
Dru killed Kendra, the id destroying the last vestige of Buffy’s virginal
innocence. “Be in me”, Dru says. The id absorbed the innocence. That part
of Buffy is now gone.
Spike is in much the same position as Buffy: “I want it like it was before.”
He doesn’t have Dru, Buffy no longer has Angel. Spike bargains for his
second chance by offering to deprive her of her own. That’s maybe why she
hit him.
Xander finally tells Willow what she always wanted to hear. In typical Joss
fashion, Willow isn’t consciously aware of it. In my view, though, it’s what
wakes her up from her coma.
Buffy “comes out” to Joyce in dialogue which evokes a child telling her
mother she’s gay.
The sword fight, besides being very cool, recalls this dialogue from WSWB:
“Angel: You're not as strong as you think.
Buffy: (gives him a challenging look) You think you can take me?
Angel: What?
Buffy: Oh, c'mon! I mean, you must've thought about it. What would
happen if it ever came down to a fight, you vampire, me the Slayer, I mean,
you must've wondered! Well, why don't we find out?”
I see the fight between Spike and Dru as the ego reasserting control over the
id.
In my view, Acathla was metaphorically sucking Buffy back into childhood.
She avoided that, and stayed on the path of her destiny, by putting Angel
away. In Joss’ world, as probably in our own, the path to adulthood requires
painful sacrifices.
Trivia notes: (1) Every season from 2-7 has an episode, or sometimes two,
which prefigure the season finale. In S2 that episode is Lie to Me: in outline
form, Buffy’s boyfriend turns into a vampire and she has to kill him.
Following up on my post on Lie to Me about the seasonal structure, I’ll note
that WSWB set up the events of Becoming. In SAR we saw the id, ego, and
superego metaphor introduced, while School Hard gave us Dru and Spike
as the metaphorical id and ego. (2) Compare Darla’s dress in the teaser with
the picture of the anonymous noblewoman in the Watcher’s Diaries we saw
in Halloween. (3) Angel told Darla that her life “sounds exciting”. From
Halloween: “They [noble women] were just incredibly dull. Simpering
morons, the lot of them. I always wished I could meet someone... exciting.”
(4) Further evidence that Joss sucks at dates: Acathla appears to be made of
stone and therefore can’t be carbon dated. That only works on things that
were once alive. (5) Alfalfa (Buffy’s mangling of the name Acathla) was
the name of a character on the very popular series “Our Gang”. (6) Giles
was using the Orb of Thesulah as a paperweight. From Passion: “One
Thesulan Orb. Spirit vault for the rituals of the undead. I don't get many
calls for those lately. Sold a couple as new age paperweights last year.” (7)
Bullock’s (Buffy meant to pay for that lipstick) used to be an upscale
department store. (8) We last saw Det. Stein in Ted, so it’s no wonder he
thinks Buffy has a history of violence. (9) When Spike told Buffy
“Goodbye Picadilly, hello Leicester bloody square”, that’s from the World
War I-era song It’s A Long Way to Tipperary. (10) “Well, I sing.” James
Marsters was and is the singer for a band called “Ghost of the Robot”. (11)
Buffy’s expulsion was subtly hinted in WSWB by both Joyce and Snyder:
“I'll just be happy if she makes it through the school year.”; “That Summers
girl. I smell trouble. I smell expulsion, and just the faintest aroma of jail.”
(12) Buffy’s “hello lover” in the mansion mimicked Angelus’s greeting to
her in the graveyard after he lured her away from the library. (13) The re-
souling spell did work, though tragically. The potential for such a spell was
hinted in BB&B (Giles reversed the love spell by going back to the source
and using Amy’s magic, just as Willow did here using Jenny’s) and, of
course, in Passion, where we saw Jenny save the spell to the disk. (14) Just
before Buffy stabbed Angel, she told him “Close your eyes.” These were
Darla’s words to him just before she sired him in the teaser to Becoming 1.
He’s damned both times, just as he said in The Harvest. (15) Sarah
MacLachlan’s “Full of Grace” plays over the ending. Remember that in
IOHEFY Angel was possessed by – that is, filled with – Grace.
 Season Three
Anne
Where the Streets Have No Name
Season 3 differs in many respects from S2, but in one way that’s very
important for purposes of my posts: it’s much less dependent on metaphor
to tell the story. The writers still use metaphors, but they aren’t the focus of
the story the way they were in S2. Season 3 places greater emphasis on plot
line. I don’t mean that as a criticism; whether you like this better or not is,
in my view, mostly a matter of taste.
I think there’s a good reason for less metaphor, namely, that S3 has much
less sex in it than S2 did. Let’s face it, American TV isn’t particularly open
to sex in the early evening time slots (or even later for that matter). If
you’re going to tell a story about a 17 year old girl having sex, it’s probably
safest in metaphor. Season 3 has a little bit of sex in it, but the sex isn’t the
centerpiece of the season the way it was in S2; Buffy’s faced that issue.
Season 3 is about other aspects of character and maturity now that she’s a
high school senior. That means I’ll be giving greater emphasis to those
issues.
There is a metaphor in Anne, but it’s pretty straightforward: Buffy sends
herself to Hell for her sin of killing Angel. I don’t mean the Hell dimension
we see late in the episode. No, Buffy’s in Hell from the moment we see her.
She’s living in Hell even if looks like part of Los Angeles. This becomes
apparent in several ways: the diner where she’s working is called “Helen’s
Kitchen”, an obvious play on Hell’s Kitchen; in her first interaction with
Ken he tells her that “This is not a good place for a kid to be. You get old
fast here. (Buffy looks up at him knowingly) The thing that drains the life
out of them is despair.” Later, when she really is in Hell, he equates despair
with the lack of hope: “What is Hell but the total absence of hope? The
substance, the tactile proof of despair.” IOW, the despair, the lack of hope,
of those trapped on the streets is precisely what makes those streets hellish.
During her final conversation with Buffy in Becoming 2, Joyce asked her,
“have you tried not being the Slayer?” Buffy’s trying that now; she has
given up on her destiny. She’s no longer committed to her authentic self
because she’s simply accepting herself as an object in the world (for
example, the way the restaurant patrons objectify her). The song lyrics
which we hear as Buffy walks away from Ken after they first meet set the
theme and the challenge: Why did I come again? / To find my own way to
freedom/ And the change is gonna come / I'm gonna find my way / Find my
way / Find my way back to freedom.
The parallels between B/A and Lily/Rickie reinforce this. DreamAngel tells
Buffy that he’ll stay with her “Forever. That's the whole point.” Rickie
repeats these exact same words in describing the heart tattoos he and Lily
got. Lily, like Buffy, has given up her own identity, and they end up in Hell
together, that being the place where one truly does lose one’s identity (“I’m
no one”). Ricky remembered Lily’s name long after he’d forgotten his own,
just as Buffy remembers Angel even after giving up her own name in favor
of “Anne”.
Along the way, Buffy’s statements to Lily could really apply to herself,
while Lily suggests that Buffy actually has brought this on herself (as, to
some extent, she has):
“Lily: …Why would this happen to him?
Buffy: That's *not* the point. (Lily calms a bit) These things happen all the
time. You can't just . . . close your eyes and hope that they're gonna go
away.
Lily: Is it 'cause of you?
Buffy: (confused) What?
Lily: You know about . . . monsters and stuff. You could have brought this
with you.”

Lily, like Buffy, is trying to deny her authentic self, an attempt the name
changes make obvious for both of them. Joyce asked Giles, “And who,
exactly, is she [meaning Buffy]?” The question seems ironic because of her
name change, but the very next scene will begin to answer the question.
Lily came up and started to address her with her real name: “Buff—“.
Joss set up Buffy’s decision to reclaim her identity as the ultimate test of
existential authenticity. Remember this quotation from my post on Lie to
Me:
“A critical claim in existentialist thought is that individuals are always free
to make choices and guide their lives towards their own chosen goal or
"project". The claim holds that individuals cannot escape this freedom, even
in overwhelming circumstances. For instance, even an empire's colonized
victims possess choices: to submit to rule, to negotiate, to act in complicity,
to commit suicide, to resist nonviolently, or to counter-attack.
Although external circumstances may limit individuals..., they cannot force
a person to follow one of the remaining courses over another. In this sense
the individual still has some freedom of choice.”
Buffy’s finds herself actually in the most overwhelming situation
imaginable: she’s outnumbered, she’s trapped in Hell, and her potential
allies have already given up. In the face of all this, she retains her freedom
to choose; she just had to find it. Buffy definitively reclaims her chosen
(heh) goal – her authentic self – when she makes the choice to fight, namely
when she declares to the guard, in one of the show’s great moments, that
“I’m Buffy, the Vampire Slayer.” Inspired by Buffy’s example, Lily then
shows that she has the courage to make a choice of her own and push Ken
off the ledge. And both of them find their way back to freedom as a result.
Two quick points:
Joyce blamed Giles for Buffy’s departure. This seemed pretty harsh to me
when I first saw the episode, but it actually has some merit. Giles has been
a secret influence on Buffy’s life, guiding her on a journey that excluded
Joyce. And it was Giles who insisted, in Passion, that Buffy not tell her
mother that she was the Slayer:
“Buffy: …I'm gonna have to tell her something. (sits on a wall and looks at
Giles) The truth?
Giles: (approaches her, waving his finger) No. You-you-you-you can't do
that.”
Buffy had to violate this instruction at the worst possible moment. That left
Joyce in the position of reacting badly, for which she no doubt blames
herself while she’s taking it out on Giles.
The attempts at slayage by Xander, Willow, Oz and Cordy raise an
interesting question: Why not resoul all the vamps? After all, Willow just
resouled Angel. I think there’s actually a reason beyond the fact that this
would destroy the premise of the show. It can’t be done. It’s not even clear
that Willow did the restoration spell herself, much less that she has the
power to do it again. Unfortunately, the vamps still need to be slain.
Trivia notes: (1) “This time it’s personal.” comes from Jaws: The Revenge.
(2) “What is Hell but the total absence of hope?” This is standard, among
poets at least. The sign over the entrance to Hell in Dante’s “Inferno” reads
“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here”. Also see John Milton, Paradise
Lost, describing what Satan sees when he first opens his eyes in Hell: “No
light, but rather darkness visible/Served only to discover sights of
woe/Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace/And rest can never
dwell, hope never comes/That comes to all.” (3) The scenes in the factory
pay visual tribute to the Fritz Lang film Metropolis. (4) There’s a visual
joke at one point in the scene where Buffy is fighting the guards, as Buffy is
holding both a hammer and a sickle, the symbols of communism or worker
revolt against oppressive capitalism. I think the scene can be interpreted
two very different ways, either as a revolt against capitalism or as Buffy
seizing the symbols of the communist oppressors in order to liberate the
workers.
 Dead Man’s Party
I have a hard time writing about Dead Man’s Party because it’s one of two
episodes in the entire series which I really dislike watching (the other being
As You Were, if you must know). I wrote the following 9 years ago at
ATPO, and my opinion hasn’t really changed:
“When something bothers me, people tell me I "must" talk about it or things
will get worse. I find this untrue. I find that talking about it is, in fact, what
makes things worse. It works much better for me to resolve things
internally; that's the way I’m able to put them behind me and move forward.
When Buffy ran away after Becoming 2, I completely identified with her
and was (and still am) furious at Xander, Joyce, and Willow for their mis-
treatment of Buffy upon her return.”
I’d be fine if the episode just presented 2 sides to the issue, with viewers
free to take one or the other, but the whole episode, including its aftermath
in later episodes, reinforces the message that Buffy was the only one in the
wrong. I really can’t watch without getting mad about this.
That’s me following the plotline. If you have the same reaction I do, it may
help to think of it in metaphor. In the metaphors I’ve suggested for the
show, Xander represents Buffy’s heart and Willow her spirit. One way to
read the episode is that Buffy’s heart and spirit are angry with her for
abandoning her duty after Becoming. IOW, she’s guilt-tripping herself. An
obvious example of this would be the dialogue right after the teaser, when
she’s hesitating before knocking on Giles’ door:
“Buffy: What if he's mad?
Xander: Mad? Just because you ran away and abandoned your post and
your friends and your mom and made him lay awake every night worrying
about you?”
That certainly could be Buffy talking to herself. Try applying this to other
confrontations and see if that helps.
Whether we think of it as plot or as a metaphor for internal guilt, we should
analyze the behavior of the characters for what that says about them (or
about Buffy’s conscience). I’ll try to summarize what I see as the key
points.
Willow. Willow did three things wrong in this episode that I can see: (1)
she flaked on her date with Buffy; (2) she didn’t listen to Buffy at the party,
both metaphorically and in reality unable to hear her; and (3) she whined
about life issues that are pretty standard for any teenager, while never even
asking about the much more extreme trauma Buffy suffered (in part because
of Willow herself) in Becoming 2.
That said, I do cut Willow some slack here. She may not have known that
Buffy blamed herself for Willow’s injuries (Becoming 2: “I never should
have let her do that spell. Angel must have known.”), even though we the
viewers know that Angel did not know and the raid to get Giles wasn’t
Buffy’s fault at all. Willow tried to resoul Angel because she thought that’s
what Buffy wanted. She had no way to know that it worked out in the worst
possible way. And the reason she didn’t know was not her fault at all, it was
that Xander lied to Buffy. Buffy obviously couldn’t talk to Willow about the
spell or its consequences if she thought that Willow really did want her to
kill Angel as Xander told her. So Xander’s Lie drove a real rift between the
two friends.
Joyce. Her biggest mistake was insisting on confronting Buffy in front of
the entire party. She had the opportunity to raise her issues with Buffy at
any time. She’s also the adult; she should know when and where to have
such a discussion. She also unfairly criticized Buffy when she told her that
“you made some bad choices” and might have to suffer “consequences”
such as going to private school. Buffy’s “bad choices” aren’t what got her
kicked out of school. That was a combination of her duty and the fact that
Snyder is a “nasty little horrid, bigoted, rodent-man.”
Xander. Almost every single word he says to or about Buffy is utterly
indefensible. The reason she couldn’t confide in anyone was largely the fact
that his Lie to her separated her from her friends, particularly Willow. I
don’t want to make this post tediously long, so I’ll limit myself to his worst
example: “I'm sorry that your honey was a demon, but most girls don't hop
a Greyhound over boy troubles.”
Word by word (almost): Xander hated Angel and certainly isn’t “sorry”;
“honey” demeans her relationship with Angel and probably Buffy herself;
Angel’s status was much more complicated than just that of “demon”;
Buffy is not “most girls”; and “boy troubles” is so inadequate a description
of what Buffy went through that I would have cheered if she actually had
punched him right then.
That leaves us to consider Buffy. In fairness I ought to give both sides of
this, and my bias is pretty obvious, so I’m going to quote a discussion I had
years ago with another ATPO poster and livejournal friend of mine,
shadowkat. I’ll let her make the general case for Xander, Willow, and Joyce
(somewhat edited) and of course repeat my response (also edited). Note that
shadowkat wasn’t trying to defend every particular thing they said, just their
general side of the case:
Shadowkat: “They saved the world with her in Becoming. At the end of
that two-part episode: Xander barely got Giles out alive, Willow had just
come out of a coma and did an amazingly difficult spell, and Joyce wasn't
sure if her daughter had gone off to her death. Buffy just leaves Joyce a note
that she's leaving. Buffy is 17 years of age and Joyce's only child….. Not
sure if Joyce shared her note with them or not. Would assume so...but still.
That just means, Buffy only saw fit to tell Joyce. Not them.
They have no clue if she's okay, what happened with Angel, etc. As far as
they know she and Angel could have taken off together or Angelus
kidnapped her. All they know at the end of Becoming Part II? Is the world
didn't end.

All summer they fight vampires. Get injured. Try to make things work and
try not to worry about Buffy. Has Buffy worried once about her friends?
Not that we know of.
Has she thought about Giles? Not that we are aware of. All Buffy thinks
about is Angel. She hasn't sent her mother a note saying she's okay or any
word to Giles. Giles in fact has been traveling around looking for her - this
we find out in Anne.

So Buffy comes back to Sunnydale. She expects everyone and everything to

be the same as she left. Sorry doesn't happen that way. Part of life is dealing
with change and dealing with the consequences of leaving without any
word or note. Also realizing that other people and their problems no matter
how seemingly trival can be important. She was needed and loved by her
friends as more than just the slayer. In Dead Man's Party she begins to
realize that.

She tells them little. They on the other hand reveal quite a bit of how they
feel. And to their credit? They attempt to deal with her. But Buff is not the
sort to discuss her problems. She contains everything and wants to move
forward without talking about it. Makes sense - after all up until Becoming
she had to keep the whole slaying gig a secret from her mom. So discussing
things? Just does not come naturally. This causes all the pent up emotions
that everyone is trying to contain to erupt. Like they always do. In a very
bad way.”

Me again:
“The problem I have is not that Buffy was completely in the right (she
wasn't), but that her friends were so clearly in the wrong.

The main problem was this: not one of them tried to find out what had
happened in the mansion or to understand what might have caused her to
flee. They never even asked. They were all accusatory (Xander) or self-
centered (Willow). And not once did they stop to consider that their own
actions may have contributed to the problem.

As for Buffy, I think her silence about Angel was the right approach. She
knew her friends had tried to help. If she told them that their "help" was
actually a disaster, that wouldn't change the result but it might make them
less willing to help in the future.”
Shadowkat: “Actually I think they did try to find out. Remember that scene
towards the beginning where they are all hanging out at Giles' apartment?

“Oz: Hey, so you're not wanted for murder anymore.

Buffy: Good. That was such a drag.
Xander: So where were you? Did you go to Belgium?
Buffy: (gives him an odd look) Why would I go to Belgium?
Xander: I think the relevant question is why wouldn't you? (smiles hugely
and giggles) Bel-gium!
They both laugh.
Buffy: What about you, Xander? What's up with you?
Xander: Oh, you know, same old, same old.
Cordelia: Hardly.
Xander: Okay, I lied, a whole lot is new.
Buffy: Well, that's good, isn't it? New is good.
Cordelia: So were you, like, living in a box, or what?
Buffy: Well, it's a long story.
Xander: So skip the heartwarming stuff about kindly old people and saving
the farm and get right to the dirt.
Giles: Perhaps Buffy could use a little time to adjust before we grill her on
her summer activities.
Buffy: What he said.
Xander: Fair enough. In fact, you can leave the slaying to us while you
settle in. We got you covered.”
See? Xander asks twice and she fluffs it off. I doubt she told them much of
anything. They may have assumed she had a great time in LA when they
were worrying about her.”

And I get the last word ‘cuz this is my book:

“No. My point was that no one asked what happened in the mansion.
What Xander asked, twice, was where she went/what she did over the
summer. Not the same thing.

What Buffy did over the summer (waiting tables in a cheap restaurant) was
not very interesting from an outsider's perspective. What she was really
doing was trying to come to terms with the fact that she had been left with
nothing but herself:

Whistler: In the end, you're always by yourself. You're all you've got. That's
the point.

That wasn't something she could tell Xander then or ever. But it also wasn't
the key point in Xander's misbehavior in DMP. That had to do with Angel.
And here's what Xander had to say [see “sorry your honey was a demon”
line discussed above].
Doesn't sound like much effort on his part to understand. And that's leaving
out his betrayal of her in Becoming.

As for Willow, she didn't come to the room to understand, she came to
accuse Buffy of ignoring Willow's problems [discussed above].

I know Xander and Willow were both 17. I just don't think that gives them
any more of an excuse than it gives Buffy.

I'm not saying that Buffy was entirely in the right. She wasn't. But Buffy is
shown to be entirely in the wrong, and, worse, accepting that conclusion:

Buffy: I am sorry.

Willow: It's okay. I understand you having to bail. I can forgive that. Mm, I
have to make allowances for what you're going through a-and be a
grownup about it. (gives Buffy a slightly smug look)

Buffy: (smiles) You're really enjoying this whole moral superiority thing,
aren't you?

Willow: (smiles) It's like a drug!

Buffy: Fine! Okay. I'm the bad.

It's that combination of misbehavior by her friends and Buffy (as usual)
taking the blame that makes the episode so difficult.”

In comments, local-max made some excellent points which I’ll incorporate

(slightly edited) as well, along with my response:
“I'm sympathetic to the Scoobies here, though I think they are ultimately
more in the wrong than Buffy is. I think the most essential point for
explaining (not justifying, explaining) their behaviour is that Buffy's having
left them for months convinces them, as Shadowkat points/pointed out, that
Buffy doesn't really care about them. Buffy has, in a sense, all the power in
her relationships with those around her -- from their perspective. She can up
and leave at any time, and they can do nothing about it; they are dependent
on her, emotionally, and to give their lives meaning, in a way she isn't on
them. And I do think, ultimately, that to every one of the characters here,
Buffy is more central to their lives than they are to hers: Buffy is Willow
and Xander's idol, and indeed the *only* important person in Joyce's life,
save Pat, who dies at the episode's end. That's a very hard thing to live with,
and they all, of course, deal with it badly.
Mostly, I think that the episode comes across the way it does because of the
strong Buffy POV we are given. We see Buffy suffering; the Scoobies don't.
We don't really see the Scoobies' inner lives, though we get glimpses of
them. The reason why I believe that this is important is that the central
reason people are upset with Buffy is that they realize here that they are
basically supporting players in Buffy's story, to be discarded and then
picked up at will. This is something that leads to a dependency on Buffy
which is quite unhealthy and causes many of their problems….
Willow, I think, stands Buffy up out of fear of rejection, which can be
overpowering. And when she finally comes to see Buffy, I really don't think
she is coming there to tell Buffy that she wished Buffy were there for her. I
think she was coming there to try to talk to her, to communicate, to see
where she was -- and then Buffy was packing up to *leave*. To leave them
again, to prove Willow's fear that she's just stopping off before the next
abandonment. And indeed, Willow's reason for bringing up her own reasons
for needing Buffy are partly selfish, but there is another layer to them too:
Buffy had just indicated that she knows that Willow stood her up because
she was worried about her, and Willow is trying to get across that she has
her own inner life, one which she feels that Buffy doesn't care about. Buffy
doesn't owe it to Willow to care about her when her problems are that much
bigger, but it happens to run across her biggest fear, which is that people
will ultimately come to their senses, decide she is a loser, and leave her.”
My response:
“Yes, they do have legitimate grievances against Buffy. I admitted that in
my discussion with Shadowkat, though I downplayed it otherwise. BUT,
she has pretty serious grievances against them. Mostly Xander, though she
doesn't realize that yet. The miscommunication with Willow is something
we can see in this dialogue:

Buffy: Sorry that I had to leave, but you don't know what I was going
through.

Willow: Well, I'd like to.

Buffy: You wouldn't understand.

The reason Buffy believes Willow wouldn't understand is, of course,

Xander's Lie. From Buffy's perspective, Willow wanted her to kill Angel.
How could Buffy then communicate the extent of her emotional devastation
at doing that which Willow actively encouraged her to do? And, of course,
from Buffy's perspective, if Willow had really wanted to know what Buffy
was going through, she wouldn't have stood her up.

What we have here is a failure to communicate, to coin a phrase, but

ultimately (IMO) it comes back to Xander. Buffy and Willow both could
have handled it better and undoubtedly would have if he hadn't interfered.

Reading your comment caused me to realize that I didn't talk about Giles in
my post. In a way, he has the biggest grievance against Buffy. He did
absolutely nothing wrong and wasn't implicated in Xander's Lie. Her failure
to let him know that she was ok is by far her biggest fault in my book.”
Well, that should be enough for everyone to take a side and let loose their
own buriedemotions.
Let’s get back to the episode itself. The zombies are a metaphor, of course:
if you try to bury your feelings, they come back to get you. Because Buffy
was the one to confront and kill the zombie master (putting an end to the
zombies), I’m inclined to see the zombies here as representing Buffy’s own
feelings towards her friends for what she sees as their failure to understand
what she had to go through with Angel. An alternative and very possible
reading would see them as representing the anger of Xander, Willow, and
Joyce. Either reading works perfectly well and gets us to the same place.
If the message is about the danger of repressed feelings, though, then
there’s a real problem. That metaphor could very easily be seen as
incoherent in the context of the plot. The message is supposed to be that if
you repress thoughts and feelings, they’ll come back in worse form later on.
The problem is that the attack of the zombies interrupted the fight in the
living room, that is, the very expression of feeling which the metaphor
suggests should take place. IOW, perhaps the metaphor got in its own way.
We can avoid this conclusion if we believe that the interruption was
intentional, that the expressions of anger and disappointment haven’t
achieved catharsis but are still latent in all the characters. That’s the way
I’m inclined to read the episode. By this logic, the real demon was the
zombie master who was summoning all these buried emotions, and Buffy
prevented that from continuing when she killed it. I’m inclined to see that
as Buffy shutting off the summoning of her own buried emotions, but it’s
also possible to read it as shutting them off for everyone. Either way, the
price is that those feelings remain repressed; the episode didn’t actually
resolve the problems.
Assuming I’ve read that correctly, there’s another message as well: they
don’t have to be friendly with each other – or even, in the case of the other
students, know her at all – in order to cooperate in the face of something
which threatens every one of them.
Buffy and her friends see the world in different ways because she has to
endure things which they never see. Buffy sacrifices herself for the sake of
harmony (no pun here) with her friends, something she does repeatedly
throughout the show. But while that may leave her friends feeling
vindicated, it’s bound to contribute to a sense of isolation on Buffy’s part.
The party itself reinforced this sense of isolation – most of her fellow
students don’t even know her.
But she saved them all anyway.
Trivia notes: (1) The Wikipedia summary of the book Joyce read over the
summer, The Deep End of the Ocean, makes its relevance to this episode
pretty obvious: “It is about an American middle class, suburban family that
is torn apart when the youngest son is kidnapped and raised by a mentally
ill woman, until he appears at the front doorstep of his real mother and asks
if he can mow the lawn.” The name of the father in the book was Pat, which
I suspect gave us the name of Joyce’s friend. Pat was a morally ambiguous
character in the book, as Pat is here. (2) The stoned guy on the phone called
Giles “Mr. Belvedere”, who was the title character in a 1980s sitcom. He
was an English butler. (3) “Weebles wobble but they won’t fall down” was
the advertising slogan for a child’s toy. Xander paraphrased it in describing
the zombies.
 Faith, Hope & Trick
The title of Faith, Hope and Trick seems to take its inspiration from
Corinthians 13:13: 'But now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the
greatest of these is love'. I think all three virtues play a part in this episode,
but I want to discuss them in reverse order.
We saw 3 tricks in the episode besides the character: (a) Giles tricked Buffy
into revealing some of the details of Becoming2. Note, however, that Buffy
said nothing to Willow or Giles other than to tell them that the spell worked
and that she had to kill Angel rather than Angelus. In particular, she said
nothing about Xander’s Lie. Buffy’s still repressing despite the events of
Dead Man’s Party because she thinks that’s essential in order to maintain
her relationships. (b) Kakistos tricked the Slayers into a trap. (c) Faith tried
to trick Buffy into dealing with Kakistos for her. This set up Giles’ trick on
Buffy – Buffy’s words to Faith about Kakistos could apply to herself:
“Faith: … *I'm* the one that can handle this. Buffy: Yeah. You're a real
bad-ass when it comes to packing Buffy: … What was that you said about
my problem? Gotta deal and move on? Well, we have the 'moving on' part
right here. What about dealing? ... Faith: You don't know me. You don't
know what I've been through. I'll take care of this, all right?” Buffy
recognized this just before she told Giles and Willow what had happened:
“She had a lot to deal with, but she did it. She got it behind her.”
The name/word Trick got substituted for “love”, which is “the greatest of
these” in the original quote. It’s Buffy’s love for Angel which is on display
throughout the episode. And just maybe it’s love that brought Angel back.
(That’s not a spoiler – we never do find out what brought him back, so I’m
speculating.)
During the episode, Buffy hopes that she can move on from Angel,
represented by Scott Hope.
And that brings us to Faith. The name is ironic given what we see of her in
this episode. Faith lacks faith in her own ability to slay Kakistos. Buffy
shows her faith in Faith, which enables Faith to slay her personal demon.
Faith is a new slayer and that means she’ll play a metaphorical role in the
season in my interpretation. In fact, it’s the most important metaphor in S3
so think about it as we go through the episodes. There are major clues to
that role, and to the season as a whole, in the dialogue.
Since it’s too early to talk about that yet, let’s move on to the storyline.
Buffy seemed to accept Kendra after her initial hesitation, but she’s very
reluctant to share her life or her destiny with Faith. She feels crowded by
Faith, even “single white femaled”. Now, that’s a very strong statement if
you’ve seen the movie Single White Female, and I want to explore Buffy’s
reaction. For those of you who haven’t seen the movie, therefore, here’s a
summary which is partly me but mostly Wikipedia (hence the quotation
marks):
“Allie has recently broken up with her boyfriend and advertises for a new
roommate. She eventually settles on Hedra, whom she immediately
nicknames "Hedy", and they become friends. Hedy says she had a twin
sister who died … After a few weeks, however, Hedy reveals her true
nature: secretive, manipulative and deeply disturbed. Fearing she will be
kicked out of the apartment in favor of [Allie’s boyfriend, who wants to
make up with Allie], Hedy does everything possible to make [the
boyfriend] look bad, even killing a puppy and making it look like it was his
fault. Hedy then copies Allie's appearance, right down her hairstyle [i.e.,
turning herself into Allie’s “twin”]. … [Allie] follows an unaware Hedy that
night to an underground sex club, and witnesses her passing herself off as
Allie. Hedy, posing as Allie, sneaks into [the boyfriend’s] hotel room and
performs oral sex on him. Afterwards Hedy attempts to blackmail [the
boyfriend] but he insists in telling Allie the truth. Hedy kills him by
gouging his eye with her stiletto heel. As she leaves his apartment complex,
the doorman mistakes her for Allie. …Hedy takes Allie captive at gunpoint
and threatens to frame Allie for the boyfriend’s death. … She is about to
execute Allie, when Allie pleads "don't make me leave you". Hedy is
convinced that Allie has come to realize her place as a twin, and plans to
run away with her, until she catches Allie making another attempt to escape.
A violent fight ensues,…. The struggle ends with Allie stabbing Hedy to
death. The film ends with a close-up of a photograph presumably made by
Hedy of their faces superimposed into one.”
Ok, I think we can agree that this summary exposes just how strong Buffy’s
reaction actually was. The question is, why such a strong reaction? This
may in part reflect Buffy’s sense of duty, but it’s also, I think, tied to the
idea that she’s supposed to be “the” slayer, the one girl in all the world.
Having Faith around constantly challenges that self-image, as well as
reminding Buffy that she died. In addition, Faith’s self-involved, even
selfish approach to life makes it hard to consider any shared activity as fair.
There may be spoilerish reasons as well related to Faith’s metaphorical role.
The point is that this episode raises an issue which will resonate throughout
the remainder of the series (literally) in very surprising ways.
Trivia notes: (1) Willow’s “I’m walkin’ here” when they drag her off the
curb comes from the movie Midnight Cowboy. (2) The lyrics in Buffy’s
dream right after the teaser match the scene perfectly: “Everything is quiet/
Since you're not around/ And I live in the numbness now/ In the
background/I do the things we did before.” (3) Scott Hope asked Buffy to
dance to the song “Cure”. The refrain is “you will never be the cure”. (4)
“Disco Dave” – Cordy’s description of Faith’s dance partner – is a slang
term for a party animal. (5) The phrase “five by five” (and yes, I
deliberately made this the fifth trivia note) comes from the communications
industry. (6) Faith’s statement that slaying makes her “hungry and horny”
should recall Buffy’s lines at the end of Prophecy Girl: “I'm hungry. … Is
anybody else hungry? … I'm really, really hungry.” (7) When Faith asked
Buffy about her “toughest kill”, Buffy responded with “The Three”. She
didn’t kill them, though. (8) Mr. Trick’s description of Sunnydale as the
place “Where the humans are jumpin’ and the cotton is high” plays off a
line from the song “Summertime”. (9) Joyce’s reference to the “Slayer
Pride parade” reinforces the “coming out” associations in Becoming 2. (10)
State Street, where the Buster Keaton festival is playing, is the main street
in Santa Barbara, the real world Sunnydale. (11) Angel’s return is an
homage to the film Terminator.
 Beauty And The Beasts
Buffy’s shadow self/dark side has been explored in a number of episodes to
date. Beauty and the Beasts examines the dark side of 3 men: Pete, Angel,
and Oz. Pete’s case is the most obvious, because the story of Jekyll and
Hyde – the obvious inspiration for the episode, which Willow mentions at
the end – is a metaphor generally for the dark side/shadow self (or
“civilized” versus “animalistic” as a specific case of the general idea). The
trigger for Pete’s transformation is his potion, a fairly thinly disguised
alcohol metaphor. Some literary historians argue that Robert Louis
Stevenson, the author of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, was
himself a cocaine user.
In previous posts I’ve mentioned Jungian theory, under which it’s necessary
for every person to undergo a process of “individuation”, which means
coming to terms with one’s shadow. Pete obviously failed in this task, to the
point where the shadow subsumed the person. Here’s how the Wikipedia
article explains it; note that it uses the Jekyll and Hyde example:
“According to Jung, the shadow sometimes overwhelms a person's
actions…. 'A man who is possessed by his shadow is always standing in his
own light and falling into his own traps ... living below his own level':
hence, in terms of the story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 'it must be Jekyll, the
conscious personality, who integrates the shadow ... and not vice versa.
Otherwise the conscious becomes the slave of the autonomous shadow'.”
In stark contrast to Pete, the episode portrays Oz as someone who has
previously come to terms with his wolf and controls himself voluntarily. As
for Angel, at the beginning we’re uncertain because he returned in a feral
state. At the end he achieves control of his inner beast through his love of
Buffy. One obvious lesson is that we can now accept that it is indeed Angel
who returned, not Angelus. It’s an example of the ability to be redeemed
because he wants to be (to paraphrase what Giles told Buffy).
I’ve seen a fair amount of criticism of Beauty and the Beasts on the ground
that this exploration of the dark sides of these specifically male characters
meant that the episode is “anti-male”. Part of this is criticism of writer
Marti Noxon, and is retrospective based on things which happen in later
seasons. I don’t agree with this criticism, but I can’t get into the details now
because of spoilers. There’s also some criticism from the text of the episode
itself which I think is also unwarranted and I want to explain why I disagree
with that.
Best I can tell, the criticism is based upon (a) Faith’s comments, particularly
her statements that “all men are beasts” and that “they’re only in it for the
chase”; (b) the fact that Angel and Oz do, in fact, have monsters inside
them; and (c) the harsh portrayal of Pete. I’ll take these in turn.
Whether it’s Buffy or any other literature, we should be very wary of taking
the statement of a single character at face value. I can’t imagine, for
example, that Shakespeare agreed with everything Iago said and did. You
can’t quote Iago and say “as Shakespeare said…”. Shakespeare said no
such thing; Iago, a character, did.
When Faith makes her comment, or indeed any comment, we have to
decide whether her character is telling us an intended message from the
show or just something about her particular character. It seems to me pretty
clear in this case that it’s only the latter. Her statement comes just before the
break and immediately after we see Willow and Buffy agreeing that Faith’s
statement is an unfair generalization:
“Willow: I don't think that's true, that every guy is in it only for the chase.
Buffy: I know. It is an awful generalization.”
Faith’s attitude towards men is an issue that the series will explore in later
episodes so I can’t say much here if I want to avoid spoilers. My point now
is that we don’t have to take her word for it.
Turning to the second point, yes it’s true that Angel and Oz have monsters
inside them, but that’s not the case for every man shown on the show.
Xander and Giles are obvious exceptions (I don’t count Giles’ past demon,
Eyghon, as still present, nor Xander’s hyena). The overgeneralization also
misses the point that Angel and Oz demonstrate that some men can control
their demons. Mr. Platt makes this explicit:
“Mr. Platt: … Everybody has demons, right?
Buffy: (averts her eyes) Gotta say I'm with you on that. (looks down at her
hands)
Mr. Platt: Excellent. So, the hope I bring you is: demons can be fought.
(Buffy looks up at him in surprise) People can change.”
Angel and Oz may have demons inside them, but that’s not the point. The
point is that they can control those demons and still be good.
In addition to the fact that not all men are shown as “beasts”, we need to ask
whether the show portrays women as entirely lacking in internal demons.
Again I can’t say much about this in the future because of spoilers, but it
certainly has not to date – from S1 we have Catherine Madison (Witch) and
Natalie French (Teacher’s Pet); from S2 we have Ampata (Inca Mummy
Girl) and Drusilla. And as I’ve emphasized several times, Cordelia has
served a metaphorical role as Buffy’s shadow self, putting Buffy in the
same situation as the men here. The fact that the show has explored Buffy’s
dark side makes it very unlikely that an anti-male theme was intended here.
That leaves Pete. Yes, he’s portrayed in a very unsympathetic light, but
there’s a good reason for that – it’s pretty hard to justify abuse. That’s not
the only reason, though. Pete is in the episode for a particular purpose,
namely to contrast him with Angel. One major point of the episode was to
distinguish between 2 types of monster. Buffy has just learned that Angel
has come back and she doesn't know whether he's Angel or Angelus;
neither do we. Giles explains how to make the distinction:

"Giles: ... In my experience, there are... two types of monster. The first, uh,
can be redeemed, or more importantly, wants to be redeemed.

Buffy: And the second type?

Giles: The second is void of humanity, cannot respond to reason... or love."

At the end of the episode we're shown exactly these two types. Debbie
(unwisely) demonstrated her love for Pete by saving his life and in other
ways. Pete doesn’t respond to her attempts to reason with him or to her
love; he kills her. Angel is presented in explicit contrast to Pete. He breaks
his chains to find Buffy, protects her from Pete, and kneels before her. In
those actions he showed both that he responds to love and that he wants to
be redeemed.
I’m inclined to see Beauty and the Beasts as an episode which says
redemption is possible even for the worst, if they want it. That's not "anti-
male", Pete was just the example used to make the point.
Having said all this, I need to add that I think the whole discussion of Pete
and Angel is secondary to what I see as important about the episode. As
usual, I think what’s important is what an episode tells us about Buffy. For
her the contrast is not with Pete, it’s with Debbie. Marti says in The
Monster Book that "Young women have a tendency to be drawn to the
darker side of man. To romanticize the bad boy. What is that about? And
when does it become dangerous? When do you lose control?'" Debbie and
Pete exemplify this. Note in particular that Pete tells Debbie that she’s the
one who brings out his evil side:
“Pete: When I drink it, nothing, Debbie. Nothing! (Debbie flinches) I don't
need this anymore, okay? I am way, *way* past that now.
He slams the bottle back onto the shelf.
Pete: You see?
He takes another bottle down and throws it to the floor, breaking it.
Pete: You see?! (breaks another) No more. (breaks a third) You could pour
out everything I made, and it wouldn't help. And you wanna know why?
He grabs her by the arms. She whimpers in fright.
Pete: You wanna know why?! Because all it takes now is you, Debbie.”

That, of course, also describes the situation with Angel and Buffy.
Remember from Innocence? “So it was me. I did it.” And “The important
thing is you made me the man I am today!”
Buffy lost herself in Angel once; does she now understand the risk that
entails? Read her dialogue with Debbie and apply both their words to Buffy
in light of Angel’s return, his ambiguous status at that moment, and her
concealment of his return from her friends:
“Buffy: You have to talk to us. (Debbie shakes her head) We can't help you
until you do.
Debbie: I didn't ask for your help!
Willow: Well, when are you going to? I mean, if Pete kills you, it'll pretty
much be too late.
Buffy: Debbie, we're running out of time….
Buffy: Where can we find him?
Debbie: I-I don't know.
Buffy: You're lying.
Debbie: What if I am? What are you gonna do about it?...
Buffy takes her by the arm again and pushes her up against the sink in front
of the mirror.
Buffy: Look at yourself. Why are you protecting him? Anybody who really
loved you couldn't do this to you.
She takes a few steps away. Debbie turns around to face them.
Debbie: Would they take him someplace?
Buffy: Probably.
Debbie: (shakes her head, sobbing) I could never do that to him. (Willow
sighs) I'm his everything.
Buffy: (disgusted) Great. So what, you two live out your Grimm fairy tale?
Two people are dead.
Debbie just shakes her head and says nothing.
Buffy: Who's gonna be next?”

Buffy’s playing a dangerous game here; the distance between her and her
friends caused by her relationship with Angel is very wide and the wounds
from Dead Man’s Party aren’t healed. There’s a real temptation for her, as
we learned in her conversation with Platt:
“Buffy: He was my first... I loved him, and then he...
Mr. Platt: ...changed.
She looks up at him, surprised again.
Buffy: Yeah.
Mr. Platt: He got mean.
Buffy: Yes.
Mr. Platt: And you didn't stop loving him.”

That’s the story of Debbie in nutshell. She didn’t stop loving Pete even
though he “got mean”. She “stayed lost” in Pete, to use Platt’s phrase. The
question for Buffy – the one she implicitly asked herself in the conversation
with Platt – is whether she will stay lost in Angel. The ending voiceover
from The Call of the Wild nicely captures the ambiguity here: does the
passage apply to “love’s dog”? To the animal instinct inside Angel? Could it
even apply to Buffy herself, feeling the call of the wild in the form of
Angel?
Finally, there’s yet another application of this episode to Buffy which I
won’t discuss because of spoilers, but I will say that the theme of this
episode fits right in with the most important seasonal theme. And there’s a
very good reason why this episode appears at this particular point in the
season.
I need to add that “Rules change” is a great moment.
Trivia notes: (1) Buffy read in voiceover from Jack London’s The Call of
the Wild. If you haven’t read it, the story involves a dog raised in
civilization but taken to a brutal environment in Alaska. The dog is able to
survive only by reverting to its animal instincts. Apparently dogs have
shadow selves too. (2) Willow carried her detective tools in a Scooby-Do
lunch box. (3) Someone’s a Sound of Music fan. This is the second episode
to use the phrase “the hills are alive”. The first was The Dark Age. Buffy
seemed to remember that it was Jenny’s phrase because she trailed off when
she used it to Giles. (4) Willow got the donuts from “Mister Donut”, which
is now Dunkin’ Donuts. (5) I’ve Got A Secret was a TV game show which
originally ran from 1952-67. (6) In comments, State of Siege correctly
pointed out that I’m being very eclectic – that’s a euphemism – in my use of
Freud and Jung. Guilty. In mitigation, I plead that I’m trying to get a
reading which takes account of popular understanding, both of the viewers
and of the writers. That will inherently lead to a less-than-scholarly
treatment of the issues.
 Homecoming
“Welcome to Slayerfest!” is one of those lines that makes me laugh every
single time. The Mayor, whom we meet for the first time and who is one of
my favorite characters in the whole series. Lyle Gorch, whom we see for the
first time since Bad Eggs. Homecoming has all these things, but it’s not a
particular favorite of mine. This is basically my own issue: I dislike scenes
in which people are humiliated even if it is really good for Buffy’s color.
For example, I hated what the frat boys did to Xander in Reptile Boy.
Buffy’s painful attempt to become Homecoming Queen makes me very
uncomfortable and those portions of the episode therefore hard to watch.
This doesn’t make it a bad episode; I think that my sense of discomfort was
intended by the writers in order to remind us of something about Buffy.
Buffy tells Cordelia that what she wants is to be recognized: “I just
thought... Homecoming Queen. I could pick up a yearbook someday and
say, I was there. I went to high school, I had friends, and... for one moment,
I got to live in the world. And there'd be proof. Proof that I was chosen for
something other than this.” Buffy had all those things at Hemery: “At
Hemery, I was Prom Princess, I was Fiesta Queen, I was on the
cheerleading squad. And the yearbook was, like, a story of me.” But of
course, as we saw in Becoming, Buffy was vapid and childish at Hemery
(lollypop and all). Here at Sunnydale she’s on the path to adulthood.
That doesn’t make it wrong for her to want recognition. We all want
recognition, of course. The problem is that Buffy not only wants
recognition for something relatively shallow, she goes about it entirely the
wrong way: she orders her friends around instead of asking; she guilt-trips
Willow; she actually includes Xander’s name on her list of Cordy’s
weaknesses; she manipulates some voters and bribes others; she engages in
dirty tricks. That’s not the way to get people to work with you or to
recognize you, and it’s not Buffy. It is, in fact, very like Cordelia, and that’s
the point – to remind us that Buffy has a side to her which Cordelia
represents in metaphor.
Cordy has functioned as Buffy’s shadow self from the beginning. The
competition for Homecoming Queen, and the conflict this generates
between them, re-emphasizes that role: “This whole trying to be like me
really isn't funny anymore.” Buffy denies this, but we can all see that it’s
true. The level of bitchiness between them reaches new and disturbing
levels. Buffy gives in to her shadow, adopting the behaviors and attitudes
she ordinarily controls, though she never goes as far as Pete did last
episode. Not until her friends force the two together and Cordy gets to
experience Buffy’s life does Buffy regain control. Her metaphorical
“grownup” side rescues her from the shallowness and distraction from her
destiny which becoming Homecoming Queen represents. Willow was right
when she said that Cordy needed that more than Buffy.
Their reconciliation – facilitated by the cooperation which is essential if
they’re to evade their hunters – I see as another case of Jungian
individuation. Individuation is the reconciliation of the conscious mind and
the shadow as part of creating an adult self. I discussed this in Out of Mind,
Out of Sight, an episode Buffy not so coincidentally references here when
she asks Oz if she’s invisible. As was true in OoM,OoS, the individuation
we see here sets up a subsequent episode. Individuation is an iterative
process, meaning that it’s necessary to do it repeatedly over one’s life.
However, this is the last instance we’ll see in which Cordy plays the role of
shadow self; her metaphorical role is done. Hence the “homecoming”, the
first of 3 important “homecomings” we see in the episode.
Though the main plot involves the Homecoming Dance and the election for
Homecoming Queen, it’s also clear that Buffy has welcomed Angel back
home. It’s not so clear that this is any more successful than her attempt to
be Queen. If nothing else, her time spent with Angel seems to part of what
cost her what little relationship she had with Scott Hope (but a big cheer to
Faith for taking Buffy’s side!).
Angel’s return also continues to isolate her from her friends. She can’t trust
them to understand: “I haven't... told Giles and the others that... you're back.
… And I'm not going to. They wouldn't understand that you're... better.”
Xander’s Lie and the events of Dead Man’s Party are still poisoning the
well. We can see the distance between them in their choice to help Cordelia
rather than Buffy, which of course only serves to reinforce the separation.
Buffy’s decision to hide Angel’s return seems logical from her perspective,
but it’s worth thinking about how her friends might feel about it,
particularly since they have no way to know that he’s Angel again.
Speaking of friends, there’s a third level of “homecoming” on display in
Homecoming. I can’t say that Xander’s sudden (?) attraction to Willow
came as a complete surprise to me. After all, I never thought he loved
Cordelia; that’s the way I interpreted the results of Amy’s spell in BB&B.
He’s always looking around at others, including Faith this season, never
content with what he has. Having Cordy tell Buffy that she truly does love
Xander just raises the stakes that much higher. Willow has always loved
Xander, so her giving in to temptation comes as no great shock either.
Willow and Xander, like Buffy, are now hiding a secret that their friends
won’t really understand or accept. It’s not a completely symmetrical
situation because Buffy isn’t the victim of their fluking, whereas Xander
and Willow are directly affected by Buffy’s concealment of Angel. That
said, there’s a metaphorical connection to Buffy: when one’s heart and one’s
spirit turn inward towards each other, that suggests a dangerous level of
self-involvement and disregard of others.
I haven’t said anything about the Mayor until now. He was mentioned four
times previously (in IOHEFY, Becoming 2, DMP, and FH&T), but this is
the first time we actually see him. He’s obviously a bad guy, given his
association with Mr. Trick, but that’s all we know so far. While you’re
thinking about what metaphorical role the Mayor might play – because by
now you know I think he has one – I’ll leave you with a suggestion. The
Mayor has only 2 scenes, both fairly short. In my view, one very obvious
theme appears from his statements.
Trivia note: (1) The Slayerfest plot is based on the short story The Most
Dangerous Game.
 Band Candy
After 3 episodes which prefigure one of the two important themes of S3, we
now get two which prefigure the other major theme and some of the plot
lines. I’m not going to spoil the plot, but I do want to talk about one of the
themes: maturity. Since Buffy’s a senior this year, it’s shouldn’t surprise us
that maturity is a theme. Mature is what all seniors are supposed to be when
they graduate.
Joyce tells Buffy that she’s being immature: “You're acting really immature,
Buffy.” She is, though not for the reasons Joyce and Giles think. It’s the fact
that she’s concealing Angel’s return which causes her to lie to them and to
Willow. Buffy then does what teenagers love to do and demands to be
treated like an adult in order to prove she is one. What follows is a
metaphorical enactment of that demand.
Jane Espenson describes the episode as “be careful what you wish for”. As
she says, “Buffy wishes she had something, she gets it and then learns that
it’s not what she hoped it would be. So in Bandy Candy she was getting a
lot of parental supervision from….."I wish I didn’t have these adults
running my life" and then they’re not adults anymore and she realizes that
she needs them, needs them as grownups.” It’s not just that the behavior of
the adults provides a “sobering mirror” (Oz’s phrase), but Buffy also learns
something from the absence of adult supervision: that she can function as
an adult even if she’s not one.
So who’s being irresponsible here? The adults, certainly, once the candy
takes effect anyway. Willow and Xander too, and Xander didn’t even need
the candy. It’s an interesting question whether Buffy is. She’s lying to Joyce
and to Giles about her studies/training, but she at least sees that as done for
a good cause, namely taking care of Angel. On the really big other hand,
though, she’s still hiding his return. That’s not exactly responsible behavior,
particularly given the look on her face while he’s doing his Tai Chi. Nor
does her reckless driving (without a license) show particularly good
judgment. Failing to study for the SAT? I’d give that a pass. Last minute
cramming isn’t likely to do her much good anyway; might as well relax.
No, Buffy shows her maturity when she has to operate as the Slayer instead
of a teenager. She takes over completely at that point in order to stop the
sacrifice. And to stop Giles and Joyce: “At least I got to the two of you
before you actually *did* something.” Heh.
Band Candy may not have the subtlest of messages, but it’s certainly one of
the funniest. Any episode with Ethan Rayne is worth watching repeatedly. It
also contains a major clue to the season finale, both in the plotline and
metaphorically.
Trivia notes: (1) Answer C on the SAT preparation test Buffy was taking in
the teaser was “all systems tend towards chaos”. We know from Halloween
that Ethan Rayne worships chaos, and that is what his candy leads to. (2)
Mr. Trick’s “I know a beast who knows a guy” plays on the expression “I
know a man (or guy) who knows a guy”. (3) When Buffy told Snyder that
she “loved the idea of going all Willy Loman” to sell the candy, she was
referring to the lead character in the play Death of a Salesman. As we’ll see
in S4, one of the writers really likes that play. (5) The song Giles really
likes is Cream’s “Tales of Brave Ulysses”. You’ll hear it again. (6) Buffy’s
description of the juvenile adults at the Bronze – “Let’s do the time warp
again” – is from the Rocky Horror Picture Show. (7) Snyder wanted to be
like Barbarino, who was the character played by John Travolta on the 70s
TV show Welcome Back Kotter. (8) Ratboy – Buffy’s description of Snyder
– was a 1986 movie starring Sondra Locke. (9) Anthony Head played
Giles’ juvenile self very much like the character Alex from the movie A
Clockwork Orange, the hat he took from the store being a real giveaway.
Someone added the hat during the shooting, because the hat is not
mentioned in the shooting script even though Joyce’s coat is. I’m giving this
detail because the novel A Clockwork Orange will provide a major theme
for S4 and later seasons.
 Revelations
Revelations brings us front and center to a critical issue: the extent to which
Angel is responsible for the crimes of Angelus (consistent with my posts to
date, I’m using the name Angel to refer to him with the soul, Angelus
without). Xander and Buffy take different sides of this debate; complicating
the picture is the bias each has because of Buffy’s relationship with Angel.
He’s jealous, she’s in love.
I want to put aside the bias problems for purposes of thinking about this
issue. Frankly, it’s a distraction from the merits. However, I also want to
hold off on the merits too until we get to Amends. What I’m going to do
here is analyze the actions of Buffy on the one hand, and Xander and Faith
on the other. In each case I’ll simply assume for the sake of argument that
they’re right in their contradictory views of Angel.
Buffy seems to view the presence or absence of the soul is a matter of
essence. By that I mean that she sees the presence of the soul as marking
the real, true essence of a person. It’s a fixed property which defines the
very meaning of what a “person” is. She uses this as a dividing line –
souled beings are generally for the human world to deal with (except when
they access the supernatural in some way), while the unsouled are the
province of the Slayer. Her viewpoint on this will remain consistent
throughout the series.
This is a very interesting position for her to hold, and I’m going to discuss it
more when I get to Amends. For now I’ll just note her position and move
on to evaluating her actions on that basis.
When Buffy sees Angel with his soul restored, that makes him immediately
similar to other real human beings in her eyes, and therefore not a creature
to be slain unless he, with the soul, commits some act to deserve that (as
Mrs. Post does here). Unlike other vampires, she wouldn’t slay him on
sight. He’s rather in a class similar to Oz in that he’s capable of evil but also
able to control himself.
If you see the “soul canon” (as it’s called in fandom) this way, Buffy’s
decision not to hold Angel responsible for the crimes of Angelus makes
good sense. If the soul is an essential component of personhood, then Angel
can’t be held morally responsible for what Angelus did in its absence.
Given Buffy’s understanding of the world, keeping Angel alive after his
return was the morally correct action.
Of course, that’s only one part of the criticism of her actions. The other part
is her concealment of Angel’s return. She’s on much shakier ground there.
From the perspective solely of the Slayer, it’s plausible to argue that she had
no duty to tell Willow or Xander about his return. The Slayer is the one who
ultimately has to make the call to slay or not, so they don’t have any right to
demand that she do so.
But having no right to command her to slay isn’t the same as having no
interest. As Cordy puts it, “Last time around, Angel barely laid a hand on
Buffy. He was *way* more interested in killing her friends.” While this is
arguable, there’s some truth to it. Angelus did try to kill Willow in
Innocence and Xander in BB&B. Cordy was never at any real risk, but her
point stands. The best we can say for Buffy-as-Slayer is that she was taking
upon herself a responsibility similar to that which she took when she was
unable to kill Angelus in Innocence. The blood of any future deaths would
be on her. It’s hardly surprising that those at risk might take a dim view of
that without further evidence (which we get later on when Angel saves
Willow from Mrs. Post).
Now let’s look at it purely as a matter of friendship. I think we can see
Xander’s Lie still working its poison here. From Buffy’s perspective,
Xander and Willow wanted her to kill Angel in Becoming. She had no
reason to think they’d react any differently now – Xander’s and Cordelia’s
statements in Dead Man’s Party confirmed this – and in fact Xander’s
reaction here was exactly what she could have expected. She justifiably
fears that she’ll lose her friends if she does tell them.
Buffy’s always had the propensity to keep things to herself rather than share
her feelings with others. I can personally sympathize with that, and the
circumstances of Angel’s return as she sees them certainly reinforce that
characteristic. The problem for her is that she needs her friends for her own
survival sometimes, and for her emotional stability most of the time, and
telling them the truth is one way she gets their help and keeps their
friendship. She recognizes this in her conversation with Faith at the end:
“Faith: *I'm* on my side, (nods) and that's enough.
Buffy: (shakes her head) Not always.”
Note that all of this implicitly assumes that Buffy is “the Slayer”, implying
that there’s only one. That’s how Buffy sees herself, the presence of Faith
notwithstanding. Buffy’s own view of herself, therefore, will inevitably
generate tension with Faith and add to Faith’s sense of isolation.
The parallel case of Xander and Willow hiding their own relationship
reinforces the problematic nature of concealment. We see Buffy’s guilt
reflected in the way Willow, her metaphorical spirit, reacts to kissing
Xander in the library. Willow concealed her behavior because she knew it
was wrong. Similarly, concealing Angel’s return from Willow and Xander
simply reinforced the implication that he was evil. Buffy knew this at some
level; in Homecoming she told Angel that Giles and the others “wouldn't
understand that you're... better.” It made Buffy and Angel look guilty even
if they weren’t; we see this assumption at the heart of the confrontation in
the library and Giles said it plainly: “You must've known it was wrong
seeing Angel or you wouldn't have hidden it from all of us.” This inherent
problem with concealment will have a major consequence later in the
season.
Buffy perhaps rightly thought she had no good option when it came to
Xander and Willow, but her relations with Xander and Willow aren’t the
only ones at issue.
Buffy’s bigger problem is with Giles. Unlike Willow and Xander, he has an
actual right to be involved in her decisions. He’s her Watcher. Angelus
killed Jenny. While we never actually saw her learn that Angelus tortured
Giles, we should assume she did because he “reminds” her of that fact after
the confrontation in the library. Moreover, Giles was not involved in
Xander’s Lie, nor in the confrontations of Dead Man’s Party. Her failure to
tell him is utterly inexcusable under these circumstances. It’s hard to
disagree with Giles when he tells her “You should have told me he was
alive. You didn't. You have no respect for me, or the job I perform.” Harsh
but true, and Buffy knows it. Buffy may have demonstrated the ability to
behave like an adult in Band Candy, but she completely blew it here.
Now let’s flip sides and consider Xander’s comments and actions. Xander
also takes an essentialist view of Angel, but he reverses the essential
feature. For Xander the critical fact is that Angel is a vampire. He’s had this
attitude from the beginning: “At the end of the day, I pretty much think
you're a vampire.” (Prophecy Girl.) For Xander, it appears that the soul is
not much more than a trigger guard on a weapon, capable of being removed
at any time.
By Xander’s lights, then, the soul doesn’t, indeed can’t, change Angel’s
essential nature. He remains a vampire. Buffy should slay him on sight. As
Faith puts it, “You're confused, Twinkie. (smiles ironically) Let me clear
you up. (points at Angel) Vampire. (points at herself) Slayer. (points at
Angel again) Dead vampire.”
Xander therefore sees himself as justified in “judge shopping” when he
urges Faith to slay Angel. The problem here might be obvious from my use
of the term “judge hopping”. In the legal world, this term refers to a lawyer
or client who doesn’t like the ruling by one judge so tries to get a “better”
ruling from another. For obvious reasons, this isn’t allowed.
It won’t do to argue that Faith is a Slayer and should get to make her own
independent decision whether to slay Angel. There are three massive
problems with this. First, even if we accept Xander’s view of Angel, as I’ve
done here for purposes of argument, the situation is very complicated. Faith
doesn’t know any of the background, and Xander doesn’t tell her. What he’s
doing here is asking a judge to decide at the same time that he’s
withholding key facts. That amounts to judicial (attempted) murder.
Second, by sending Faith after Angel, Xander pitted Slayer against Slayer,
in a potentially disastrous fight. Though they escaped the fight without
mutual physical injury, Xander’s conduct drove a wedge between the two
Slayers which may have future consequences (and see below). Buffy was
possibly wrong to conceal the facts from Faith, Willow and Xander, but
Xander’s behavior made it much more difficult for Buffy to make things
right with Faith.
Third, by talking to Faith on his own he bypassed Giles. If Buffy was wrong
in failing to consult Giles about Angel’s return, then it’s impossible to
excuse Xander for going behind Giles’ back. And note that by lying to
Faith, Xander actually enabled the real villain to seize the glove and try to
do what he only feared from Angel: to kill them all.
Xander’s fundamental problem is that he wants to be the General but he’s
not. It’s that attitude which led to his Lie in Becoming 2. In both cases,
Buffy and Giles – the ones in charge – rejected his position and he tried to
subvert their decision.
That wasn’t Xander’s only fault in this episode. The other was his personal
attack on Buffy in the library. He never even attempted to learn the facts
because he’d prejudged the case. He wasn’t making a rational argument
about the danger Angel posed so much as he was self-righteously criticizing
Buffy for her failure to do her duty as the Slayer: “I think you're harboring a
vicious killer.”; “For Angel to go psycho again the next time you give him a
happy?” [a truly vile comment in light of the facts]; “you just fell on his
lips” [like Xander “just fell on (Willow’s) lips”]; “Like you did last time
with Ms. Calendar”; “leave us to clean up the mess” [except for the part
where he did little but lie to her and she’s the one who had to send Angel to
Hell].
Xander simply assumed his view of the world rather than actually discuss it,
and then used it as a club to beat Buffy over the head. I consider Buffy’s
willingness to accept his quasi-apology – not “I’m sorry”, but “I leaned
toward the postal” – as a remarkable demonstration of her character.
That leaves us to consider Faith’s actions. In one sense, she’s the flip side of
Xander. Just as Xander failed to tell Faith the information she needed to
make a decision about Angel, Faith herself recklessly headed out to slay
him without even attempting to find out. Even though Xander did tell her,
rather contemptuously, that “Buffy says he’s clean”, Faith didn’t stop to
think: “Yeah, well, I say we can't afford to find out. I say I deal with this
problem right now. I say I slay.” Reckless and irresponsible, still worse for
her cavalier attitude towards Giles when she and Xander find him
unconscious in the library.
It’s also the case that Faith feels isolated from the rest of the gang, which
may have contributed to her response to Xander. It’s hard to identify any
external ground for her sense of isolation prior to this episode. In Faith,
Hope and Trick, Xander and Willow were so intrigued by her that Buffy
was jealous, and in Beauty and the Beasts, Homecoming and the beginning
of this episode the two slayers worked together quite well. We might
suspect a lingering sense of inadequacy from the incident with Kakistos,
reinforced here by Mrs. Post. Perhaps she also felt diminished by the fact
that Buffy killed Lagos where she had failed.
All this was undoubtedly present, but the biggest single factor must be the
fact that Buffy shut her out regarding Angel and concealed his return,
reinforced by Faith’s exclusion from the meeting (with Mrs. Post twisting
the knife). As I pointed out in FH&T, Buffy tends to think of herself as
“the” Slayer even in the rather unavoidable presence of Faith. This has to
affect Faith’s sense that she doesn’t belong (h/t executrix). In truth, there
were good reasons for not telling Faith about Angel from the perspective of
the SG, but from Faith’s viewpoint it’s understandable that she’d feel left
out. Xander’s failure to tell her the whole story, which caused her to rush
out in a bad cause, certainly didn’t help her sense of confidence either. And
her trust issues were substantially exacerbated by Mrs. Post.
Learning that Buffy also hid the truth from everyone else ought to make
Faith feel less isolated, but of course those others have a longer background
with Buffy and can more easily move past the issue. Still, Buffy did come
over to apologize and Faith didn’t accept it; she’s still alienated and we’ll
see consequences from that in the future.
Revelations was the 7th episode of S3. The 7th episode of S1 was Angel, the
7th of S2 was Lie to Me. I’m just sayin’…. I’ll add that the New Testament
Book of Revelations did not have that name because it revealed events in
the past which had been concealed. No, it was a prophecy – it revealed
events yet to come.
Trivia notes: (1) The episode opens with Dingoes finishing a song, the last
line of which is “you know I’d never lie”. (2) Tragedy masks – what Buffy
said everyone was wearing in the library – were worn by actors in ancient
Greece to depict the character portrayed by the actor. (3) Faith’s description
of Buffy as “Twinkie” is gay slang meaning an effeminate man. Her use of
this term is very suggestive in light of Buffy’s joke in the teaser about going
out with Faith. There are lots of Fuffy shippers among BtVS fans.
 Lover’s Walk
Lovers Walk is one of my personal favorite episodes. It has the return of
Spike, no longer a metaphor, but a chaotic force as he blows into and out of
town and tears the masks of deception off of Buffy, Willow, and Xander.
He’s great in every scene: with Joyce in the kitchen; his “love’s bitch”
speech; with Willow in the factory. The episode also has possibly my
favorite scene with the Mayor and it has the PEZ witch.
But while it’s incredibly funny, the episode has a real bite to it. Xander and
Willow get caught, er, “fluking”, and the repercussions are going to be with
us for a while. Willow’s would-be attempt at “de-lusting” shows that she’s
unwilling to do the hard work of dealing with her emotions. The spell was
doubly wrong: she shouldn’t be using the dark arts for such purposes; and
she didn’t have Xander’s consent to perform magic on him, a particularly
egregious omission given his experience in BB&B. I think the point is to
contrast her with Buffy, who does, with an assist from Spike, reach an
understanding about her own desire and manages to control herself without
any supernatural aid.
Spike’s words to Buffy and Angel obviously had an impact, but the
opposite of the one we might expect. Instead of embracing Spike’s view of
love, Buffy seemed to fear it and take it as something to avoid. Perhaps we
can see the reason for this by comparing Spike’s view of love with that of
Mr. Platt in Beauty and the Beasts:
“Spike: (faces them) You're *not* friends. You'll never be friends. You'll
be in love till it kills you both. You'll fight, and you'll shag, and you'll hate
each other till it makes you quiver, but you'll never be friends. (points at his
temple) Love isn't brains, children, it's blood... (clasps his chest) blood
screaming inside you to work its will…. *I* may be love's bitch, but at least
*I'm* man enough to admit it.”
“Mr. Platt: Look, lots of people lose themselves in love. It's, it's no shame.
They write songs about it. The hitch is, you can't stay lost. Sooner or later,
you... you have to get back to yourself. … If you can't... (inhales) Well,
love becomes your master, and you're just its dog.”
The dialogue in Lovers Walk doesn’t reference Mr. Platt’s view, but we
heard it just four episodes ago and Buffy surely remembers it. If Platt was
right, Spike’s words aren’t a paean to love, they’re a big red warning light.
Buffy may or may not want that kind of love (see below), but she’s mature
enough to recognize that she can’t have it with Angel.
There’s another point worth noting about the speech. This is a paradigm
case of the problem inherent in attributing the views of a character to the
author. Spike’s view may or may not be true; it may or may not be that of
Joss Whedon. But we can’t take his words as true in principle or even as
true for Buffy and Angel, any more than we can the diametrically opposite
view of Mr. Platt. All we really can know is that his words express how
Spike himself sees love.
In S2 I made a big deal out of the fact that Xander and Cordy were a
parallel relationship for Buffy/Angel, so I should note here that Cordy turns
away from Xander in the scene immediately preceding the one in which
Buffy tells Angel that she’s not going to see him anymore.
Trivia notes: (1) Spike knocked over the Sunnydale sign just as he did in
School Hard. (2) “Cletus the slack-jawed yokel” is Cletus Spuckler, a
character from The Simpsons. (3) The book Angel was reading by the fire is
La Nausée by Jean-Paul Sartre, which I mentioned in my post on Lie to Me.
In the DVD commentary for the Firefly episode Objects in Space, Joss says
that La Nausée is the most important book he’s ever read. In my view, we’ll
see the results of Angel’s reading in the episodes through Gingerbread. (4)
Weird Science – Buffy’s description of Willow’s failed love spell – was a
1985 film by John Hughes. (5) Charisma Carpenter actually suffered an
accident very similar to the one which befell Cordelia in this episode. (6)
The words we heard at the funeral while Buffy and Willow were talking are
from the Wisdom of Solomon 1:14-15. (7) Buffy’s demand that Angel tell
her he doesn’t love her echoes the same demand by James to Grace in
IOHEFY. (8) The version of “My Way” which Spike sang at the end is by
Gary Oldman for the movie Sid & Nancy.
 The Wish
On the surface, The Wish is a very entertaining episode with important
things to say about the characters. The problem is that if you look at it a bit
more closely, it suffers from a couple of significant flaws which lurk below
the surface: (1) the episode leaves us believing that none of the characters
actually learned any of those important things; and (2) the WishVerse
creates major continuity problems. I’m going to explain below the existence
of these two problems and offer a metaphorical reading which (mostly?)
solves them, but first I need to talk about it just from our perspective as
viewers.
The most important thing I have to say about The Wish is this: don’t let the
apparent focus on Cordelia cause you to miss what I consider to be the most
important point of the episode. The real point is not about Cordy, it’s about
Buffy: what would she have been like if she’d never come to Sunnydale?
Dead inside is the answer. That’s the Buffy we see in the WishVerse: a
hardened killer with no emotional attachments. It’s the fate Buffy warned
Faith against at the end of Revelations.
The teaser clues us in to this purpose:
“Xander: So how come Faith was a no-show? I thought mucus-y demons
were her favorites.
Buffy: Couldn't reach her... again. She hasn't been hanging out much.
Xander: I detect worry.
Buffy: A little bit. Slaying's a rough gig. Too much alone time isn't healthy.
Stuff gets pent up.”
Buffy’s worried about Faith’s isolation, so we see the impact of isolation in
the remainder of the episode. The cause of WishVerseBuffy’s emotional
deadening is that by never coming to Sunnydale she never gained her
friends and Watcher. How does Buffy deal with the terrible things that
happen in her life? “I have you guys”, as she says to Xander and Willow in
the teaser. WishVerseBuffy tells us about Buffy, it tells us about Faith, and –
what sets the episode apart – it uses Cordelia to tell us these things because
it tells us about her in the surface plotline. Three birds, one stone.
The reason why the episode is told through the eyes of Cordelia at this point
in time is that she’s a metaphor for Faith and Buffy because she feels that
she has no friends. That makes her feel dead inside, which is one reason
why she dies less than half way through her own wish. The episode
accomplishes this in a very clever way, namely by putting us in Cordelia’s
point of view in order to tell us about Buffy/Faith. That allows us to learn
something about Cordy at the same time we’re learning about Buffy/Faith.
Ok, now let me return to the problematic aspects of The Wish. I said it
above, but I’ll repeat it here: The “message” problem is that it doesn’t
appear that there is one within the confines of the episode. We, the audience,
learn important things from the events we see in the WishVerse, but the
reversal of the wish, combined with Cordy’s reaction at the end, make it
seem that she didn’t learn anything (and, of course, no other character could
have either). This is, to say the least, unsatisfying.
I also mentioned continuity problems. The “continuity” objection to the
alternate reality as we see it is that it’s impossible for Cordy to be there. The
reason is that the Master must have risen at the Harvest because Buffy
wasn’t there to stop it. When we saw the Harvest, Luke was busy devouring
everyone in sight until Buffy interrupted him. And this is the key: the one
he was about to drain when Buffy showed up was Cordelia herself. She
would have died then.
There are other problems as well: Where’s Darla? Luke? Jesse? What
happened to the Annoying One? Was Xander vamped before the SheMantis
got him? Before he became a hyena with no one around to transpossess
him? Was Willow vamped before Moloch seduced her? Since Xander had
no interest in Willow at that time, when and how did he and VampWillow
become a couple? Why didn’t Angel die when Spike restored Dru to health?
How can Xander refer to Cordy as “an old crush” when he hated her long
after Buffy came to Sunnydale?
I’m not saying that these problems are unsolvable. In any show with magic
and an alternate universe, virtually anything is possible. I’m trying to
explain the episode without resort to fanwanking on that scale. The way I
propose to do that is to consider that the episode was told using the
metaphor of a daydream, and the fact that we’re seeing a daydream
necessarily means that it’s told from Cordelia’s (internal) point of view.
Before I explain what this means and how I see it working, I need to give a
hat tip to shadowkat, whom I’ve mentioned before as one of the posters at
ATPO. She was the one who clued me in to the importance of point of view
(POV). I don’t believe she ever used it to analyze The Wish, so anything I
say here is not her fault.
First I need to distinguish a related but different concept. When we watch a
show or read a book, we necessarily interpret it through the lens of our own
background and experiences. What we see may not be what the author
intended. The debate about the extent to which our own interpretations are
valid or even preferred over that of the author goes under the heading
“authorial intent”. It’s a debate about the interpretations of people outside
the confines of the show.
That’s not the topic I’m going to talk about here, though I’ll get to it later.
What I’m going to discuss here is the POV of the characters inside the
confines of the show itself, for example Buffy’s POV or Xander’s.
An important consideration in watching any TV show (or play or movie, or
reading anything, for that matter) is deciding whose point of view the
audience is supposed to be viewing the events through. BtVS is usually
presented as third person, meaning it’s shown as if outside observers were
seeing the events as they happen. But that doesn’t mean that what we see is
the objective truth. As a general rule, works of literature tend to give us the
story from the perspective of the protagonist – here, Buffy – no matter how
“objective” the presentation may otherwise appear. We mostly see the
events as she sees them, and we almost unthinkingly adopt her perspective
on those events. If you have any doubts about this, just consider how the
presentation might differ if told from the perspective of a vampire or
demon.
There isn’t any rule that says we have to see the fictional world through the
eyes of the protagonist – we could, for example, take Xander’s view of
Angel in Becoming rather than Buffy’s. But most of the time, the natural
inclination will be to see the world of BtVS through Buffy’s eyes. I myself
lean very strongly to this way of watching the show, and I tend to interpret
the events through a Buffy-centric lens. That’s consistent with what I called
in the Introduction the Central Metaphor of the show: Buffy is us and we
are Buffy.
If you’re like me and generally see the Buffyverse through Buffy’s eyes, it’s
important to keep in mind that what we see isn’t necessarily objectively true
(though it often is), but that it’s what appears to be true for Buffy. Thus, we
may see Giles as occasionally (always?) stuffy because that’s how Buffy
sees him. Similarly, we see Xander as loyal but self-righteous and
judgmental, Willow as loyal and supportive, Angel as romantic, etc. All of
these may be true from an objective viewpoint, but we don’t have to treat
them as objectively real within the show, we just have to treat them as true
for Buffy.
Sometimes, whether in a particular scene or in an entire episode, we’ll be
shown events through the perspective of another character. This is usually
obvious when Buffy isn’t in the scene, but sometimes it happens even when
she is. As I see it, there are at least 6 episodes in which most of the events
we see are interpreted through the eyes of a supporting character. I think
arguments can be made for other episodes as well, but the 6 I have in mind
–The Wish, Amends, The Zeppo, Doppelgangland, A New Man, and
Storyteller – are the most obvious. Those who’ve seen the show can
consider these episodes, particularly The Zeppo, and it’ll be pretty obvious
what I mean.
Since The Wish is the first of these episodes, let’s talk a bit about what it
means to see the world through the eyes of someone other than Buffy. One
thing it means is that the episode plot tends to revolve around the
supporting character rather than around Buffy. The episode may still tell us
something important about Buffy, but it’s the other character who briefly
takes center stage. It should be obvious that The Wish focuses very strongly
on Cordy; she’s the (apparent) center of the story here.
Another key aspect of a character POV episode is that we see the world as
they do or as they would like to see it. I made this point with respect to
Faith’s view of men in BatB and Spike’s view of love in discussing Lovers
Walk. His attitude towards love isn’t the only one possible, so we don’t have
to treat his “love isn’t brains, children, it’s blood … blood screaming inside
you to work its will” speech as expressing Eternal Truth. It just tells us
about Spike.
The case of Spike in Lovers Walk is a good example of my point that there
have been particular scenes in previous episodes when the show took us
away from Buffy’s view and lets us see the world through the eyes of
another character. Since this has been true from the beginning, I should
explain why it is that I’ve waited until now to raise this point.
There are two important reasons. One is that The Wish is the first of what
I’m calling POV episodes, in which the entire episode is (or seems to be)
dedicated to the POV of another character, so it’s an obvious choice. The
other is, as I said above, that I believe I can solve the “message” and
“continuity” problems by analyzing The Wish with consideration of POV.
This brings us back to the point I made above regarding where Cordelia is
in life at this moment. She made a courageous decision to date Xander
publicly (BB&B), only to have him betray her in a painful way. Because of
the social status difference between them, his betrayal is crushingly painful
and makes her feel (and look) particularly foolish. She suffers the loss of
the social network over which she’d previously reigned, leaving her now in
a harsh, brutal social environment with no source of emotional support at a
time when she really needs it. Not surprisingly, the world looks pretty bleak
to her.
And that’s what we see in the world Anyanka creates in The Wish. Harmony
defers to Cordelia because that’s how Cordelia sees what “should” be true.
The Cordettes look up to her again, John Lee asks her out (after rejecting
her in real life), but she has the Queen C status and leaves him hanging.
Then everything goes wrong. She runs into Willow and Xander, who are
bloodsucking fiends and kill her as a couple because she sees their coupling
(so to speak) as having sucked the life out of her in reality. Giles is well-
meaning but ineffective, almost a pre-Ripper Giles. Buffy is harsh and cold,
which is how Cordy sees her. Oz kills Willow because Cordy expects that
he’s as angry at Willow as she is at Xander. Xander kills Angel because
Cordy knows he hates Angel. In short, the WishVerse is an extended
metaphor of a daydream describing Cordy’s life as she imagines it is now,
albeit with a moral lesson on her part gained during the course of her
reverie:
Cordelia: Listen to me. We have to find Buffy. She'll figure out a way to save
us. She was supposed to be here, and as much as it kills me to admit it...
things were better when she was around.
***

Cordelia: No. No! No way! I wish us into Bizarro Land, and you guys are
still together?! I cannot win!

***

Cordelia: (frantic) Giles! It's all my fault! I wasn't... I made this

*stupid* wish...

Giles: Come on. Please lie...

Cordelia: No! You have to get Buffy. Buffy changes it. (Giles lets go of her)
It wasn't like this. It was better. I mean, the clothes alone... (Giles takes off
his glasses) But people were happy. Mostly.

If that ain't a moral, Aesop should burn his stories.

So that’s the internal message. It’s not the only message, because we as
viewers can see other ones, but it’s a message available to Cordy within the
show.
Now let me talk about the mechanics of it. I’d describe the events like this.
Anyanka created the WishVerse from scratch. We can think of it as either a
separately existing world or, as I’d prefer, one existing solely in Cordy’s
imagination, consistent with the daydream metaphor.
In either alternative, this WishVerse never existed before Cordy made the
wish; Anyanka even characterizes it as a “brave new world”. In order to
create that world, Anyanka needed information to create the inhabitants.
She took that information from Cordy's view of them at the moment in time
when Cordy made the wish. Thus, Cordy saw Xander and Willow as a
predatory and evil couple, so that’s what they became in the WishVerse.
Etc. As a result, the characters in the WishVerse do not represent
objectively "real" characters in Sunnydale, but rather those characters as
filtered through Cordelia's thoughts and impressions at that particular time.
There are some objections to my reading here. One is that I can’t account
for the amulet if the WishVerse exists solely in Cordy’s mind. That
objection is easier to solve if we see Anyanka as having actually created the
alternate universe. However, I don’t think it’s a problem either way.
“Smashing the amulet” just becomes a metaphor for Cordy waking from her
reverie. Our imaginations are perfectly capable of such images. In
comments a number of people preferred the idea that the amulet was real. I
have some responses to that, but I can’t discuss them without spoilers for
later this season and for S7. I will mention them when I can do so without
spoiling.
Some people object that Cordy can’t die if it’s all in her head. But
RealCordy didn’t die, only WishVerseCordy. We all are capable of
imagining our own deaths and the consequences of that. One important
consequence is that if the whole episode took place within Cordy’s mind,
then Cordy could actually learn a lesson from it. That’s not possible if the
WishVerse existed separately; once the amulet was destroyed, nobody could
“remember” things which happened under its spell. Separate existence
would not solve the “message” problem with the episode.
In addition, the consequences of the amulet’s destruction are consistent with
the metaphor of a daydream or fantasy. Giles says that “'In order to defeat
Anyanka, one must destroy her power center. This should reverse all the
wishes she's granted….” That’s what happens when our daydreams end –
the world goes back to what it was before.
There’s another potential problem which those who’ve seen the rest of S3
will recognize, but it involves spoilers so I’ll come back to it at the
appropriate time. What I’d say about my interpretation is that it solves the
continuity and “message” problems that are otherwise obvious given the
facts we know. We don’t need to worry about what “really” happened in
The Harvest or other episodes, because we aren’t seeing that “reality”. All
we’re seeing is what Cordy imagines in her daydream; that’s the metaphor.
One final point. Giles took a great leap of faith when he destroyed
Anyanka’s necklace. “Buffy: You're taking an awful lot on faith here….
Giles: I have to believe in a better world.” He had no idea that the other
world would be better, but he believed. Keep this in mind for the next two
episodes.
Trivia notes: (1) The episode seems based on the movie It’s A Wonderful
Life. Let me just note that I think this reinforces my interpretation of the
WishVerse. (2) “Tears of a Clown”, Xander’s somewhat dubious description
of Cordelia in the Bronze, is a song by Smokey Robinson. (3) This is the
second episode (Halloween was the other) to refer to Jo Jo the Dog-Faced
Boy, a P.T. Barnum attraction. Here, Cordy says “Buffy the dog face girl”.
(4) The Master asked VampXander “What news on the Rialto?” That’s from
the Merchant of Venice, Act III, sc. i. (5) The Master’s question to his
demonic duo -- “You killed the girl who sought the Slayer?” – has the same
rhythm as the old nursery rhyme “There was an old lady who swallowed a
fly”. (6) When Anyanka described the WishVerse as “brave new world” she
could be referring to the novel of that title by Aldous Huxley. It’s also a
reference to The Tempest, Act V, sc. i, which is where Huxley got the
phrase. It’s a little unclear which reference might be meant. (7) local-max
pointed out in comments that The Wish reinforces my point in Homecoming
that Cordy’s role as Buffy’s shadow self has ended: “The episode also
makes Cordelia's status as Buffy shadow fairly clear by having her
displaced at the halfway mark within her own nightmare by Buffy. [This
indicates] that there just isn't space in this tale for the two of them, and to
some extent Cordelia's arc in BtVS is just to learn to get out of Buffy's way,
so that Buffy can learn to behave better than Cordelia tends to.”
 Amends
This is a long chapter. I’m going to deal first with some very important
features of Amends before I discuss the issue which I’ve been saving for
this episode, namely Angel’s culpability, if any, for the actions of Angelus.
I’m covering a lot here and I hope I haven’t tried to do too much.
Suicide is Painless
I mentioned in my post on Lie to Me that Joss describes himself as an
absurdist in philosophy and talked about the way existentialism influenced
the story lines. For purposes of that episode I didn’t need to make any
distinction between absurdism and existentialism, but now I do. The reason
is that Amends raises a question which absurdists believe is fundamental:
why shouldn’t one commit suicide?
This may seem like an odd question, so let me explain how they
(specifically, Albert Camus) get there. Camus starts with the proposition,
which he shares in common with Jean Paul Sartre, that there is no inherent
meaning in life. The universe is meaningless, therefore the human search
for meaning in the universe is what Camus calls “absurd”. What he means
by this is that it’s humanly impossible to find any meaning, such that the
search itself is pointless: “it is absurd to continually seek meaning in life
when there is none.” (Quote from link.)
Camus’s discussion of the absurd in his most famous work, The Myth of
Sisyphus (see below), begins “with an implicit reference to Sartre's novel,
Nausea” (Id.). That was the novel in which Sartre explained the inherent
meaninglessness of the uncaring world. In Lover’s Walk we saw Angel
reading that novel, the novel Joss described as the most important book he
ever read. In my view, this was no accident – it was the implicit reference
which began the discussion of the issues raised by Camus. Let’s see how
this plays out in the subsequent episodes.
The next episode after Lovers Walk was The Wish. It presented us with a
stark picture of a meaningless, uncaring world. That’s the world the
absurdist sees. Recognizing the absurdity of the world triggers the
existentialist crisis, which Angel articulated to Giles here in Amends: “I
need to know why I'm here.”
Given this crisis, that is, the recognition that the world is absurd, Camus
identified 3 possible ways to react in the face of absurdity (see here). One
possible solution was that proposed by the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard,
who is sometimes called the founder of existentialism. Kierkegaard was a
devout Christian who argued that in the face of the absurdity of the world
the path to one’s true self required a “leap of faith”.
“A leap of faith, in its most commonly used meaning, is the act of believing
in or accepting something intangible or unprovable, or without empirical
evidence.” (Quote from link.) In essence, the idea is that you escape the
bleakness of the world as it appears to be by an act of faith, even though
such faith appears to be irrational. Faith “imagine[s] and live[s] for a life
beyond this life.” (Quote from Camus link, above.) Faith reveals to those
who have it that the apparent harshness of the world is merely an illusion.
Escape from the WishVerse came when Giles took a leap of faith:
“Anyanka: You trusting fool! How do you know the other world is any
better than this? Giles: Because it has to be.”
This “leap of faith” is something Kierkegaard described in the phrase
“subjectivity is the truth”. What he meant by this is that there is no
objective certainty of God’s existence – we can’t prove it by reason or any
other reference to the outside world. We can only believe subjectively, that
is, in our own minds. I may be reading too much into this, but an additional
reason I see The Wish as a reverie or a daydream is because I see it as
exploring Kierkegaard’s proposed “subjectivity” solution.
Camus, however, rejected any “leap of faith” because he was an atheist. I
should emphasize that this doesn’t mean that faith can never alleviate the
meaningless of the world – those who have faith do (subjectively, at least)
believe that the world has meaning. But this won’t work for an atheist like
Camus – Camus believed that those who accepted faith were fooling
themselves. Similarly, Angel can’t really follow the path of faith because
he’s a demon (“vampires aren’t that big on Christmas”). Others might find
the leap of faith satisfying, but Angel can’t and neither did Camus. Since
Camus couldn’t accept faith, that left two remaining logical possibilities in
his mind and Joss explores those other two in Amends and the following
episode, Gingerbread.
The first of those two remaining options is suicide. Logically speaking, one
can escape the absurdity of the world by ceasing to exist. Because Camus
rejected faith, he had to take seriously the possibility of suicide. “There is
only one really serious philosophical problem,” Camus says, “and that is
suicide. Deciding whether or not life is worth living is to answer the
fundamental question in philosophy. All other questions follow from that.”
(Quote from Camus link, above.) The real debate for Camus, and the one
Joss explores here, is between suicide and option 3, which I’ll describe
below.
Camus explained his reasoning in his most famous book The Myth of
Sisyphus. For those who don’t remember it, the story of Sisyphus in Greek
mythology is that he was condemned by the gods to push a large stone up a
hill. Just as he got to the top the stone would escape his grasp and roll back
to the bottom. Sisyphus would therefore have to start all over again. For
eternity.
Camus saw Sisyphus’ condition as a metaphor for that of modern man
striving to find meaning in the world: constantly engaged in pointless
striving to achieve something which has no meaning. His solution (option
3) was that embracing and accepting this fact ends the absurdity of it. By
facing the true state of mankind, people can overcome the sense of
absurdity they experience when seeking meaning that isn’t there. Once they
recognize that there are no universal absolutes, people free themselves to
create their own meaning out of life. Wikipedia phrases it like this:
“The freedom of humans is thus established in a human's natural ability and
opportunity to create his own meaning and purpose; to decide (or think) for
him- or herself. The individual becomes the most precious unit of existence,
as he or she represents a set of unique ideals which can be characterized as
an entire universe in its own right. In acknowledging the absurdity of
seeking any inherent meaning, but continuing this search regardless, one
can be happy, gradually developing his or her own meaning from the search
alone.”
With this background in mind, let’s examine the dialogue between Buffy
and Angel on the hilltop (that’s intentional, of course, in direct comparison
to Sisyphus). Angel wants to commit suicide not because of what he did as
Angelus, but because he perceives himself a failure as a person: “Angel:
Look, I'm weak. I've never been anything else. It's not the demon in me that
needs killing, Buffy. It's the man.” Buffy begs him not to, telling him that if
he ends things now, then all he’ll ever have been was a monster. Angel then
responds with a key point: “Am I a thing worth saving, huh? (shakes her)
Am I a righteous man? (shakes her) The world wants me gone!”
That last phrase, “the world wants me gone”, is a description of the
uncaring nature of the universe as it appears to someone who assumes
there’s meaning in it. If you operate under the assumption that there is
meaning in the universe, and if the universe seems hostile to you, then the
natural conclusion is that the universe “wants” you out of it. Suicide is an
obvious solution.
Buffy then tries the argument that she herself wants him to stay, but he
won’t accept that: “Buffy, please. Just this once... let me be strong.” And
this is when Buffy gives him the real answer: “Strong is fighting! It's hard,
and it's painful, and it's every day. It's what we have to do. And we can do it
together.” Quoting again from the Camus link, “What then is Camus's reply
to his question about whether or not to commit suicide? Full consciousness,
avoiding false solutions such as religion, refusing to submit, and carrying
on with vitality and intensity: these are Camus's answers.”
The fascinating thing about Amends, though, is that Angel knows she’s right
but doesn’t formally choose to accept her statement. Instead, the miracle
snow spares him the need to choose, at least at that moment. As I’ve
mentioned so often before, it’s the power of choice which defines
existentialism and absurdism, yet Angel didn’t choose. I’ll let Joss himself
explain:
“I'm an atheist but it's hard to ignore the idea of a "Christmas miracle"
here... The fact [is] the Christian mythos has a powerful fascination to me
and it bleeds into my storytelling. Redemption hope purpose Santa these all
are important to me whether I believe in an afterlife or some universal
structure or not. I certainly don't mind a strictly Christian interpretation
being placed on this ep by those who believe that -- I just hope it's not
limited to that (joss Dec 15 22:17 1998).”
Like most of us, Joss incorporates multiple concepts into his view of life.
As he mentions here, one of those concepts is redemption; he is, as we say
in Buffy fandom, a redemptionista. It’s a theme which we’ll see repeatedly
throughout the remainder of the series. Just remember this: redemption is a
process, not an event. Nobody gets redeemed by a single act or even many.
The snow, miracle or no, doesn’t mean Angel is forever off the hook. It just
means that the snow bought him more time to contemplate the meaning of
his existential crisis. We next see Angel and Buffy, no longer on the hill, but
walking along the street in contemplation. “After the rock comes tumbling
down, confirming the ultimate futility of his project, Sisyphus trudges after
it once again. This ‘is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments
when he leaves the heights…, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than
his rock.’” (Quote from Camus link.) It’s on the downward journey that
Sisyphus recognizes “the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what
he thinks of during his descent”. (Id.) I’ll explain the result of that
contemplation and put it in context next episode.
Three quick points before I move on to the bulk of this essay:
1. There are two stories being paralleled here, Angel/Buffy and
Willow/Oz. Neither guilty party actually makes amends, but both are
given the opportunity to do so by the power of love. In other cases
where amends might be necessary, Buffy does start to make amends
to Faith (and vice versa), but the one who tries the hardest is Giles.
Xander hasn’t always been Angel’s mostest best friend, but he puts
that aside in the Chanukah spirit.

2. Willow’s attempted seduction of Oz is a great scene, but why

does she believe that sex is the way back to him? I think Willow heard
two bits of conversation as suggesting that. In Lovers Walk, after Oz
gave her the PEZ witch, we get this dialogue:
“Willow: (suddenly disappointed) Oh... I don't have anything to
give you.
Oz: (smiles at her) Yeah, you do.”
I took this as referring to sex and I think Willow did too. In addition,
here in Amends Buffy told her, “I guess now it's just about showing
Oz that he comes first.” Again, the wording is ambiguous but
certainly could be read to suggest sex.
 3. Amends is a very important episode for purposes of Season 7, so
keep it in mind. I’m holding off discussing some features of the
episode for this reason (and because this post is long already).
Through Angel’s Eyes
I’m going to take two controversial positions in the remainder of this
discussion of Amends. In both cases what I say is almost certainly a
minority view among fans and may very well be unique to me.
First, as I mentioned in discussing POV in The Wish, I see Amends as a
POV episode. That is, we see the world as Angel sees it himself – feeling
guilty and a bit sorry for himself. We also see, though, what we might call
Angel’s fantasy version of events. Angel wants others – whether the
Scoobies or the Powers That Be – to notice him, to forgive him, to accept
him, and to give his life meaning and purpose. He gets all of these here.
Giles and Xander more or less accept him, Buffy begs for his life and gives
him the “comfort” of existentialist purpose, the PTB grant him miracle
snow. If nothing else, the episode allowed Angel to put aside thoughts of
suicide and begin to address his past.
Did it really happen precisely this way? That’s up to you to decide, but keep
the question in mind as we get to the other POV episodes I mentioned and
see how you answer for other characters.
Angel’s Responsibility For The Crimes Of Angelus
The second controversial position involves the merits of Angel’s moral
case. I’ve held off till now any discussion of a very important issue in the
Buffyverse: what does it mean to be a vampire? I’m referring to moral
culpability here, not genre details such as whether they breathe or not. The
key question, as we’ve learned from Angel’s story over the last 2.5 seasons,
is whether we should consider him guilty of the crimes of Angelus.
I could have brought this up earlier, in Passion maybe or certainly in
Becoming or Revelations. I could also wait till later because future episodes
bear on this issue. While raising it here is somewhat arbitrary, any other
time would suffer from the same problem unless I waited until the very end.
That’s too long to hold off discussing such an interesting issue. My excuse
for choosing Amends as the focal point is that we now have enough
evidence to make the discussion productive and the episode itself does
bring the issue to the forefront. I will, though, limit the arguments to those
which don’t rely on spoilers, so those who haven’t seen the remaining
episodes may want to hold off coming to any final conclusions until you’ve
seen them all.
I’m going to set up the debate by letting Masq frame it. Masq used to be a
philosophy professor (she has a real job now ) and she ran the ATPO site
which I mention regularly. This is from a post on June 3, 2002:
“There are two major theories for the vampire-human relationship, both of
which emerge out of the text of the shows themselves:

(1) Vampire as spiritual and physical infection, the vampire is a different

"person" from the human predecessor and
(2) Vampire as physical infection only, the vampire is the same "person" as
the human predecessor, minus conscience
-----//-----

(1) The first theory comes from bits of dialogue that have been scattered
through BtVS … over the years. We've seen these quoted many times
before. Just off the top of my head, I can think of these instances (there
might be more).

Giles in The Harvest: "The books tell the last demon to leave this reality fed
off a human, mixed their blood. He was a human form possessed, infected
by the demon's soul.

Giles to Xander in The Harvest: "Jesse is dead! You have to remember that
when you see him, you're not looking at your friend. You're looking at the
thing that killed him."

Buffy in Lie to Me: "Well, I've got a news flash for you, braintrust: that's
not how it works. You die, and a demon sets up shop in your old house, and
it walks, and it talks, and it remembers your life, but it's not you."

This view depicts the vampire demon as an infection of body and most
especially of spirit--a replacement for the outgoing human soul. It states
outright that that vampire is not the same "person" as the human
predecessor, and in doing so it implies that the soul that has been lost is
something more than mere conscience, it is a unique spiritual aspect of the
human person, their self, and that all that is left behind of the person we
knew is a body, memories imprints in the brain, and habits of walking and
talking. The person we knew is gone, banished to the ether. All else is
appearances, 'cause someone else is driving the machine.

(2) The second theory appears not in dialogue (at least not directly), but in
ME's writing in general, most especially the behavior of the characters
themselves.

Basically, this theory posits that the "vampire" is not a spiritual infection,
but a physical one only. The original demon who bit a human (see Giles
quote above) gave them animal-aspects of the demon such as blood lust and
violent tendencies. It altered their physiology to make them stronger and
give them vamp-face when they feed. The vampire is a brute animal;
everything else about the vampire is supplied by the human: intelligence,
personality, love, family issues. The only thing missing from human
predecessor is the conscience.

Theory #2 has its support in the long history of vampires resembling and
amplifying the traits their human hosts, from Jesse's inept stalker tendencies
blooming full-grown in VampJesse to ….”

In considering Masq’s two options, we have to start by recognizing that

Angel certainly feels that he is guilty. In that way, he’s on the same side as
Xander. Buffy, however, takes the opposite view. Indeed, it may very well
be essential that she do so: if she really believed that Angel – not Angelus
but Angel – murdered Jenny and tortured Giles, even her formidable power
of forgiveness would be challenged. Yet the moment Buffy saw Willow’s
spell take effect in Becoming 2 she recognized that something essential had
restored Angel and she could tell him she loved him.
Any explanation we give therefore has to account for the fact that (a) Angel
perceives himself as guilty; but (b) Buffy, the hero, does not. I do have a
way to account for these facts, and it’s probably best if I disclose that up
front. I’m going to do that by copying a dialogue I (Sophist) had with
Rahael (of ATPO) on her livejournal page. As you’ll see, Rah disagreed
with me and I’m sure others will too. I’ll get to some of the disagreements
afterwards (spoilers removed):
“Recently, Sophist and I have been having a discussion concerning two
quite differing ways of viewing souls & personalities in BtVS …on my
livejournal. We thought the Board [ATPO] might like to read/comment on
the exchange, so here it is. It was quite lengthy, so I might split it up into
parts.

It's part of a longer thread, and so it might start a little abruptly, but bear
with us!

Sophist
it is argued that when Vampires kill people, it can't be classified as 'murder'.

I haven't seen many people make this argument [Note today: I probably was
wrong about this]. A much more common argument, and a better one (hey,
it's my own), is that Angel is not responsible for the killings of Angelus….
It's the only way I personally can justify Buffy's behavior in S3….

Rahael
We have to segment all kinds of actions that require thought & emotion in
order to make the show's metaphysics work, as far as vampires are
concerned - we are forced to jump through hoops.

Oh, and I must just mention another complicating factor. … If he acts as if

he should receive redress for ill treatment, or act as if it still matters to him,
then, doesn't that complicate the whole thing where he's a completely
different person?

Sophist
… I don't think it's surprising that the souled vamp would feel responsibility
for "his" previous actions. All the memories and feelings are there;
psychologically, there appears to be only one "him". That is how I
understand the torment of the gypsy curse to affect Angel -- all the more
poignant because it's not strictly rational. I don't think it complicates the
moral issue, I think it deepens the psychological one.

Rahael
…

I agree it deepens the psychological moment. I think the show hangs around
this paradox. Sometimes it works really well, this faultline. Sometimes, it
breaks the suspension of belief.

Because if you have such psychological realism, it renders the soul/no soul
distinction as increasingly troubled.

There was an excellent Babylon 5 ep called "Passing through Gethsamene"

where a murderer had his mind wiped clean, and programmed to have
positive impulses towards society. He became a monk, a very holy man.
When his memories came back, it was induced by the angry relatives of his
victims. They then crucified him.

That ep was all about vengeance and forgiveness. The person who led the
crucifixion subsequently had his mind wiped, and became a monk, taking
the place of the man he crucified. He was offered the same chance of
forgiveness and redemption.

At no point were the crimes excused, despite the fact that the 'mindwiped'
men felt like a totally different person. Different personalities, no
memories.

Forgiveness was offered, and it was a very strong theme in the ep, but I felt
in no way that the crime was diminished. …

Sophist
…

There was an excellent Babylon 5 ep called "Passing through Gethsamene"

where a murderer had his mind wiped clean, and programmed to have
positive impulses towards society. He became a monk, a very holy man.
When his memories came back, it was induced by the angry relatives of his
victims. They then crucified him.

This is, in some ways, the mirror image of the situation in BtVS. Based on
your description, in B5 the person felt different but was the same. In BtVS,
the person (Angel…) felt the same but was different (at least in my view of
it).

I've never seen the B5 episode, but from your description I don't believe it
has the psychological or moral complexity of BtVS. I don't personally
believe that memories alone are important enough for us to treat the same
person as though we had also forgotten the past. If, for example, Josef
Mengele showed up today claiming amnesia, I would have no trouble trying
him for war crimes. And I would hardly watch a show in which the heroine
falls in love with him.

In contrast, the soul canon on BtVS, at least in my interpretation, separates

the person (in his "essence", not physically) and the deed while preserving
the memories. That solves the moral dilemma, in no way diminishes the
previous crimes, and still allows for a very complex exploration of
psychology, both for the (former) killer and for his victims. YMMV….
Sophist
I think I can justify Buffy's behavior in S3 under my view of the show's
metaphysics, but I can't do it under any other. If I believed Angel to be the
same "essence" as Angelus, I'd have been with Xander in Revelations (and
we know that could never happen!). I'd also have to have even more
problems with Amends, since it would then appear to let Angelus off the
hook not only with Buffy but with Giles and everyone else. My view avoids
this problem.
Rahael
hahaha re Xander.

Well there might also be this: that both meanings are possible, and that the
credibility of one or the other rises and falls depending on the ep, the theme,
the arc.
Sophist
I quite agree. However, let me reprise the B/A arc in your terms by
removing the metaphor:

Buffy meets a man who seems attractive and mysterious. She begins to
develop feelings for him. After shared experiences which awaken in her a
physical desire for him, she learns that he is living incognito but was
previously a concentration camp guard who tortured and murdered a large
number of innocent people. (I'm not treading on Godwin's Law here; the
portrayal of vampires leaves us with only a few plausible real life
examples.)

He admits to her that this is the case (note that he did not tell her this before
she learned it on her own), but says that he has reformed his life and no
longer behaves as he did in the past. Rather than turn him over to the
authorities, she kisses him and tells him she nevertheless can't continue to
see him. She avoids reading books which are available to her which
describe his earlier crimes.

Circumstances, however, continue to throw them together. He proves to be

loyal and trustworthy. Her feelings, perhaps never entirely subdued, re-
awaken and she falls in love. They sleep together. After she does so, he
goes through a psychotic episode in which he reverts to the torture and
murder of innocents, including people she knows. Forced now to act, she is
able to have him committed to a mental hospital for treatment of his
psychotic episode.

Under circumstances which are unclear, he leaves the mental hospital and
returns to her, claiming again to be cured. He again performs actions which
indicate he is trustworthy.

Stopping the narrative at this point, let us ask some questions.

1. Is it plausible that a girl in such a case would not think some punishment
was in order for the man?
2. Is it plausible that she would continue to express love and concern for
him?

Now, I think I have given an entirely neutral and impartial (;)) summary of
S2-3 which follows your metaphor but puts it in real life terms. I can't make
it plausible. I think the soul must mean something more essential in order
for Buffy's behavior to be justifiable.”

To summarize, I opt for Masq’s option #1, though incorporating some

elements of her #2, because I see the soul in BtVS as providing an
“essence” to a person. Angel with the soul is essentially different than
without it, i.e., when he’s Angelus. When I say “essentially different”, I’m
limiting that difference to the soul. It’s obvious that the demon retains basic
personality traits of the departed human. Thus, when Buffy tells Willow in
Passion that Angel’s “not the same guy”, Willow can respond that he is in
one sense because “all he ever thinks of is you”. The specific obsessions
and character flaws remain those set by the dead victim. As writer David
Fury put it in a Zap2it interview on February 9, 2001, “We feel like there's a
ghost of the person you once were inside them -- a philosophical ghost, not
an actual spirit. It is, in fact, a demon, but the demon is infused with some
of the characteristics of the people that they possess.”
It’s the human substrate which guides the crimes committed. That is what
causes the demon to pick this victim over that one, to artistically torture and
murder rather than to face a mob with just fists and fangs. But though the
specific characteristics of the vampire’s actions can be traced to the human,
the fact of the act itself cannot. It wasn’t Angel’s human self which
murdered his family (Angel), it was the vampire Angelus. Angel didn’t
torture Drusilla and drive her insane, Angelus did. The essence of Angel,
the soul which restrained his evil desires, wasn’t there.
In my view Angel is not responsible for the crimes of Angelus. However,
Angel feels responsible because he shares the same body and memories as
Angelus, and because Angelus exploited precisely those weaknesses that
Angel knows he has. The body, including the brain, contains the memories
and emotions. The soul is immersed in the body and therefore is privy to
those memories and emotions, whether it was present to create them or not.
Angel remembers the crimes of Angelus as his own and the emotional
impact of Angelus’ crimes would affect Angel; that’s what the gypsy curse
was all about: “You have no idea what it’s like to have done the things I’ve
done and to care.” (Angel)
In comments, State of Siege made an excellent point about Angel’s feeling
of responsibility: “One of the things I love about Amends is that it shows
that while the ensouled vampire might feel responsibility for—and indeed
deeply regret—his past crimes, he can still feel their pleasures... I would
argue that what Angel flees, what tortures him the most during the episode
is not the reminder of his crimes—he lives with them daily, hence the
trademark brooding—but the revivification of their pleasures through the
magicks of the Bringers (not that he does not otherwise remember them, but
that the spells make them inescapably vivid). That he did them he knows—
but that he enjoyed them and, on some level, continues to enjoy them, the
demon not being dead, only kept in check—that is for him the thing
insupportable.”
Ok, that’s where I’m coming from on this, but remember from my post on
Revelations that I also believe Buffy takes this same position. I’ll get into
some arguments pro and con below, but I need to be very upfront about one
important point first. My theory that the soul provides an “essence” directly
contradicts the fundamental premise of existentialism. Existentialism
was designed to be the exact opposite of the philosophy of “essentialism”,
which argues for an “essence” which makes us human from the beginning.
Existentialists deny the existence of any such “essence”. For them, we exist
first and create our own “essential self” by the choices we make in the life
we live. The phrase used to express this is “existence precedes essence”.
After all the emphasis I’ve put on Joss and existentialism in these essays,
I’m now in the position of saying that Joss created a “soul canon” which
undercuts his own philosophy at its most fundamental point. And that his
hero is the biggest proponent of this essentialist doctrine.
Well, yeah. Sartre and Camus were atheists; they rejected the very concept
of “soul”. Once Joss reintroduced the soul into the show, it became
impossible to follow existentialism on every single point. I want to
emphasize that this is not a criticism of Joss. For all I know, Joss doesn’t
consider himself an existentialist on this particular point. The show
Dollhouse might suggest that he doesn’t, though I don’t want to get too far
into the brambles of philosophical debate about a different show (I’m in too
far on this one).
Even if he does take that view in his personal life, he isn’t Jean Paul Sartre
or Albert Camus, who were philosophers writing novels in order to
communicate an intellectually rigorous philosophical system. Joss is a
storyteller who has been influenced by philosophy. He makes use of the
philosophy, but it doesn’t bind him. If the story requires it, I expect the
philosophy to yield (just as the plot sometimes does in his works). And
there’s no denying that he told a wonderful story indeed in S2. The fact that
Joss is a storyteller means that he contains multitudes within him. If the
immediately preceding episode can feature a leap of faith which absurdist
philosophy rejects, and if an atheist can write a Christmas miracle, an
existentialist can write an essentialist story.
Philosophy aside, it’s time to consider the evidence from within the show
and the arguments on either side. I’ll begin with what the text gives us.
Following are the relevant passages from the episodes we’ve seen thus far
so you can see them all in one place:
“Xander: So vampires are demons?

Giles: The books tell the last demon to leave this reality fed off a human,
mixed their blood. He was a human form possessed, infected by the
demon's soul.” The Harvest.
“Xander: We've gotta get in there before Jesse does something stupider than
usual.

Giles: You listen to me! Jesse is dead! You have to remember that when you
see him, you're not looking at your friend. You're looking at the thing that
killed him.” The Harvest.
Buffy: (to Giles) Can a vampire ever be a good person? Couldn't it happen?
Giles: A vampire isn't a person at all. (clears his throat) It may have the
movements, the, the memories, even the personality of the person that it
took over, but i-it's still a demon at the core, there is no halfway.” Angel.
“Angel: When you become a vampire the demon takes your body, but it
doesn't get your soul. That's gone! No conscience, no remorse... It's an easy
way to live. You have no idea what it's like to have done the things I've
done... and to care. I haven't fed on a living human being since that day.
Buffy: So you started with my mom?
Angel: I didn't bite her.
Buffy: Then why didn't you say something?
Angel: But I wanted to. I can walk like a man, but I'm not one.” Angel.
“Ford: …I will become immortal.
Buffy: Well, I've got a news flash for you, braintrust: that's not how it
works. You die, and a demon sets up shop in your old house, and it walks,
and it talks, and it remembers your life, but it's not you.” Lie to Me.
“Buffy: Angel, there must be some part of you inside that still remembers
who you are.
Angelus: Dream on, schoolgirl.
Xander takes the cross from Jenny and starts toward Angelus.
Angelus: Your boyfriend is dead. You're all gonna join him.” Innocence.
“Buffy: Do you remember my ex-boyfriend, the vampire? I slept with him,
he lost his soul, now my boyfriend's gone forever, and the demon that wears
his face is killing my friends.” IOHEFY.
I believe I’ve now quoted all the relevant passages from the series to date,
and they all say exactly the same thing: the vampire is no longer the person
s/he once was. The vampire may be affected by the personality of the dead
victim, but there’s something missing which differentiates the two.
In the context of the show, this must be true. If a vampire were “the same”
as the person s/he once was, then having Buffy automatically slay every
vampire would be problematic, to say the least. It would be as if she were to
slay Oz, something both she and Giles agree would be wrong. If it weren’t
true, then Buffy would love Angelus just as she does Angel. I take it that no
one would argue for that.
That’s one side of the coin, of course. The other side is whether the souled
vampire is “the same” as the vampire. Obviously Buffy doesn’t think so,
otherwise she’d have slain Angel herself as Xander told her to do in Angel,
and she wouldn’t have phrased it the way she did in the passage from
IOHEFY which I quoted.
The issue goes beyond Buffy’s view, though. It’s absolutely critical to the
storyline since the episode Angel that Angel be seen as in a separate
category. If Angel were exactly identical to Angelus, then Buffy should slay
him, not fall in love with him, and the whole storyline would fall apart. If
Angel is not exactly identical to Angelus, then we have to decide where the
difference lies. He’s not human; on that we can agree. But he’s not vampire
either.
Given these two facts, it seems to me that the only available conclusion is
that the souled vampire has an essential difference from all other vampires.
The obvious difference is the soul, which Joss has described as functioning
like a conscience. That is, the presence of the human soul enables someone
to distinguish right from wrong. Without it, and having a demon soul
instead, the vampire can’t make that distinction. To me, this means that the
souled vampire can’t be held morally responsible for the acts of the
unsouled creature he was before his soul was restored – the feature which
makes moral choice possible was missing.
The argument on the other side, as I understand it, relies on two key points.
One is the storyline, as Masq alluded to in her description of the two sides.
Angel wants to do something to be redeemed; that was why he followed
Whistler in Becoming. If he doesn’t actually need redemption, then this
story isn’t all that compelling. My explanation – that the need is
psychological rather than moral – strikes some people as detracting from
the power of a redemptionist story.
The other key point is that, as I’ve agreed, the demon which takes over
builds on characteristics which were already present in the individual. Since
those characteristics were already present in the human, the souled vampire
will see that his former human self bears responsibility for the evil done in
pursuit of those ends. I’ll let shadowkat explain this in more detail (edited
to remove spoilers):
“Also, we're talking metaphor here, so I don't see why the physical should
equate so strictly. Vampires are a metaphor for unrestrained hunger, desire,
id. While the id does have a role in terms of creating identity, and is
certainly necessary at a certain level for survival, when not balanced by
other parts of one's identity, problems result -mainly immaturity. That is
what the vampires represent.
Id gives the motivation to live - the desire to eat, drink, take pleasure etc.
Those things aren't intrinsically bad, they just are. It's when those desires
are frustrated in some way, or we refuse to grow out of that stage that id
becomes a problem. If vampires could feed without hurting humans, would
they be evil and would there be a need for a slayer? …

In terms of the growth of identity, accomodating one's darker impulses,

containing them without harming others is an important part of learning
who one is. To be unconscious of our impulses or deny they are a problem,
as a vampire usually does, stymies the process of self-knowledge. …Choice
is important and operative here. Choice means becoming conscious, not
being a victim of one obsessions and compulsions. He got back his 'moral
compass' in Joss' terms, but that does not mean he lost the identity of the
last 100+ years ... I don't see why his soul would negate the identity he
created as a vampire. … Soul does not equal identity.

I believe it is possible to change and transform oneself. One can become the
person one wishes to be by changing what one does every day to ensure that
it conforms to that person. Living and being (to me) are conscious decisions
-one's desired identity is won and lost every day with a myriad of actions.
Part of the reason that I find BtVS so compelling is because it shows us
every episode that it is a struggle and that it is possible.”
If you find the metaphor compelling in the way she explains, the identity of
the two creatures makes for a gripping storyline.
Since I let Masq set up the problem, I’ll let her have the last word (here
SPOILER WARNING for link; spoilers removed from quote below):
“Angel's dilemma is both compelling and perplexing. In one respect, his
situation is not so hard to understand. He has a conscience and human
emotions, but a demon physiology drives him, and he must fight it. In
another respect, Angel's situation raises confounding questions about guilt
and responsibility. The show has been fairly clear that upon siring, Angel's
human soul was banished to the Ether. Nevertheless, in Lie to Me, Angel
"confesses" to Buffy the truth about "his" siring of Drusilla. Does this mean
he thinks the human soul is responsible for this horrible act? But how could
that be so, since the human soul wasn't even present at the time? In Amends,
Angel distanced himself from the acts of the demon when he told the First
Evil that "It wasn't me."
“And there lies the rub: "It wasn't me" "It was me"--who is the "me" doing
the talking? The "Angel" we know is both the demon who did the bad deeds
and the human soul that didn't. So what is their relationship to each other?
Are we talking about
1. two consciousnesses in one body taking turns being in control,
like some sort of multiple-personality guy?, or
2. a single, combined consciousness at once both demon and
human? or
3. a split consciousness, two consciousness both aware
simultaneously, just not of each other, or
4. one consciousness--the human's--spurred on by the mindless
drives of a vampire physiology?
“Angel has "memories" of his mortal life (as Liam of Galway), of Angelus'
deeds, and of his days as a souled vampire. This would seem to indicate the
second of these choices. But it's not quite that simple. Option number four
is also close to the truth, and fits well with Joss' "drug addict" analogy for
Angel's condition:
“Whedon said that the character of Angel … was intended as a metaphor
for an alcoholic in recovery. Angel, like many recovering addicts, is making
amends for what he did "under the influence" (Hercules, Ain’t It Cool
News, March 4, 2001).
“I always thought of Angel's "soul" as the conscience and goodness of a
person or put another way his "control" over doing the evil within all of us,
so to speak. The "demon" that comes with being a vampire is what he is
controlling and denying the light of day (pardon the pun). So, Angel is
always there, regardless of the "demon" aspect pushing towards the
commitment of horrible things (i.e. killing Ms. Calendar) ...but when he
gets his soul back, he realizes how horrible the things he did are and thus
feels all the guilt. I don't think the soul ever goes away, it just gets locked
up inside, out of a controlling position (W. R. Terrell 4:17pm Oct 19, 1999).
“The "soul" that left Liam of Galway's body upon death/vamping (and
Angel when the Gypsy curse was reversed) was just one part of his
personality--namely, his conscience. Everything else that made up the
human Liam's personality remained behind. Which means that "Angelus" is
merely Liam of Galway with a demon physiology and without a conscience
(and the same would be true for all other vampires). This is supported by
the fact that Angelus was sadistic and sociopathic, in other words, he lacked
empathy.
“As for memories being what's left of the person controlled by the demon,
aren't memories what make up who we are? Someone i forget who said that
we are the sum of our memories. ...(16:53:24 ) I think [Angel's memories]
had an effect on the "person" Angelus was. ...The person Angel was had,
through the parts left when the demon took over the first time, an influence
on how the demon acted. The "person" Angel was when he lost his soul in
Surprise had an influence on the demon Angelus and his acts (Lady
Bathory, Dec 20 16:14 1998).
“If this is the proper view of the Buffyverse soul, then the received story
about vampires being "a human body possessed by a demon 'soul'" in The
Harvest would have to be dismissed as Watcher mythology, and everything
we've learned about vampires would have to be explained according to such
a view, …. This theory does have the merit of being a simpler, more elegant
understanding of complex metaphysical situations like Liam-Angelus-
Angel….”
So, the official philosopher disagrees with me too.
If you take my view, the issues of redemption and forgiveness simply don’t
arise. If you disagree with me, though, they do. In that case the show is
raising important questions about the nature of redemption. Among those
questions are: (1) Can atonement ever be made for crimes which are so
horrifying and numerous? (2) What form would that atonement take? After
all, nothing can restore Angelus’ dead victims. Does saving others count?
Another way to look at the problem is from the point of view of
forgiveness. We might see forgiveness in the Christian tradition in which
Jesus forgives all our sins when we declare moral bankruptcy. By that I
mean that we declare bankruptcy, discharge our debts, and start “over”. The
show may very well be making a statement about the power of forgiveness,
since Buffy has and will demonstrate remarkable forgiveness over the
years. I’ll argue that religious comparisons in her case are fully justified (at
the very least as part of the Hero’s Journey), and of course forgiveness is a
big part of that in the Western tradition.
Then there’s the question of the point in time at which forgiveness is
offered. In the Christian tradition, that would be “always”. At any point in
time an acknowledged sinner can come to grace. The issue of atonement
complicates that somewhat, because it suggests that atonement is a
necessary pre-condition for forgiveness. In Christianity that’s not the case,
but it might be on BtVS.
Going one step further on the forgiveness theme, we see that Buffy is not
the only one to forgive Angel, as we might expect if religious imagery were
the only factor. Willow is also quick to forgive Angel, Xander not really,
and Giles is doubtful but ambiguous. Perhaps we can explain Willow in
metaphorical terms: she’s Buffy’s spirit and it is, after all, the spiritual
aspect of forgiveness which is crucial in the Trinitarian tradition.
It’s also possible there’s a point being made here about gender and
forgiveness (h/t Cait), which I’d urge you to consider as we go forward. If
Buffy and Willow go one way and Xander the other, does this mean women
take a different view than men? Or is this simply specific to their
characters? There will be more evidence to come on this, so hold the issue
open for now and think about what the consequences might be if there were
a gender difference.
Now let me throw out a suggestion that will probably make everyone
unhappy. As I noted above, I see Amends as a POV episode. Suppose we
extend that idea and treat the whole soul canon not as an objective fact, but
as something dependent on POV. In this interpretation, Xander sees Angel
and Angelus as one person; so does Angel. Buffy sees them as two, and
probably Willow does also. Giles is simply pragmatic. Each of them is right
for himself/herself. The whole issue is an attitude, not a fact.
In the end, I don’t think there’s a way to answer these questions definitively,
whether within the show or outside it. I hope I’ve laid out both sides enough
for everyone to understand that BtVS does raise these issues and to judge for
him/herself how they should be resolved. I’m sure the tinybit of extra space
given to my own argument doesn’t affect that at all.
Trivia notes: (1) There’s no explanation ever given on BtVS for why Angel
returned or what caused the snow. Feel free to speculate. (2) “The Lord is
my Shepherd…” (Daniel’s prayer when Angelus corners him) is Psalms 23.
(3) Oz asks Willow “You ever have that dream where you're in a play, and
it's the middle of the play and you really don't know your lines, and you
kinda don't know the plot?” That was Willow’s nightmare in Nightmares.
(4) The Sun is a British tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch. (5) “He’s a
Rebel” (and he’ll never be any good…) was a song by the Crystals. Giles
used the phrase to describe the Bringers. (6) The phrase “dead by sunrise”
has two possible meanings: dead by the time the sun rises; or dead because
the sun rose. That’s how Buffy could find Angel on the hilltop. (7) Joss
obviously had Christmas on the brain this season, since The Wish seems
based on It’s A Wonderful Life and Amends rather loosely on A Christmas
Carol.
 Gingerbread
What appears to be the principal message of Gingerbread – tolerance versus
tyranny – comes across as lacking in subtlety. There are, I think, two more
significant issues raised in the episode which get lost because of that heavy-
handed treatment.
First, there’s a point being made about parents who get too involved in their
children’s activities, to the point where they spoil it. Think of the
stereotypes of Little League parents or those of child actors (a comparison
that probably had real resonance to cast and crew). Joyce begins the episode
by tagging along while Buffy slays, though she has no real business being
there. She then disrupts Buffy’s ability to do her job by inducing hysteria in
the rest of Sunnydale.
Second, Joyce raises an issue for which Buffy doesn’t really have an answer
(yet):
“Joyce: I mean, you patrol, you slay... Evil pops up, you undo it. A-a-and
that's great! But is Sunnydale getting any better? Are they running out of
vampires?
Buffy: I don't think that you run out of...
Joyce: It's not your fault. You don't have a plan. You just react to things. I-
i-it's bound to be kind of fruitless.”
Joyce’s conclusion sets up the remainder of the episode in her attempt to do
better than Buffy: the formation of MOO, the raid on the school, the attacks
on those who are different, and the near murder of Buffy, Willow, and Amy.
As I said in my post on Amends, I believe that Gingerbread fits in with the
absurdist themes Joss was developing at this point in the season, so let me
explain the connection between those and Joyce’s actions here.
At the end of The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus introduced the idea of what he
called “rebellion”. What he meant by that was an individual’s method of
opposing the injustice we see in the absurd world. He elaborated on this
idea in his book The Rebel: “The Rebel begins with the kind of revolt that
rejects oppression and slavery, and protests against the world's injustice.”
(All quotes from the link.) I think we get a verbal clue to this theme in
Willow’s declaration: “I’m a rebel. I’m having a rebellion.” I think there are
other clues as well, but those involve spoilers.
What’s interesting about The Rebel, and what makes me see a connection
between it and Gingerbread, is that Camus actually spends most of the
book discussing the wrong way to rebel. There was a good historical reason
for this emphasis. In 1951, when the book was published, the issue of
Communism and revolution was a major political dispute. Camus hated the
idea of revolution (and Communists demanded revolution), so he wanted to
distinguish it from rebellion, which he considered the proper course for
someone who recognized the absurdity of the world:
“In The Rebel Camus takes the further step [that is, beyond The Myth of
Sisyphus], which occupies most of the book, of developing his notion of
metaphysical and historical rebellion in opposition to the concept of
revolution. Applying his philosophical themes directly to politics in the
years immediately after the Liberation of France in 1944, Camus had
already concluded that the Marxists, and especially Communists, were
guilty of evading life's absurdity by aiming at a wholesale transformation of
society, which must necessarily be violent.” My emphasis.
The difference for Camus was not that rebellion is individual and revolution
involves many. It need not be that way. The difference, rather, is that
rebellion accepts the absurdity of the world – which, per Camus, is inherent
and cannot be changed – while revolution insists that absurdity can be
overcome. There is an irresistible human impulse: “faced with absurdity
and injustice, humans refuse to accept their existence and instead seek to
remake the world.” That effort to remake the world means that revolution
functions like religion in Camus’ eyes. It’s an evasion of the actual state of
the world.
“Revolution emerges when revolt seeks to ignore the limits built into
human life. By an “inevitable logic of nihilism” Communism climaxes the
modern trend to deify man and to transform and unify the world. Today's
revolutions yield to the blind impulse, originally described in The Myth of
Sisyphus, “to demand order in the midst of chaos, and unity in the very
heart of the ephemeral”. As does the rebel who becomes a revolutionary
who kills and then justifies murder as legitimate.”
Now let’s take a close look at Joyce’s reaction to the injustice she
experiences (or thinks she does) when she discovers the bodies of the
children. In the passage I quoted above, Joyce insists that Buffy can’t solve
the problems through her individual efforts. Joyce proceeds to organize the
adults of Sunnydale to remake the world, which is precisely the goal Camus
rejected. Joyce and Sheila “demand order in the midst of chaos and unity in
the heart of the ephemeral.” They become willing to justify murder as
legitimate. In short, they become revolutionaries.
We can contrast Joyce with Buffy and Angel. When Buffy mentions her
mother’s criticism to Angel, he gives her back an elaboration on the answer
she gave him in Amends, and their dialogue demonstrates that they both
understand and accept the absurdity of the world:
“Buffy: My mom... said some things to me about being the Slayer. That it's
fruitless. (shakes her head) No fruit for Buffy. [Buffy’s striving is pointless]
Angel: She's wrong.
Buffy: Is she? Is Sunnydale any better than when I first came here? Okay,
so I battle evil. But I don't really win. The bad keeps coming back and
getting stronger. …[I keep having to roll that damn rock back up the hill]
Angel: Buffy, you know, I'm still figuring things out. There's a lot I don't
understand. But I do know it's important to keep fighting. I learned that
from you. [She told him that on the hilltop]
Buffy: But we never... [get the rock to the top of the damn hill]
Angel: We never win.
Buffy: Not completely. [Because that would remake the world into
something it’s not]
Angel: We never will. That's not why we fight [roll the rock up the hill].
We do it 'cause there's things worth fighting for.”
This conversation completes the journey which began in Lovers Walk with
Angel reading La Nausee. He read there of the meaningless nature of the
world, the kind of world we saw in The Wish. This realization led Angel to
an existential crisis. The ending of The Wish explored one way out of the
crisis, but it’s not a way that’s really available to Angel, him being a demon
and all. In the throes of that crisis he contemplated suicide on the hilltop in
Amends, where Buffy gave him the key to the existentialist answer and the
miracle snow granted him the opportunity to walk down the hill, like
Sisyphus, during which journey he could recognize that Buffy’s answer was
right. Angel has now internalized, if I may coin a phrase, that if nothing we
do matters, then the only thing that matters is what we do. Sisyphus and his
rock.
Gingerbread makes certain that we know that Buffy knows it too. Unlike
her mother, she accepts the absurdity of the world, which means that Buffy
can still solve the problem her mother posed. Joyce tried a revolutionary
response, but this not only failed, it was disastrously counterproductive and
ended only when the monstrous nature of it was revealed (hey, look: a
metaphor!). There is a different solution to the evils which plague mankind,
but it’s one we won’t get until Buffy adopts it in Graduation Day 2. If you
have a sneaking suspicion that I believe Camus is involved in that solution,
there’s a clue in the speech Joyce gave after the Mayor.
Fairy tales are real. That’s not just absurd, it’s horrifying. Makes you
wonder what, say, Red Riding Hood might look like in real life.
Trivia notes: (1) Snyder’s “I love the smell of desperate librarian in the
morning” plays off the famous line from Apocalypse Now, “I love the smell
of napalm in the morning”. (2) Giles referred to the cops taking his books as
“Marauders”. This may be a reference to the villains of the X-Men comics.
(3) Jack traded in his cow for some magic beans in Jack and the Beanstalk.
(4) Cordelia asked Giles how many times he’s been knocked out. By my
count it’s now up to 10: Witch, Never Kill A Boy On The First Date, The
Pack, Prophecy Girl, When She Was Bad, Passion, Becoming 1,
Homecoming, Revelations, and Gingerbread. He was also shot with the
tranquilizer gun in Beauty and the Beasts. (5) Hecate is a goddess
associated with many things, among them witchcraft. (6) Diana was the
goddess of, among other things, wild animals. Both goddesses were also
invoked in Bewitched, Bothered & Bewildered.
 Helpless
Writer David Fury says in his DVD commentary that Buffy’s red coat in
Helpless was a deliberate reference to Red Riding Hood. Kralik reinforced
the reference at several points: “Why did you come to the dark of the
woods?”; “To bring all these sweets to grandmother's house?”; and “If you
stray from the path you will lose your way”. So, in line with the theme that
fairy tales are real, let’s see what Wikipedia tells us about the original
version of Red Riding Hood:
“The antagonist is not always a wolf, but sometimes an ogre or a ‘bzou’
(werewolf), making these tales relevant to the werewolf-trials (similar to
witch trials) of the time…. The wolf usually leaves the grandmother’s blood
and meat for the girl to eat, who then unwittingly cannibalizes her own
grandmother…. In [other versions] she escapes with no help from any male
or older female figure, instead using her own cunning.”
And what was Kralik’s plan? He told Joyce: “I won't kill her; I'll just make
her like me. Different. She'll go to sleep, and when she wakes up, your face
will be the first thing she eats.” But, of course, Buffy escaped using her own
cunning (a word Quentin Travers actually used to describe the virtues a
Slayer needs).
Helpless shows us Buffy deprived of her Slayer power, though she turns out
not to be helpless at all. In my reading, Buffy’s reconciliation with Cordelia
in Homecoming was necessary for this episode. When Cordelia stared down
Lyle Gorch, that was telling us that Buffy had non-Slayer attributes she
could use to face challenges as a person; she’s not limited to her Slayer
side. Whatever you think of the Cruciamentum (see below), Buffy
experienced the world the way ordinary people – people like Willow and
Xander – do. That was a necessary step on her journey to adulthood, even if
it wasn’t intended that way by the Watcher’s Council.
The big revelation in the episode, though, is the nature of the Watcher’s
Council (gleefully abbreviated in fandom as the “WC”). We’ve heard about
it for some time, but never seen any representative except Giles and (the
presumably renegade) Mrs. Post. What we saw in Helpless was not
promising, so let’s consider the Council’s policy.
I think the best case that can be made for the Watcher’s Council is along the
same lines as Col. Graff made in Ender’s Game. If you haven’t read the
book, spoilers for it follow.
Briefly, Ender is a child prodigy who is taken by military commanders in
order to train him to become a commander himself. In order to make him
ruthless, they isolate him from his fellow students, who torment him
repeatedly. This results in Ender using his undoubted talents to find ever
more creative ways to get back at the other students by winning the games
the commanders set for him. Unbeknownst to Ender, at some point the
games become actual combat situations in which his decisions are
translated into commands for the Earth star fleet. He eventually ends the
war by a ruthless and totally destructive move, something he never would
have done but for the way he’d been treated.
The book is somewhat ambiguous about the way Ender was treated. The
conclusion suggests real regret on his part, but Col. Graff excuses or
palliates the harm done to Ender personally as necessary in the service of a
greater good. The ending of Helpless, in contrast, left us with little
sympathy for Quentin Travers or the Watcher’s Council.
So the question is, can the “military necessity” excuse justify the
Cruciamentum? Or is it, as Giles says, nothing but an “archaic exercise in
cruelty”? One could argue that the test is much less cruel than we’re shown
precisely because a Slayer is likely to have gained enough combat
experience to be able to pass it without as much risk as it may seem.
Personally, I don’t find this very persuasive because Slayers will have
gained their experience in exercising Slayer powers, not acting as ordinary
teenage girls; it’s not like Cordy and Willow are capable of walking out of
Thunderdome after a bout with an insane vampire.
That said, a Slayer who did survive – and didn’t realize how she’d been
betrayed and manipulated by her Watcher – probably would gain
confidence from the knowledge that she defeated a vampire “on her own”.
That, of course, implies the “usual” case in which the vampire doesn’t
escape and endanger third parties. Quentin’s behavior was inexcusable even
if the Cruciamentum itself can be justified, because he was indifferent to the
harm to Joyce and his own employees.
Assuming that military training does serve a purpose, however
instrumentalist towards a human being, I find it hard to see why this
particular exercise would be applicable to someone who’s already been a
Slayer for (in Buffy’s case) nearly 3 years. A Slayer would surely have
picked up the skills necessary to survive during that time; if not, she
wouldn’t have survived (a la Kendra). Thus, the test itself seems
unnecessary for training purposes.
What it is useful for, though, is controlling the Slayer. The WC structure is
set up to isolate the Watchers (or at least the Council) from any real risk.
The Slayer is the one actually fighting evil, as Giles pointed out. The
Cruciamentum seems well-designed to eliminate a Slayer who gets too
independent – since another will be called, the WC doesn’t need any
particular Slayer. It can simply assert its authority over the newly Chosen
One. She may very well be younger and will certainly be less confident of
her own abilities, thus more willing to defer to the Council’s authority. The
whole test seems designed to perpetuate the Council rather than to make the
Slayer “better” in any meaningful way.
The test also seems to serve a disciplinary function for the Watcher in the
field, as we saw at the end. The Council asserts its authority over them as an
additional method of control. Giles clearly recognized the problem with the
process, so we need to understand why he would agree to participate and to
betray Buffy as he did. Part of it was surely the sense of duty he had as a
subordinate to the WC, which seems to be its goal. We all tend to do as
we’re told by our bosses. This would be all the more true of Giles, since his
father and grandmother were both Watchers (NKABOTFD) and he was
raised from childhood to become one. The fact that he felt somewhat
ignored by the Council (Revelations) may have made him more anxious to
prove to them what a good job he’s done with Buffy by having her survive
the test. Part of it, though, may stem from lingering subconscious
resentment at the way Buffy withheld Angel’s return from him. That’s not
very noble, but it may be a real factor.
Buffy’s reaction to her loss of power was also interesting. The injections
made her truly “just a girl” and she didn’t like it. Her commitment to being
the Slayer is complete; she’s reached the stage where she rejects the very
idea of opting out.
Trivia notes: (1) The rather phallic crystals Giles used to hypnotize Buffy
imply a patriarchal role for the Cruciamentum. The one Buffy was playing
with suggests that her workout with Angel was less than completely, um,
satisfying. (2) Buffy described Faith as on a “walkabout”. A “walkabout”,
quoting Wikipedia, is “a rite of passage during which male Australian
Aborigines would undergo a journey during adolescence and live in the
wilderness for a period as long as six months.” I don’t think this term was
used accidentally. (3) Giles told Buffy to “look for the flaw at its [crystal]
center”. That could be a metaphor for the flaw in the WC system. (4) Oz
was correct about the various colors of kryptonite and their effect on
Superman. So much for Xander’s geek cred. (5) Angel’s birthday gift was
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets From the Portuguese. They were love
poems to her husband-to-be. (6) Buffy compared her pre-Slayer self to
Cordelia, which is the passage I had in mind in discussing Cordy’s role as
Buffy’s shadow self in my post on NKABOTFD. (7) Buffy’s concern that
her calling might be a wrong number fits with the growing up theme. As
highschoolers move towards graduation, they get secretly nervous that
they’re not ready for the world outside.
The Zeppo
The Zeppo is probably the most obvious of the POV episodes I listed in my
post on The Wish. If you weren’t persuaded that The Wish is best seen as
Cordelia’s view of the world, then watch it again now that you’ve seen The
Zeppo. Or maybe the Buffy/Angel relationship really is as overwrought, nay
melodramatic, as it appears to Xander here. And maybe the apocalypse is
pretty much a parody.
No, it seems clear to me that in this episode we’re seeing the world through
Xander’s eyes. Sometimes we’re even seeing what he fantasizes: that he’s
the real hero in the SG notwithstanding his role as Everyman.
I want to be sure that I’m not misunderstood on this. I’m NOT saying the
actual events of The Zeppo didn’t happen. There really was an apocalypse
to defeat; Xander really did have sex with Faith; Xander really did confront
Jack in the school basement. So those events happened, it’s just that the
way we see them has been filtered through the lens of Xander’s beliefs,
attitudes, insecurities, and desires. That’s why Buffy and Angel seem
melodramatic in the mansion – Xander sees them that way. That’s why
Willow assures him she loves him and hugs him. And Faith probably is
much as Xander sees her, but it’s still true that we’re seeing Faith through
Xander’s eyes.
Point of view is a tricky thing. We want our own view of the world to be
objective. Think about it, though, from the assumption that there is no God,
no higher power. In that case, there’s no such thing as an “objective” view.
There are only the views of each individual, interpreted in their own minds.
The events are generally real; we all agree that 9/11 happened, we just see
the events in slightly different ways and we draw conclusions about the
consequences based on our own beliefs, etc.
As I said in the post on Revelations, this has important consequences for the
show generally. We see the show through Buffy’s eyes, mostly, but we can
always ask ourselves if others might see events or even her in a very
different way. This will become a major issue for many fans in S6 and S7.
Xander’s had a long hard fall from his peak in Revelations. Back then he
was feeling on top of things, fully justified in his hatred of Angel and self-
righteous about Buffy. Then he very seriously overstepped all moral bounds
by siccing Faith on Angel, and just one episode later got caught cheating on
Cordy. He’s had a very hard time finding his place again. It’s not just that
we see this in his desperate search for something that will make him cool,
it’s that he gets rejected by pretty much everyone. Buffy wants him “fray
adjacent”; Giles and Angel dismiss him; Faith uses him and kicks him out.
He ends up playing Clint Eastwood.
You will be shocked, shocked to learn that I think there’s an existentialist
point to this. Xander’s search for what might make him “cool” ended up
being a search for what was authentically him. He tried on other roles: car
guy; criminal; sexual partner. None worked, but at the end he found
something that he truly could do, namely save the lives of others through
his courage (heart, you know). That’s how he can create his authentic self.
There is a structural reason why we’re seeing this theme at this point in the
season, just as there was a structural reason why Bad Eggs appeared when it
did.
There’s probably a joke here as well. Remember that the creation of one’s
authentic self comes only after one recognizes the world as absurd. That
word had a technical meaning for Camus, of course, but it has a colloquial
one too. Xander’s view of the world which we see here probably qualifies
as “absurd” in the colloquial sense, so Joss may have been having some fun
on this point.
Trivia notes: (1) The Zeppo of the title is Zeppo Marx. (2) The Michael
Jackson song Xander mentioned to Jack is “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’”.
(3) Xander’s car was a 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air. (4) Up With People is an
international education organization known for its musical performances.
Bad Girls
Bad Girls begins the final run to the conclusion of S3, just as Surprise did
in S2. It’s arguably the first episode of a two-parter with Consequences, but
they aren’t formally treated as one and there’s plenty to discuss separately
so I’ll make separate posts.
As I explained in discussing Homecoming, I think that Cordy stopped
serving as Buffy’s shadow self at that point. Faith takes over that role in
Bad Girls. We were given many clues to this in Faith Hope & Trick, a
major one which I’ll discuss when I get to Graduation Day, and others
including Buffy’s comments such as “at school today, she was making eyes
at my not-boyfriend. This is creepy.”; “I'm not looking to go halfsies on [my
life].”; “Which, by the way, is *my* life.”; “Yeah, and mine's the sane
one.”; “She doesn't need a life. She has mine.” We got more clues to this
season theme from the two episodes immediately following FH&T – BatB
and Homecoming – both of which dealt with shadow selves. Faith is
“definitely” Buffy’s “shadow self, her dark side” (quoting Marti Noxon),
and in this episode she goads Buffy into exploring what it’s like to live on
the wild side, to take things too far.
There’s one important difference, however, between the metaphorical roles
of Cordy and Faith. Cordy was the shadow self for Buffy’s human side.
Faith is the darker half of her Slayer side. We saw Buffy face the challenge
of Helpless after reconciling her human dark side; now she faces a much
more significant challenge from her Slayer-side shadow.
One big difference between Buffy and Faith as Slayers is that Faith is all
action without taking time to think. Buffy wants to exercise some control.
This is a balancing act we’ve seen before – in S2 Kendra played the other
side of this dichotomy. Buffy needs both action and thought in order to
succeed as the Slayer. The different characteristics of other Slayers help her
find that balance.
Why are we only seeing this contrast now? Why not immediately after
Homecoming? Because the shadow self isn’t something we struggle with
every single minute. It only becomes relevant when life issues make it so.
As I’ve argued from the beginning, Buffy’s journey is one that will take her
to adulthood, and being the Slayer is a metaphor for that. Faith’s story
explores one way many would-be adults get sidetracked at this particular
stage of life.
Within the story Buffy is a high school senior in her last few months before
graduation. There’s a strong temptation at that age to think that “being an
adult” means “I get to do what I want now”: Want. Take. Have. The power
of becoming an adult is, using Joss’s word to describe the power of the
Slayer, intoxicating. It’s very common for seniors to think that this is the
time when they can blow off all their responsibilities. They stop worrying
about grades; they party (note Buffy’s description of the fight down the
manhole: “Faith and I got into a serious party situation.”); they have a final
fling before they leave all their friends behind and go off to college. This is
all the more likely when faced with a new “teacher” who might not be evil
in the strictest sense, but certainly isn’t anyone Buffy wants to impress. It’s
a teenager’s form of rebellion, not an adult’s.
Also within the story, Buffy is nearly drowned again. This reminder of her
mortality likely makes her see some merit in Faith’s “livin’ large” (FH&T)
philosophy, and their behavior reminds us that Buffy has this within her as
we saw in WSWB (wild dancing, blowing off her friends, etc.). Ultimately,
of course, Faith represents the road not taken; Buffy flirts with Faith’s
choices, in Jane Espenson’s words, but doesn’t make them.
Faith’s devil-may-care attitude may be partly an attempt to impress Buffy,
but it’s also part of her personality. Over the course of the episode her
behavior becomes increasingly reckless to the point of stabbing anything
that moves, and the result is predictably tragic. The death of Allen Finch is
the turning point of S3. It may be useful to re-watch Ted at this point, so
you can compare the way all the relevant parties react.
From a legal standpoint, killing the Deputy Mayor wasn’t murder one –
nobody thinks Faith premeditated it – but it was a homicide. Under CA law
there are 3 plausible charges (I’m simplifying):

1. Second degree murder. This requires “malice aforethought” but

is not premeditated. “Malice aforethought” includes a wanton
disregard for human life. “Wanton” means, roughly, grossly negligent
or reckless.
2. Voluntary manslaughter. This requires that the killing be with a
conscious disregard for human life and it usually applies to cases of
provocation.
3. Involuntary manslaughter. This requires failing to act with a
proper degree of caution.

In his DVD commentary, writer Doug Petrie uses the term murder to
describe what Faith did. He must have had second degree murder in mind,
and Faith’s behavior certainly could be characterized “grossly negligent” or
“reckless”. I think it’s also possible to see it as involuntary manslaughter,
but even that is pretty serious.
We can see that Faith’s upset about the killing from her reaction when Buffy
comes by at the end, and her initial reaction to run strongly suggests a sense
of guilt (similar to Buffy’s concealment of Angel in Revelations). But guilt
isn’t the same as taking responsibility or even showing remorse and Faith’s
denial of both compares badly with Buffy’s reaction in Ted and with Buffy’s
advice now. I’m not even sure Faith really believes herself when she says “I
don’t care”, but she’s at least trying to convince herself that she doesn’t.
That doesn’t bode well.
As I see it, a lot of Faith’s problem stems from insecurity, even an
inferiority complex. She lost her first Watcher due to her own perceived
fault. She fell for Gwendolyn Post. Taking responsibility now would require
another admission of failure and she’s not able to handle that.
A few minor points:
Speaking of Watchers, the introduction of Wesley gives us a parallel case of
a shadow self, this time for Giles. The scene where they simultaneously
clean their glasses clues us in to their similarity. That and the British accent,
the height, the stuffiness, etc.
Lots of viewers saw lesbian subtext in certain scenes in this episode (a lot
of the dialogue, the heart on the window, all the pelvic thrusting, the
dancing). That was definitely present. Doug Petrie says "… Faith was very
attractive to Buffy in a lot of ways, so there was definitely this subtle (and
sometimes not so subtle) lesbian subtext, where Faith is very seductive.
She's like 'come play with me; let's be what we really are,' and Buffy has
always been a lil bit uncomfortable with that….”
Usually the demon provides a metaphorical connection to the plot. The only
things we really know about Balthazar are that (a) he lost his power and
wants it back; and (b) his acolytes formed a duelist cult. I suppose we might
see the duelling as a metaphor representing a struggle between Willow and
Faith over Buffy. That’s pretty thin so if anyone else has a better suggestion,
feel free to add it.
Bad Girls gives one plot detail which is a little cryptic and never clarified
later so I’ll state what might be technically a minor spoiler: Balthazar was a
demon who clashed with the Mayor. It was the Mayor who crippled him
and whom Balthazar is referring to when he says “When he rises... you'll
wish I'd killed you all.”
Trivia notes: (1) The name of the vampire cult, El Eliminati, is probably a
play on the 18th Century secret society, the Illuminati. (2) As is widely
known, Alexis Denisof, who plays Wesley, has been married to Alyson
Hannigan since 2003. They’re one of at least 3 long-term Buffyverse
couples (the others involve actors who haven’t appeared yet so I won’t
mention them). (3) Buffy hates to be drowned because of Prophecy Girl, of
course. (4) Buffy described the Eliminati as “out in Magnum Force”, which
was a 1973 Clint Eastwood movie. (5) Giles described Wesley as “Captain
Courageous”. Captains Courageous was a novel by Rudyard Kipling. (6) If
you see a definite Lady Macbeth vibe to Faith scrubbing the blood from her
shirt, that’s good. It was intended that way. (7) Here’s Joss’s stage direction
for Wesley: “He thinks he’s Sean Connery but in fact he’s George
Lazenby”. (8) The Gleaves mausoleum was named after writer Doug
Petrie’s sister. (9) The inspiration for Balthazar came from the comic book
villain Kingpin.
 Consequences
Consequences reads like waking up with a hangover after a night of binge
drinking. Maybe binge drinking that led to a hit and run accident.
The metaphor of Buffy’s dream in the teaser seems pretty obvious: she’s
drowning morally, just as she did physically in Bad Girls, and it’s Faith
who’s holding her under water by insisting that Buffy not “rat her out”. The
metaphor ties in nicely to the fact that Faith dumped Finch’s body in the
river. It’s also a prophecy: Finch’s body can still provide the clues which
will “grab” the Slayers. In light of all this, you have to give “credit” to Faith
for using the one argument that would successfully guilt Buffy into silence,
namely mentioning Buffy’s concealment of Angel’s return.
Faith’s arguments justifying her behavior are as problematic as her
unsuccessful attempted concealment of the crime. Take her first one for
example:
“Faith: (steps closer) Buffy, I'm not gonna *see* anything. I missed the
mark last night and I'm sorry about the guy. I really am! But it happens!
Anyway, how many people do you think we've saved by now, thousands?
And didn't you stop the world from ending? Because in my book, that puts
you and me in the plus column.”
Faith wants to treat an individual human life as nothing more than an
accounting chit, something to balance or trade as the case may be. For
Buffy, each person is an end, not a means to achieve some greater goal. In
contrast to Faith, she is “going to cry over some random guy who gets
caught in the crossfire”. Buffy will consistently reject Faith’s argument
throughout the series, no matter who makes it (and it will get made,
repeatedly).
Faith next suggests an entitlement to special rules:
“Faith: You're still not seeing the big picture, B. Something made us
different. We're warriors. We're built to kill.
Buffy: To kill demons! But it does *not* mean that we get to pass
judgment on people like we're better than everybody else!
Faith: We *are* better!
Buffy is taken aback.
Faith: (exhilarated) That's right, better. People need us to survive. In the
balance, nobody's gonna cry over some random bystander who got caught
in the crossfire.”
Here’s writer Doug Petrie describing what he was trying to do in Buffy
Magazine July 2004:

"Faith brings out a lot of stuff that, sooner or later, Buffy was going to have
to deal with. What I like about Faith is that she's a character that forces you
to take the whole premise seriously. That episode enabled us to get into the
idea that, like it or not, whether they're good guys or bad guys, Buffy is a
professional killer. We've gotten a lot of mileage out of the juxtaposition of
Buffy being a blonde, southern California high school student who's also a
professional killer of bad, non-human things. But she kills; that's her job,
and what that episode got to do was take an unflinching look at this dark
side of what it is they do. There's one scene in which Faith says, 'we're
killers,' and Buffy says 'No, we're slayers' there's a difference.' But is there?
So we got to really go pretty far with that…. Faith's idea of what they are
isn't entirely accurate for Buffy. It's not wrong; that's what I love about
Faith. She's not wrong; she's saying 'Let's call us what we are, we're killers,'
and Buffy has a hard time with that."
And then later, but on the same theme, Faith again:
“Faith: (approaches Buffy) But that's not it. That's not what bothers you so
much. What bugs you is you know I'm right. You know in your gut we don't
need the law. We *are* the law.”
It’s pretty clear that Faith made this argument in order to evade her
responsibility. It’s a way of saying “I have the power so I can do what I
want.” You may remember this idea being mooted in Ted, that time by
Buffy’s then-shadow figure, Cordelia:
“Cordelia: I don't get it. Buffy's the Slayer. Shouldn't she have...
Xander: What, a license to kill? (takes a bite of a cookie)
Cordelia: Well, not for fun. But she's like this superman. Shouldn't there be
different rules for her?
Willow: Sure, in a fascist society.
Cordelia: Right! Why can't we have one of those?”
I’ve previously talked about the concept of responsibility in existentialist
philosophy, but I don’t think I need to complicate matters here. Everyone
can see that Faith’s refusal to accept responsibility for her actions was
wrong. There are mitigating circumstances, there are “military”
justifications for “collateral damage”. But none of them can possibly apply
unless and until she owns her actions, as Buffy did immediately in Ted.
“Giles: She's in denial. There *is* no help for her until she admits what
happened.”
Making choices requires that you accept the consequences of those choices.
From my post on Lie to Me: committing yourself means that your actions
“become something that I myself own up to, become responsible for.”
Existentialists don’t get to make excuses or invent new rules that apply
uniquely to them; those are just attempts to avoid responsibility rather than
accept it. As long as Faith is lying about the incident, she’s acting in bad
faith under any definition of morality. And yes, I do think her name was
intentionally chosen for its resonance with that concept.
It’s therefore important to understand that Faith’s fundamental problem was
not that she killed Allan Finch. That was an error – she was negligent (at
best) or reckless (at worst) in her behavior, depending on how you interpret
the scene. But her real flaw was her lack of remorse, the fact that she was
“utterly unable to accept responsibility”, in Giles’ phrase, for her actions.
It’s that failure which puts her at risk of “having [or developing] a taste for
[killing]”, as Angel says. Because Buffy interprets her rescue from Trick as
a sign of Faith’s remorse, Buffy’s “not gonna give up on her”. It was Faith
who gave up on herself when she showed up at the Mayor’s door.
Some additional points:
Remember Faith’s arguments here. All of them will be relevant in later
episodes.
Despite his seeming flash of insight in The Zeppo, Xander continues to
behave cluelessly in this episode. His attempt to intervene with Faith was
clumsy at both ends. First he managed to disclose the fact that he had sex
with Faith in probably the most emotionally painful way possible for
everyone, then he didn’t realize how he’d been used, then even after Buffy
had told him that as nicely as she could, he persisted in his mistake and said
things to Faith that wound her up to the point of trying to rape/murder him.
Ironically, perhaps, Angel’s a real hero in rescuing the guy who hates him
and tried to kill him. Angel really did take to heart what Buffy said in
Amends.
Just when you thought it wasn’t possible to dislike Wesley more, he proves
you wrong. He actually does conduct an intervention that manages to be
even less successful than the ones with Buffy in Dead Man’s Party and
Revelations. I think his behavior may have stemmed from resentment at the
way his failings were exposed in Bad Girls, but that’s hardly a defense, and
in any case he’s plenty officious enough to have acted that way without any
other motive. Just one more reason to dislike the WC (as if we needed more
after Helpless).
Lastly, Faith, whose behavior has careened even more out of control since
she last spoke to Buffy, posed a challenge to Buffy on the docks:
“Faith: I've seen it, B. You've got the lust. And I'm not just talking about
screwing vampires.
Buffy stops in her tracks.
Buffy: Don't you *dare* bring him into this.
Faith: (taunting her) It was good, wasn't it? The sex? The danger? Bet a
part of you even dug him when he went psycho.
Buffy: No! (continues walking)
Faith: (follows) See, you need me to toe the line because you're afraid
you'll go over it, aren't you, B? You can't handle watching me living my
own way, having a blast, because it tempts you! You know it could be you!”
Given Buffy’s reaction, Faith struck a nerve with these comments. Buffy’s
at least worried that Faith might be right. That, after all, is what a shadow
self is and does:
“In Jungian psychology, the shadow or ‘shadow aspect’ is a part of the
unconscious mind consisting of repressed weaknesses, shortcomings, and
instincts. …’Everyone carries a shadow,’ Jung wrote, ‘and the less it is
embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.’ It
may be (in part) one's link to more primitive animal instincts….
According to Jung, the shadow, in being instinctive and irrational, is prone
to projection: turning a personal inferiority into a perceived moral
deficiency in someone else.”
So I’ll leave you to think about whether Faith is projecting her own
weaknesses on Buffy or whether she’s truly articulating what Buffy knows
about herself deep down inside. You might keep in mind Cordelia’s request
for a book when she walked into the library: “[P]sych class. Freud and
Jung.”
Trivia notes: (1) Apparently Cordy’s a Star Trek fan (“Giles: The Next
Generation”). (2) Detective Stein makes his third and last appearance on the
show. (3) The Mayor loved the idea of a Slayer “up for Murder 1”. This is a
good example that we can’t take a character’s statements at face value.
Murder 1 requires premeditation (with exceptions not relevant here), so that
wouldn’t be the charge. Of course if we were being “realistic”, both Slayers
would be guilty of obstruction of justice for giving false statements to the
police. (4) Goody Two Shoes (you know you’ve always wondered where
that came from) was the title of a 1765 book. It was a morality play on the
benefits of virtue.
 Doppelgängland
Doppelgänger is a German word meaning “a paranormal double of a living
person, typically representing evil or misfortune.” Wikipedia tells us that
“Doppelgängers, as dark doubles of individual identities, appear in a variety
of fictional works …. These doppelgängers are typically, but not always,
evil in some way. The double will often impersonate the victim and go
about ruining them, for instance through committing crimes or insulting the
victim's friends. Sometimes, the double even tries to kill the original.”
Given this meaning, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Doppelgangland appears
at this point in the season, right after two episodes showing Faith as the
dark side of Buffy’s Slayer half. It’s the same basic theme. And if it’s the
same basic theme, that means I think there’s a message about Buffy in the
episode even if it seems to focus on Willow.
It’s easy to identify the other doppelgänger in this episode: Faith is Buffy’s
doppelgänger. And just as Willow was trying on the role of being bad in the
main plot, so is Faith. She’s not entirely there yet, as we see from her
hesitation when The Mayor suggests killing Willow. But the more she
practices that role, the better she’ll get.
The issue with both Faith and VampWillow is how much of the real person
is contained in the doppelgänger. Buffy mused at the beginning that
“different circumstances, that [Faith] could be me.” Willow reassured her
that this isn’t so: “No way. Some people just don't have that in them.”
Given the parallels between Willow/VampWillow and Buffy/Faith, is one of
them right in both cases?
In my view, the answer is a resounding “yes and no”. At the ending Buffy
affirms her statement at the beginning. Buffy responded to Willow’s
insistence on sending VampWillow back to the Wishverse with “there but
for the grace of getting bit”. That’s the same point she made in the
beginning, this time about VampWillow rather than Faith. Willow, however,
didn’t change her view either: “Willow: (hesitantly) I mean, I know she's
not me. We have a big nothing in common, but... still.” That leaves the issue
open within the context of this episode alone.
Normally I’d side with Buffy, but in this case there are a couple of points on
the other side which persuade me. One is the statement by Joss which I
quoted in the post on Consequences, that Buffy “would never let herself be”
Faith. This statement is not entirely free of ambiguity, but I read it as saying
that Buffy isn’t Faith.
The other reason goes back to the business I left unfinished in my post on
The Wish. I mentioned then that I had to leave open one issue because of
spoilers, and what I had in mind was the reappearance of VampWillow. My
interpretation of VampWillow, and therefore my interpretation of how we’re
to see the doppelgänger characters, obviously depend on how I interpreted
The Wish.
Here’s how I described my view at ATPO 10 years ago, which is essentially
what I said in my post on The Wish:
“The Wish was a message to Cordy after her break up with Xander. The
alternate universe represented her worst fears about Xander and Willow. We
were not meant to see VampXander or VampWillow as "real" aspects of
either, but as representations of Cordy's internal, emotional state after
Xander betrayed her….

In short, Willow's "vampire" side was never truly Willow, but only Cordy's
mental construct of Willow, born of anger. That "side" never really existed
in this universe. Even in the alternate universe, that dark side was
destroyed.”
To say this view is controversial would be understating it quite a bit. If any
other commenter at ATPO agreed with me, they were silent about it. Most
viewers do see VampWillow as very similar to Willow herself.
Nevertheless, that earlier post is the way I still (mostly) see the episode
today. I would add a perhaps critical amendment, though, one which I noted
in my post on The Wish: that Cordy didn’t merely imagine Willow’s flaws.
Cordy has known Willow for a long time and has an idea of Willow’s
weaknesses (real or perceived). She may have exaggerated those
weaknesses, she may have interpreted them in a highly prejudiced way, but
there’s a basis for Cordy’s view.
There are a couple of obvious objections to my interpretation of the two
episodes which I need to address here because I couldn’t do so previously.
If Doppelgangland is a Willow POV episode, and VampWillow is a mental
construct of Cordy, then why does Willow see VampWillow as her double?
One important factor is, of course, her looks. That’s enough to make anyone
think so, as we can see from Buffy’s reaction. Buffy was prepared to
believe it was Willow even though in Buffy’s view “a vampire's personality
has nothing to do with the person it was.” Identifying VampWillow as
Willow would be even more likely because Cordy is not entirely wrong in
her assessment of Willow, so there was enough resemblance to make the
identity seem plausible. In the end, as I quoted above, Willow herself
decided that she and her evil twin “have a big nothing in common.”
The next problem with my view stems from the premise of the episode.
Because it’s a POV episode, we see the world as Willow does. This means
that everyone is constantly ordering her around and she’s never able to
assert herself. It also means that Willow’s still a little unhappy about
Buffy’s rejection of her in Bad Girls and thinks that bad girls get to have all
the fun without the responsibility she’s being saddled with. The episode is
Willow’s exploration of what it would be like to be bad for a change.
That’s fine, but Willow doesn’t know anything about the Wishverse nor
VampWillow and didn’t even ask for her in any case. She therefore can’t
have just imagined the same exact character. For this we need to rely on
Anya as the common factor. Anya doesn’t really know Willow, but she does
know VampWillow and the Wishverse. When the spell is interrupted
(Willow blocks the falling sand), what’s retrieved from the Wishverse is
what Willow secretly wanted rather than what Anya secretly wanted.
Willow got a bad version of herself, one which couldn’t possibly have been
her own version but was close enough for everyone’s purposes.
The net effect is that Willow gets to see what a bad version of her might be
like without having to become evil. This is exactly the role Faith serves for
Buffy.
Willow also got her other wish, namely to participate in Buffy’s fight
against evil just as she wanted to do in Bad Girls. Her bravery in going into
the Bronze teaches her that she can assert herself a bit more, which gets at
the root of what was bothering her about herself: “She bothered me. She's
so weak and accommodating. She's always letting people walk all over her,
and then she gets cranky with her friends for no reason. I just *couldn't* let
her live.” A little more self-assertion and she won’t have to die a virgin with
perfect teeth.
At least Buffy still does have perfect teeth.
One final point to tie up the issues regarding The Wish. If you see
Anyanka’s pendant/necklace as a tangible, physical thing, essential for her
power – and there’s certainly dialogue to support that – then obviously my
interpretation of the events of The Wish as occurring entirely in Cordelia’s
mind would be problematic. As I said in that earlier post, I see the
pendant/necklace as more of a metaphor. Giles describes it as her “power
center”, so I see the destruction of the pendant/necklace as the destruction
of Anyanka’s power over Cordelia (and other women scorned). The spell
here was simply an attempt to regain that power. There are future events
which I believe support my reading, but they involve spoilers so I’ll wait
until we get to the relevant episodes. I will also put a comment below which
explains this point in more detail.
Personally, I love this episode and never get tired of watching it. AH is
fantastic and Oz gets one of my all-time favorite lines: “I’d call that a
radical interpretation of the text.” Best I can tell, the fan base feels the same
way. Myles McNutt summarized it pretty well in his review I think:
“’Doppelgangland’” is momentous not because it changes or shifts the
series in any particular way, but because it offers a microcosm of the show’s
ability to engage with complex notions of plot and character while still
capturing the little things which endear us to the series as a whole.”
Trivia notes: (1) The Creature From the Black Lagoon was a 1950s horror
movie. (2) Notice Buffy’s reflexes in pulling back the stake from
VampWillow when Willow shouts for her to stop, and compare to Faith
stabbing Allan Finch in Bad Girls over Buffy’s shout. Buffy said at the
beginning of the episode that she wanted to do better than Faith, and here
she demonstrated that in what is, under the circumstances, a very
meaningful way. (3) Buffy’s “there but for the grace of getting bit” plays on
the phrase by John Bradford while watching another man being led off to
execution: “There but for the Grace of God goes John Bradford”; we
usually generalize it to say “there but for the Grace of God go I”. (4) AH
loved her VampWillow makeup so much that she repeated it for a
Halloween party. (5) Because the future episodes which impact my
interpretation of The Wish are far away in S6 and S7, those who want to
read it now can skip ahead to the trivia notes for the episode Selfless.
 Enemies
The title of Enemies is ironic. Faith became Buffy’s enemy the moment the
Mayor opened his door in Consequences. Buffy just didn’t know she had an
enemy until now.
When I first saw Enemies, I missed the clue that Buffy caught when she
realized that Faith had killed the demon and had gone over to the Mayor. So
for those watching for the first time, when she and Faith went into the
demon’s apartment, they had no way to know what might be there. “Buffy:
Faith, careful.” However, Faith entered the room without any concern that
the demon might be still alive. Then she went straight to the light switch
around the corner in the other room as if she knew where it was. Buffy even
gave her a look at that point. It’s subtle, but the clue is there.
I’ll start the discussion with the metaphor. When Faith first approached
Angel with blood on her hands, she was trying to seduce him. We didn’t
know that at the time, but the later conversation between Faith and the
Mayor confirms it:
“Faith: It's not like I wasn't trying, okay?
Mayor: Hey, there's no need to convince me. I'm sure you gave it your level
best. I just don't understand what that boy could be thinking?
Faith: Try Buffy Summers, like in a big, fat, one track way.
Mayor: Hey, come on, don't be discouraged. You're a bright, young,
energetic girl with a whole life ahead of her. And I won't tolerate brooding.
So you couldn't give him that one moment of true happiness.
Faith: I was thinking more along the lines of a long weekend, but okay.”
Had Faith been able to sleep with Angel, this would have accomplished
three purposes. First, it would have meant that Angel betrayed Buffy.
Second, it would, in Faith’s mind at least, have validated her superiority to
Buffy. We see this in the later dialogue: “Faith: Why? So you can impart
some special Buffy wisdom, that it? Do you think you're better than me? Do
you? Say it, you think you're better than me. Buffy: I am. Always have
been. Faith: Um, maybe you didn't notice. Angel's with me.”
Third, it would have taken an ally away from Buffy and given one to the
Mayor.
When the original plan didn’t work, they opted to summon the Mage and
use the spell. I see this as a metaphor for almost a kind of emotional
blackmail. What the spell did, in essence, was allow Faith to say “sleep
with me or I’ll tell Buffy you slept with me by showing her ‘evidence’ that
you did”. It was important to her that she be able to flaunt such a ‘triumph’.
The plan backfired because Angel merely pretended to demonstrate that
“evidence” and he told Buffy the truth. I’ll elaborate on the context of this
point in my post on Graduation Day.
Now let me turn to Faith’s weaknesses, which the episode openly explores.
Enemies marks a giant leap into the dark for her. Where she was willing to
save Buffy’s life in Consequences and was reluctant to harm Willow in
Doppelgangland, she now is willing to loose a monster onto the world.
She’s become a monster herself (Joss’s word). And she’s doing it as much
to hurt Buffy as for any practical benefit to the Mayor’s plans (which we get
the first hints about).
It’s resentment that’s driving Faith’s rage. We see it when she thinks she has
Buffy helpless:
“Buffy: Why, Faith? What's in it for you?
Faith: What isn't? You know, I come to Sunnydale. I'm the Slayer. I do my
job kicking ass better than anyone. What do I hear about everywhere I go?
Buffy. So I slay, I behave, I do the good little girl routine. And who's
everybody thank? Buffy.
Buffy: It's not my fault.
Faith: Everybody always asks, why can't you be more like Buffy? But did
anyone ever ask if you could be more like me?
Angel: I know I didn't.
Faith: You get the Watcher. You get the mom. You get the little Scooby
gang. What do I get? Jack squat. This is supposed to be my town!
Buffy: Faith, listen to me!
Faith: Why? So you can impart some special Buffy wisdom, that it? Do you
think you're better than me? Do you? Say it, you think you're better than
me.”
Faith’s basic complaints are all false. She wasn’t “doing her job better than
anyone”. When she came to Sunnydale, she was running away and planned
to dump her problem on Buffy. She cooperated only sporadically with Giles
and Buffy in between her “walkabouts”. When she did act as the Slayer, her
judgment was erratic and even dangerous when she went after Angel in
Revelations. She failed to notice Buffy’s plight in FH&T and she was
reckless throughout Bad Girls.
Nor was it the case that she was rejected when she first arrived. In FH&T it
was Buffy who was feeling left out because Xander, Willow, and Joyce all
seemed so charmed with Faith. Giles was prepared to act as her Watcher
and Wesley insisted on it.
What really bugs Faith, I think, is that at some level she knows what she’s
saying is false and that Buffy really is better than her. And it’s that sense of
inferiority which is driving the rage she admits to. Notice the example she
uses when wants to prove her superiority: “Angel's with me.” This wouldn’t
be much of an example at any time. It’s more an expression of spite than
superiority.
This leaves us to explain Buffy’s concern about Angel which she expressed
to Willow after she saw Angel and Faith seemingly intimate, and in the fact
that she requested a “break” from Angel at the end. As I see it, the role she
asked Angel to play (which he did all too well – though it’s not text, I
assumed when I saw it that “Angelus” and Faith had sex) called into
question just what it was about Buffy that Angel found attractive. This
would concern Buffy because she doesn’t want it to be her dark side. She
wants to be loved for her good qualities, not her dangerous ones. Who
wouldn’t?
Trivia notes: (1) The movie Angel and Buffy saw in the teaser is fictitious.
(2) Faith’s description of Buffy and Angel as “close but no cigar” seems
like a Freudian pun. (3) Faith described the SG as the Super Friends, which
was an animated cartoon series from the ‘70s and ‘80s. (3) Buffy described
Faith as “making Godot look punctual”. Godot was the friend who never
arrived in the play Waiting for Godot. (4) Willow found the Mayor’s files
empty because in Doppelgangland she told Faith that she was trying to
access them; Faith obviously told the Mayor. (5) “Angelus’s” words to
Buffy “Maybe there's still some good deep down inside of me that
remembers and loves you.” are nearly an exact quote of what she said to
him in Innocence. (6) Writer Doug Petrie compared Angel’s role in this
episode to the TV show Wiseguy, which involved an undercover agent who
infiltrated the mob. One of the issues that show raised was the extent to
which playing such a role leads one to become the part. This helps explain
Buffy’s request for a “break”.
Earshot
Those who watch Buffy on DVD get to experience something the TV
viewers didn’t: Earshot in the correct order. The originally scheduled air
date was the week after the shootings at Columbine High (April 20, 1999),
and the network decided that the Earshot storyline was too similar. It
eventually aired on September 21, 1999, just before the beginning of S4.
In the comments on Enemies, deidre asked an excellent question which
hadn’t occurred to me: how was the season arc affected by the fact that
Earshot got skipped? I wish I could remember my thoughts on the season
when it first aired, but I don’t. I mostly remember seeing Earshot and
thinking that they should have aired it on time because there was nothing in
it which would have suggested any “approval” of Columbine.
When I look at it today in context, it seems to me that Earshot contains
important elements leading to the season finale. The empathy we see Buffy
develop (see below), in particular, strikes me as crucial for understanding
both the behavior of her fellow students in The Prom and her own actions in
Graduation Day. That said, those of us watching it live must have filled in
those blanks because I don’t recall thinking that something important had
been left out. That’s a sign that the story arc was strong enough to carry the
conclusion.
The irony of the delay is, of course, that the actual message of the episode is
diametrically opposite that of the Columbine murders. Not only were no
murders shown or even committed, but Buffy stopped them because the
telepathy enabled her to empathize with her fellow students. That’s
something we all (hopefully) learn to do as we grow up. It’s particularly
important for Buffy because being the Slayer tends to isolate her from
others, even her friends, and could lead her to stop caring about other
people. We get reminded of some of that isolation early in the episode when
Willow tells her that “everyone” is going to the basketball game, but Buffy
can’t because she has patrolling (i.e., adult responsibilities). The isolation
and its potential consequences would be a serious problem for anyone, but
could make it eventually impossible to function as the Slayer – why bother
to save people if you’re that distant from them?
The telepathy enables Buffy to understand the internal pain of her fellow
students, which she describes to Jonathan in the tower. However, it also
reinforces Buffy’s isolation, to the point where she “can’t really be around
people anymore”. In metaphor, Buffy is isolated precisely because she
alone has come to understand the internal lives of her fellow students. The
telepathic demons have no mouths because the pain we all experience
comes in part from the lack of communication (consistent with the message
of Dead Man’s Party).
The subplot works in unison with the main one. Buffy’s concerns about
Angel are a specific example of the insecurity her fellow students
experience. In her case it’s a matter of jealousy, as we see from the
classroom discussion of Othello. Faith preyed on Buffy’s insecurities
regarding Angel in Enemies, much as Iago did on those of Othello. The
dialogue between Buffy and the teacher describes the way Joss saw Buffy
and Faith:
“TEACHER: Jealousy clearly is the tool that Iago uses to undo Othello. But
what's his motivation? What reason does Iago give for destroying his
superior officer?
***
BUFFY: Well, he, um, he sort of admits himself that his motives are...
spurious! He, um, he does things because he, he enjoys them. It's like he's
not, he's not really a person. He's a, the dark half of Othello himself.”
Exactly.
In the same way, all the students have their own little Iagos preying on their
insecurities: “How can I be her friend now? She doesn't need me.”; “I hate
my body. No one is ever gonna love me.”; “Am I normal?”. Buffy realizes
that and tells Jonathan: “Every single person down there is ignoring your
pain because they're too busy with their own.” Joss describes this insight as
“the key to the whole show” (Joss has too many “keys”). Further tying
together Buffy’s individual concern with this theme of the episode, Buffy
solves her problem with Angel in the same way she solves it with Jonathan:
by talking about it.
The ending scene might well win a contest for favorite in the whole series.
Trivia notes: (1) Joss rewrote the classroom scene and changed it to the
discussion of Othello. He wanted the scene to relate to Buffy’s situation. (2)
In the DVD commentary, Jane Espenson says that “In general, if a line’s
really good, it tends to be [Joss’s]. It’s remarkable how many times the
writers get complimented on a line and it turns out to be one of Joss’s.” (3)
Willow’s interrogation of Jonathan was a deliberate callback to the similar
scene in Go Fish. (4) Don’t be puzzled if you were wondering where the
bell tower came from. They built it for this episode. (5) Joss also wrote the
bell tower scene. (6) Xander’s frantic efforts to prevent anyone from eating
the Jello are an homage to the movie Soylent Green.
 Choices
With the emphasis I’ve given to the importance of choice in existentialist
thought, you should expect that I think an episode with the title Choices
will have something significant to say. You’d be right. Faith’s made her
choices, Buffy makes choices, Willow makes choices, and all those choices
have (or will have) consequences for which they need to take responsibility.
I’ll start with Buffy’s choices because I usually start with Buffy. Buffy
made a choice which I think reveals a lot about her values. In the book over
to the right of the blog, The Philosophy of Joss Whedon, Joseph Foy and
Dean Kowalski argue that while Joss is consistently existentialist on the
principle of authenticity, he’s not when it comes to values. I don’t want to
get into an overall discussion about values because that’s biting off too
much, but I do want to talk about Buffy’s values in one specific situation,
namely when she has to choose between a particular individual and a
“greater good”. That’s the situation we see in Choices, but it will recur in
later episodes so I want to begin the discussion now.
Buffy chose Willow over destroying the Box of Gavrock. Let’s consider the
argument on both sides. Wesley gave the argument against the trade: “This
box must be destroyed. … This box is the key to the Mayor's Ascension.
Thousands of lives depend on our getting rid of it. … This is the town's best
hope of survival. … You'd sacrifice thousands of lives? Your families, your
friends?”
Wesley’s argument – sacrifice Willow’s life in order to save the rest of
Sunnydale – is an example of what’s called “consequentialist” ethics. As
the name implies, it judges the morality of any action by its consequences.
In this case, Wesley is saying that the greatest good will come from
protecting the citizens of Sunnydale generally, even if Willow has to be
sacrificed. While this reasoning is very popular, it also has many critics who
condemn it, which we see from the reaction of the SG to his suggestion.
Quoting from the link:
“[C]onsequentialism is also criticized for what it seemingly permits — or,
more accurately, requires. It seemingly may demand (and thus, of course,
permit) that innocents be killed, beaten, lied to, or deprived of material
goods to produce greater benefits for others. Consequences — and only
consequences — can conceivably justify any kind of act, no matter how
harmful it is to some.”
Buffy rejected Wesley’s consequentialist reasoning here. As Buffy will say
in a later season, “You can’t fight evil by doing evil.” When the proposed
solution is wrong in itself or when it would cause her to act in such a way as
to undermine her own character, Buffy will try to find another way even at
great personal cost. I should add that she obviously distinguishes between
property rights and the rights of human beings. Buffy doesn’t pay much
attention to property rights, particularly when the property is owned by the
government. The government, of course, doesn’t have “rights” in the
“endowed by their Creator” sense of the Declaration of Independence, but it
does have property. Buffy and the SG see no problem with hacking the
government’s computer system or putting on something more break-and-
enterish.
The rights of people, though, are treated very much more respectfully.
Buffy’s personal morality – and for an existentialist, that’s the only kind
there is – in this particular situation is a form of another major category of
ethics called “deontological” ethics (there’s a third category, “virtue ethics”,
which I’m not discussing). Roughly speaking, this can be summarized in an
old saying: “let justice be done though the world perish” (it sounds better in
Latin: Fiat justitia et pereat mundus.). In short, do the right thing and let the
consequences take care of themselves; don’t kill one person even to save
many.
While existentialists don’t, strictly speaking, need to be either
consequentialists or deontologists (and the distinction isn’t always clear),
most existentialists adopt a form of deontolgy:
“Deontological theories are also of different kinds, depending on the role
they give to general rules. Act- deontological theories maintain that the
basic judgments of obligation are all purely particular ones like "In this
situation I should do so and so," and that general ones like "We ought
always to keep our promises" are unavailable, useless, or at best derivative
from particular judgments. Extreme act-deontologists maintain that we can
and must see or somehow decide separately in each particular situation
what is the right or obligatory thing to do, without appealing to any rules
and also without looking to see what will promote the greatest balance of
good over evil for oneself or the world. Such a view was … at least
suggested by Aristotle when he said that in determining what the golden
mean is "the decision rests with perception," and by [Bishop Joseph] Butler
when he wrote that if:
‘. . . any plain honest man, before he engages in any course of action, ask
himself, “Is this I am going about right, or is it wrong?” . . . I do not in the
least doubt but that this question would be answered agreeably to truth and
virtue, by almost any fair man in almost any circumstance [without the need
to refer to any general rule].’
Today, with an emphasis on ‘decision’ rather than intuition and with an
admission of difficulty and anxiety, this is the view of most existentialists.”
Cite.
In essence (no pun intended), this form of ethics says “consider the
particular case and you’ll know [instinctively?] what the right thing to do
is”. The “decisive” and perhaps intuitive nature of this form of ethics comes
across when Oz stands up and destroys the pot. He needs no words to
convey the point.
If you think back on it, this has been Buffy’s rule before now, and it is
certainly the rule she applied here. Consistent with the rule of responsibility,
of course, Buffy now owns her decision to trade the Box for Willow. She
will be responsible for the consequences.
Buffy’s making another choice as well. She embarked on her journey to
adulthood 2 years ago, though she’s hesitated at times along the way. In the
scene under the tree she tells Willow, “I'm never getting out of here. I kept
thinking if I stopped the Mayor or ... but I was kidding myself. I mean,
there is always going to be something. I'm a Sunnydale girl, no other
choice.” But Willow sees through this: “I mean, you've been fighting evil
here for three years, and I've helped some, and now we're supposed to
decide what we want to do with our lives. And I just realized that that's
what I want to do. Fight evil, help people. I mean, I-I think it's worth doing.
And I don't think you do it because you have to.”
Willow made choices, both in captivity and in deciding to stay in
Sunnydale. Her choice to snoop in the Mayor’s office and read the Books of
Ascension was certainly the bravest thing Willow has ever done. If she had
used her chance to escape, nobody could have criticized her. Of course,
while she did gain information by staying, she also gave Faith the
opportunity to capture her and for the Mayor to make the trade.
Willow also made the choice to stay in Sunnydale. Not for Buffy, but for
the fight against evil. Note what Buffy says in response: “You look at
something and you think you know exactly what you're seeing, and then
you find out it's something else entirely.” That, folks, is a perfect definition
of a metaphor (h/t manwitch). Buffy’s spirit has enlisted for the duration.
As Willow told her – and I think we need to see Willow speaking as Buffy’s
spirit here – Faith made her choice as well. When she cast her lot with the
Mayor, she gave up her freedom of choice from that point on. She has
allowed outside forces to choose for her, which, to existentialists, makes her
an object (something in the control of others) rather than a subject
(someone who acts on her own). She’s no longer an authentic individual as
a result (like the Operative in Firefly/Serenity if you’ve seen that series).
That’s what Willow means when she says “now you’re nothing”. Faith isn’t
a Slayer, she’s let herself become just a killer, as we see with the courier,
including the gruesome use she makes of her knife. I think the look she has
in the cafeteria when the Mayor orders her to leave suggests that she
actually recognizes this at some level. Sadly, she lacks the courage to back
out.
In Willow’s confrontation with Faith, Willow specifically rejected any of
Faith’s possible excuses: “You know, it didn't have to be this way. But you
made your choice. I know you had a tough life. I know that some people
think you had a lot of bad breaks. Well, boo hoo! Poor you. You know, you
had a lot more in your life than some people. I mean, you had friends in
your life like Buffy. Now you have no one. You were a Slayer and now
you're nothing.” In existentialist philosophy you must accept the
consequences of all your choices. In fact The Teaching Company, which
puts out lectures by college professors on a wide variety of topics, titles the
lectures on existentialism “No Excuses: Existentialism and the Meaning of
Life”.
I’m not really sure what to make of Xander in this episode. He seems to be
making a choice to go on the road rather than attend college, though in fact
he doesn’t seem to have any real choice to attend college. His reading
material, however, perhaps belies the notion of choice. As I see it, the book
he’s reading, On The Road, tells the story of someone who simply drifts
while searching for something he never finds. One way to say it is that “The
search for "IT" becomes the unending quest that both Kerouac in his
writing, and Paradise [the Kerouac persona in the novel] in his spiritual
hunger strive for without ever fully attaining….” Maybe a more
sympathetic reader can offer a different suggestion, though Buffy’s sardonic
comment about Xander “making the open dumpster your cafeteria”
suggests that perhaps Joss is as unimpressed with the book as I am.
Finally, it’s clear that Buffy and Angel have reached the point where they
need to make a choice. The Mayor may be evil, but if you’re like me you
were nodding along while he was talking in the cafeteria. The scene at the
end demonstrates that they knew it too.
Trivia notes: (1) The Mayor’s phrase “faster than you can say Jack
Robinson” was dated when I was a kid; if you really want to see the
explanation, follow the link. (2) Nancy Drew was the eponymous heroine of
a series of detective novels. (3) There is a University of California campus
in Santa Barbara, the real world Sunnydale.
 The Prom
Looking back on it, I find it hard to believe that I didn’t much care for The
Prom when it first aired. Now I love it and can re-watch it whenever I need
a feel-good moment. I’m not even sure any more why I wasn’t thrilled with
it. Now I see it as Buffy’s just reward.
From Homecoming: “Because this is all I do. This is what my life is.
(lowers her head and steps into the room) You couldn't understand. (shrugs)
I just thought... Homecoming Queen. (smiles) (Cordelia keeps respectfully
silent) I could pick up a yearbook someday and say, I was there. I went to
high school, I had friends, and... for one moment, I got to live in the world.
(smiles) And there'd be proof. Proof that I was chosen for something other
than this.” Buffy gets her “perfect high school moment” here, not because
she was a normal girl, but precisely because she was the Slayer.
Joyce really annoyed me on first watch when she told Angel to leave town.
In retrospect, though, she was right. The “Buffy & Angel 4ever” scribbling
should have clued me in. Angel may be forever, but Buffy isn’t. The Mayor
was right about that among other things. Even the teaser shows them as
incompatible beneath the cuddling. Angel’s dream reinforced this by
showing him that his desire for Buffy would consume her. He really
shouldn’t have needed Joyce’s push; he should have left on his own. Still,
credit where credit is due – when push came to shove, he did make the right
call.
Buffy’s desire to be with Angel actually prevents her from growing up. Her
own words condemn her: “Buffy: Don't what? Don't love you? I'm sorry.
You know what? I didn't know that I got a choice in that. I'm never gonna
change. I can't change.” Inability to change is what freezes someone into
childhood; it’s the condition of a vampire, not of a person. Earlier in the
conversation Buffy said she was supposed to be growing up. Moving past
her crush on Angel is an essential part of that.
Note the similarity between their conversation here and that of James and
Grace in IOHEFY:
IOHEFY: Buffy: Then tell me you don't love me!
Cut to 1955.
James: Say it!
Ms. Newman: Is that what you need to hear? Will that help? I don't.”
The Prom: “Buffy: …. I want my life to be with you.
Angel: I don't.”
In both cases, that’s what she needed to hear. Buffy admits it and Willow
confirms it in their conversation afterwards.
Angel’s decision to break up with Buffy left her in a situation similar to that
of Tucker Wells, who was rejected when he asked a girl to go to the prom.
The contrast between Buffy’s reaction and that of Tucker could hardly be
any more obvious. Killing the hellhounds Tucker unleashed out of his
resentment metaphorically killed her own resentment about Angel and
paved the way for his later appearance at the dance.
In its own way, The Prom could be called “Amends”. Xander makes up
with Cordy. Angel makes up with Buffy. The whole school makes up with
Buffy. As we’ll soon see, that latter step is essential to the story.
The award to Buffy is heart-warming of course, but the way Jonathan began
the presentation was perhaps a bit odd: “We’re not good friends”. In one
sense this statement comes from his confrontation with Buffy in Earshot:
“JONATHAN Stop saying my name like we're friends! We're not friends!”
(Original viewers missed the resonance of this, and the significance of
having Jonathan make the presentation, because Earshot didn’t air on
schedule. h/t deidre) It goes beyond just Jonathan, though -- it’s true for all
the other students as well. There is a reason for saying it in my view and
we’ll see it in the finale.
Trivia notes: (1) Buffy’s “miles to go” quote is from Robert Frost’s
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. (2) The marriage service in
Angel’s dream is from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. (3) When
Buffy and Angel meet at the butcher’s, behind Angel it’s possible to see the
logo on the truck of the meat company. It’s the Culver City Meat Company,
the slogan of which is “You can’t beat our meat”. Really. (4) Buffy’s phrase
“pulling a Carrie at the prom” refers to the classic 1976 film by Brian
DePalma based on the book by Stephen King. (5) Buffy says she’s “going
to party like it’s ….”, leaving off the “1999” from the Prince song. This
episode aired in May 1999. (6) Buffy’s description of her class protector
award as a “little toy surprise” comes from the toy in every box of
Crackerjack. (7) Sarah Michelle Gellar once listed The Prom as her favorite
episode.
 Graduation Day 1 & 2
The Changing of the Guards
“Gentlemen,” he said,
“I don't need your organization,
I've shined your shoes
I've moved your mountains and marked your cards
But Eden is burning
Either get ready for elimination
Or else your hearts must have the courage
For the changing of the guards.”

Graduation Day ties together what I see as the three principal themes of S3.
The most important theme involves Buffy’s acceptance of the absurdity of
the world. For Joss, that’s a key insight in becoming a true adult. I’ll
summarize that below and explain how the events of GD2 fit in with that
theme and with Camus’s concept of rebellion as an important response to
absurdity. The second theme, related to the first, involves the corruption of
adult institutions represented by the Mayor and the Watcher’s Council. The
teenage years are a natural time for rebellion and corrupt adult institutions
are proper targets to rebel against. Lastly, we have the Faith arc, which
involves both Buffy’s reconciliation with her shadow self and the
existentialist quest for authenticity.
I’ll take these in order, starting with absurdity and rebellion. I last discussed
this topic in my post on Gingerbread. That episode showed us that Buffy
had accepted the absurdity of the world, building on what we’d previously
seen in Lovers Walk through Amends. Gingerbread also showed us the
wrong way to rebel, the way the absurdist philosopher Albert Camus
criticized in The Rebel. Joyce wanted the adults to “take back” the world,
but her solution was the wrong one precisely for that reason. Monsters and
witches and Slayers are intrinsic to the world and the world therefore can’t
be “taken back” from them. Joyce’s solution denied the absurdity of the
world represented in metaphor by monsters, witches and Slayers. She was
attempting a revolution in trying to remake the world. That road leads to
tyranny. Buffy’s actions in GD2 demonstrate the correct form of rebellion.
Camus described the correct form of rebellion both in The Rebel and in his
novel The Plague, in which he “describ[ed] collective action against the
evil threatening the community”. Cite. I believe we got a clue to this latter
work in Gingerbread when Joyce gave her speech to the crowd at city hall:
“I-I was supposed to lead us in a moment of silence, but... silence is this
town's disease. For too long we-we've been plagued by unnatural evils.
This isn't our town anymore. It belongs to the monsters and, and the witches
and the Slayers. … I say it's time for the grownups to take Sunnydale back.”
My emphasis. [The fact that Amy becomes a rat – rats spread the plague –
may also be a clue. h/t Catherine McKenzie for the idea]
Now let’s look at The Plague. Very briefly, the novel describes a plague in
the city of Oran in Algeria, at that time a French colony. Because of the
plague, the citizens of Oran feel isolated, not just from the world but from
each other: “The ravages of the plague in Oran vividly convey the absurdist
position that humans live in an indifferent, incomprehensible universe that
has no rational meaning or order, and no transcendent God. The plague
comes unannounced and may strike down anyone at any time. It is arbitrary
and capricious, and it leaves humans in a state of fear and uncertainty,
which ends only in death.” (Quote is from the Wikipedia entry on the
novel.)
That’s the condition of the people of Sunnydale as Joyce described them in
Gingerbread (“silence is this town’s disease”), and it’s the condition of the
students at Sunnydale High as we saw them in Earshot: “Every single
person down there is ignoring your pain because they're too busy with their
own. … If you could hear what they were feeling. The loneliness. The
confusion.”
If Camus had really been describing just a disease, it might be more
difficult to see the connection between that and Buffy’s world. However,
the plague in his novel was a metaphor for the German occupation of
France during World War II – Camus was in the Resistance. This makes the
situation in the novel much more similar to Buffy’s world, which is
occupied by monsters and witches and Slayers. The point of the novel is to
identify the correct way to respond to life in such a world.
At this point, think back to Joyce’s comment to Buffy in Gingerbread that
her fight was “fruitless” and to Buffy’s dialogue with Angel in which they
both acknowledge that they can never win (both quoted in my post on
Gingerbread), and consider Wikipedia’s description of the main theme in
The Plague:
“In the face of this metaphysical reality, what must be the response of
individuals? Should they resign themselves to it, accept it as inevitable, and
seek what solace they can as individuals, or should they join with others
and fight back, even though they must live with the certainty that they
cannot win? Camus's answer is clearly the latter, embodied in the
characters of Rieux, … and Tarrou. Rieux's position is made clear in part II
in a conversation with Tarrou. Rieux argues that one would have to be a
madman to submit willingly to the plague. Rather than accepting the natural
order of things — the presence of sickness and death — he believes one
must fight against them. He is aware of the needs of the community; he
does not live for himself alone. When Tarrou points out that "[his] victories
will never be lasting," Rieux admits that he is involved in a "never ending
defeat," but this does not stop him from engaging in the struggle.” My
emphasis.
As the passage states, the correct response is joining with others and
fighting back; Camus’s solution can be described as “solidarity and
participation” (quote from link). Buffy’s decision to involve the entire
student body is therefore the key to victory:
“It is at first, like The Myth of Sisyphus, a single individual's rebellion, but
now Camus stresses that revolt creates values, dignity, and solidarity. “I
revolt, therefore we are” is his paradoxical statement. But how can an I lead
to a we? How does “we are” follow from “I revolt”? How can the
individual's experience of absurdity, and the rebellion against it, stem from,
produce, imply, or entail the wider social sense of injustice and solidarity?
… Acting against oppression entails having recourse to social values, and at
the same time joining with others in solidarity.” (Quote is from link above
and applies to The Rebel, but Camus had already written The Plague at that
point and the idea is the same.)
In The Prom Buffy acted on her determination to save the other students
and give them their special night. The other students recognized that quality
in her in their presentation; that was an essential step for their cooperation
here. Buffy’s individual determination became a “we” in Graduation Day
as they all joined with her in solidarity, a response we saw prefigured in
Anne when Buffy joined with Lily to escape Hell. “The idea of the whole
school coming together was, thematically, a big part of the arc of that
season. It’s like in Earshot … the idea that they all had their own pain, we
sort of took that and said ‘now they’re all going to band together, they’re all
going to fight together’….” (Joss DVD commentary.)
In my post on The Prom I asked you to consider why Jonathan began his
presentation to Buffy with the words “we’re not good friends”. As I see it,
the situation is somewhat like Dead Man’s Party. There, Buffy stopped
fighting with her friends in order to save them from the zombies. In GD2,
Buffy works with students from whom she’s been pretty isolated (or at least
felt isolated) for the past 3 years. In each case, the danger, and her sense of
duty, guide her to overcome that isolation and lead her peers in the struggle
against evil. She began her Slayer duties at Sunnydale as an “I”, but the
result of her actions is that by GD2 that “I” becomes “we”.
While the destruction of Sunnydale High was fun, it wasn’t the point of the
episode. There are, after all, lots of high schools in the US, every one of
them a big square building filled with boredom and despair. And Buffy
didn’t even destroy the school, Giles did (though she made the plan). The
defeat of the Mayor certainly was one point of the episode, but not, in my
view, the most important one. The most important theme was one
previewed in Anne and The Prom, namely that Buffy could and did
empower her fellow students. What distinguishes Buffy’s response from
that of Joyce in Gingerbread is that Buffy has accepted the absurdity of the
world and didn’t try to remake it or to deny its inherent absurdity. This was
no global revolution or even an attempt to remake Sunnydale itself. It was a
rebellion against a particular evil, and Buffy’s revolt created the social
values of dignity and solidarity. Buffy’s actions were those of the true adult.
In defining what they defeated in their rebellion, we need to consider the
second major theme of S3 and to ask, What does the Mayor represent? As I
see him, he represents adult society, certainly patriarchal given the Mayor’s
general attitudes, the fact that he became a giant snake, and that Buffy
tauntingly referred to him as “Dick”. He wants to devour young people,
metaphorically what society tends to do to us when we become adults. It’s
an abuse of power (which Joss describes as “the” theme of S3), a form of
social control, which is why the Mayor told Mr. Trick in Homecoming that
“Do you have children? (Trick just smiles) Children are the heart of a
community. (walks around his desk again) They need to be looked after.
Controlled. (sits on his desk) The more rebellious element needs to be dealt
with.” My emphasis.
This also explains why the Mayor bonds so closely with Faith: because the
way society corrupts us is through our dark sides. It provides for our needs
at the cost of demanding that we submit to its control and give up our own
power of choice (again, see Anne). We saw examples of that control in
Choices when he threatened to take away Faith’s present; when he forced
her to take her feet off the desk; when he commanded Faith to leave Willow
alone; and when he ordered her to his side as they left the cafeteria. The
inevitable consequence of that surrender of control by Faith is evident in
her stunning admission to Prof. Wirth when he asks her why she’s about to
murder him: “you know, I never thought to ask.”
Buffy rebelled against not just the Mayor, but the WC as well. The WC is
also a controlling, top-down organization less interested in the Slayer than
in its own power. As became apparent in Helpless, the WC wants to control
the Slayers and isn’t all that morally concerned about how that’s
accomplished. It used its power to refuse her request for help for Angel in
an effort to enforce its control over Buffy. She rejected that control on the
Slayer side just as she did with the Mayor on her human side. Again,
though, she didn’t try to undo the whole Council structure in some
revolution. That’s why she made it clear to Wesley that there was no
“mutiny”, just graduation.
In short, I see the season theme as the one prefigured in Anne: the need to
rebel against a tyrannical, controlling society in which no one is free to
create an authentic life. Graduation – escape from the control of high school
– represents an opportunity to do that.
That leaves the third theme of the season. Buffy had to deal with her “dark
side” as part of the process of growing up. FH&T (see below), BatB, and
Homecoming all prefigured the “dark side” theme. This was explored at
length in the episodes from Bad Girls through the finale. Consistent with
the other existentialist themes, it demonstrated the correct way to create
one’s authentic self by showing the contrast between Buffy’s actions and
the “bad faith” conduct of Faith.
Before she could defeat the Mayor, Buffy had to integrate her shadow self,
just as she’d had to do with Cordelia in Out of Mind, Out of Sight. First
Buffy had to take control of her shadow, which she did in the fight at the
end of GD1. Paraphrasing from my post on Oom, OoS, Buffy then
integrated her shadow when she and Faith shared the dream in GD2. Faith
told Buffy to “take what you need”, metaphorically offering her whatever
was in Faith’s mind. When she touched Buffy at the end of the dream,
Buffy thereby reincorporated the shadow into her personality, producing a
stronger, wider consciousness than before. As with every such instance (and
remember, this is a constant process throughout life in Jungian theory), this
gave Buffy a launching-pad for further growing up.
Metaphorically Buffy had to confront Faith, but we still need to analyze that
in terms of the storyline. Was Buffy right when she went after her? In my
view she was, so let me explain why.
In his commentary on Bad Girls, Doug Petrie refers to Faith as “Buffy’s
evil twin”. This should remind you of what Buffy said when Faith first
showed up in FH&T: “I’m the one being single white femaled here.” It
should remind you of that movie because the movie involved a young
woman who had lost her twin sister and tried to create a new twin out of her
roommate. The movie plot served as the outline for this portion of the
season. Here’s a summary of the plot of the movie Single White Female
which I edited and quoted from Wikipedia in my post on FH&T:
“Allie has recently broken up with her boyfriend and advertises for a new
roommate. She eventually settles on Hedra, whom she immediately
nicknames "Hedy", and they become friends. Hedy says she had a twin
sister who died … After a few weeks, however, Hedy reveals her true
nature: secretive, manipulative and deeply disturbed. Fearing she will be
kicked out of the apartment in favor of [Allie’s boyfriend], Hedy does
everything possible to make [the boyfriend] look bad, even killing a puppy
and making it look like it was his fault. Hedy then copies Allie's
appearance, right down her hairstyle [i.e., creating a twin]. … [Allie]
follows an unaware Hedy that night to an underground sex club, and
witnesses her passing herself off as Allie. Hedy, posing as Allie, sneaks into
[the boyfriend’s] hotel room and performs oral sex on him. Afterwards
Hedy attempts to blackmail [the boyfriend] but he insists on telling Allie
the truth. Hedy kills him by gouging his eye with her stiletto heel. As she
leaves his apartment complex, the doorman mistakes her for Allie. …Hedy
takes Allie captive at gunpoint and threatens to frame Allie for the
boyfriend’s death. … She is about to execute Allie, when Allie pleads "don't
make me leave you". Hedy is convinced that Allie has come to realize her
place as a twin, and plans to run away with her, until she catches Allie
making another attempt to escape. A violent fight ensues,…. The struggle
ends with Allie stabbing Hedy to death. The film ends with a close-up of a
photograph presumably made by Hedy of their faces superimposed into
one.”
I summarized the plot at some length because I think it bears a resemblance
to the Buffy/Faith relationship over the season, and that this was signaled
from the very beginning. Specifically on the plotline I’d note that Buffy had
recently “broken up” with her boyfriend (Becoming); the Slayer line had a
vacancy after Kendra died (same); the disturbed nature of Faith (FH&T);
Faith attempted to frame Buffy for the death of Allan Finch
(Consequences); the attempt to seduce Buffy’s restored boyfriend
(Enemies); the attempt to “blackmail” Angel in Enemies; Faith told Buffy in
Enemies “kill me and you become me”; Faith attempted to kill Angel
(GD1); Faith took Buffy captive (Enemies); Buffy stabbed Faith and Faith
told her “you killed me” (GD1); the dream in which Faith offered her stuff
to Buffy, metaphorically offering her what’s in Faith’s mind, IOW a merger
of the two. (There’s additional evidence which supports this reading, but it’s
a spoiler for S4.) Now, the equivalence is not perfect, but in outline the plot
elements are there, even if in somewhat different order. The reason this
works is because SWF reads as though Hedy was a metaphor for Allie’s
shadow self.
What Faith really seemed to want was to seduce (word used advisedly,
given the not-so-subtle lesbian subtext in both S3 and in SWF) Buffy into
corruption as she herself had been corrupted (i.e., they would become
twins). That was Hedy’s goal in Single White Female. The essential
question in the fight was whether Buffy would kill Faith. In Enemies Faith
told her “kill me and you become me.” In GD1 Xander told Buffy he was
worried about the confrontation because he “didn’t want to lose [her].” The
dialogue before the fight reinforces both the potential consequences and the
“evil twin”/Single White Female theme:
“Faith: Come to get me? You gonna feed me to Angel? You know you're
not going to take me alive.
Buffy: Not a problem.
Faith: Well, look at you. All dressed up in big sister's clothes. [Buffy is
dressed like Faith.]
Buffy: You told me I was just like you.”
If I’ve interpreted this correctly, Buffy was right to confront Faith. I agree
with Willow in Choices – Faith may have had it tough, but that can’t excuse
going over to the dark side. Faith abused her Slayer power, consistent with
the season theme; she’s the “vessel” (Joss’s term) for exploring the potential
for Buffy’s abuse of power and the corruptive (Joss’s term) nature of power.
Joss describes Faith as “everything that Buffy would never let herself be”.
Faith gave up her autonomy and ended up not much more than the Mayor’s
tool, the paradigm case of existentialist bad faith. Had she been human
Buffy would and should have left her to the law, but Buffy’s writ runs to the
mystical and that includes a Slayer gone bad who’s actively harming
Buffy’s allies.
We could question the plan of feeding Faith to Angel, though there was
some sense in it because it meant saving Angel’s life. Surely nobody would
object if Buffy had killed Faith in order to stop her from staking Angel, and
that’s pretty much what she was doing. But whether you agree with this or
not, ultimately Buffy and Faith were going to confront each other. The fact
that it was at this time and for that reason doesn’t seem to matter much.
Faith couldn’t be left free to damage other lives and Buffy was the only one
able to stop her.
The plan to bring Faith to Angel left matters neatly ambiguous regarding
Buffy’s goal and the potential consequences. In the event, Buffy didn’t kill
Faith and offered herself to Angel instead. That scene was certainly the
most blatantly erotic use the show ever made of the “biting = sex”
metaphor. It was the concrete manifestation of Angel’s metaphorical dream
in The Prom of fire consuming Buffy, all the more meaningful after The
First told him in Amends “you will drink her”. We can wonder how it might
have played out if Faith had taken Buffy’s place.
Xander, of course, criticized Angel for jeopardizing Buffy’s life to save his
own. It wasn’t quite that simple – it rarely is when it comes to Xander’s
prejudices. Buffy’s willingness to sacrifice herself in order to save others is
an essential part of what makes her not just a successful Slayer but a great
one. Her action here was different in degree but not in kind from what she
does every single night. I also see a strong Christian resonance in the scene:
this is my blood you drink. And it saves you.
But just because Buffy offered doesn’t mean Angel had to “accept”. In a
way, this brings us back to the nature of Angel which I discussed at length
in Amends. It showed that Angel’s self-control is less certain and more at
risk than we might have thought from recent events. The ambiguity that
creates will be exploited when Angel walks off through the smoke to his
own show.
Trivia notes: (1) Lurconis (Band Candy) was a snake demon which ate
children, prefiguring the Mayor’s Ascension. If you revel in the small
details, the courier in Choices who brought the box of Gavrock wore
snakeskin boots and had a snake tattoo on his face. (2) Revelations
prefigured the plot points in which Faith tried to kill Angel and Buffy
fought her to save his life, just as we saw here. The fight between them
even featured crashing through glass to a patio, just as it did here. The
physical fight was a metaphor for the internal battle Buffy fought with her
dark side. (3) If you’re watching for the first time, the dream sequence was
no doubt cryptic. Keep it in mind – it’s also a prophecy and I think I can
safely say it’s the most important one in the entire series. (4) They made so
much noise blowing up the school that the city of Torrance (the site of the
high school we see in the show) wouldn’t let them come back. (5) Faith’s
line to Buffy just before they fight – “Give us a kiss” – is from Jaws. So is
Xander’s “we’re going to need a bigger boat.” (6) When the Mayor tells
Angel “someone’s been eating his spinach”, that’s a reference to the Popeye
cartoons. Popeye would get instantly strong after eating a can of spinach,
just as Angel instantly recovered by drinking Buffy. (7) The Mayor’s
speech actually expressed some of the themes of the show: “Journey's end.
And what is a journey? Is it just… distance traveled? Time spent? No. It's
what happens on the way, it’s the things that happen to you. At the end of
the journey you're not the same. Today is about change. Graduation doesn't
just mean your circumstances change, it means *you* do. You ascend… to
a higher level. Nothing will ever be the same.” (8) When Principal Snyder
was eaten, did you think back to his very first scene when he appeared for
the very first time in The Puppet Show: “My predecessor, Mr. Flutie, may
have gone in for all that touchy-feely relating nonsense, but he was eaten.”?
(9) When Buffy tauntingly addressed the SnakeMayor as “Dick”, I think we
can safely assume a double entendre. (10) As Buffy surveyed the wreckage
of the school, remember Willow’s suggestion to her in The Harvest for one
way to get kicked out of school: “Maybe you could blow something up.”
Yes, I think Joss intended that all along, if he got the chance. (11) Like
Earshot, GD2 was delayed because of Columbine. Set to air in May, it
eventually appeared on July 13, 1999. (12) In case you were wondering
about the production of Buffy episodes, Pop Matters interviewed Harry
Groener (the Mayor) and he had this to say:
PM: As a professional actor working with Joss Whedon as a professional
writer/director, what can you say you learned from Whedon while on the set
of Buffy?
HG: …What I learned about the business through him was interesting. He’s
so brilliant in his work—in his writing, his mind, and his imagination. You
think that everything in television is fairly controlled, and it is. Pretty much.
Things don’t go so crazy. Yet for the last two episodes [of the third season],
we didn’t have a script. We were given synopses at the end of the evening
about what they were going to film the next day. But no words, no script, no
anything. They just said, “Come on in, and when we have it, we’ll give it to
you.”
PM: Sounds a little scary to me! [Both laugh.]
HG: Yes, I’ve always had a script. There’s never been just a synopsis. You
go to work, you get ready to work. What Joss was doing was actually
writing it as we were traveling, getting there. And we’d wait. Finally, they’d
say, “We have the first scene.” You’d get the scene; then you’d go and
rehearse it. They’d light it. And while they were lighting it or rehearsing it,
Joss was over there in the corner on the set, literally over in the corner,
writing the next scene. You think, Well, that I’ve never seen before. You’re
amazed that that can happen, especially now when you have a room full of
people deciding on one little thing. That’s fascinating.
 Season 4
The Freshman
The production of a play, movie, or TV show isn’t the work of a solo artist
like a novel might be. It’s a group effort which involves, at least, the writers
(not all of them Joss); the actors; the directors (even on his own episodes,
Joss didn’t always direct); the Standards & Practices department (which
controls what you can and can’t say and do on the air); make-up artists;
costume designers; and musicians. The actions of all of these will affect
what we eventually see on the screen.
This will be all the more true when events in the real world make it
impossible to tell the story which the writers originally intended. We saw a
little bit of that at the end of S3, where the broadcasts of Earshot and
Graduation Day were delayed because of events at Columbine. While
nothing that dramatic affected S4, the things which did happen caused
probably an even greater impact on what eventually appeared on the screen.
I’ll talk about those outside factors when we get to the relevant episodes,
but I can’t do it until then because of spoilers.
You need to bear in mind that this is true when I discuss the opening
episodes of S4. It may be that those episodes don’t give us the usual clues
about the seasonal themes, or that those clues are less obvious because the
eventual story got modified from what the writers expected at the time they
wrote them. Worse yet, actually identifying the seasonal themes is itself
pretty difficult. At the time S4 first aired, many fans were disappointed
because the season seemed a little disjointed. That’s a fair criticism in a
way, but in retrospect it’s my impression that they’ve come to like the
season because so many of the episodes are individually good.
The Freshman is one of those good episodes. It shows us Buffy in the
common emotional state of college freshmen: nervous about moving on
from high school and unsure of themselves in the new environment. This
plays out in metaphor through the character of Eddie. He’s equally “lost”,
both physically when he and Buffy look at the map and emotionally
because of his insecurity. He even mentions that he keeps the novel Of
Human Bondage by his bed as a security blanket. I see this as a telling
detail, as I’ll describe below.
I hope I’ve convinced you by now that these seemingly random literary
references are not accidental at all. The novel Of Human Bondage
establishes the theme for this episode and one of the important themes for
the season. The message of the book is open to some interpretation, so I’m
going to quote a summary of the plot and interpretation from the Penguin
Books website (I’ve edited it to make it shorter):
“Of Human Bondage is a bildungsroman [a “coming of age novel”, like
BtVS itself] made unique by W. Somerset Maugham's minute dissection of
the limitations of individual freedom. The novel delineates the coming of
age of Philip Carey, an orphan with a clubfoot. Raised by his aunt and
uncle, a vicar, Philip grows up under the rules of their house and church. He
is tormented at school but excels academically and even aspires to be an
ordained minister. Just before graduation, he takes off for a year in
Heidelberg, where he is plunged into a world of ideas and succumbs to
religious skepticism. But he finds nothing to replace his religion or his
identity as an English gentleman. Attempting to fill in the blanks and follow
his true nature, Philip struggles by trial and error to establish a philosophy
for himself. The novel relates the weight of each failure, each
disappointment that Philip endures, in realistic detail. As a result, Maugham
convincingly shows a sensitive young man's battle to eliminate the
constraints imposed on him so that he may live freely, but at the conclusion
of the novel, it is unclear whether Philip ever attains the freedom he desires
—and whether Maugham's title, Of Human Bondage, suggests that
humanity's natural state of being is one of freedom or rather one of
perpetual restriction.
…Philip loses his faith as a result of the buildup of years of repression
imposed on him while living in his uncle's vicarage and while attending
King's School. In both places, Philip's pious caretakers often treat him with
indifferent cruelty. The reality that Philip experiences does not match the
professed ideals of his religion. … But just because Philip sheds one
unrealistic ideal does not guarantee that he won't fall for the next one. …
Philip frees himself from a religious upbringing that he realizes contradicts
his reality. But what does he replace it with?
Philip's preoccupation with freeing his spirit leads him to read philosophy
in order to find "some guide by which he could rule his conduct", but he
ultimately decides to become his own philosopher. …His failed attempts at
finding an occupation are not without their benefits. Once he enters medical
school to begin his third attempt at a vocation, Philip has pieced together a
philosophy, albeit an incomplete one. He doesn't believe in right or wrong,
yearns to discover the intention of the soul, and is still trying to define a
mode of conduct and the meaning of life. At this point in the novel, it is
important to wonder whether Philip's fragmentary philosophy affects how
he lives: whether it helps him free his inner nature or merely restricts it in a
different way….
The desire for happiness is, finally, the last ideal that Philip casts aside in
his pursuit of freedom. When he realizes that "his life had seemed horrible
when it was measured by its happiness" and that "it might be measured by
something else", he disowns his desire to be happy and in turn is happy. But
what is this something else by which life might be measured? Perhaps it is
his belief that the pattern one chooses to follow in life determines the
meaning of one's life. In the end, when he decides to marry Sally, Philip
chooses ‘the simplest pattern, that in which a man was born, worked,
married, had children, and died’. And with this decision to pursue the
mundane—a departure from the typical bildungsroman in which the
sensitive protagonist turns out to be an artist or otherwise realize his
potential—we are told, ‘It might be that to surrender to happiness was to
accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories’.”
Think about this story from the perspective of an existentialist. I don’t know
if Albert Camus or Jean Paul Sartre ever read the book, but if they
interpreted the ending in the standard way I suspect they would have been
horrified by it. It’s a story of the way Philip struggled against the world and
failed, in the sense that he sacrificed his hopes and dreams for “normality”.
If the existentialist project is to create your own authentic self, Philip’s story
is a bleak warning of the way the world at large blocks your efforts to do so,
forcing you to settle.
What makes one vulnerable to this fate is, in part, insecurity. If you come to
college insecure in your own identity, the influence of your professors and
classmates will force you onto the “normal” track. We can see what Joss
thinks of this in Eddie’s fate: he becomes a vampire. He’s frozen in his
insecurity, never able to grow up in the sense Joss considers meaningful,
which is to create one’s own authentic self.
This is the challenge Buffy must overcome in the episode. Her insecurity
about college has left her insecure in her identity as Slayer, which is to say
insecure about her path to becoming an integrated adult. Part of that
insecurity is her sense that she can’t call on her friends – her metaphorical
heart, mind, and spirit – in her struggle, yet she needs them:
Buffy: It's just... there was this vampire, and she took me down, and I just...
I don't know how to stop her.
Xander: Then where's the gang? Avengers assemble! Let's get it going!
Buffy: No, I don't want to bug them. I mean they're just starting school, and
they don't need this.
Xander: Ok Buff, what's the 'what' here?
Buffy: It's just, what if I can't cut it?
Xander: Can't cut what? Slaying?
Buffy: Slaying, everything.
Xander: Buffy, this is all about fear. It's understandable, but you can't let it
control you. 'Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to
anger.' No wait, hold on. 'Fear leads to hate. Hate leads to the dark side.'
Hold on, no, umm, 'First you get the women, then you get the money, then
you...' okay, can we forget that?
Buffy: Thanks for the Dadaist pep talk, I feel much more abstract now.
Xander: The point is, you're Buffy.
Buffy: Yeah, maybe in high school I was Buffy.
Xander: And now in college you're Betty Louise?
Buffy: Yeah, I'm Betty Louise Plotnick of East Cupcake, Illinois. Or I might
as well be.
Her initial defeat by Sunday, who represents the way insecurities prey on
us, illustrates that Buffy’s vulnerable to Eddie’s fate. In fact, Buffy’s
emotional state always governs her ability to exercise her Slayer powers.
The key moment is therefore Xander’s speech to her in the Bronze,
probably his second finest moment in the series after Prophecy Girl:
“Buffy, I've gone through some fairly dark times in my life, faced some
scary things, among them the kitchen at 'The Fabulous Ladies Night Club.'
Let me tell you something, when it's dark and I'm all alone and I'm scared
or freaked out or whatever, I always think, 'What would Buffy do?' You're
my hero. … Let's put this bitch in the ground!”
Her metaphorical heart restored her sense of confidence and then went off
and recruited her spirit. With them in support, and her metaphorical mind
following, Buffy’s able to face college confident in her own identity.
I’ll have more to say about Of Human Bondage and the issues it raises
when we get to Goodbye Iowa.
Now let me talk briefly about Giles. Any parent who has sent kids off to
college knows what Giles is feeling – that he needs to back off, to let Buffy
develop on her own. At the same time, he still wants to keep the role of
mentor which he’s had for the last 3 years. This tension between the two
roles will be a consistent theme going forward, just as it is for all parents
and kids in the struggle to create a new relationship as the kids become
adults.
Trivia notes: (1) Oz’s description of the campus as “a madhouse, a
madhouse” is from Planet of the Apes. This is the second time a season
opener used the phrase, the first being WSWB. Joss wrote both, so obviously
he liked the movie. (2) Buffy’s description of the library as big enough to
hold the Nuremberg rallies refers to Hitler’s infamous speeches to the Nazi
Party faithful in Nuremberg, Germany. (3) Willow asked Riley if they were
going to study operant conditioning. You know by now that I think that
these classroom topics are not accidental. (4) The stoner vamp is modeled
after the character Jeff Spicoli from the movie Fast Times at Ridgemont
High. (5) If you’re not watching AtS, the scene where Buffy picked up the
phone and no one was there mirrored a scene in the AtS episode City Of in
which Angel called her but said nothing. (6) Angie Hart and her band,
Splendid, previously appeared in IOHEFY. (7) Xander’s “Avenger’s
assemble” comes from Marvel Comics The Avengers. Joss is, of course, the
writer on the film version. (8) Xander’s “first you get the money…” comes
from the movie Scarface. (9) The Dadaists – “thanks for the Dadaist pep
talk” – were anti-war critics of modern culture who ridiculed the
meaninglessness of the modern world during and shortly after World War I.
(10) Xander’s “What would Buffy do?” is a play on the Christian “What
would Jesus do?”. You know you really want the T-shirt.
 Living Conditions
There’s an obvious life lesson in Living Conditions: don’t have the bad
judgment to be the college roommate of someone who grows up to be a
Hollywood writer.
We saw in The Freshman that one risk college presents on the road to
becoming an authentic adult is a failure of self-confidence. Living
Conditions shows us another source of risk, namely immaturity. Kathy may
seem sympathetic in her struggle against her father, but she’s a metaphor for
immaturity despite being 3000 years old. Age isn’t the same as maturity;
Kathy’s behavior was that of a child.
Kathy actually shares something in common with Eddie. He was insecure in
his own identity, which is why he kept his copy of Of Human Bondage with
him at all times. Similarly, Kathy can’t stay at college with her own identity
so she tries to steal Buffy’s: “Willow: Ok, so that was the evil twin, right?
'Cause she was bordering on Cordelia-esque. Giles: I concur she's not, uh,
herself….” “Willow: And Buffy's completely being not herself.”
Since issues of identity appeared in both of the first two episodes, the
question of one’s identity, including identity theft, is therefore an important
theme of the season.
I talked about Giles last episode so now I need to consider how Willow and
Xander fit into Buffy’s life after high school. Willow and Xander are
becoming adults too, and they’ll naturally start to develop more
independence of thought as they do. This means they won’t always agree
with Buffy, which we see here in their questioning of her judgment about
Kathy. Just as Giles’s new role will create tension, so will the paths of
Xander and Willow. They all need their own path, but Buffy needs them as
well – they are, remember, her metaphorical mind, heart, and spirit, and her
goal is to create an integrated self. That’s part of the challenge for S4.
Trivia notes: (1) Contrary to Xander, “Big Sky Country” is Montana, not
Nebraska. Since Kathy didn’t seem to know that, this was probably a clue
to the audience. (2) Oz’s concern about Buffy “hitting the red zone” comes
from the warning on the dashboard of cars that the engine is overheated or
being revved too hard. (3) Presumably Buffy sees Kathy as “the Titanic”
because Celine Dion, whose poster Kathy put up in The Freshman, sang the
music for the movie. Note that at the end, Kathy is sucked into a vortex
much like the Titanic sank. (3) When Xander described Buffy as “doing a
Linda Blair on us”, he was referring to the actress’s role in the movie The
Exorcist.
 The Harsh Light of Day
The Harsh Light of Day gives us a lovers’ triangle: three pairs of lovers (or
“lovers” in the case of Spike and Harmony). Each is contrasted with the
others, all three connected by their eventual unhappiness. Note that the
three women walking on campus at the end form a triangle.
Parker is tall and dark, like Angel. While he says he hates the idea of guys
who are dark and broody, he kind of is. These should have been flashing
warning signals for Buffy, but the real clue was in the “philosophy” he
expressed to Buffy right after the teaser: “Parker : I just wanted to say that it
[his father’s death, assuming that was true] was so sad cause there was well,
a lot of stuff that he didn't finish. It make me think about, you know, living
for now.” Note that Parker isn’t lying here, but he’s using the phrase in
exactly the opposite way Buffy takes it. He means it in a very shallow way,
a usage we’ve seen twice before: once in WTTH when Buffy told Willow to
“seize the moment because tomorrow you may be dead”; and in Surprise
when Willow told Buffy “carpe diem” [seize the day]. Both of those
previous instances turned out very badly, and we can see from Buffy’s
conversation with Willow at the end that the experience with Parker has
reopened Buffy’s insecurity about her relationships.
Parker told no actual lies, at least none that we know of. He simply made
statements which, in retrospect, could be interpreted 2 different ways and
let Buffy draw the wrong conclusion. He appeared to be one thing when he
was in fact something very different. Buffy, I think, at some level wanted to
show that she could move past Angel, so she let herself believe instead of
applying to Parker the same skepticism she showed with Kathy. As bojana
pointed out in a comment to the post on Living Conditions, the lyrics to
Cher’s song “Believe” might very well be seen as cluing us in to Buffy’s
attitude here:
Do you believe in life after love
I can feel something inside me say
I really don't think you're strong enough,
Now

What am I supposed to do
Sit around and wait for you
And I can't do that
There's no turning back
I need time to move on
I need love to feel strong…
The search for one’s perfect love is like the search for the Holy Grail – it’s
an unattained or unattainable goal. At the end of the episode, Buffy
arranged to send the Gem of Amara to Angel. He’s her Holy Grail, still. But
as Spike’s experience in the crypt showed, in a scene reminiscent of Indiana
Jones and the Last Crusade, actually identifying the Grail from competing
candidates is very hard. When Buffy slept with Parker we might say that
“she chose…poorly.”
So did Harmony, though not for same reason as Buffy. Unlike Parker, Spike
made no secret of his contempt for Harmony and he treated her much worse
than Parker treated Buffy. As a vampire, though, Harmony didn’t
understand what the Gem/Grail might be, so she didn’t even know what to
look for. Because she didn’t recognize the Grail, she gave it up to someone
who didn’t deserve it. I think that could be a metaphor there as well as a
double entendre.
The story is less clear with Anya, so we’ll say the jury is still out on her
choice. State of Siege added this in comments:
“I understand your reasons for not wanting to talk about Anya, I do think
that there is a way in which we can include her here without giving
anything away: all three women want something difficult and complicated,
and each allows herself to be deluded—by her given partner, by herself, or
both—into having sex as a easy, simple way to satisfy that desire. Buffy, as
you point out, wants to prove that she can move past Angel, so she takes
Parker at face value, refuses to see the slime dripping from each word he
says; Harmony, as Willow points out, always wanted a boyfriend—so much
so that she lied about having one in high school—and so she sleeps with
Spike and puts up with his cruelties in order to pretend she has one (she
may not know what love is, but she certainly feels the pain of his endless
jabs and rejections). And Anya, well, she wants to get over her desire for
Xander, so she sleeps with him, thinking once will do it. It doesn't—and no
matter what happens after, we can still say she was wrong about her first
assumption and feels wronged, in turn, when it does not immediately seem
that Xander shares her feelings—which is why she ends up in the Quad as
part of the triangle.”
Trivia notes: (1) The lyrics to the chorus of the Dingoes song we hear as the
episode opens pretty accurately describe Parker: “When I see your face/my
eyes just dilate /but I can't erase/that I want to violate/every bit and
everything and/every part of you.” His eyes weren’t the only thing dilating.
(2) In the big battle at the end of Graduation Day 2, there’s a scene of
Harmony getting bit by one of the Mayor’s vamps. We didn’t see her
turned, but obviously she was. (3) Buffy’s scar from where Angel bit her in
GD2 is likely a metaphorical emotional scar as well as a physical one. (4)
When Harmony asked Spike if she could make Antonio Banderas a
vampire, that was a reference to the movie Interview With The Vampire.
He’s married to Melanie Griffith, hence Spike’s response of “do Melanie
and the kids as well”. (5) Buffy woke up in bed alone after sex with Parker,
just as she did after sex with Angel in Surprise. You may be sensing a
pattern here. (6) Spike’s “I love syphilis more than you” gets my vote for
harshest putdown in the show. If you count AtS, though, it’s probably
second to “I wasn’t thinking about you when you were here”. (7) The album
Oz held up for Giles was “Loaded” by The Velvet Underground. Owning a
Velvet Underground album is evidence that Giles was once really hip. (8)
The story of the Gem of Amara continued on the AtS episode In the Dark.
 Fear, Itself
Fear, Itself may have the ending of a shaggy dog story, but it’s actually a
critical episode for the season. Structurally and thematically, this episode
identifies the most significant problem Buffy must solve in the climactic
episode – not the finale this year – and the solution to that problem.
I won’t spoil the season conclusion, nor what’s going to happen two
episodes from now, so what I want to do in this post is explore the fears of
Buffy, Willow, and Xander, something the show hasn’t done since
Nightmares in S1. I’ll talk about the way those fears interact with their
relationships to each other. Note that all the fears are on display even before
they enter the haunted frat house. I’ll give quotes from before and after they
enter the house to show what I mean.
Willow displays two fears: that she’s just Buffy’s “sidekick”; and that she
isn’t really any good at magic. What’s wrong with being a “sidekick”? Two
things, I think. First, the sidekick is generally there to magnify the hero’s
accomplishments, to make sure we all recognize the hero. Second, and
related, the sidekick isn’t an actor in her own right. Being the sidekick
means that you occupy an inferior position, one who just sets the stage for
the hero. As we’ve known since Nightmares, Willow fears that underneath
it all, she’s still just a badly dressed geek. If her role with Buffy is merely
subsidiary, that reinforces those fears.
Willow needs to be important in her own right. Magic is a critical part of
her identity, or at least she wants it to be. That’s her chance to be a real
contributor (as computer hacking was in S1). Just after the teaser we get
this dialogue expressing her uncertainty:
Willow: “I’ve got the basics down – levitation, charms, glamours. I just
feel like I’ve plateaued wicca-wise.”
Buffy: “What’s the next level?”
Willow: “Transmutation, conjuring, bringing forth something from
nothing. Gets pretty close to the primal forces. A little scary.”
Buffy: “Well, no one’s pushing. You know, if it’s too much don’t do it.”
Willow: “Don’t do it? What kind of encouragement is *that*?”
Buffy: “This is an ‘encouragement’ talk? I thought it was ‘share my
pain’.”
Willow: “I don’t know. Then again, what is college for if not
experimenting? You know, maybe I can handle it. I’ll know when I’ve
reached my limit.”
Then, when they do get to the frat house, both of Willow’s fears get tied
together in one scene. Not only does she feel that Buffy is giving orders, but
Buffy doubts Willow’s ability at magic. Buffy, by the way, is right about
Willow and magic, but that probably just makes it more painful to hear
rather than less:
Willow: “Being the Slayer doesn’t automatically make you boss. You’re as
lost as the rest of us.”
Oz: “What are we talking about?”
Willow: “It’s a simple incantation, a guiding spell for travelers when they
become lost or disoriented.”
Buffy: “And how does it work?”
Willow: “It conjures an emissary from the beyond that – lights the way.”
Buffy: “Conjuring. Will, let’s be realistic here. Okay, your basic spells are
usually only fifty-fifty.”
Xander fears that he’s invisible to the group and to Buffy in particular.
Xander isn’t in college, he isn’t employed, and he feels himself inferior to
those who are:
Xander: “There is a party?”
Willow: “We didn’t tell you?”
Xander: “No, it’s cool. You guys got your little college thing. I’m fine. I
mean, I got better things to do than tag along to some fraternity.”
***
Anya: “I don’t understand.”
Xander: “Well, every October 31st, we mortals dress up in masks...”
Anya: “No, no, I understand that inane ritual. It’s those people. You
continue to associate with them though you share little in common.”
Xander: “What are you talking about?”
Anya: “I mean they go to college, you don’t. They no longer live at home,
- you do.”
Xander: “Oh, hey, those things... The bonds of true friendship transcend...
Could we just change the subject?”
Again, the scene in the haunted house merely reiterates what Xander
already said:
“Buffy looks around: “Xander?”
Xander: “Funny how you still haven’t lost your sense of inappropriate
humor.”
Buffy turns around looking right through him: “Xander, where did you
go?”
Xander: “Buffy, knock it off. Skit’s over. I’m right here.”
Buffy stomps off down the hall: “This is so *typical* of him!”
***
Cut to Xander walking up to a mirror: “There I am. I didn’t go anywhere.
Great. Now I just have to live with the fact that no one else can see me.”
Buffy's fear is fear of abandonment, i.e., that every time she cares about
someone she'll be deserted. Worse than even this is her fear that the reason
people abandon her is that there’s something wrong with her, that it’s her
fault. That was the fear about her father we saw expressed in Nightmares,
and her experience with Angel and Parker reinforces that:
Joyce: “…Your father loved spending time with you.”
Buffy looks down: “Not enough, I guess.”
Joyce: “Buffy.”
Buffy: “Oh, that just paved right over memory lane, huh?”
Joyce: “Our divorce had nothing to do with you.”
Buffy swallows: “I don’t know. – I’m starting to feel like there is a pattern
here. – Open your heart to someone, and he bails on you. Maybe it’s easier
to just not let anyone in.”
Then again in the frat house, where it’s phrased generally enough to include
not just the men in her life but her friends too:
Hollow voice: “All alone.”
Buffy pushes herself up: “Who said - that?”
The guy that fell down the steps walks around a corner with his head tilted
at an unnatural angle.
Guy: “They all ran away from you. They always will. Open your heart to
someone and …”
Their individual fears and insecurities isolate them from each other. Start
with Buffy’s fear that her friends will desert her. If Xander feels ignored by
Buffy, then of course he’s less likely to stick around. Similarly, if it’s true
that Willow is only there to magnify Buffy’s accomplishments by the
contrast to her own weakness, then she’d have no reason to stay. And if
Xander’s fears and Willow’s fears were true, then it would also be true in
some sense that it is Buffy’s fault that they leave.
Returning to the metaphor I’ve used before, Buffy needs to listen to her
heart. She needs to give recognition to the importance of her spirit. They
are, after all, part of her.
In the episode the friends reunite because the demon who’s feeding off their
fears needs those fears to manifest itself. The reveal of the manifestation of
their fears allows them to recognize the insignificance of those fears.
Trivia notes: (1) The title of Fear, Itself comes from President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt’s famous line “we have nothing to fear except fear itself.”
(2) This is the first episode to use the word “wicca”, but it will become
common from now on. It’s mostly used as a synonym for “witch”, though
that’s not quite right as you can see from the link. (3) Oz’s description of
Buffy as suffering from “post-Parker depression” seems like a play on post-
partum depression. (4) When Giles said “It’s alive!” in reference to his
Frankenstein puppet, that was a reference to the 1931 movie Frankenstein.
Chaz repeats the phrase when they find him in the closet of the haunted frat
house. (5) Oz’s “mi casio es su casio” is a bi-lingual pun. In English, the
phrase “my house is your house” is said by the owner to make a guest feel
welcome. Oz translated the phrase into Spanish, where the word “house” is
“casa”: “mi casa es su casa”. Casio is the name of the speaker Oz brought
over. (6) When Buffy said she was “just the beard” for her father to get
candy, she was using gay slang to say that she was just the cover her father
used. A “beard” in slang is (originally) a man used by a lesbian who is
concealing her sexual orientation, or vice versa. (7) We never saw Buffy tell
her mother that Ted was a robot, but apparently she did. (8) In addition to
being correct about the phrase “fifth wheel”, Xander is also right in that
there will be 5 people in the group once Anya gets there. (9) Abbott and
Costello were an old comedy team. One of their movies was “Abbot and
Costello Meet Frankenstein”. (10) Willow freaked at the tarantula on her
shoulder because she’s always been afraid of spiders. From Nightmares:
“Xander: Oh, the spiders! Willow's been kind of, um, what's the word I'm
looking for? Insane about what happened yesterday. Willow: I don't like
spiders, okay? Their furry bodies, and their sticky webs, and what do they
need all those legs for anyway? I'll tell you: for crawling across your face in
the middle of the night. Ewww! How do they not ruffle you?” (11) Buffy’s
“size doesn’t matter” reference to Gachnar plays off of the advertising
campaign for the 1998 movie version of Godzilla. (12) Bunnies will
become a standing joke in the series.
 Beer Bad
There are worse episodes than Beer Bad, but not very many. If you ask a
random Buffy fan to name the worst episode in the series off the top of
his/her head, Beer Bad will come up pretty often. The problem is not that
the point is obscure, as was true of, say, IRYJ. To the contrary, the episode
beats us over the head with the message, even more than Buffy beat Parker.
Emotionally satisfying that may be for her, but less so for us. At least I can
discuss the point of the episode instead of stretching to find one as I did
with IRYJ or Go Fish.
Immediately after Buffy’s dream, the camera panned to a shot of Parker and
his next conquest-to-be chatting in Prof. Walsh’s class. We then hear Prof.
Walsh tell us about the id, the ego, and the superego:
“These are the things we want. Simple things. Comfort, sex, shelter, food.
We always want them and we want them all the time. The id doesn't learn, it
doesn't grow up. It has the ego telling it what it can't have and it has the
superego telling it what it should want. But the id works solely out of the
pleasure principle. It wants.”
This all sounds very familiar from S2, and it arises in the same context: sex.
The transition from the shot of Parker to the lecture hammers home the
point that Prof. Walsh is talking about Parker here. He’s a slave to his id;
sex is all he wants. “Willow: This isn't sharing. This isn't connecting. It's the
pleasure principle. That's right, I got your number id boy. The only thing
you're thinking about is how long till you can jump on my bones.”
The episode’s metaphors, heavy-handed though they may be, reinforce the
message. Beer, even if not enchanted, strips us of our inhibitions, that is,
our superegos. The “cavemen” represent the stereotypical instance of that.
They’re pure id. CaveBuffy wants too, but not sex. She wants revenge on
Parker. She gets that metaphorically in three different ways: when her
metaphorical spirit exposes the shallowness of his pick-up routine,
revealing his true self; when the metaphorical ids (the cavemen) hit him
over the head immediately after Willow finishes; and when she herself hits
him over the head at the end.
You might have sensed another case of id on display. We’ll see that play out
next episode.
The episode also fits in with the seasonal theme of identity theft. The beer
robbed Buffy and the other students of their true selves. This was similar to
the identity theft we saw in Living Conditions, in that something essential
was taken away. Keep in mind that there may be other ways to steal
someone’s identity.
Trivia notes: (1) Xander may have seen the movie Cocktail, but perhaps
that wasn’t the best model. (2) A fugue state (Xander’s description of
Buffy’s mopey sadness) basically involves temporarily forgetting who you
are. (3) The arrogant guy who wanted to conduct sociometry was looking to
use numbers to describe social relationships. The scene is an homage to the
movie Good Will Hunting. (4) In case you missed it, there was a very brief
scene with Veruca in Living Conditions. Veruca’s band, Shy, was actually
the band T.H.C. Sarah Folkman was the lead singer – Paige Moss, who
played Veruca, didn’t sing. (5) Thomas Aquinas was probably the most
important Catholic theologian. He lived in the 1200s. His theory of divine
providence – what one of the students wanted to discuss – states that God
actively supervises Creation rather than just creating the universe and then
sitting back and watching it. (6) Buffy was watching Luscious Jackson on
MTV when Willow thought she’d had group sex. (7) Xander described the
boys affected by the beer as “questing for fire”. Quest For Fire was a 1981
film about the discovery of fire by archaic humans. (8) Xander described
Giles as “Mr. ‘I spent the sixties in an electric Kool-Aid funky Satan
groove’”. The “electric Kool-Aid” refers to the book The Electric Kool-Aid
Acid Test.
 Wild At Heart
I love Wild at Heart, but many viewers (including me) were very
disappointed that Oz left. There was no secret about it at the time so it’s not
a spoiler now to say that his departure was caused by an outside event. Seth
Green had a movie offer which he badly wanted to take, so they let him
leave. By all the public statements, the departure was amicable and BtVS
would have been happy to have him back. The fact that he left was one of
the factors I had in mind in my comments on S4 in the post on The
Freshman, and Oz leaving will have extremely important and long-lasting
ramifications both on the show and perhaps for the show.
One consequence of Seth Green’s departure is that Wild at Heart is unique
among the episodes. It’s not really about Buffy in any meaningful way,
though it does fit in with the season themes as I’ll discuss below. Joss: “I
remember we spent a long time trying to figure out - we broke the story
[meaning outlined the episode], we had it down, but we were like, we don't
know what the Buffy is. … I remember when we broke it we were just like,
‘We've gotta figure out how Buffy's agenda completely relates to this one.’
This is the first time we went, you know what? We don't, actually. It's like,
Buffy can be strong and interesting in the episode and save the day, but this
one is about Oz and Willow, straight up, and let's deal with that.”
The events of Wild at Heart were foreshadowed in Fear, Itself. I
deliberately held off discussion of Oz’s fears, and one of Willow’s, for that
reason, but I’ll review them now. Both of their fears in Fear, Itself come
true here. Oz feared that he would lose any control over the werewolf part
of himself, hurting Willow in the process: Oz: “…I won’t lie about the fact
that I worry? I know what it’s like to have power you can’t control. I
mean, every time I start to wolf out, I touch something –deep – dark. It’s
not fun.” Later, in the house, that fear manifested itself when he began to
wolf out even with no full moon. After Oz clawed her and ran away,
Willow feared that he’d leave her: “Oz! – Oz, don’t leave me!”
Similarly, the events of Beer Bad set the stage for Wild at Heart. In my post
on Beer Bad I quoted Prof. Walsh’s words about the id, and we were
introduced to Veruca not long afterward when Oz and Willow sat in the
Bronze listening to her. The werewolf is a metaphor for the unrestrained id
(see my post on Phases), and we got strong hints of that in Oz’s reaction to
Veruca’s singing both in that episode and in this one.
Oz is in denial that his true self includes his id. We see this when he denies
to Willow that anything is amiss, and when he denies to Veruca that he’s
“really” a wolf:
“Veruca : Maybe. Or maybe you just don't wanna admit what happened to
you. Maybe you just wanna pretend like you're a regular guy. (She walks
over to him.)
Oz : Well, I am. I'm only a wolf 3 nights a month.
Veruca : Or you're a wolf all the time and this human face is just your
disguise. You ever think about that, Oz? …
Veruca : I can help you, Oz. You're scared. I was, too. But then I accepted it.
The animal, it's powerful, inside me all the time. Soon, you just start to feel
sorry for everybody else because they don't know what it's like to be as
alive as we are. As free.”
Veruca’s presence, and Oz’s reaction to her, bring him eventually to decide
that Veruca was right: “The wolf is inside me all the time, and I don't know
where that line is anymore between me and it.” Marti Noxon, who wrote
both episodes, compared Wild at Heart to Beauty and the Beasts, saying
"What is our basic animal nature? How much of that should be fulfilled and
how much do we have to resist and say no, that's a dangerous impulse?
Many of the problems we have between men and women are based on the
fact that we deny a lot of these impulses and blame other things. The
question of how much of me is animal and how much is man and how to
control that is a big reason why Willow and Oz end up breaking up.”
Oz’s concern about who he really is fits in perfectly with the theme of
personal identity which, as we’ve seen, is one of the principal themes of S4.
A few other points worthy of note. First, Xander got it totally wrong in his
advice to Willow:
“Xander : Well... Have you asked Oz about it?
Willow : Well, I thought about it, but then he'll think I'm all jealous and
worry.
Xander : But you are. And odds are, he feels it. I'll bet that's all there is to
the weird you're feeling. You guys should talk things out, Will. You'll both
feel better.”
The reason he got it so wrong, I think, is that this is not a standard case of
romance gone wrong. It’s a more basic question of Oz’s fundamental
identity. Xander, in fairness, couldn’t have expected that so he gave the
standard advice: talk about it. The problem was that he suggested that
Willow’s failure to talk to Oz had caused Oz to react to that failure. This
was true, up to a point – it contributed to the awkward lunch, and Willow
knew it. However, it wasn’t the real problem; that was internal to Oz and
unrelated to Willow. Thus, Xander’s advice, well-intentioned though it was,
made things more painful for Willow when she caught Oz with Veruca the
next day because it would have left her with the sense that it may have been
partly her fault.
Second, Oz’s behavior in bringing Veruca into the cage was obviously
wrong, though he probably got the idea from Buffy. She told him that if she
found the other wolf, he “might have a roommate in there”. She, of course,
was concerned only about safety and had no reason to think that something
else might be going on. Oz did, and both Veruca (before) and Willow (after)
called him on it. Even more than the sex, Oz was sharing a fundamental
part of his nature with Veruca, something Willow couldn’t touch. As Marti
put it on the DVD commentary, “And the wolf, to me, is the part that both
men and women have that can destroy relationships even when people love
each other.”
Third, Willow’s uncompleted spell was emotionally understandable but just
as impossible to justify as Oz’s behavior. The difference is, Willow stopped
herself. Unfortunately, by the time she was ready to talk to him about it, Oz
had come to his realization and had made the decision to leave. We can
even understand what Oz was going through. Seth Green (speaking to Joss
and Marti): “my favorite thing about working on the show was just how
well you guys handled every character ‘cause no one was just a bad guy,
even the people who were doing the horrible things, like Spike. Everybody
had a reason. Everybody had their own emotional agenda that was no - it
was undeniably valid. You could really understand everybody's point of
view, and it made the audience unable to choose sides. And that was my
favorite thing about this episode was that - even though Oz is the bad guy,
doing the bad things and being the ill character, it's like you understand
where he's coming from, and you can see why he thinks leaving is the right
thing and how he feels, like he's protecting Willow in a way. And you can
see the selfishness, but you can understand from everybody's point of view
why things happen the way they do.”
But Willow never got the catharsis when she dropped the spell and then Oz
left without her having any say in it.
William B added a good point about Willow’s magic use: “Willow also
nearly does the spell because it's part of Willow's character at this point in
the series to go closer to that edge. And she is devastated by the idea that, in
her manifest goodness and wholesomeness, she is cut off from whatever
animal instincts that attract Oz and Veruca. It's another motivation to keep
exploring the dark arts, as protection from this sort of thing happening.”
So, what’s up with those commando guys? We’ve seen them several times
now, but they remain mysterious. Having them completely undercut Spike’s
(over)dramatic monologue in the teaser just whets the appetite, as does
Buffy’s collision with one on her way back to rescue Willow. We’re about
to find out.
Trivia notes: (1) Oz mentions having seen Giles’s album collection, which
refers back to to The Harsh Light of Day when Oz noticed his Velvet
Underground album. (2) Buffy described Veruca as “quell Fiona”, referring
to singer Fiona Apple. (3) It pains me no end to include this as trivia, but
Oz’s reference to the “extreme Jerry Garcia look” requires me to note that
Jerry Garcia was the lead singer for The Grateful Dead. (4) Willow’s
mention of the wicca group meeting sets up a very important plot point later
in the season which is directly a consequence of Oz’s departure. (5) The
game show Giles was watching on TV asked about the treaty which ended
the Thirty Years War. Giles’s answer – the Peace of Westphalia (1648) –
was, of course, correct. (6) Veruca scornfully called Oz’s cage a “Habitrail”,
which is the set of tubes and “houses” used to create more interesting
environments for a hamster or mouse. (7) Barabbas was a robber who was
freed instead of Jesus during Passover (h/t Isaac P.). Willow called on
Barabbas as part of her incomplete spell. (8) Willow also called on “the
Saracen queen”. “Saracen” was the Roman word for the Arabs. There are
several “Saracen queens” in history and literature, so it’s hard to say which
one was meant. (9) It’s pretty much true: “Joss: Well, it's also a rule on
Buffy: If anybody ever has sex, the person that they - the reason they
shouldn't be having sex will walk into the room.”
 The Initiative
The Initiative is the seventh episode of S4, and by now we know that the
seventh episode is a very important one. The previous 3 such episodes were
Angel, Lie to Me, and Revelations. Each of those addressed the most
important issues of their respective seasons, so we should be on the alert for
something of equal significance here.
The most important line of dialogue in The Initiative occurs near the end.
Riley told Prof. Walsh that “The implant works. Hostile 17 can't harm any
living creature, in any way, without intense neurological pain.” There’s a
metaphor here which it’s critical to understand in order to follow what’s
going on with Spike and with the Initiative itself. Writer Doug Petrie tells
us in a phrase: “we 'Clockwork Oranged' Spike”.
A Clockwork Orange is one of the most important novels of the 20th
Century (and a fine movie by Stanley Kubrick, even if the book’s author,
Anthony Burgess, hated it) and lots of people read it in high school or
college. If you haven’t read it, I didn’t say that to make anyone feel bad,
I’m just noting why the writers used it here. I’ll summarize the plot because
it’s very important to understand it. For reasons I don’t need to go into now,
but will later, there are two versions of the novel, one published in England
(the original) and one in America. I’m giving you the American version,
again for reasons I won’t go into now but will later.
The short version is that Alex is a teenage sociopath who loves brutal
violence and engages in it whenever he gets the opportunity. After a series
of horrific rapes and murders, he’s arrested for murder and taken to prison.
There the prison authorities force him to undergo a form of behavior
modification therapy in which he’s conditioned to be nauseated by violence.
The prison chaplain accuses the authorities of stripping Alex of his free
will, but the authorities continue with the treatment anyway. After a while
they consider him “cured” and release him. He’s helpless when released
because he can’t fight back when anyone abuses him, and he has lots of
enemies who proceed to do just that. Eventually his conditioning wears off
and he begins the cycle of violence again.
So, the idea with Spike is that now he’s been given an “implant” (a chip, as
we’ll soon learn) and can’t harm anyone without suffering “intense
neurological pain”. This is a form of operant conditioning, the topic Willow
asked Riley if Prof. Walsh would cover in The Freshman. I hope the
comparisons to Alex are pretty obvious at this point, and the question is
what will be the consequence of this behavior modification “therapy”.
Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange to explore the moral issues involved in
behavior modification, which he strongly opposed. The fact that the
Initiative is engaged in behavioral modification therefore might be a clue
that it’s not a force for good.
Wait a minute, though. There’s a serious difference between behavioral
modification on human beings (even one as depraved as Alex) and
behavioral modification on a vampire. Whether vampires actually have free
will is iffy. Because they lack a soul, they don’t really understand all the
ramifications of their actions. This makes them fundamentally evil in a way
that most humans (maybe all humans) are not.
Before I go further into that discussion, though, there’s another, related
metaphor going on here as well. The Initiative got its inspiration from the
English TV show The Prisoner. If you’ve never seen it, writer Doug Petrie
describes it as a “very creepy, very existential” show. The plot involves a
former secret service man who is held captive and referred to only as
“Number 6” (hence the references in the episode to Spike as “Hostile 17”).
Wikipedia describes the show as featuring “themes includ[ing] … identity
theft, mind control, … and various forms of social indoctrination. …. A
major theme of the show is individualism versus collectivism.”
These issues are very similar to those raised by A Clockwork Orange.
Alex’s behavior modification was seen by the chaplain as a form of identity
theft. In Living Conditions and Beer Bad we saw identity theft take the form
of depriving someone of an essential part of their character (either the soul
or the superego). The prison officials took the opposite approach in Alex’s
case, because they added a conditioned reflex. Either way, the original
person has been changed into something different.
Other themes from The Prisoner also appeared in A Clockwork Orange.
The mind control theme is obvious in both. The behavior modification
naturally served as a form of social indoctrination for Alex, and that brings
me to the next point.
Now let me throw in yet a third related theme from the philosophical
tradition. The Initiative as we see it is what’s called a panopticon (h/t
manwitch). That’s a combination of two Greek words meaning “sees all”.
The concept and the term were invented by the English utilitarian
philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the late 1700s. Bentham’s basic idea was
that a prison should be constructed so that the prisoners could be watched at
all times by a watchman who remained unseen. Before Bentham, they really
didn’t have prisons in the sense of a long-term place to hold criminals after
conviction of a crime. Most crimes were punished physically, either by
execution (all felonies were, by definition, death penalty cases) or by
methods such as whipping or the stocks for misdemeanors. Prisons existed
to hold the accused prior to trial, not to punish them afterwards.
Bentham was one of many reformers who wanted to move away from this
system, particularly the number of executions. In his view, the prisoners
could be reformed – made into proper subjects of the King – if held in the
proper sort of prison. In Bentham’s view, the prisoners could never
misbehave because they were always under observation and the authorities
could intervene to prevent or punish misbehavior. (Those who’ve seen
Joss’s show Dollhouse may recognize the concept from that show.) This
would eventually train them to behave properly. The connection to the
behavior modification strategy of A Clockwork Orange should be obvious.
This is where The Initiative gets very clever indeed. Spike’s chip acts as an
internal panopticon (h/t manwitch). It’s constantly monitoring his behavior,
preventing him from ever harming another living creature. Extrapolating
backward, we could say much the same for Alex’s behavioral conditioning
in A Clockwork Orange.
Is this a good thing? Well, on the one hand an extremely dangerous vampire
is now controlled and can’t harm people any more. That seems like a pretty
big factor on the plus side. On the other hand, the chip could be seen to
diminish Spike’s essential nature in some way; we could easily say that the
chip has robbed Spike of his identity. It deprives him of the power of
choice, forcing him to be “normal” (well, not really normal, but you get the
idea). The chaplain at the prison objected to the modification of Alex, a
pretty close real world comparison to Spike, considering it as a violation of
something very basic to human beings. Then again, Spike’s not human.
I’ll give you one possible clue to Joss’s attitude by quoting Doug Petrie:
“Also we had a big argument - not really an argument, but a discussion -
about how heroic Spike should be. And I was dead wrong, because I was
saying Spike was going to escape from [the Initiative] later in the episode,
and I thought, "Well, this is hard to do because it makes him seem heroic."
And Jane Espenson at the time was saying "No, no, he should seem heroic!"
and I was like, "No, Spike's the villain, he shouldn't seem heroic." And Joss
Whedon came in and said "Newsflash: he's heroic in this scene. He's
gigantically heroic. He's James Bond escaping from Blofeld."
Infer from this what you will. Before you jump to any conclusions, I’ll add
that there are multiple ways to interpret Joss’s instruction here, one being
that Spike’s escape foreshadows events later in the season. Which it does.
I raise these issues not to decide them, but to think about; I’ll have much
more to say about the idea of the panopticon when we get to Goodbye Iowa.
In my view, Joss is taking these three themes – identity, mind control, and
social indoctrination – from A Clockwork Orange, The Prisoner, and
Bentham, and is using them to raise basic questions about human identity
and the extent to which we should be able to construct our own identity as
part of our existential project. Such questions are closely related to Buffy’s
journey in S4, as I’ll explain in my post on Goodbye Iowa.
Speaking of season themes…. I’m going to let Doug Petrie explain one of
the seasonal themes at this point: “We're also trying to point out this guy
[the commando] is just a guy. It's not part of Buffy's world. She turns down
the assignment of going to look for this guy because it's not supernatural.
And that really sets up the whole season; these guys are just human beings
delving in the supernatural world. And that's not part of Buffy's world and
not part of Buffy's responsibility. And that's the tension throughout the
season…. Season 4 is all about Science versus Magic.”
As I interpret this, the words “science” and “magic” stand more generally
for things coded masculine and feminine. Thus, “science” is rational, hard-
headed, military. In contrast, “magic” is natural, organic, mysterious. Please
don’t confuse these characteristics with individual persons. A woman can
have “scientific” or “masculine” qualities, just as a man can have “magic”
or “feminine” ones; we all tend have some of each. It will help you keep the
ideas straight if you think of the traditional stereotypes of these qualities
and how they were associated with gender. (In addition, “magic” will be
used metaphorically in another, related way in S4 and S5 which I can’t
discuss yet because of spoilers.)
If you recall, I mentioned in my post on WTTH/The Harvest that the very
first thing we see on the show is Darla and the boy breaking into the science
room at the high school. I suggested that there was a metaphor there,
namely the intrusion of the bewitched world into our rational, scientific one.
Season 4 is, in part, an expansion of that.
Now let’s move on to the obvious possible romance. Viewers watching the
first time through weren’t entirely sure, until now, that Riley was being set
up for Buffy. A lot of his early interaction came with Willow, and it was
plausible to think that they might be a couple after Oz left. This episode
negates that possibility.
Riley seems quite normal, and we’re obviously supposed to like him after
he punched out Parker and was so thoughtful to Willow at the party. At the
same time, though, he’s involved with the Initiative and, depending on your
view of the conditioning and the experiments, that may be an issue.
In The Freshman, Buffy told Willow that “Giles said I have to be secret-
identity gal again.” Now we learn that Riley has a secret identity too. This
not-so-coincidental fact suits the seasonal theme of creating one’s own
identity, and I’ll have more discussion as events develop. One question you
might ask now is whether it’s morally proper to “court” someone while
concealing a major part of who you are, and at what point there might be a
duty of disclosure. I’ll have more to say about Riley’s identity when we get
to Goodbye Iowa.
To this day I can’t quite figure out how the show managed to turn a
rape/murder metaphor into one of the funniest scenes in the whole series,
but it did. AH and JM are just fantastic.
Trivia notes: (1) Doug Petrie’s DVD commentary tells us that the big white
balloons we see in the Initiative are an allusion to The Prisoner. (2) The
vampire we see next door to Spike was the one from Sunday’s gang
captured at the end of The Freshman. (3) Only now that Oz has gone do we
hear his full name: when Willow mentions “Daniel Osborne” to Riley. (4)
The phrase “semper fi”, used by Xander, is an abbreviation of the Marine
Corps motto, Semper Fidelis (always faithful). (4) We learned that “Mr.
Gordo” was the name of Buffy’s stuffed pig in What’s My Line 1. The same
episode and Helpless gave us Buffy’s love of ice skating. (5) When Willow
got depressed at hearing the Dingoes song at the party, we got this dialogue:
“Riley: …Associations? Willow: Big. Riley: Bad?”. The obvious third word
would be “wolf”, as in Big Bad Wolf. It’s an allusion to Oz. (6) The dorm
list Spike uses to find Buffy’s room contains the real names of many of the
Buffy crew. (7) The scene where Riley and Forrest take the elevator to the
Initiative was taken from the movie True Lies. (8) Willow suggested that
Spike wanted her to do a spell because that’s what he wanted when she last
saw him in Lover’s Walk. (9) The fight scene in the corridor was an homage
to The Matrix.
 Pangs
Pangs gets my vote as the funniest episode in the whole series. “You made
a bear” cracks me up every time.
As Richardson and Rabb point out in The Existential Joss Whedon, p. 162,
the vampire’s comment to Buffy in the teaser – “Why don't you just go back
where you came from? Things were great before you came.” – gives us the
perspective of Hus. The fact that a vampire and Hus share this view may
suggest how we’re supposed to view Hus’s crusade. No matter how
sympathetic the original victims may be, the show will never justify
vengeance, as we saw in Innocence, as we see here, and as we’ll see in the
future. There’s probably a message in the “bickering and confusion” over
what to do with Hus: vengeance can’t be justified, but it’s nevertheless true
that Buffy faces serious moral dilemmas when she makes her decisions to
slay and those can’t be simplified.
Pangs continues the “science v. magic” theme which Doug Petrie
mentioned in his commentary on The Initiative. The anthropology
department delved into something without truly understanding the
circumstances. It wasn’t even aware that the buried mission still existed,
and perhaps not of the meaning that mission might have had to the
Chumash. The intrusion into the mystical without true understanding led to
tragic results, foreshadowing events later in the season.
We see multiple examples of pangs in the episode, both metaphorical and
literal. Hus suffers metaphorical pangs for the loss of his people. Angel
suffers metaphorical pangs of loss for Buffy, as does Willow for Oz. Spike
suffers literal pangs of hunger, and metaphorical pangs of loss for his
identity as a vampire. The old Spike would have taken his share of the meal
instead of staring wistfully through the window. He might even have driven
the others off and taken the kill for his own. His trip to the vet means he’s
no longer a member of the pack.
This brings us to Buffy. Spike wanted to participate in a feast with his
fellows, but couldn’t. He did end up at a feast, but of course didn’t really
belong there. Buffy desperately wants a family Thanksgiving, just like
Spike wanted to join in the vampire feeding fest. Why? In my view it’s for a
similar reason – she doesn’t feel as secure in her relationships.
“Everything’s different now,” she told Willow. Giles and Xander aren’t as
much in her life as they were before; her spirit (Willow) is still depressed at
the departure of Oz. We saw in Fear, Itself that she feared being left alone
and the dinner is her way of reassuring herself that she isn’t.
The bickering about what to do with Hus interferes with this goal and
foreshadows later episodes. Then, at the end, she finds out that her friends
kept a very important secret from her. “Wasn’t exactly the perfect
Thanksgiving.”
Trivia notes: (1) Buffy’s “we have a counterpoint?” refers to the segment on
the TV show 60 Minutes called Point/Counterpoint. (2) Willow’s
description of the buried mission as similar to the church the Master was in,
refers to The Harvest. (3) The Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh cut off his
own ear, which is why Willow mentioned him to Buffy. (3) The Chumash
were indigenous to the Santa Barbara area (the real life model for
Sunnydale) prior to the Spanish settlement. The Chumash still exist today,
though their population is small. (4) The visions Angel mentions were seen
by Doyle in the AtS episode Bachelor Party. (5) Riley’s home town of
Huxley, IA is a real town outside Ames, IA. No snark about Ames – I was
born there. (6) The artist Grant Wood was born in Iowa and grew up there.
His paintings look like, well, Iowa. (7) Riley’s quote about home being the
place they have to take you in is a line from “The Death of the Hired Man”
by the poet Robert Frost. (8) Buffy’s description of how she likes her
demons (and her men) – “Tied to the train tracks, soon my electro-ray will
destroy Metropolis" – references the Superman comics (most likely Lex
Luthor) and (probably) Snidely Whiplash. (9) As Spike said, Caesar didn’t
feel bad about any of his conquests. In Latin his famous saying is “veni,
vini, vici” (I came, I saw, I conquered). (10) For those of you who don’t live
in CA, casinos are illegal except on Indian reservations. The Chumash
operate one in Santa Ynez, CA, not too far from Santa Barbara. That’s why
Buffy told Hus, “uh, you can have casinos now.” (11) Spike’s “sorry about
that chief” was a line from the ‘60s TV comedy Get Smart and therefore a
pun. (12) Gentle Ben – what Xander called the bear – was a movie about a
bear of that name. (13) Does anyone not know the story of Custer? Well just
in case, he was an American general who incompetently got his entire
command killed in combat with the Sioux in 1876. Custer is infamous for
his enthusiasm for “removal” of the Native Americans.
 Something Blue
Something Blue is a fun episode, and it works very well to advance certain
plot points (Buffy/Riley) and to deal with Willow’s pain from Oz’s
departure. The problem I have in writing this post is that the episode has no
apparent relationship to any of the season themes. I’ll therefore deal with
the episode on its own.
I’ll start with Willow’s spell. Like most spells, the secret is in the exact (and
frequently ambiguous) wording. The key language is this: “Out of my
passions, a web be spun. From this eve forth, my will be done.” The spell
called for her will to be done “out of my passions”. That’s why only some
of her wishes came true – she had to say them when she was feeling
emotional.
I’ve seen criticism of Willow for casting spells on her friends without their
consent. She’s attempted such spells in the past (Lovers Walk, Wild at
Heart), though she’s never carried through on one. This spell was different.
At no time did she try to make Oz come back or punish him. The whole
point of the spell was to enable her to control her own emotions, that is, to
enforce her will upon herself. Her very first words after casting the spell
were “It is my will that my heart be healed. Now.” Only when she thought
the spell had failed and didn’t realize the impact of her words did she say
something which affected others.
For this reason, D’Hoffryn’s effort to recruit her as a vengeance demon was
never likely to succeed. Willow really didn’t intend to hurt her friends. She
wasn’t calling out for vengeance, she was expressing her pain.
There are a couple of ways to look at the issue whether Willow was
justified in her pain. One is to compare her reaction to that of Buffy over
Parker. It took Buffy 2 episodes to get her catharsis with Parker in Beer
Bad. It’s taken Willow 3. That doesn’t seem excessive given that Oz was
much more important to Willow than Parker was to Buffy. Indeed, the real
comparison should be Buffy/Angel, and as Buffy herself told Giles in The
Initiative, she ran away for months and went to hell. If we’re grading on a
curve, Willow comes out far ahead.
Because Buffy/Angel is the obvious comparison, I’m inclined to think that
Willow’s experience here was intended to serve as a message for Buffy as
well. She told Willow in the teaser,
Buffy: I don't know. I really like being around him [Riley], you know? And
I think he cares about me.. but.. I just.. feel like something's missing.

Willow: He's not making you miserable?

Buffy: Exactly. Riley seems so solid. Like he wouldn't cause me heartache.

Willow: (Fake worry) Get out. Get out while there's still time.

Buffy: I know.. I have to get away from that bad boy thing. There's no good
there. Seeing Angel in LA.. even for five minutes.. hello to the pain.”
Since the remainder of the episode deals with Willow’s pain, I think Buffy
is supposed to take the hint and get over Angel, just as Willow needs to
move past Oz. This is all the more true because Buffy has a potential
relationship with Riley; she can’t hold on to Angel at the same time.
That said, the two situations are different in ways that make it more
understandable for Willow to grieve for Oz than for Buffy to grieve for
Angel. Among other things, Angel has been gone for much longer already.
In addition, Willow has always been very supportive of Buffy in her grief,
as we’ve seen in, for example, The Prom and in S4 regarding Parker. Buffy
is more supportive in Something Blue than Xander is, but that’s a low bar.
Willow probably deserved a little better.
Buffy and Willow tend to cope in different ways. Buffy avoids other people,
while Willow tries to eliminate the pain. In my experience, people are
inclined to see their own coping strategy as “normal” and to be less
sympathetic to different strategies, even to see them as “wrong”.
Trivia notes: (1) The title comes from the old “folk wisdom” rhyme about
weddings: the bride should have “Something old, something new/Something
borrowed, something blue”. Here it has a double meaning, referring both to
Buffy’s “wedding” and to Willow’s mood (“feeling blue”). (2) The first
transition in the teaser contains very subtle foreshadowing of a spoiler
point. (3) Buffy saw Angel in the AtS episode I Will Remember You. (4)
The Zagat Guide which Spike mentioned is a restaurant guide for major
cities around the world. (5) Willow referred to Spike as “the undead English
patient”. The English Patient was a 1996 movie. (6) Spike’s favorite soap
opera was Passions. (7) Riley suggested taking Buffy for a ride “past the
vineyards”. The area just north of Santa Barbara has many vineyards. (8)
Xander’s description of Willow as a “brave little toaster” referred to the
movie The Brave Little Toaster. (9) Xander’s wistful mention of a “fuzzy
bikini” referred to the outfit worn by star Raquel Welch in the movie One
Million Years B.C. (10) The movie Steel Magnolias might make Willow
feel better in a “there but for the Grace of God” way – one character in the
movie died from the complications of diabetes. (11) Xander may think
they’re not all doomed to relationship badness, but remember the ending of
IRYJ: “Buffy: Let's face it: none of us are ever gonna have a happy, normal
relationship. Xander: We're doomed! Willow: Yeah!” (9) If you’re used to
the Centigrade scale for temperature, the blood Buffy handed Spike was 37
degrees (human normal). (10) Foreign viewers: American couples register
their preferences for gifts at department stores so that wedding guests have
some idea what to get them.
 Hush
Regardless of the success or not of the seasonal arc, S4 contains two of the
most innovative episodes of any TV series ever. Hush is the first of these.
It’s a very popular episode, regularly appearing on Top 10 lists and often
cited by fans as their favorite episode. There are so many great little details
and great scenes that I can’t even try to describe them all.
Worse yet, from my perspective, there’s been so much discussion about
Hush that it’s hard to come up with anything new to say. Note, though, that
it fits right in with the theme of identity I’ve been discussing, particularly
when it comes to Buffy and Riley, but also for Willow as I’ll explain later in
order to avoid spoilers now.
Joss explains in the DVD commentary that he had wanted to do a silent
episode for some time:
“I early on, wanted to do a show where people didn’t talk. As the show
went on, I became more and more obsessed with it because I felt as a
director I was degenerating. I was turning into a tv hack, over, over, two
shots. Shot of him, shot of her, they’re talking to each other, shot of them
both, and back….and I was beginning to fall into a shorthand. One thing
that I don’t love about tv is that a lot of it is what I refer to as radio with
faces. If you want to shoot a scene quickly, you put someone up against a
wall, have them say their lines, and boom, it’s done. From the start, one of
the important things about Buffy is that I wanted the show to work visually,
so much so that a Fox executive told me that I was putting too much visual
information on every page, that it was not going to be possible to shoot it.
…

By the fourth year, I had kind of fallen into the people are yakking without
really thinking about it, and I wanted to curtail that in myself. And so, on a
practical level, the idea of doing a show where everybody lost their voice
presented itself as a great big challenge, because I knew that I would
literally have to tell the story only visually. That would mean I could not
fall into tricks.”
What makes the episode brilliant is that Joss found a way to tie this need for
change to the actual plots and themes of the show. Hush is an extended
metaphor about communication. As I see them, The Gentlemen represent
the fairy tales we all tell ourselves and others. At the end of Buffy’s dream
in the teaser, Riley morphs into one of the Gentlemen. That’s telling her that
the Riley she sees in the dream is a fairy tale. The destruction of The
Gentlemen represents the destruction of the tales they’d been telling each
other. And they’re the creepiest villains in the entire series.
Prof. Walsh sets up the problem of communication in the teaser: “"So this is
what it is… talking about communication, talking about language... not the
same thing…. It's about the thoughts and experiences that we don't have a
word for.” We then see an example of non-verbal communication when
Buffy and Riley kiss. The fact that part of what we see takes place entirely
in Buffy’s imagination reinforces the point.
Buffy and Riley haven’t been and aren’t communicating, as we see at the
end of the teaser from the babblefest and missed kissage. More
significantly, they’re both hiding an important feature of their respective
identities, namely the fact that they are Clark Kenting their way through
life. This causes both of them to lie, an obvious form of non-
communication.
It may seem peculiar to raise a theme about communication in an episode
which has so little dialogue, but Joss explains it this way: “I had a general
notion that what it was about was the idea that when people stop talking
they start communicating. That language can interfere with communication,
because language limits. As soon as you say something you’ve eliminated
every other possibility of what you might be talking about. We also use
language to separate ourselves from other people, we also use language as
white noise, we also misuse it horribly. All of those things appear on the
show.”
Here’s one of the examples he gives (there are a great many more scattered
throughout the episode):
“(Spike on the couch, Xander and Anya arguing in Giles’ apartment)

For example, in this scene, I hope we learn that Xander can’t express
himself. He can’t tell Anya how he feels because he’s not that kind of guy,
and she of course says something inappropriate because her understanding
of language is very rudimentary and straightforward and like it’s her second
language, because it is! She’s ex-demon. Also the fact that everyone keeps
talking and Giles desperately wants them to shut up, he can’t take all the
noise. Later on in the Wicca scene, the misuse of the word empowering.
People just using language to block themselves from expressing
themselves.”
Buffy and Riley end up learning a lot about each other in this episode, much
more than they’ve learned in their previous interactions. They kiss for the
first time, demonstrating that they care about each other (somewhat less
aggressively than Xander and Anya). They each learn that the other has a
secret identity, not from saying it but from seeing it. Ironically, they sit
awkwardly silent at the end because their failure to talk has led them to a
situation in which explaining it all – their relationship, their identities, how
their identity might affect their relationship – is awkward now that words
have become necessary again.
Other characters learn about themselves and about each other during the
episode as well. Anya learns that Xander really does care about her; maybe
Xander learned that about himself too (see Joss’s comment above). Olivia
learned some possibly uncomfortable truths about Giles. And Willow
learned something about being a real witch. I’ll have much more to say
about Willow in the future, and how her arc in S4 fits in with the seasonal
theme of identity, but I’ll leave it there for now so as not to spoil anyone
(unlikely on this point, I suspect, but an excess of caution can’t hurt).
Trivia notes: (1) Andy Hallet, who later played Lorne on AtS, was in the
classroom audience for the teaser. (2) “Fortune favors the brave” is a line
from the Aeneid. (3) “Blessed be” is a greeting or farewell for Wiccas.
That’s why Willow described the wicca group as a bunch of “wanna-
blessed-bes”. (4) Spike’s gesture to Xander – holding up two fingers, palm
facing Spike – is the British equivalent of the American middle finger. (5)
The prayer group meeting had sign reading “Revelations 15:1”, which reads
(King James Version): “And I saw another sign in heaven, great and
marvellous, seven angels having the seven last plagues; for in them is filled
up the wrath of God.” (6) The music Giles played during his “lecture” was
the “Danse Macabre” by the French composer Camille Saint-Saens. (7) The
“hips” joke was SMG’s idea. (8) The little club Riley drew out of his boot is
a telescoping baton made by ASP, Inc. (9) I particularly liked Myles
McNutt’s review of this episode, so I’m reproducing part of it here:

“I do certainly wish that I could go back in time and experience this with
everyone else at the turn of the century. More than any other episode of
Buffy so far, I wish that I could have been there to write a review and to
analyze the myriad of ways in which this is easily the most well-executed
hour of television Buffy has produced to this point. While other episodes
have been more emotionally resonant or explosive, no other episode has felt
this expertly and ingeniously crafted. Compelling both as a standalone piece
of entertainment and as an advancement of the season’s story arcs, “Hush”
didn’t leave me speechless so much as it made me wish that I could go back
to the turn of the century and be part of the initial response to what is
rightfully heralded as one of the series’ finest moments….
There’s a moment after the silence ends where Giles and Olivia discuss
how, for the latter, witchcraft has finally become real, Giles’ stories
becoming more than just fairy tales. This isn’t news for the viewers, who
have seen numerous things they presumed to be unreal come to life within
the series, but this is the most potent example of the series’ reality being
subsumed by such an insurrection. Rather than interrupting storylines,
disrupting the logical progression of things, “Hush” actually brings each
character’s ongoing lives into the Gentlemen’s terrifying plot, using it add
complexity to the season’s storylines that wasn’t there before. I don’t yet
know how that turns out (I stopped after “Hush” to write this review
without moving onto “Doomed”), but that’s part of the fun of the way this
episode was initially scheduled: coming right before the Christmas break, I
imagine “Hush” would have had plenty of time to settle in viewers’ minds
by the time the show returned in January. And the episode isn’t just sitting
there because of the stunning depiction of the Gentlemen or the novelty of a
silent episode: it sits there because of the meaning it created for the
characters, and the ways in which the episode takes the series’ existing
structures and executes them to a level that it hadn’t achieved previously.”
[Link]
buffy-the-vampire-slayer/
Proving that good analysis of BtVS can appear in seemingly unlikely
places, here’s an excellent point I’d never seen before which appeared on a
political blog:

“As noted above, the only time Whedon’s not tracking [camera shots] is
when he’s tightly framing faces. That technique makes sense in an episode
in which all the information about the characters’ respective mental states is
going to be non-verbal. In his excellent post on non-verbal facial cues in
The Social Network, David Bordwell argues that the “intensified continuity”
in modern cinema requires actors to “be maestros of their facial muscles
and eye movements,” and though “Hush” is an episode of a television show
and not a film, the same applies here.
Because even shows like Buffy prefer some sort of realistic acting, this
almost qualifies as over-doing it: this is intensified continuity intensified,
but it remains naturalistic in the hushed context of the episode. The only
way the characters can communicate is to over-act. Looking concerned no
longer communicates being worried unless, as per the last frame above, that
concern is exaggerated. (I could demonstrate that this dynamic is operative
when Xander and Spike are conversing or when Riley’s trying to enter the
Initiative, but in the interest of space and bandwidth, just take my word for
it.) In sum, Whedon is setting the audience up by having it pay closer
attention to facial expressions than they otherwise would. Why would he
do that? Meet the episode’s antagonist:
They would be the Gentlemen, and creepy as they would be otherwise, their
creepiness is heightened by the fact that in an episode that keys the
audience to pay attention to the plasticity of faces, theirs don’t move.”
[Link]
being-lecture-notes-on-the-buffy-the-vampire-slayer-episode-hush#more-
19519
 Doomed
Doomed may seem like an odd episode to feature an apocalypse. It’s not a
season finale, which we might expect. It isn’t played as farce like The
Zeppo. What makes the situation apocalyptic is metaphorical: Buffy’s fear
of starting a new relationship, particularly one that might be similar to her
relationship with Angel. She was happy to date Riley when she thought he
was a “corn-fed Iowa boy”. The idea that she’s about to hook up with
another professional demon hunter is deeply worrying to her for two
reasons: (1) It may say something about the men she’s attracted to; and (2)
Riley’s been concealing some pretty important facts.
Riley was quick to point out that she hasn’t been fully forthcoming either,
but what happened next was crucial. Buffy immediately told him who she
was, namely, “Slayer, The”. Riley, in contrast, wouldn’t tell her about
himself, leaving her to provide him with an all-too-accurate description.
The relationship can’t succeed if she’s disclosing her identity and he’s not.
That was all in the teaser. Later Riley tried to argue her out of her decision
on the ground that someone may have “done you wrong” in the past but that
he won’t. The flaw in this argument is that she has no reason to trust his
promise since she found out he’s been hiding such important facts from her
and still won’t tell her the whole truth.
From Buffy’s perspective, this whole situation has all too many similarities
to her relationship with Angel. Angel first appeared to her as a mystery guy
who gave her helpful information. He neglected to mention the insignificant
fact that, oh yeah, he’s a vampire. She fell for him, yes, but it wasn’t until
she felt she could trust him that she committed. “I love you. I just don’t
know if I can trust you.” (Lie to Me.)
These similarities, I think, explain why Buffy saw the potential for “pain,
death, apocalypse”. There’s a risk that she’s about to repeat the mistakes she
made in high school. There are multiple references to “being back in high
school” by Willow, Buffy and Spike throughout the episode. Buffy felt as if
she was doomed to repeat high school; that’s the metaphor. Her trip back to
the school allows her to face the demons which her high school experience
generated and which are metaphorically blocking her from entering into a
new relationship.
When Doomed first aired, the scene in which Buffy jumped into the
Hellmouth after the Vahrall demon really bothered me – she obviously
violated the laws of physics. Doomed is one of the episodes I had in mind in
my discussion of “realism” in the Introduction. The key to the scene is not
the physics, it’s the emotional truth that Riley was willing to stay with her
and pull her out of the depths of despair into which she had plunged. Riley
earned her trust by helping bring her back from the Hellmouth, just as
Angel earned it by his actions in The Dark Age.
Buffy really does like Riley, so we don’t see much about Xander, her
metaphorical heart in Doomed. Her reluctance to enter a relationship with
Riley is instead reflected in Willow, her metaphorical spirit. Willow’s
uncertainty at the party demonstrates that she still lacks confidence in who
she is. She was thrown by Percy’s question about Oz and got upset that
Percy called her a nerd and a geek. Her recent sense of herself is very tied
up with dating Oz – “hello, dating a guitarist” – but his departure has left
her so unsure about herself that Percy’s comments made her feel “like I was
back in high school”.
In this context, Spike’s description of Xander and Willow as losers who
simply get in Buffy’s way both plays into the metaphorical insecurities of
Buffy and Willow and will have important repercussions later on:
Spike: “*Buffy* fights the forces of evil. You’re her groupies. She’d do
just as well without you – better I’d wager, since she wouldn’t have to go
about saving your hides all the time.”
Xander: “That is so not true! We’re part of the team. She needs us.”
Spike: “Or you’re just the same tenth grade losers you’ve always been, and
she’s too much of a softy to cut you loose.”
I guess this is as good a place as any to talk about Riley. To say he wasn’t
popular with fans is an understatement. Most saw him as boring, very few,
if any, thought Marc Blucas had any chemistry with SMG, and many
disliked the idea of Buffy moving on from Angel. I don’t dislike Riley, but
I’m not a particular fan of his character. This episode pretty much sums up
why: at the end, when Riley talked about blowing his cover, he said it’s “the
end of the world”. That one phrase demonstrates just how distant his life
experience is from Buffy’s, who really does face the plural of apocalypse
and who has to account for that in her life.
We can read Riley’s enthusiasm in the face of his ignorance about demons
as all too typical of graduate students (maybe of college grads generally).
They have an unjustified self-confidence and excitement about confronting
the challenges of the world, but they don’t really know what that world is
like – compare Riley’s glee about the earthquake with Buffy’s reaction. In
the metaphor of the show, Buffy has grown up much more than Riley
because she’s faced those problems. What we’re told of his home life in
Iowa plays off a stereotype of someone who’s been sheltered. The only way
he could describe Buffy as “self-involved” – a line that still grates on me –
is that he knows nothing of the challenges she faces.
Riley also evinced a “boys with toys” attitude consistent with his over-
enthusiasm. Buffy hung a lantern on this with her reference to playing
Donkey Kong when Riley showed up with his pheromone reader. This also
ties back in to Doug Petrie’s comment that one theme of the season was the
contrast between science and magic. The twin, intercut scenes of the
Initiative and of Buffy as they prepare to find the demons makes this point
pretty obvious:
“Cut to the gang researching at Giles.
Giles: “A Vahrall demon.”
Willow looking over at his book: “Eew!”
Xander: “I second that revulsion.”
Giles: “Yes. ‘Slick like gold and girt in moonlight, father of portents and
brother to blight’.”
Buffy reading over his shoulder: “Limbs with talons, eyes like knives, bane
to the blameless, thief of lives.”
Cut to Riley debriefing his patrol team: “Three meters [10 feet] tall,
approximately 100 –120 kilograms [220-264 pounds], based on my visual
analysis.”
Graham: “Special hazards?”
Riley: “Unknown. Probably nothing we haven’t handled before. There is
no pattern we can discern yet, so we got to assume that it is on a basic kill-
crush-destroy.”
Cut to Buffy: “This thing isn’t digging up the bones of a child for fun.”
Xander: “Well, a demon’s got some pretty hilarious ideas about fun.”
Willow: “Bones of a child though. I saw that! (Pulls a book over to her
and flips pages) An ancient ritual – uses the blood of a man, the bones of a
child and – something called the Word of Valios? I-It’s all part of the
sacrifice – the sacrifice of three.”
Buffy: “Let me guess – ends the world.”
Willow: “Well, yeah, - I-it’s not big with the details, though. It doesn’t say
how the world ends or what the ritual entails exactly.”
Xander: “The sacrifice of three... – Three people are going to die?”
Buffy: “No, they won’t. Because claw boy is not getting all of his
ingredients. We have to find that third one, the Word of Valios, keep him
from getting it.”
Willow: “If he doesn’t already have it. I mean, who knows where he’s
been?”
Cut to Riley: “Here is one for the good guys: this thing has a pheromone
signature a mile wide. Agent Gates has been working with the detection
system the lab’s developing.”
Forrest gets up: “Can’t tell where it’s going, but I’ve got a bead on where
it’s been. (Stands next to Riley) Residual traces showing up in populated
areas. The thing’s not shy.”
Riley: “We’re going out in civies, day clothes only guys. Weapons stowed
in packs, keep ‘em out of sight til nightfall. Remember this isn’t a capture,
it’s a kill.”
Forrest as the meeting breaks up: “Get your quadrant assignment from me.
We’ll blanket the town.”
Cut to Buffy: “I’ll check the magic shop. See if they’ve heard of a book
called the Word of Valios. (Puts on her coat) Willow, Xander, how about
the book archives at the museum?”
Riley’s view of the demons and his reaction to them stem from his social
indoctrination, one of the themes of S4. He’s been trained to see the world
in a given way and he’s not (yet, at least) capable of achieving a deeper
understanding. For all the technology the Initiative can bring to bear, it
can’t actually stop the Vahrall demons or even find them because it doesn’t
understand them. Riley just assumed that the demons were instinctual
animals on a “crush-kill-destroy” spree, while Buffy took the time to
acquire actual knowledge of their goal. The seemingly hard-nosed,
pragmatic attitude of the Initiative in fact represents a superficial
understanding of the world. This was prefigured in the teaser when Buffy
described Riley’s “secret” to him while he had never heard of the Slayer.
The ending of Doomed provides two twists on the Clockwork Orange story.
One is that Spike, who’s having his own identity crisis, can hurt other
demons, a fact which he celebrates hilariously while Willow and Xander sit
and stare. That’s consistent with the basic idea of his conditioning because
the chip causes pain when he tries to do evil but he can still get pleasure
from fighting it. The other is his realization that words alone can hurt
Xander and Willow without triggering his chip. That allows free rein to his
worse instincts. These contradictory impulses will play an increasing role in
the future.
Trivia notes: (1) This dialogue – Giles: Now in the meantime, I’ve got a
few theories about our mysterious commando friends.” Buffy: “Oh. -
Really?” – is possibly a play on Riley’s name (Oh Really/Oh Riley). Note
that Buffy otherwise failed to tell Giles about Riley’s connection to the
commandos. (2) When Forrest suggested that the Slayer was a thrash metal
band, that’s because there really is such a band by that name. (3) Forrest’s
description of Buffy as “she’s cool, she’s hot, she is tepid, she’s all
temperature Buffy” referenced old commercials for the detergent Cheer. (4)
When Riley said his duties were “not just a job”, Buffy responded “It’s an
adventure….” That’s a reference to the slogan used in commercials for the
US Army: “It’s not just a job, it’s an adventure.” (5) When Xander said “I
second that revulsion”, he was playing off the song by Smokey Robinson “I
Second That Emotion”. (6) Riley’s description of the demon as “kill-crush-
destroy” quoted the Lost in Space episode “Revolt of the Androids”. (7) I
see the following dialogue as an extended double entendre:
Cut to a stake clamped to the edge of a table. Camera pans up to reveal
Spike standing on a chair before it his arms spread wide.
Spike: “Good bye, Dru. See you in hell.”
He lets himself fall forward just as Willow and Xander walk in. He turns in
the air to look at them and misses the stake, smashing the table.
Willow: “What are you doing?”
Spike picks himself up: “Bloody rot. Can’t a person knock?”
Willow: “What were you doing?”
Xander: “You were trying to stake yourself!”
Spike: “Fag off!
Willow: “It’s ooky. We know him, we can’t just let him poof himself!”

Spike’s behavior and reaction suggest the scene can be read as a metaphor
for masturbation. The stake, of course, is a phallic symbol, as we just saw in
the lecture scene in Hush. Interpreting his behavior as masturbation is
consistent with the references to him as “impotent” by Xander here and by
Giles in Something Blue, and Buffy’s “flaccid” in Something Blue.
Remember also the scene in The Initiative, in which Spike’s inability to bite
Willow was played metaphorically as the inability to perform sexually.
Asking someone why they didn’t knock is a cliché for interrupted sex
scenes in television and movies. Then too, “fag” is derogatory American
slang for a gay man, just as “poof” is British slang for one.
 A New Man
A New Man is another POV episode, this time seeing the world through
Giles’ eyes. As was true for the previous POV episodes, we learn important
things about Buffy in the course of this. That’s because Giles is reacting to
what Buffy does and, more importantly, doesn’t do. We can see the episode
title as referring to him – he’s a “new man” in the sense that his role has
changed this year, and he wakes up after his evening with Ethan very new
indeed. But the title also refers to Riley, as the new man in Buffy’s life. It’s
Buffy’s relationship with Riley which is the source of Giles’s alienation.
Giles is filled with anger and rage, he says when he’s a Fyarl demon, and
it’s easy to see why: Buffy, for the most part. She treated him as so
unimportant that she neglected to tell him that Riley was one of the
commandos. In fact she didn’t tell him about Riley at all until she
introduced him as her boyfriend at the party. She followed those omissions
with comments about Prof. Walsh’s age and intelligence which implicitly
compared Giles unfavorably to her. Bringing up her previous birthdays
didn’t help, considering Giles probably wouldn’t care to be reminded of his
role in Helpless.
We can look at the situation in metaphor as well. Giles is Buffy’s
metaphorical mind. Buffy hasn’t been using her mind very much lately. She
began the year doing well academically, even being asked to lead a
discussion section. Then she got distracted from class by Parker, by Oz’s
departure, by the mysterious commandos, and by Riley. Her school work
dropped off, as Prof. Walsh noted: “And to think all that time you were
sitting in my class. Well, most of those times. I always knew you could do
better than a B minus.” The metaphor tracks the story line.
Giles also serves as Buffy’s surrogate father. When kids go off to college,
they don’t need their parents as much and they don’t communicate with
them as often. At this stage of Buffy’s progression to adulthood, we’d
therefore expect Giles to feel neglected. In fact Giles was feeling useless as
early as Wild at Heart, when he showed up at the Bronze very awkwardly,
and then later when he was watching game shows on TV and appeared
over-eager to see Buffy:
“Giles : You come on business, I hope?
Buffy : (Giving him a look.) Yes. Lucky for you, people may be in danger.
Giles : (Embarrased.) I only meant, uh, that I'm at the ready.”
Then, in The Initiative, Giles and Xander both felt useless:
“Giles : Oh, I think we can safely assume they're human, So, um, no
research needed.
Xander : No studying? Damn! Next thing they'll tell me is I'll have to eat
jelly doughnuts or sleep with a supermodel to get things done around here. I
ask you, how much can one man give?
Giles : Not too much, I'm afraid. Um... Once again I'd say that you and I
will not be needed to help Buffy.
Xander : Really?
Giles : Really.”

In the commentary to Wild at Heart, Joss and Marti Noxon describe Giles
like this:
Joss: It was season 4 where Giles has no life.
(Marti laughs)
…
Marti: It's sort of "creepy hanging around for no reason" Giles.
Another factor, played out in metaphor, added to Giles’s sense that he didn’t
belong. Buffy and Riley are courting. She introduced him to her surrogate
father, albeit without mentioning Riley’s “job”. Riley, in turn, introduced
Buffy, in her capacity as Slayer, to his “mother”. When the in-laws meet,
they stereotypically don’t get along and so it proved here. Prof. Walsh –
whom Buffy had just praised so extravagantly – was arrogant and rude to
Giles in suggesting that Buffy lacked a male role model. I’ll have more to
say about his conversation with Prof. Walsh, but I’m holding off for 2 more
episodes.
To make his bad day even worse, Giles then mistimed the rising of the
“demon prince” and learned from Willow and Xander, rather than Buffy,
that Buffy’s new boyfriend was one of the commandos Giles had been
searching for.
After his experiences at the hands of Buffy and Prof. Walsh, Giles naturally
believed he must be some kind of hideous monster whom nobody listens to,
that he might as well be speaking Fyarl. And there’s a small additional
metaphor thrown in for good measure, as we see Giles wake up a demon
after a night of drinking. The blind rage of the demon reflects Giles’ anger
at his situation, which dissipates at least somewhat, after he’s able to
express it in his fight with Buffy. The fight scene also teaches us something
important about Buffy, though I won’t mention it for a few weeks until we
get to the episode which this sets up.
Yet another metaphorical point also tracks the story. Just as Buffy failed to
tell Giles about Riley and the commandos, Willow conspicuously omitted
Tara from her description when she told Buffy about the failed magic
experiment:
“Buffy: Hey. I didn't hear you come in last night. Where were you?
Willow: (quickly) The chem lab, by myself. (a beat) I-I was trying this new
spell; floating a rose, when all of a sudden (motions with fork) zing, zing,
zing! Like all over the room. It was like a rose-based missile.”
Buffy’s spirit is focused elsewhere than on her immediate family. As usual,
consequences will follow.
A New Man gave us additional signs of the conflict between science and
magic, as well as some hints about where this conflict might be going:
“Prof. Walsh: … We use the latest in scientific technology and state-of-the-
art weaponry and you, if I understand correctly, poke them with a sharp
stick.” Apart from being condescending, Prof. Walsh demonstrated with
these words the shallowness of her understanding. She followed that by
praising Riley’s kill/capture count and implying it would be higher than
Buffy’s. This served only to reinforce her shallowness; at the risk of being
crude, I’d say she volunteered Riley for a cock-measuring contest which he
proceeded to lose. To a girl.
“Ethan: Heh, you know demons. It's all exaggeration and blank verse.
"Pain as bright as steel" things like that. They're scared. There's something
called "314" that's got them scared most of all. The kind of scared that turns
to angry. I know we're not particularly fond of each other, (Giles chuckles
scoffingly) Rupert. But we are a couple of old mystics. This new outfit, it's
blundering into new places it doesn't belong. It's throwing the worlds out of
balance. And that's way beyond chaos, mate. We're headed quite literally
for one hell of a fight…. We're just a couple of sorcerers. The night is still
our time. Time of magic.”
Trivia notes: (1) Giles described himself to Prof. Walsh as like Theseus in
the Labyrinth, but his reference made no sense. Quick review: Theseus was
the son of the King of Athens. Every year Athens had to send a number of
boys and girls to be devoured by the Minotaur on Crete. They were put into
the Labyrinth, at the center of which was the terrible beast. The victims
couldn’t find their way out of the Labyrinth so were eventually killed.
Theseus seduced the daughter of the King of Crete, Ariadne, and she
provided him with string which he could lay down on the path as he
wandered. All he had to do was follow it in order to get out. Thus, if Giles
had really felt like Theseus, he could have found his way to Prof. Walsh
very easily. I don’t know if we’re supposed to see this as a mistake by
Giles, setting up Prof. Walsh’s dismissal of him, or if it’s just a mistake by
the writers. I suspect it’s the latter because when Giles turns into the Fyarl
demon he has a bull’s horns on a man’s body, just like the Minotaur. That
makes it seem as if the earlier reference was somewhat shoehorned in for
the joke. (2) Spike’s “What do I spy with my little eye?” refers to the child’s
game “I spy”. (3) Sadly, this is the last TV episode in which we see Ethan
Rayne, one of my favorite villains.
 The I in Team
The I in Team brings us to the second real world event which impacted S4:
Lindsay Crouse, Prof. Walsh, left the show. Her death at the end of this
episode was not part of the original plan. It was written in when she decided
to leave. Nobody has ever explained just why she left; it’s all very
professional on both sides. Something happened but we don’t know what.
Her departure had a major impact on the season because she was supposed
to be the Big Bad. Adam got substituted as the Big Bad, but this changed
some of the thematic points which had been intended (I’ll talk about that in
the next post and later ones). As a result, in my view, a lot of the emotional
resonance of the season got lost. I’ll explain this in more detail later on.
The expression “there is no ‘I’ in team” is a cute way of saying that teams
are supposed to work together as a unit. They can’t succeed if each team
member refuses to set aside her ego and goes off on her own. The natural
question, therefore, is Who is guilty of this behavior? The answer, not
surprisingly, is Buffy. Buffy became, however briefly, a member of the
“team” at the Initiative: “Prof. Walsh: Welcome to the team.” She was,
obviously, not much of a team member given the way she stood out in dress
and in attitude.
We’re obviously supposed to think that Buffy’s maverick behavior was a
good thing. She began asking questions which someone should have asked
before. When she questioned Riley about “314”, the phone rang
immediately afterward. Since we know that Prof. Walsh was watching
Buffy and Riley on video, the natural implication is that this is what led
Prof. Walsh to attempted murder, which in turn backfired on her and
exposed her big secret, Adam. All well and good – it’s a classic rogue agent
story line – but …
Buffy began the episode belonging to another team. She then found an
exciting new form of foreplay with her new boyfriend, and she became
eager to become part of his “family”. Yes, the Initiative is a “family” –
that’s why, when the commandos get paged in the Bronze, Riley tells Buffy
“Mother wants us”, and it’s why Adam’s first word is “Mommy”. Prof.
Walsh told both of them to “make me proud”, just what a mother would tell
her children.
Buffy “joining” the Initiative is a metaphor for the way the world often
works – the woman leaves her own family and goes off to become a
member of her man’s. Thus, another way to interpret the episode title is that
Buffy left her team to go off on her own – that is, without the SG – to join
the Initiative. Buffy therefore was “the I in team” when it came to both her
old team and her would-be new one.
Her metaphorical heart and spirit have doubts about her choice which they
express in the teaser:
“Xander: Wish the Buff could've made it. This three-hand poker is not
quite the game.
Willow: Guess she's out with Riley. You know how it is with a spanking
new boyfriend. …
Xander: Well. . .(coughs) The thing is . . . I think Riley is . . . okay, in an
oafish kind of way. But . . . am I the only one with a big floating question
mark over his head about this Initiative thing?”

Buffy’s distraction from her friends then gets hammered home in the early
part of the episode:
“Buffy: Hmm. How was your night?
Willow: Like a normal person's. Light on the action-pack. Hope tonight's
not too much of a let-down for you. Excitement-wise. (a pause) You do
remember about tonight, right?
Buffy: Bronze. The gang. Are you kidding? I wouldn't be anywhere else.
I miss you guys. We haven't been able to spend that much time together
lately.
Willow: You've been busy. Fighting armies and stuff. Not to mention other
distractions of a romantic-- (sees that Buffy's no longer paying attention)”
***
Xander: … Besides, it's getting late. Maybe we should go.
Willow: Go? You can't go. Buffy hasn't gotten here yet.
Xander: Let's face it, Will. She's over an hour late. She's probably out
living the life of Riley. I don't think she's coming.
Willow: She is! (unconvincingly) She said she was looking forward to
spending quality time with just us. (brightens) See? Here she comes.
Shot of Buffy walking into the Bronze followed by Riley, Graham, Forrest,
and two other guys.
Willow: (crestfallen) . . .with Riley . . . and some other guys.”
***
“Buffy: (lowers voice, but excited) I'm in. The Initiative. Professor Walsh
gave me the grand tour and we're talking Grand as in Canyon! You'd never
believe the size of it.
Willow: That's really . . . again I say 'neat.' So, what do you mean exactly?
You've joined them?
Buffy: No. N-not exactly. It just means that when I patrol I'll have a
heavily armed team backing me up. (smiles) Plus, boyfriend going to work
with me: big extra perk.
Willow: Buffy, do you really think this is a good idea? I mean, don't you
think you're rushing things a little?
Buffy: (frowns) I thought you liked Riley?
Willow: Not with Riley. With the Initiative. I mean, there's a bunch of stuff
about them we still don't know.
Buffy: I know that. (then) Like what?
Willow: Well, what's their ultimate agenda? I mean, okay, yeah, they-they
neuter vampires and demons. But then what? Are they gonna reintegrate
them into society? Get them jobs as bagboys at Wal-Mart?
Willow: Plus, don't forget that '314' thing that Ethan told Giles about.
Buffy: Well, a man that worships chaos and tries to kill you, is a man you
can trust.
Willow: Well, bad info or not, I just think there's certain questions you
should ask before you go off and enlist.”
Buffy’s rejection of her friends is paralleled with Willow initially declining
to meet Tara later to work on spells. When Willow did knock on Tara’s door
after Buffy blew her off, she commented on the irony.
From the perspective of her actual team, the SG, Buffy went off on her own
and nearly got herself killed. That’s what Prof. Walsh told Riley: “She . .
.went after them on her own. … she kept insisting she didn't need any
team, she could handle it by herself.” Prof. Walsh lied when she said this,
but her words were true from the perspective of the SG. The title has
different implications depending on which “team” is meant.
But there’s another way to think about the title as well. I don’t want to talk
about that in detail yet, because it would spoil the season ending, but I will
drop a couple of hints:
(1) The I in Team serves the same functional role as Gingerbread did in S3.
By this I mean that the episode shows a potential, but wrong, solution to
Buffy’s seasonal dilemma. (2) The discussion above focused on the two
different “teams” and Buffy’s role on those teams, but another way to think
about the title is to ask “what is the meaning of ‘I’?” We’ve already seen
that the issue of identity is one of the key themes for S4, so asking this
question obviously connects directly to that theme.
When Buffy tells Prof. Walsh “If you think that's enough to kill me, you
really don't know what a Slayer is. … Trust me when I say you're gonna
find out.” – and may I say that I love that scene – I read it as saying “you
don’t know what a true adult is”. I’ll discuss the implications of this in the
next post. I’ll also discuss the most important line in this episode, Riley’s “I
am how they trained me”, and some related issues.
Trivia notes: (1) We got an early clue about Prof. Walsh’s role as “mother”
in Pangs when Forrest called Riley “mama’s boy” when he thought Riley
was too gung ho. (2) Spike’s reference to Willow as “Teen Witch” comes
from the 1989 movie of that title. (3) The scene of Buffy and Riley waiting
to enter the Initiative elevator and then her reaction when she sees it reads
as a double entendre of a couple about to have sex for the first time. Of
course, they do just that a bit later on. (4) Adam’s name is an intentional
Biblical reference. (5) Xander describes Buffy as “living the life of Riley”,
punning on the old expression which means “living the good life”. (6)
Private Benjamin – Buffy’s rejection of camouflage – was a 1980s movie
starring Goldie Hawn. (7) As Riley said, Prof. Walsh did tell Riley that she
liked Buffy in The Initiative. (8) This is the first time Buffy has slept with
someone and he’s still in bed the next morning. Hence her initial concern
and Riley’s “Weren't expecting to see me?” (9) Spike’s reference to playing
“Rock the Casbah” on a Jew’s Harp refers to a very old musical instrument.
(10) Note that Giles has a new cordless phone after he destroyed the old one
in A New Man. We saw him install it at the end of that episode. (11) It’s a
bit subtle, but when Willow and Buffy returned to their room, each having
spent the night out, Willow had the doll’s-eye crystal Tara had offered her
the day before. I missed that on first watch.
 Goodbye Iowa
Goodbye Iowa ties together all of the themes I’ve mentioned thus far as
important to S4: identity, including the creation of one’s authentic self;
identity theft; indoctrination, including its relation to identity theft; family;
science v. magic; individualism v. collectivism. It’s a little hard to discuss
them all because they’re intertwined with each other, but I’ll do the best I
can.
In my post on The Initiative I mentioned the concept of a “panopticon” and
its origin with Jeremy Bentham. For Goodbye Iowa I want to expand on the
panopticon and talk about how it fits in with the season themes.
There is a very important discussion of the idea of a panopticon in the book
Discipline and Punish by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. I don’t
know if Joss has read this book (or some derivative of it), but themes from
it appear very obviously in the show Dollhouse so I assume that he has. I’m
writing this post on that assumption. First a description of Foucault’s work
from the link:
“Discipline and Punish (1975) is a … study of the development of the
“gentler” modern way of imprisoning criminals rather than torturing or
killing them. While recognizing the element of genuinely enlightened
reform, Foucault particularly emphasizes how such reform also becomes a
vehicle of more effective control: “to punish less, perhaps; but certainly to
punish better”. He further argues that the new mode of punishment becomes
the model for control of an entire society, with factories, hospitals, and
schools modeled on the modern prison.
At the core of Foucault's picture of modern “disciplinary” society are three
primary techniques of control: hierarchical observation, normalizing
judgment, and the examination. To a great extent, control over people
(power) can be achieved merely by observing them. … A perfect system of
observation would allow one “guard” to see everything (a situation
approximated … in Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon)….
A distinctive feature of modern power (disciplinary control) is its concern
with what people have not done (nonobservence), with, that is, a person's
failure to reach required standards. This concern illustrates the primary
function of modern disciplinary systems: to correct deviant behavior. The
goal is not revenge (as in the case of the tortures of premodern punishment)
but reform, where, of course, reform means coming to live by society's
standards or norms….
The examination (for example, of students in schools…) is a method of
control that combines hierarchical observation with normalizing judgment.
It is a prime example of what Foucault calls power/knowledge, since it
combines into a unified whole “the deployment of force and the
establishment of truth”…. It both elicits the truth about those who undergo
the examination (tells what they know…) and controls their behavior (by
forcing them to study…).
Bentham's Panopticon is, for Foucault, an ideal architectural model of
modern disciplinary power. It is a design for a prison, built so that each
inmate is separated from and invisible to all the others (in separate “cells”)
and each inmate is always visible to a monitor situated in a central tower.
Monitors will not in fact always see each inmate; the point is that they
could at any time. Since inmates never know whether they are being
observed, they must act as if they are always objects of observation. As a
result, control is achieved more by the internal monitoring of those
controlled than by heavy physical constraints.”
Ok, let me try to put this in terms of what we’re seeing in S4. Foucault’s
argument is that modern society functions very much like Bentham’s
panopticon, that is, society functions like a prison. We’re constantly under
observation by others, whether parents, police, or (one of Foucault’s prime
examples) college professors. Society uses those observations in order to
indoctrinate us, to mold our behavior towards a “norm”. If I were to put this
in existentialist terms (which would be controversial in discussing Foucault,
but I don’t want to get too technical about this), society’s attempt to force us
towards what it considers “normal” interferes with the existentialist project
of creating our own authentic self.
This should sound very familiar. In my post on The Freshman I pointed out
that Philip, the protagonist of the novel Of Human Bondage, ended the book
believing that adopting “the simplest pattern” was the best. That “simplest
pattern” is the one society expects us to follow, it’s the “normal track”.
Philip viewed this as an insight; an existentialist finds it horrifying.
Then, in my post on The Initiative, I noted that the Initiative raised themes
of indoctrination, identity, and identity theft. Foucault’s arguments show us
how these relate to the “normal track”: it’s indoctrination by society which
forces us to be “normal”; forcing us to “be normal” prevents us from
developing our authentic identity; and the conditioning we receive from
society can be seen as stealing our true, organic identity and replacing it
with one society prefers (remember Alex in A Clockwork Orange).
Prof. Walsh was a metaphor for all of these aspects of society. Because she
occupied multiple positions, including professor – professor being one of
Foucault’s primary examples – and military leader, she served as a
representative of the way school, government and society in general force
us in the same direction. We originally saw this aspect of her in relation to
Spike, with his chip as the equivalent of the operant conditioning Alex got
in A Clockwork Orange. Since then we’ve seen that she used her position of
authority to direct her students and the commandos towards her preferred
goal. Consider this dialogue from A New Man:
“Walsh: (returning to her desk) I don't lecture from the text book. But I'm
glad she's inspired by the material. She's bright. All she's really been
lacking is encouragement in the academic sect.
Giles: Oh, uh, I think it's best if-if. . . if we let a young person find their
own strengths. If you lead a child by the hand then they'll never find their
own footing.
Walsh: And if it's true about hiking, ergo, it must be true about life.
Giles: (removing his glasses to polish them with a handkerchief) That's not,
uh . . . I'm just saying Buffy is, uh, well she's not the typical student. Once
you get to know her, she's a very unique girl. I hope you're not going to
push her.
Walsh: I think I do know her. …
Walsh: She's very self-reliant, very independent--
Giles: Exactly!
Walsh: --which is not always a good thing. (this causes Giles to pause) I
think it can be unhealthy to take on adult roles too early.”
Giles argued for letting Buffy develop on her own. Prof. Walsh wanted to
control her development and didn’t want Buffy to take on an adult role even
though she legally is an adult. She decided to kill Buffy in The I in Team
because she didn’t feel she could control her.
Prof. Walsh functioned as a paradigm case of the observation and control
that Foucault discussed in other ways as well – remember her heartless
response to Willow’s concerns about Oz in The Initiative? She used the
classroom not to expose the students to new ideas, but to indoctrinate them
in her own: “I run a hard class, I assign a lot of work, I talk fast and I expect
you to keep up.” Indoctrination was, remember, one of the themes of The
Prisoner, from which The Initiative took its inspiration, and it’s the key
point raised by Foucault’s criticism of society.
We saw further evidence of indoctrination in her treatment of the men under
her command. The military always depends on indoctrination, but we see it
taken to another level under Prof. Walsh. It was suggested with Riley’s
“vitamins” in The I in Team, but we learn definitively in Goodbye Iowa that
the soldiers were being drugged without their knowledge. In The I in Team
we saw that she maintained surveillance over Riley (and Buffy) even in the
most private moments (panopticon).
The dialogue in The I in Team gave us a succinct explanation of kind of
soldiers the Initiative produces:
“Riley: I am how they trained me.
Buffy: They? Who they?
Riley: You know, the government. Plucked me out of special op training
for this.
Buffy: What did they tell you it was for?
Riley: They didn't. In the military you learn to follow orders. Not ask
questions.
Buffy: I don't understand. Aren't you curious about all the science and
research stuff they're doing?
Riley: Hm. I know all I need to know.”
Riley, as he tells us, is the result of this training: he’s the epitome of
“normal”. In The Initiative Riley described himself as “Joe Regular”. In
Pangs he said his home was like a Grant Wood painting. In Doomed Buffy
described him as a “corn-fed Iowa boy”. In Goodbye Iowa she says, “Riley
was supposed to be Mr. Joe Guy.”
The description of his training Riley gave us (quoted above) shows us the
consequences: he’s not becoming an authentic adult, he’s being molded into
the role society demands from him. Philip could hardly have defined it
better in Of Human Bondage, and the result is that Riley is in bondage in
the sense of not being free to develop on his own. Consistent with
Foucault’s theory, the control is subtle rather than overt, but it’s all the more
effective for that:
“Riley: I'll kill you!!!
Adam: You won't. You haven't been programmed to.
Riley: I cannot be programmed! I'm a man!
Adam: It's here. [He holds a diskette up.]
Adam: The plan she had for us. What happens. How it ends.”
The drugs fed to Riley and his withdrawal symptoms we see in Goodbye
Iowa serve as a metaphor for the reaction of someone who suddenly
realizes what has been done to him. He rejects the idea at first (denial):
“Giles (softly): See I've heard rumors that the Initiative isn't all that we've
been told. That, um, secretly they're working toward some darker purpose,
something that might harm us all.
Riley: No! That's - that's not what happens there.”
Later, in the confrontation at Willy’s (anger), he asks Buffy a question he
needs to ask himself: “Who are you?” This question gets asked a lot in S4
and will be very frequent in the next 2 episodes. Obviously his question
directly relates to the seasonal theme of identity, in this case relevant to
Buffy as well as Riley.
He then reaches the crisis point: “Except rules don't seem to apply much
these days do they? … I mean who do you believe? First it sounds like lies,
then it sounds like truth. … What’s happening to me? … I thought I knew,
but I don't. I don't know anything.” Buffy herself sums it up at the end:
“Everything's he's ever believed in has been taken away.” And the reason
that happened was precisely because Riley followed the rules others gave
him instead of developing an authentic self.
Riley’s world crumbles upon the exposure to reality which his relationship
with Buffy has brought him. We see that moral crisis reflected
metaphorically in his physical breakdown.
Riley is losing the identity he thought he had, and he now will need to
construct a new one. Here’s where I think the departure of Lindsay Crouse
had a significant impact. Try to picture this scene, or something similar,
with Prof. Walsh rather than Adam:
“Adam: Oh! Mother created you too.
Riley: Maggie's not my mother! I have a mother! A real …
Adam: A birth mother. Yes. But after you met Maggie, she was the one
who shaped your basic operating system. She taught you how to think,
how to feel. She fed you chemicals to make you stronger - your mind and
body. She said that you and I were her favorite children. Her art. That
makes us brothers. Family.” My emphasis.
Adam’s description of himself and Riley as “family” brings us to another
related theme. One method the military uses to mold its soldiers – and
again, Prof. Walsh’s multiple roles allow us to generalize this to society as a
whole – is to create an inorganic, and therefore inauthentic “family”. We
can see immediately that this “family” shows us the twisted reflection of
Buffy’s organic – that is, naturally developed – family (the SG). In Joss’s
view, Buffy’s family can be a true one even if it’s not the standard
parent/child relationship, because it developed over time and with love:
“I am a great believer in found families and I'm not a great believer in
blood. Although I love my family, even the ones I grew up with, to me I've
always felt that the people who treated you with respect and included you in
their lives were your family and the people who were related to you by
blood might happen to be those people but that correlation was a lot less
[strong] than society believes it is.” Joss Whedon.
Riley’s case is paralleled with Spike’s. In fact, there’s a flash cut from Riley
being escorted away from Buffy after he was stabbed by Adam to Spike
being left bloody in the street by the demons. Spike’s experience with the
demons in the bar follows the story line of A Clockwork Orange. There,
Alex suffered physical violence at the hands of others after his conditioning
in prison. In Alex’s case he had no choice because he couldn’t fight back. In
Spike’s case, it’s precisely because he can, and therefore does, fight demons
that they reject him. We can say that the reaction of other demons is a sign
that, like Riley, he’s now lost – had stolen, actually – the identity he once
thought he had. He’ll need to construct a new one.
Now let’s add to this Prof. Walsh’s creation, Adam (name obviously chosen
for its resonance with Genesis). What is Adam, that is, what is his identity?
When he shows up at the Initiative, he asks that very question:
“Adam: …So now I want to learn about me. Why I feel. What I am. …
Buffy: She pieced you together from parts of other demons. Adam: And
man. And machine. Which tells me what I am, but not who I am.”
Who I am. That’s the key to the season, meaning that it’s the key to Buffy
and her goal of becoming an adult.
Adam’s an artificial construct stitched together from otherwise
incompatible parts, creating a monster. The metaphor of Adam is that this
is what college tends to do to us – we get force fed disparate
philosophies and theories with no unifying conceptions. Professors insist
that we follow their ideas, cramming them into us, to the point where it’s
difficult to maintain our own integrity (the existentialist project).
Because Prof. Walsh occupied several different roles, we can also see Adam
as a metaphor for what society generally does to us. Prof. Walsh intended
for Adam to become the first of a new breed; the paradigm case of what
society could create unencumbered by the individual struggle to create
one’s own self. Those who see Adam truly, like the little boy, recognize him
as a monster. But as Adam says, Riley is a creation of Prof. Walsh just as
Adam is. The natural conclusion is that Riley’s “normality” is just as
monstrous.
Unfortunately, the departure of Lindsay Crouse made it all too easy to
believe that the Big Bad for the season was Adam, the monster, rather than
(as intended) Prof. Walsh, the creator of the monster. Her role as creator
brings me to yet another of the interrelated themes of S4. I see this as
another example of the “science/magic” theme. Note this dialogue:
“Buffy: She pieced you together from parts of other demons.
Adam: And man. And machine. Which tells me what I am, but not who I
am. Mother wrote things down. Hard data, but also her feelings. That's
how I learned that I have a job here. And that she loved me.
Riley: She wasn't your mother and she didn't love you!
Xander: Is that really the issue?
Riley: She made you because she was a scientist!”
Riley’s still trying desperately to cling to his training at this point, but his
“defense” condemns Prof. Walsh’s whole project more than any direct
criticism could do. You’ll recall that I suggested in my post on The
Initiative that we can see this conflict more generally as one between
masculinity and femininity. There are contrasts between Prof. Walsh
(masculine, military, “scientist”, “mother” of a “family”) and the SG
(female-centered, inclined to magic, much too anarchical for the military,
with Giles as the true father of an emotionally real family). This contrast
will provide the key to Buffy’s resolution of the challenge posed by Adam
and the Initiative.
In my reading of S4, the basic idea is that we’re supposed to create our own
identity in the face of society’s attempt to impose one. If that’s a theme for
the season, then we should expect to see that developed in Buffy’s journey.
While the plot line has thus far focused on Riley, and will focus on him and
on Adam, it’s Buffy who needs to answer the questions Riley’s experience
poses. She already tried out the idea of taking on a new identity by
becoming part of a new “team” in The I in Team, but that nearly led to her
death – in metaphor, the death of her Slayer project, namely becoming an
authentic adult. Over the remainder of the season she needs to understand
her own identity in order to meet the challenge she faces. The next 2
episodes, a two-parter, will make this connection explicit.
Trivia notes: (1) Prof. Walsh suffered same fate as the anthro prof. in Pangs
– murdered by something she created when delving into matters she didn’t
fully understand. (2) Buffy’s description of the sewer as “raining monsters”
and Xander’s response (“Hallelujah”) refer to the song “It’s Raining Men”.
(3) The scene with Adam and the little boy is an homage to the 1931 movie
Frankenstein, which contains a very similar scene. (4) Giles’ reference to
Anya’s “Wagnerian” snoring is to the German composer Richard Wagner.
(5) Buffy’s comment about Anya and Giles replaying “scenes from my
parents’ marriage” refers to the movie Scenes From A Marriage. (6) The
apocalypse demons who nearly did Willy in were the Sisterhood of Jhe
from The Zeppo. (7) The spell which Tara spoiled sets up a plot point for
S5. (8) Xander’s comment upon seeing the Initiative – “can I have sex with
Riley too?” – continues the double entendre in the dialogue between Buffy
and Riley from The I in Team. (9) Sadly, this is the last appearance of Willy,
another of my favorite minor characters.
 This Year’s Girl and Who Are You?
Who Are You? is the 72nd episode, exactly the half way point of the series.
Although it could never have been intended, I think it’s fitting that the
whole series is pretty much designed to answer the question posed in the
episode title.
This Year’s Girl and WAY? revisit plot and theme from S3, but nicely tie
them into S4. TYG opens on the same themes we’ve been seeing, namely
identity and family. As Myles McNutt put it in his review, these are
episodes
“about identity, which plays a key role for Riley (who’s struggling to
discover who he is without his role in the Initiative), Spike (who questions
whether he’s truly a vampire if he can’t bite anyone) and Faith herself. It’s
also been playing a key role for just about every other character on the
show, so there’s great meaning even in Tara and Willow confidently using a
spell to assist Buffy in her efforts to return to her rightful body (despite the
fact that the characters’ questions of identity have played out in a very
subtle fashion).”
Buffy raises identity theft early on when she expresses her concern about
Riley: “The Initiative has all those brainwashy behavior modification
guys.” Then Xander asks Riley “Did they put a chip in your brain?” Buffy
again, this time to Riley: “I . . . am looking for brainwashy chips in your
head.”
Riley, in turn, struggles to define himself, no longer sure who he is. Forrest
offers him one solution, the Initiative as “family”:
Forrest: We have a problem, we deal with that problem. You know the most
important part of the equation now is that we keep said problem within the
family.
Riley: Family? Is that what we are?

Riley’s seems sure he wants no part of that “family”, but beyond that he’s
confused about who he is anymore:
Buffy: You seem a little . . . somewhere else. (takes his hand) Is there
anything I can do?
He sits down on the bed next to her.
Riley: (sighs) Give me an order. It's what I do, isn't it? Follow orders?
Buffy: You don't have to.
Riley: Don't I? All my life that's what I've been groomed to do. They say
jump, I ask how high? I get the job done. Just don't know if it's the right
job anymore.
Buffy raises a hand to touch his cheek.
Buffy: I know how you feel. Giles used to be a part of this council. And for
years all they ever did was give me orders.
Riley: Ever obey them?
Buffy: Sure. (a beat) The ones I was going to do anyway. The point is, I
quit the council. And I was scared. But it's okay now.
Riley: See. Now that's where you and I are different. I just suck at the
whole gray-area thing.
Buffy: It's a choice. Go back in there and maybe make some changes from
the inside. Or you can quit the team. Fight demons in your own way.
Riley: You make it sound so simple. I don't even know what my way is.
Buffy: Well, it's time to find out.
Riley: I'm a soldier. Take that away, what's left?

At this point the word goes out that Faith has escaped the hospital, so we
need to consider how her story ties in to these themes. Faith’s second dream
tells us what she wants: an idyllic life with the Mayor as her surrogate
father (family). When she wakes up, she’s no more sure of her place in the
world than Riley is of his. She wanders the streets, seeing fathers and
daughters who remind her of her relationship with the Mayor (Doug Petrie
states in the DVD commentary that this was deliberate). She blames her
loss on Buffy, again reflected in her dream when Buffy stalks her with the
knife. Then she gets the opportunity for the revenge which she thinks she
deserves.
The body switch is a classic example of identity theft, prefigured in Living
Conditions and The Initiative. What TYG and WAY? do, I think, is maintain
the identity theft theme while switching (heh) the focus from Riley to
Buffy.
In my post on Graduation Day, I argued that the Faith arc drew inspiration
from the movie Single White Female. These two episodes reinforce that
conclusion. The basic story of SWF was that Hedy, who had lost her twin
sister, became the roommate of Allie and tried to force Allie into the role of
replacing that twin or being killed. Along the way, Hedy (a) masqueraded
as Allie and (b) slept with Allie’s boyfriend. At the end of the movie a
photo montage combined images of Hedy and Allie into a single girl,
suggesting that in some ways they were indeed alike.
To state what is probably obvious, Faith (a) masqueraded as Buffy and (b)
slept with Buffy’s boyfriend (in a truly disturbing abuse of Buffy’s body).
At the end of WAY? we see the superimposition of images of Faith and
Buffy similar to the one which ended SWF. Remember this line from
Faith’s first appearance in Faith, Hope & Trick: “Buffy: She doesn't need a
life. She has mine.”
While the identity theft is the whole point of the two episodes, the title Who
Are You? gives us a theme for the season as a whole. That’s what Buffy has
to find out – just who is she? When Faith takes on Buffy’s identity, we learn
a great deal about what Buffy is like as a result: Buffy’s mother loves her;
Buffy has friends who treat her with respect and include her in their lives
(I’m paraphrasing Joss’s description of a family which I quoted in my post
on Goodbye Iowa); Buffy has a boyfriend who’s tender and treats her with
respect and love; that acting as the Slayer results in gratitude from those she
helps.
Most important, Faith learns that Buffy is the Slayer:
“Forrest: Yeah, you're a killer.
Faith-as-Buffy: I am not a killer!!! I am the Slayer!”
At the same time, Spike and Forrest think they learn something about who
Buffy really is, but in fact they’re learning about Faith. This mistake will, I
believe, have consequences for both of them and perhaps for Buffy too.
The lesbian subtext in the Buffy/Faith relationship – re-watch the dialogue
for the double entendres when they meet on campus – brings us to another
important question of identity. I’ve held off discussing the issue since it was
first hinted in Hush, but several scenes in WAY? make it obvious where
Willow and Tara are heading.
Tara herself says it: “I am, you know. Yours.” Faith’s cruel lines to Tara
demonstrate that Faith has recognized it: “Willow’s not driving stick any
more.” Still more obvious, I hope, is the famous “Floating O” spell. Let’s
face it – a big “O” floating above Willow as she lies back with a look of
ecstasy on her face? The cuts from her to Riley making love to “Buffy”
reinforce the blatant orgasm metaphor in the spell. Joss describes it as “one
of the steamiest sex scenes we ever shot”.
In the DVD commentary for Hush, Joss explained the practical reasoning
for Willow’s recognition of her sexual identity:
“Seth Green, who played Oz, left rather abruptly, and we weren’t sure
where to go. And then she, Amber Benson, appeared, sort of made up our
minds for us. We had the idea of introducing the character Tara, a very shy
girl who falls for Willow fairly on, because college is the sort of place
where people expand and explore their sexuality.”
The lesbian relationship between Willow and Tara was groundbreaking at
the time. It was also controversial in several ways. Putting aside the moral
disapproval from bigots, some fans of the show were upset that Willow had
moved on from Oz; others argued that she couldn’t have a relationship with
a woman because her relationship with Oz meant she couldn’t be gay (not
that there’s anything wrong with that…). There were even obnoxious
comments at The Bronze that Amber Benson (Tara) was “fat”. I’ll have a
great deal more to say about this relationship as we go along.
Because of concerns about the relationship both within the corporate
hierarchy and the audience, magic was used as a metaphor for their
relationship in S4 and S5. One obvious example was the Floating O spell
here, but there will be others. Since the show clearly viewed the
relationship as positive, the association of magic with it was also intended
as positive. Tara’s ability to sense that Buffy isn’t herself is one example,
but we can see Joss’s attitude even in the two magical devices used for the
body switch. Faith’s device, presumably the result of dark magic, had a
harsh, mechanical look. Contrast that with the cool glowy thing Willow and
Tara conjured to reverse the spell.
Finally, we learned something about Riley in these episodes as well. When I
first saw WAY?, I thought Buffy was unfair to Riley when she was so upset
that he had slept with Faith-as-Buffy. In my view then, Riley had no idea
that such a thing was possible and he didn’t even know who Faith was, so
couldn’t recognize aspects of her personality. I had completely forgotten the
point of A New Man, where Buffy recognized Giles when she looked in the
Fyarl demon’s eyes. Buffy-as-Faith even referenced that incident when she
was trying to convince Giles that she wasn’t Faith: "Can't you just look in
my eyes and be all...intuitive?". I still missed the point, but it should be
apparent that Riley’s failure to recognize that it wasn’t Buffy he was having
sex with pretty strongly suggests that Riley doesn’t really know who Buffy
is.
Trivia notes: (1) As in Buffy’s joint dream with her in Graduation Day 2,
Faith’s dream in the teaser to TYG includes a cryptic prophecy. (2) Another
cultural reference that should be pretty well known: Buffy’s comparison of
Adam to the Terminator refers to the movie franchise of that name. (3)
Willow’s description of Riley as “their top gun guy” refers to the movie Top
Gun. (4) Writer Doug Petrie describes the scene with the demon tied to the
trees as a Silence of the Lambs scene because it’s similar to one in that
movie. (5) The scene where Faith climbs out of the grave in the rain was an
homage to The Shawshank Redemption. (6) Buffy as bad predictor: she tells
Riley “Whatever comes, we can handle.” Then Faith wakes up. (7) Buffy’s
description of Faith as her wacky identical cousin from England refers to
the 1960s television comedy The Patty Duke Show. (8) When Buffy
suggested that Faith should “get out of Dodge”, she was playing off the
expression “get the hell out of Dodge”, meaning “get out of here”. (9) The
black helicopter which brought the Watcher’s Council retrieval team is a
joking nod to the Black Helicopters of right wing fantasies in the US. (10)
Faith looked at the knife display in the store she and Buffy broke into in
Bad Girls. (11) Faith’s mention of being stuck like “animals in tar pits”
refers to the La Brea Tar Pits. (12) Faith’s description of Riley as “the clean
marine” comes from the movie The Right Stuff. (13)The expiration date on
the credit card Faith found is a joke which requires spoilers to explain. (14)
Willow’s reference to “hyena possession” is a callback to The Pack. (15)
Buffy’s mention of Giles and Joyce having sex refers to Band Candy. Buffy
learned this when she had psychic power in Earshot. (16) Spike’s
description of himself to Faith-as-Buffy as “helpless as a kitten up a tree”
comes from the song “Misty” by Johnny Mathis and Nat King Cole. It’s a
double pun because the movie Play Misty For Me involves a female stalker
and features the song. (17) Willow’s name for the spell which switched
bodies – “Draconian Katra” – was probably taken from Star Trek, where a
“katra” is the essence of a Vulcan mind and can be transferred to another in
the moments before death. (18) When Faith-as-Buffy tells Riley “I can’t use
you” and orders him to stay outside the church, there’s a double meaning to
her words: he won’t be any good in a fight because of his injury; and she
can’t treat him as an object to be used (what Faith originally intended with
the sex). (19) There’s also a pun when Faith-as-Buffy tells the vampire
“I’ve just come to pray [prey]”. (20) During the fight in the church, Buffy-
as-Faith saves Faith-as-Buffy by staking the vampire in the back. The scene
is nearly identical to the one in which Faith saved Buffy from Mr. Trick in
Consequences. They’re even now. (21) Faith’s story continues on the AtS
episodes Five By Five and Sanctuary.
 Superstar
For all that S4 gives us a generally favorable view of magic, Superstar
demonstrates that magic can be carried to excess. The episode is another
take on identity, this time Jonathan’s attempt to magic himself an entirely
new one at the expense of everybody else. There’s no doubt that what he
did was wrong. An authentic self isn’t constructed out of thin air, it’s the
process of a lifetime of work: "Buffy: Jonathan you can't keep trying to
make everything work out with some big gesture all at once. Things are
complicated. They take time and work."
Jonathan’s world was a pastiche of fantasy and real life. It’s possible he got
the motivation from this dialogue in Earshot (also written by Jane
Espenson):
“WILLOW Fantasies are fun, aren't they Jonathan?
JONATHAN Uh... I guess.
WILLOW We all have fantasies that we're powerful, more respected.
Where people pay attention to us.
JONATHAN Uh... maybe.
WILLOW But sometimes the fantasy isn't enough, is it Jonathan?
Sometimes we have to make it so people don't ignore us. Make them pay
attention.”
Jonathan’s spell here is certainly consistent with the season theme that
others try to force you into becoming a different person than you are. In this
case, Jonathan got tired of the identity he felt others forced on him and
decided to push back. He ended up trying to force others to conform to him:
“Buffy: I think that Jonathan may be doing something so that he's
manipulating the world and we're all like his pawns." For all that we like
Jonathan, and sympathize with him, he’s no better than Maggie Walsh once
he does the spell. The consequence is even the same – the creation of a
monster which must be defeated. Hint.
Fear of change can block some people from even trying to defeat the
monster:
“Riley: "So if this is the world he created, what's the real world like?"
Willow: "I'm scared. Everything's going to change."
Giles: "Well, actually it'll remain pretty much the same except Jonathan
won't be Jonathan - not our Jonathan, anyway."
Xander: "No! No! No! World without sunshine! World without joy!"
Adam, ironically enough, tells us how to see through efforts to manipulate
the world:
“Adam: "These are lies." [He turns off the TVs.] "None of this is real. The
world has been changed. It's intriguing but it's wrong."
The vampire looks back and forth.
Vampire: "Feels ok to me."
Adam: "You're under his spell just like the others. I seem to be the only one
who is not."
Vampire: "Really? And what makes you so special?"
Adam: "I'm aware. I know every molecule of myself and everything around
me. No one - no human, no demon - has ever been as awake and alive as I
am. You are all just shadows."
A real adult sees through the efforts of others to impose their identity on us
and finds her own authentic identity. Buffy was first to realize Jonathan’s
deception because, deep down, she knows her true self. Self-awareness.
“Riley: … She sees things that the rest of us don’t.”
Note Jonathan’s mention of the incident from A New Man where Buffy
recognized FyarlGiles: “I mean you have this amazing connection with
him… and then at the one moment when it matters the most he looks into
your eyes and he doesn't even see that it's not you looking back at him."
Trivia notes: (1) The opening credits are hilarious. The last scene –
Jonathan’s power walk wearing a cape – was taken from the credits of
Angel the Series. There are so many funny background props in the episode
that I can’t possibly list them all. (2) When Jonathan recognized that Giles
was playing the Nimzowitsch Defense, he was referring to an actual chess
opening. However, the chess board in the scene doesn’t show the real thing.
(3) Jonathan aiming at the apples on the soldiers’ heads is from the story of
William Tell. (4) “Witch Doctor”, the first song we hear playing in the
Bronze, was a 1958 hit by David Seville of Alvin and the Chipmunks fame.
It naturally suggests what Jonathan is doing in this episode. (5) When
Xander accused Anya of moaning Jonathan’s name, he said she wasn’t
“fluffing up the old ego”. “Fluff” in this context refers to a woman (usually)
on the set of a porn movie who gets the male star hard when necessary. (6)
Jonathan sings “Serenade in Blue”, a 1942 song by Harry Warren with
lyrics by Mack Gordon. The actual singer was not Danny Strong
(Jonathan), but Brad Kane, who played Tucker Wells in The Prom. (7) The
US women’s soccer team did win the Women’s World Cup in 1999, the
summer before this episode aired. But Jonathan didn’t coach them. (8) The
movie marquee advertising “Being Jonathan Levinson” plays off the movie
Being John Malkovich. (9) Anya’s “alternative realities are neat” seems to
be a reference to The Wish.
 Where The Wild Things Are
I have a hard time writing much about Where The Wild Things Are. I see it
as one of the very weakest episodes in the series. While there are good
scenes with Spike and Anya in the Bronze, with Giles singing, and with
Spike talking himself out of helping rescue Buffy, the sexathon manages to
be boring – even disgusting for some viewers – and the religious
fundamentalism explanation is used as an anvil rather than a metaphor.
I think my view is pretty general among fans; I’ve only see a few people
defend the episode as a whole. Here’s Rob from AtPO explaining why he
likes it:
“I think I'm the only person who likes Where the Wild Things Are. I will
admit that it's not the best episode, but there's a lot about it I really enjoy,
particularly the thorns. The episode first came out when I was doing a term
paper on fairy tales for a children's literature course, and I found the
"Sleeping Beauty" visuals very striking. Given that Bruno Bettelheim
interpreted Aurora pricking her finger as being symbolic of her first
menstrual cycle and the sleep as being the transition between her childhood
and sexual awakening, I always thought the episode worked as a more adult
spin on the fairy tale.”
Rob’s explanation seems reasonable, though it doesn’t have much to do
with the seasonal themes. If we see it as basically a stand-alone episode –
that is, we don’t try to force the episode’s themes or metaphors into some
relevance to the season themes – then the vines growing outside Riley’s
door represent the way repression serves to conceal sexual desire. Much of
the episode consists of various forms of concealment and/or repression: the
orphans were repressed; Buffy and Riley make flimsy excuses for their lust;
the party-goers play “Spin the Bottle”; they talk about “sensuality” when
they mean sexuality; and Willow and Tara talk in code filled with double
meaning:
“WILLOW: Horses, like big ... tall ... teeth that can take your arm off
horses?
TARA: Well, sure. I learned to ride when I was a kid. It's fun. (Smiling)
And, by the way, most horses don't like arm very much.
(Willow looks uncertain.)
WILLOW: I had a bad birthday party pony thing when I was four. I, I look
at horses and I see really big ponies.
TARA: You should ride with me sometime. I guarantee safety and fun.
(Willow smiles.)
WILLOW: Well... if you promise you'll look after me.”
In this interpretation, Xander and Anya are the ones who can break through
the barriers of repression to rescue Buffy and Riley because they’re the
most open and uninhibited about their sexual desires. The problem is that if
we’re supposed to find sexual openness a good thing, then it seems a failure
of execution for the sex scenes to be pretty universally condemned.
The message is both fairly obvious and spelled out directly for us in the
dialogue at the end:
“WILLOW: Don't be too hard on yourself.
BUFFY: He's right, Will. If Riley and I hadn't ... gotten so wrapped up in
each other, none of this would've happened.”
Tracey Forbes, who wrote this episode, never wrote another.
Trivia notes: (1) The episode title comes from the children’s book of the
same name by Maurice Sendak. (2) Buffy’s “who says we can’t all get
along?” plays off the statement by Rodney King after the Los Angeles riots
in 1994. (3) The “wrinkled man” Anya saw on TV talking about erectile
dysfunction was Bob Dole. (4) The guy at the party who discovered the
orgasm wall was the snobby one from Beer Bad. Tracey Forbes also wrote
that episode. (5) When Xander described people as “going Felicity with
their hair” he was referring to Keri Russell, star of the TV show Felicity,
who cut her hair between seasons. Julie, the one who cut off her hair in the
closet, had long curly hair somewhat like Keri Russell’s. (6) Spike
wondered if Danger Mouse, a cartoon show, was on. (7) The song Giles
was singing was “Behind Blue Eyes” by The Who. (8) Xander’s “she who
smelt it dealt it” is flatulence humor. (9) Xander’s “House is clean” comes
from the movie Poltergeist. (10) In comments, William B suggested a good
way to relate this episode to the seasonal themes, and I’ll discuss that in my
post on Primeval.
 New Moon Rising
I really like New Moon Rising in many ways, but it walks a very fine line
with its metaphor. There’s a tolerance theme, obviously, with Oz as the text,
and Angel, Willow and Tara as the (barely) subtext. That’s all good, but it
creates a real potential for misunderstanding the entire rest of the series.
I’ve actually seen people argue from this episode that vampires and demons
symbolize an oppressed class, and that Buffy is an oppressor because she
slays them. I’ve even seen the syllogism that (a) blacks are the most
oppressed class in America; (b) vampires and demons therefore represent
them; thus (c) Buffy is racist.
Far be it from me to tell anyone how to watch the show. I’m of the school
that we’re all entitled to our own interpretations; in some sense, every
viewer watches a different show. I’m pretty skeptical, though, of treating
vampires and demons in general as representatives of an oppressed class.
For one thing, I seriously doubt that blacks, or any other minority, would
appreciate the comparison to blood sucking fiends. For another, it’s pretty
clear that the external demons we see in the show are intended as metaphors
for our internal demons.
“To Joss, vampires were supposed to be ugly, evil, and quick to be killed.
He got talked into one romantic vampire by his writing partner David
Greenwalt and that was Angel. Of course Angel took off like a rocket and
when I was cast Joss did not imagine me to be popular; Spike was supposed
to be dirty and evil, punk rock, and then dead. Things started to turn out
differently and I think Joss was passionate that I would not corrupt his
theme, which was basically trying to find a metaphor for all of the problems
you encounter during adolescence. Vampires stood in for those problems
and I think I endangered that theme by being popular. He did not want
people to like me at all.” James Marsters,
[Link]
James-Marsters-(Buffy-the-Vampire-Slayer,-Angel).htm
In my view, the metaphor in NMR can work but only in very narrow,
carefully defined cases. As a general rule, the vampires, the demons, and
the forces of darkness are evil and should be slayed (as Buffy does on sight
with vampires). There have been and will continue to be exceptions to that
rule, but it remains the default.
NMR gives us another take on identity, consistent with the season theme.
Willow commits to the identity she’s been moving towards since Hush. Oz
returned believing that he had come to terms with his identity, but maybe
not as much as he had thought. For all of Riley’s experience with Prof.
Walsh, he hasn’t yet fully understood the way the Initiative (metaphorically)
establishes the rules to which he conforms:
RILEY: … Is it that whole thing about Willow last night? (He sits on the
bed.) Look, I only said what I said because I'm concerned. I don't wanna see
her get hurt.
BUFFY: You sounded like Mr. Initiative. Demons bad, people good.
RILEY: Something wrong with that theorem?
Only after the events of this episode reinforce the problematic nature of the
Initiative does Riley reassess the track he’s on:
RILEY: I don't know. I'm sorry it ended that way. But I am glad it's done.
I'm glad I know where I stand, finally.
Riley declared a new identity for himself as an anarchist by punching out
his commanding officer. That was a reasonably satisfying scene, given how
they portrayed Col. McNamara, but it’s another instance where we can
imagine what was lost when Lindsay Crouse left.
Is Riley now more like Willow, committed to his new identity, or is he more
like Oz, perhaps less firmly in control than he thinks?
Trivia notes: (1) Willow suggests that a cat might be a “familiar”. A
familiar is a supernatural entity, often in the form of an animal, which helps
a witch do magic. (2) When Forrest came into Riley’s room to announce
that “beta team” had been “hit”, Buffy was wearing one of Riley’s shirts. It
was the same shirt Faith-as-Buffy wore in Who Are You? That undoubtedly
reinforced Forrest’s negative view of Buffy after Faith’s dismissive words
to him in that incident. (3) The Initiative “doctors” gave Oz haloperidol,
which is an antipsychotic drug. A metaphor, obviously, given his inner
wolf. (3) When Buffy threatens to “pull a William Burroughs”, she’s
referring to the author who killed his wife (he was convicted of
manslaughter). (4) When Oz wolfs out and attacks Tara, that’s a metaphor:
Tara, naturally, feels threatened by Oz’s return.
 The Yoko Factor
The Yoko Factor threads together several of the themes we’ve seen earlier
in the season. The disputes among the SG were foreshadowed in Pangs, and
their insecurities in Fear, Itself. Spike aggravates the insecurities of the SG,
playing on them to bring their fears to the surface. That causes Buffy’s
family to fall apart, setting up the events of Primeval.
ADAM: Friends?
Spike: There's your --what do you call it-- variable. The Slayer's got pals.
You want her evening the odds in a fight you don't want the Slayerettes
mucking about.
ADAM: Take them away from her.
What are these insecurities on which Spike so cleverly played? In Giles’s
case it was the sense of becoming irrelevant, like most parents feel when
their children go off to college. We saw that feeling, and the internal sense
of frustration (even rage) which it generated, in A New Man. Spike saw and
understood that reaction then and played upon it here:
Giles: I'll tell her.
Spike: Oh, you'll tell her! Great comfort that. What makes you think she'll
listen to you?
Giles: Because . . . (trails off, unsure)
Spike: Very convincing.
Giles: I'm her Watcher.
Spike: I think you're neglecting the past-tense there, Rupert. Besides, she
barely listened to you when you were in charge. I've seen the way she
treats you.
Giles grows uncomfortable at those words. He grabs a bottle off the bar
and starts to pour himself a drink.
Giles: Oh, yes? And how's that?
Spike: Very much like a retired librarian.
The fact that Giles was himself responsible for this in some sense –
Anthony Stewart Head says that Giles “cut himself adrift” in S4 – perhaps
made the sense of abandonment all the more painful.
Somewhat the same dynamic plays out with Willow and Xander. Spike
states it expressly: “And you know how it is with kids. They go off to
college, they grow apart. Way of the world.” Similarly, Willow tells Tara
that “It hardly feels like we're roomies now. I mean, she's busy with Riley
and I'm gone a lot too.” This separation from our friends is a natural part of
growing older, so it tracks a journey to adulthood.
Turning to the specifics for each character, Xander fears being useless to his
friends and hence invisible to them. That was his fear in Fear, Itself, and the
whole season has shown him rather isolated from Willow and Buffy. It’s
aggravated by the fact that he loves Buffy and his love is unrequited; Buffy
pays a lot of attention to Riley and therefore necessarily less to Xander.
He’s also living in his parents’ basement and has failed at all his jobs.
That’s not going to boost your ego: “Xander: Like I'm some sort of useless
lunk. It happens I'm good at a lot of things. I help out with all kinds of . . .
stuff. I have skills . . . and . . . stratagems. I'm very . . . (looks to Anya)
Help me out.”
We saw in Fear, Itself that Willow felt unappreciated for and insecure about
her magic. Spike played on her insecurity by questioning her computer
skills, but did so in the context of magic as metaphor for Willow’s
relationship with Tara. Willow’s very insecure indeed about this – she
hadn’t even told Xander or Giles until she said it in the heat of the
argument. While Buffy covered pretty quickly in New Moon Rising, Willow
must have noticed that she was initially thrown (as Buffy herself admitted
in her conversation with Riley in that episode). Oz reacted still more
noticeably, which naturally would have made Willow even less sure of her
decision. As a result we get her reaction in the brilliantly constructed
argument scene:
Willow: (sarcastic) Right. (stands moving to the living room) And then
maybe you'll get lucky and he'll still be there and he can rip your arms off
for you? (sternly) Buffy, you can't go back alone….
Buffy: Willow is not going either. I'm doing it alone. …
Willow: (still sarcastic) Oh, great. And then when you have your new "no
arms" we can all say "Gee, it's a good thing we weren't there getting in the
way of that!"…
Buffy: Okay, I need you. I need both of you. All the time! Just ... not
now. Adam is very dangerous.
Willow: Wait. How do you need me, really?
Buffy: You're ... good with the computer stuff. (Willow accepts that)
Usually. (Willow glares at her) And-and there's the witch stuff.
Willow: (accusingly) Witch stuff? What exactly do you mean by "witch
stuff?"…
Willow: It's not today! Buffy, things have been wrong for a while! Don't
you see that?
Buffy: What do you mean wrong?
Willow: Well, they certainly haven't been right, since Tara. We have to
face it. You can't handle Tara being my girlfriend.”

Buffy fears being alone: “Hollow voice: “All alone.” Buffy pushes herself
up: “Who said that?”
… Guy: “They all ran away from you. They always will. Open your heart
to someone and….” (Fear, Itself). That’s not surprising considering her
experience with her father, with Angel, with Parker, and the more general
sense of isolation we’ve seen which comes from being the Slayer. It’s
precisely that fear which comes true after the fight at Giles’s:
Buffy: (somberly) So . . . I guess I'm starting to understand why there's no
ancient prophecy about a Chosen One ... and her friends.
She hurries to the door grabbing her jacket.
Buffy: If I need help, I'll go to someone I can count on.

While these insecurities and fears have been re-emphasized during S4,
many of them trace back to much earlier events. For example, during the
fight in Dead Man’s Party Willow’s attack on Buffy arose out of her sense
that she was going through important transitions in her life and that Buffy
hadn’t been there for her. The same is true here. Willow wants to be a full
participant in Buffy’s life, and for Buffy to be a full participant in hers, so
when Buffy refused her help in TYF, Willow reacted just as she did in
DMP, as she did in Bad Girls, and as she did in The I in Team.
Xander’s concerns about feeling useless date back even further. In The
Harvest he got angry when Buffy wouldn’t let him go with her to rescue
Jesse: “I’m less than a man.” Buffy played directly into those concerns
when she said nearly the same thing she’d said then: “You're not going,
Xander. Y-you'd get hurt.”
While Buffy’s angry reaction to the attacks from Willow and Xander
stemmed in part from her stress level generally – emphasized in her
conversation with Angel – the specific fear of being isolated and abandoned
is longstanding. It’s probably fair to say that Xander’s Lie in Becoming
remains in the back of her mind when Willow and Xander both end the
argument by refusing to help her now:
Buffy: Enough! All I know is you want to help, right? Be part of the
team?
Willow and Xander shake their heads, grumbling.
Willow: (unison) I don't know anymore.
Xander: (unison) Really not wanted.
There’s another “family” which falls apart too: the Initiative. “Family’s
tearing apart”, says Forrest. The Initiative serves as a parallel case in which
the concept of “family” is yanked out of its organic sense and applied to an
artificial construct which isn’t a “real” family in any meaningful sense. The
Initiative is the Adam of families.
The fact that both “families” disintegrate, and that Adam very deliberately
sets about causing that disintegration, tells us that this is an important
consequence of society’s forced “normality”. By acceding to the pressure
from society to conform, we end up abandoning the things that are not just
important, but critical to our ability to function as authentic individuals.
“How can you possibly help?”, Buffy asked. We’ll see the answer, and how
it affects Buffy’s authentic self, next episode.
Spike plays a crucial role in TYF. When I was discussing the effects of the
chip/internal panopticon in my post on The Initiative, I mentioned that one
way to see it was that it interfered with Spike’s essential nature. Adam puts
that into words here: “You feel smothered. Trapped like an animal. Pure in
its ferocity, unable to actualize the urges within. Clinging to one truth.
Like a flame struggling to burn within an enclosed glass. That a beast this
powerful cannot be contained. Inevitably it will break free and savage the
land again. I will make you whole again. Make you savage.”
In Doomed Spike showed his true nature underneath the effect of the chip.
We’ve gotten repeated reminders of this since: in Who Are You? during the
alley scene with Xander and Giles; in Superstar; and when he talked
himself out of helping Buffy in Where The Wild Things Are. This gets us
back to the issues raised by Alex’s conditioning in A Clockwork Orange.
Here we see that the conditioning hasn’t changed Spike’s underlying nature.
He joined with Adam quite easily and reveled in his ability to harm the SG
with words alone.
I need to talk about Riley a bit too, both in his relationship with Buffy and
in his status vis-à-vis the Initiative. In the teaser we got another statement of
the attitude the Initiative has towards its soldiers (again, pretend a similar
scene has Prof. Walsh in it):
“Mr. Ward: And the men?
McNamara: These are exceptional boys. …
Mr. Ward: This incident with Finn was unfortunate.
McNamara: Fell in with a bad crowd. Quite frankly, I don't think he was
ever the soldier that you all hoped he was. Boy thinks too much.” My
emphasis.

This is precisely what’s wrong with the Initiative and with society in
general, according to the metaphors and themes playing out in S4. It’s
treating adults as children, demanding that they conform without thinking.
Col. McNamara may believe that “thinking too much” is a bad thing, but
that’s hardly how Buffy behaves. We’ve seen since at least Angel that she
very carefully makes distinctions in the course of carrying out her Slayer
duties. It’s precisely those distinctions which the Initiative refuses to make:
“they’re just animals”; “what kind of demon? Does it matter?”. The
Initiative’s failure even to try to understand the enemy – previously signaled
by Buffy’s questions in The I in Team – will have drastic consequences.
Riley’s behavior at the end of New Moon Rising seemed to bear out Col.
McNamara’s statement, though the ending of TYF is nicely ambiguous
about Riley’s intentions. There probably would have been greater emotional
tension to this scene had we seen Prof. Walsh, instead of Adam, with Riley.
Now let’s talk about his relationship with Buffy. During their conversation
in Buffy’s room, Riley tells Buffy he loves her. He previously said these
words to “Buffy” in Who Are You?, but that was actually Faith. Buffy has
never heard the words before. Note specifically that she did not tell him that
she loved him back. What’s also very interesting is that during the entire
conversation, Riley never asked her about the big bloody scratch on her
forehead even though Buffy asked him how bad he was hurt. Angel asked.
You want a metaphor, I’ll give you a metaphor: while Willow is
contemplating whether she’ll live with Buffy next year, she’s playing with
Tara’s, uh, kitten. Ahem. Censorship is the mother of metaphor.
Trivia notes: (1) I absolutely refuse to explain Yoko Ono more than the
episode itself does. That would make me feel entirely too old. (2) If you
don’t watch Angel the Series, or haven’t started watching it yet, this episode
takes place after Buffy made a trip to Los Angeles to see Angel (the episode
“Sanctuary”). That trip ended in a fight between Buffy and Angel. That’s
why Xander later refers to her as “L.A. Woman”, which is also the name of
a song by The Doors. (3) Spike’s reference to Buffy as “Little Miss Tiny”
refers to one of a series of children’s books by Roger Hargreaves. (4) Tony
Robbins is a motivational speaker. Spike compares Adam to him after
Adam’s “you feel smothered” riff. (5) Spike’s phrase “when the wild
rumpus begins” comes from the book Where The Wild Things Are. (6) Giles
was playing the song “Freebird” by Lynard Skynard on his guitar. (7) “Be
all you can be” – part of Spike’s insinuations to Xander – was a recruiting
slogan for the US Army. (8) Buffy’s blaster was the one she got from Prof.
Walsh in The I in Team. Riley fixed it in This Year’s Girl. (9) When Buffy
referred to Forrest’s “family” as the Corleones, she was referencing the
mafia family of The Godfather. (10) Willow’s “if ever a whiz there was”
plays off The Wizard Of Oz. Duh. (11) Angel was able to recognize Riley
because he saw Buffy talking to Riley in Pangs. (12) Spike wasn’t surprised
that Adam liked Helter Skelter because that was an obsession of murderer
Charles Manson. (13) Do I really need to explain that Batman’s butler is
named Alfred? (14) Fort Dix is an actual army base in New Jersey. (15)
Since TYF is the episode in which Willow formally comes out, it’s worth
remembering this dialogue from Doppelgangland:
Willow: (appalled) It's horrible! That's me as a vampire? (Angel closes the
door) I'm so evil and... skanky. (aside to Buffy, worried) And I think I'm
kinda gay.
Buffy: (reassuringly) Willow, just remember, a vampire's personality has
nothing to do with the person it was.
Angel: (without thinking) Well, actually... (gets a look from Buffy) That's a
good point.
 Primeval
Unlike every other season, S4 has its climactic events in the penultimate
episode. Primeval “concludes” the season, but the brilliant coda of Restless
gives us closure. Because it comes right before Restless, Primeval is often
overlooked or criticized, but I really enjoy the episode and can re-watch it
repeatedly.
The teaser brings us to the conclusion of the theme we’ve been following
since the reference to Of Human Bondage in The Freshman. Adam, who
now stands in for Prof. Walsh as well as for the consequences of Prof.
Walsh’s Initiative, promises Riley the lure which society, including
particularly college, offers all of us in return for our compliance:
Adam: You have no power. Not yet. Once you forget your old life and
embrace your destiny as I have, you will know power you've never dreamed
of. I think you're going to like it.
The final phase of the Initiative is to make this process an assembly line –
the specific humans and demons in the Initiative itself are a synecdoche for
all of us. Buffy’s challenge at this point of her journey to adulthood is to
defeat Adam, thereby metaphorically rejecting college’s/society’s attempt to
mold her into something monstrous. We therefore need to look at how
Buffy defeats Adam in order to understand the remainder of the episode and
the conclusion of the season.
As I’ve suggested throughout S4, and as Joss Himself says, a key theme of
the season is identity. In order to understand the point of this theme to
Buffy’s journey, I think it helps to start with the critical event(s) of the
climax. As I’ve argued in several previous posts (The Freshman, The
Initiative, and Goodbye Iowa), the challenge facing Buffy on this part of her
journey is how to create her own identity. The price for Riley’s “reward” is
the sacrifice of his own identity; as Adam tells him, and as we see clearly
demonstrated by Riley’s inability to act on his own, he has no power. Buffy,
it turns out, does – she’s “never been one to toe the line”. Here’s how it
worked:
Willow (taking cards from a tarot deck): Spiritus...Spirit. (lays it down in
front of her)
She hands a card to Xander.
Xander: Animus...Heart.
She hands a card to Giles.
Giles: Sophus...Mind.
Willow: And Manus...
Cut to Buffy punching Forrest.
Willow: (o.s.) The hand.
Buffy had to unify her mind, heart, and spirit. This is accomplished via
metaphor, with each member of the SG serving as a representation of a
particular aspect of Buffy. I first suggested this equation of these characters
with these aspects of Buffy in the Introduction and this scene is obviously
one source for that suggestion (we’ll see more in Restless and later
episodes). I hasten to add that this reading is not original to me; many
others at AtPO noted it and relied on it.
That this unification spell was an essential step for Buffy can hardly be
doubted. It involves integrating essential features of her authentic self. I’ve
mentioned before that themes which we see in S4 also appear in Joss’s
series Dollhouse. In the episode which closes the first season of that show,
Epitaph 1 (mild spoiler follows), one of the main characters tells others that
she can show them the way to Safe Haven, a place where they’ll be
protected from those trying to steal their identities: “Where no one can be
changed. You die as you were born. Heart in concert with mind. I know the
way to Safe Haven.” My emphasis. The idea in Primeval is much the same,
only more elaborate in some ways.
That’s metaphor. On the storyline, it would be easy to criticize the
reconciliation as rushed or incomplete, especially given the long-standing
nature of the feelings which I discussed in the post on The Yoko Factor. I
think the fact that Spike played such a key role allowed the SG to put aside
their differences. Those differences didn’t really vanish, but they could be
pushed away and the blame cast on Spike – “Buffy: That’s where it came
from, the stuff we said the other night.” – for the sake of the emergency.
I suggested in my post on The I in Team that Buffy adopted the wrong
solution by attempting to join the Initiative. That was the cause of the
problem, not a solution. The flaw was not that she went off on her own, per
se, it was that she didn’t understand what her true identity consisted of, that
is, she didn’t understand the “I” in the title. Buffy’s identity – her “I” –
includes her friends, her metaphorical heart, mind and spirit. Her team and
her identity are the same. The joining spell represents a commitment to that
identity, just as Willow committed to hers in New Moon Rising.
After unifying her heart, mind, and spirit, Buffy then calls upon the essence
of the First Slayer:
Willow: We enjoin that we may inhabit the vessel--the hand...daughter of
Sineya...first of the ones...
What does it mean to call upon the essence of the Slayer? In my reading,
becoming the Slayer is a metaphor for becoming a true adult. Thus, in order
to defeat Adam, a metaphor for the false adulthood college and society try
to force upon us, Buffy calls upon the powers of true adulthood: “The
power of the Slayer and all who wield it. Last to ancient first, we invoke
thee. Grant us thy domain and primal strength. Accept us in the power we
possess. Make us mind and heart and spirit joy. Let the hand encompass
us. Do thy will. …” Those powers include the mystical because that’s an
essential part of life. Using that power to pull out Adam’s power center and
float it away is a metaphorical way of rejecting both the power of a college
and society which try to force us to conform and the monstrous results from
that.
The actual execution of Buffy’s exercise of adult power was inspired by the
comic series Promethea (feminine form of Prometheus). In essence (pun
intended), Promethea is the essence of a being which manifests in our world
through a series of different human bodies – vessels – down through the
ages. That’s why Willow twice uses the word “vessel”, by whom she means
Buffy: “We enjoin that we may inhabit the vessel”; “We implore thee, admit
us, bring us to the vessel….” In the comics there’s a mystical connection
between the vessels, so in Primeval we learn something hinted before with
Faith, namely that there’s a mystical connection between Buffy and other
Slayers.
There’s also a general anti-materialist and anti-science theme in the
Promethea comics. This obviously ties in rather well with the science v.
magic theme for S4. As I’ve mentioned before, the struggle against Adam
highlights the masculine/feminine dichotomy for which science and magic,
respectively, stand. Primeval emphasizes the masculine nature of Buffy’s
opposition through the association of Adam as a botched science
experiment, the military use intended for him, the rigid attitudes of Forrest
and Col. McNamara, and the twisted nature of the “family” Adam has
gathered together (ZombieWalsh, ZombieAngleman, DemonForrest, Adam
himself, and Riley). Please do remember that the “masculinity” which is
criticized here has nothing to do with any specific person’s gender; it’s the
ideology, not the sex, against which Buffy fought.
Buffy’s situation contrasts that of Adam at all points. Her “family” is an
organic one, developed out of friendship and love over the years. She isn’t
giving orders to her “troops”, they’re helping her out of love and adding to
her power. She doesn’t rely on science, but on magic and mystery. The spell
that the SG used to overcome Adam was not knowledge that College or the
Initiative could ever either acquire or disseminate: "You can never hope to
know the source of our power. Your's is right here." In Doug Petrie’s
phrase, “science gets its ass roundly kicked”. William B suggested in
comments that the anti-science theme is more nuanced than Petrie’s
comment seems, and I think he’s right: “I do think that rather than anti-
science, the season more argues that the human (psychological/ethical)
condition can't be reduced to science. … it's the use of the tools of science
to exert control that is Walsh's (and Adam's, and the Initiative's generally)
downfall.”
The phrase “the source of our power” is nicely ambiguous. I’m inclined to
see it as meaning (a) the united force of her friends; (2) the metaphorical
joinder of heart, mind, and spirit; and (3) the power of the Slayer/adulthood.
Any of the three probably works individually as well.
By defeating not just Adam but the government and (by inference, since the
message got muddled) university attempts to create monsters out of
disparate parts, Buffy rejected the effort to force her into “normality”.
Instead she reaffirmed her own identity, consisting of heart, mind, and
spirit.
Now let’s talk about the demons. William B. suggested in a comment that
WTWTA provides a reminder that repression merely leads to a break out
later on. That showed us in metaphor what actually happens with the caged
demons in Primeval. As the voiceover at the end explains,
“Man: It was an experiment. The Initiative represented the Government's
interests in not only controlling the otherworldly menace, but harnessing its
power for our own military purposes. The considered opinion of this
council is that this experiment has failed. …
Man (v.o): … I trust the irony of that is not lost on any of us. Maggie
Walsh's vision…was brilliant, but ultimately unsupportable.
Man (v.o): The demons cannot be harnessed, cannot be controlled.”
We’ve known this since S3. The vampires, the demons, and the forces of
darkness are intrinsic to the world. Society can no more control them than
Joyce could in Gingerbread. Nothing external can change them.
This has important consequences for the other themes of S4. If demons
can’t be controlled from the outside, then Bentham was wrong about the
reformation of character via the panopticon. Spike’s essential nature can’t
be changed with a chip.
Nor, ultimately, could Riley’s. Maggie Walsh did to Riley what she’d done
to Spike and what Kathy tried to do with Buffy in Living Conditions – steal
his identity. Riley thought he had a secret identity; turns out it was a
different secret identity than the one he thought he had. As with Spike,
Riley’s chip takes away his ability to act on his own volition, to choose his
own path. Where Spike’s case might have been arguable, and where we
might even have justified it because of Spike’s vampiric nature, Riley’s is
not. He’s a person and what Maggie did to him is an abomination. This is
where the shift in focus to Adam really changed the way we might view the
season. The emotional resonance of what happened to Riley was lost
because Maggie’s been dead for months, and Adam wasn’t the guilty party
in his case.
Yes, Riley seems "better" than the SG (and Xander always sees him that
way), but I think the end of TYF tells us that may not be the case. After
Buffy storms out and says she's going to find someone she can count on, the
scene cuts to the high school and good old dependable Riley isn't there. His
programmer has summoned him. And for all his good qualities, that's Riley
too.
Riley’s a fundamentally decent person whose love for Buffy leads him to
reject his programming, just as Angel’s love for Buffy led him to the road to
recovery from his metaphorical addiction. He’s been moving in that
direction since the fog was lifted from his eyes in Goodbye Iowa, but his
journey was longer than he could have realized. Staying with the Initiative,
even with his eyes open, as he tried to do from Goodbye Iowa through New
Moon Rising, couldn’t work. He not only had to leave permanently, he had
to consciously remove the programming Prof. Walsh had installed in him.
Riley’s removal of the chip is pretty unrealistic, as are other features of the
chip if you think about it. However, the chip is a metaphor for the way he’s
been forced onto the “normal” track (like Philip in Of Human Bondage).
The removal of the chip signifies his rejection of that path, similar to
Buffy’s removal of Adam’s power core.
One interesting point to contemplate as we move forward: Did Riley only
come to like Buffy because Walsh told him to? In The Initiative, Prof.
Walsh told Riley that she liked Buffy. This was important to Riley
(mother’s approval). He even mentioned it to Buffy in The I in Team:
Riley: It's . . . a little unusual. She's just not used to it. Maybe because you
barely ever opened your mouth in her classroom. But I know she likes
you. In fact, she liked you before I did.
Buffy: (hopeful) Really?
Riley: Told me so herself.
Consider this dialogue in light of what we now know about his chip. How
much of his identity was really him and how much was created by Maggie
Walsh and social expectations (regardless of the chip)?
Trivia notes: (1) Spike’s reference to getting Buffy into the Initiative as
going “down the rabbit hole” is a reference to Alice in Wonderland. (2)
When Spike referred to Buffy as “Nancy Drew”, he meant the eponymous
heroine of young adult detective novels. (3) If you really want to know
about asymmetric key algorithms for encryption, see here. (4) When
Xander said Spike had to “get his ya-yas”, he was referencing the Rolling
Stones song “Get Yer Ya-Yas Out”. (5) Buffy’s “give the demon his due”
plays off the phrase “give the devil his due”. (6) We didn’t see Riley tell
Buffy about Adam’s uranium power core, but Riley learned it from
Jonathan in Superstar. (7) David Fury wrote most of the episode, but Marti
Noxon wrote the scenes in the elevator shaft. (8) “Must See TV” was
NBC’s advertising slogan during the 1990s. (9) Spike’s “Dr. Owe Me One”
puns off of Obi-Wan from Star Wars. (10) When Willow says “there’s no
there there” regarding the space behind Room 314, she’s referencing a
quote by Gertrude Stein (who said it about the city of Oakland, CA). (11)
Note that the escape from the Initiative during the battle was a scaled-up
version of Spike’s escape in The Initiative. Joss wanted Spike’s escape to be
“epic”; now we see why. (12) In comments, State of Siege offered a post-
modernist interpretation the series which is too long to quote here but is
definitely worth reading. You can find it here. There are spoilers at the link,
but they’re labeled.
 Restless
Many of the commenters at AtPO were of the view that “all things lead to
Restless”. By this they meant that the episode works both forward and
backwards. Looking back, it gives insight into previous episodes by telling
us how Joss saw the characters up through that point in time. “I thought a
nice coda to the season, which had been very anarchic and sort of
upheavely season, would be to do a piece that just commented on the four
characters we had grown to know and love, and where they were in their
lives, what they felt about things and each other….” (Joss DVD
commentary; all quotes from Joss below come from the same source.)
Looking forward, it sets the stage for seasons 5-7. Many of the themes and
images from Restless will be used in future episodes. This is specifically
true of the prophetic aspects of Buffy’s dream (see below), but it’s also true
in many other respects as well.
I might not be quite as enthusiastic in my acceptance of the “all things lead
to Restless” view as some, but I do think it’s generally true and a very
useful way to explore the themes of the episode and the show generally.
The unique status of Restless, in its structure, in its concept, and in its role
as the season finale, make it the most difficult episode to write about. I’ll do
the best I can with this “tone poem” (Joss’s words). Joss helpfully provided
a fairly detailed commentary on the DVDs, so I’ll include parts of that as
well as some of my own thoughts.
As a preliminary matter, I want to emphasize that in each case the
character’s dream reinforces the association of that character with the aspect
of Buffy that we saw in The Yoko Factor: the First Slayer chokes Willow so
that she’s unable to breathe (aspirate, which puns with spirit); she rips out
Xander’s heart; and she cuts open Giles’s head to reveal his “enormous
squishy frontal lobes”. We’re even shown the dreams in the same sequence
as Willow laid out the Tarot cards when she performed the joining spell in
The Yoko Factor.
Again, these associations will be made in future episodes as well, but I
think it’s worth calling attention to them here because of the Janus-like
features of Restless.
Fundamentally, I see the dreams as expressing (exposing?) the characters’
insecurities and how they see themselves and each other. These insecurities
are very similar to those we saw on display in Fear, Itself and A New Man,
and rubbed raw by Spike in The Yoko Factor. I’ll begin the discussion of
each character’s dream with a quote from my posts on those episodes. I’m
sure you’ll see the connection.
Willow’s dream.
Fear, Itself: “As we’ve known since Nightmares, Willow fears that
underneath it all, she’s still just a badly dressed geek.”
Her dream opens with a beautiful scene of Willow using calligraphy to
write a poem on Tara’s naked back. “This scene [with Tara] is largely about
their intimacy and trust and the safe place in her life that is her relationship
with Tara.” (Joss)
The scene is an homage to the movie The Pillow Book, which fits the
calligraphy. The words, however, are written in Greek and come from a
poem by the Greek poet Sappho called Hymn to Aphrodite. Here’s one
translation of the complete poem (well, it’s actually a fragment to begin
with):
Deathless Aphrodite on your lavish throne,
Enchantress, daughter of Zeus: I beg you, queen,
Do not overpower my soul with heartaches
and hard troubles,
But come here, if ever at another time
Having heard my voice you paid me attention
And leaving the golden house of your father
you came to me,
Yoking your horse and chariot: gorgeous swift
Sparrows carried you over the coal-black earth,
Thickly whirling their feathers through the midst of
heaven's ether.
Swiftly they arrived, and you, O blessed one,
Smiling with your immortal face, you asked for
What I suffered, and why again I call you
And what in my maddened soul I desire most
To happen to me: what dearest one shall I now
Persuade to lead you back to her — who, O Sappho,
wronged you this time?
For even if she flees, swiftly she will pursue;
And if she does not receive my gifts, she will give;
And if she does not love me, swiftly she will love,
Even against her will. So come to my aid now,
Release me from my grievous cares, fulfill as much
As my heart yearns to be fulfilled: come, be my
fellow-fighter."
Interestingly, Joss describes the scene as one of warmth and trust, but the
poem expresses a concern that the poet’s lover doesn’t actually love her;
that’s the reason she calls on Aphrodite, the goddess of love. I think we can
see Willow’s fundamental insecurity in this contrast. The fact that Tara tells
her “you don’t know everything about me” reinforces this in my view.
Tara’s statement, like many of her statements in the dreams, will serve as
the basis for one episode in S5.
Willow had mentioned in The Yoko Factor that she was thinking of taking
drama. It’s therefore natural that her dreaming mind would turn to that. In
addition, her stage fright has been well-established since the S1 episodes
The Puppet Show and Nightmares, so the context of a play is an obvious
way to explore her insecurities.
The play we see is nominally Death of a Salesman, though the dream
version is, naturally, fanciful. The actual play relates the story of Willy
Loman, a salesman whose deterioration at the age of 60 leads to his failure
at his job and his eventual suicide. It’s at least possible that Willow’s dream
focuses on that play as a reflection of her own underlying insecurities about
who she is (see below). The scene of Riley and Harmony with the milk jugs
(heh) cuts directly to this dialogue:
TARA: (offscreen) Everyone's starting to wonder about you. The real you.
If they find out, they'll punish you, I ... I can't help you with that.
Willow’s dream ends with her exposure in front of a high school class. Two
features of this part of her dream are interesting. Taking the more mundane
first, her book report was on the C.S. Lewis novel The Lion, The Witch and
the Wardrobe. The title of the book names 3 parts of Willow’s dream: the
lion = Miss Kitty Fantastico; the witch = Willow (and Tara); and the
wardrobe = the references to Willow’s attire throughout the dream (“you’re
not in costume”; Buffy ripping Willow’s clothes off to reveal her S1 outfit).
This segment gave the name to a fan board – The Kitten, The Witches, and
The Bad Wardrobe, known colloquially as The Kitten Board – which will
become very important in S6. I’ll discuss it in connection with the episode
Seeing Red.
What’s psychologically important about the classroom scene is that it
highlights Willow’s concern about her true self being revealed for all to see
– she’s always worried that in the end, she’s the same inadequate loser
Cordy always told her she was. This concern gets expressed with reference
to her attire, which we’ve seen since the “softer side of Sears” scene at the
drinking fountain in Welcome to the Hellmouth. Joss says that “Willow is
feeling like she is wearing a disguise, she isn’t telling anyone the truth. The
mislead is that what she’s talking about is her sexuality. In fact she’s talking
about is that she still considers herself to be a big nerd.” If her friends saw
her as she really was, she worries that they’d sit and watch while she was
killed.
Xander’s dream.
Fear, Itself: “Xander fears that he’s invisible to the group and to Buffy in
particular. Xander isn’t in college, he isn’t employed, and he feels himself
inferior to those who are.”
Xander’s dream invokes two of my favorite movies, The Graduate and
Apocalypse Now. It begins with the latter because that was the movie they
were going to watch when the episode opened. “Giles says that it’s
[referring to Apocalypse Now] all about the journey, and that’s particularly
true in the case of this episode. It’s the journey of life, it’s a journey through
these people’s psyches. … But it’s not about the twist, it’s not about the end,
it’s about the journey. You could say that about the show as a whole.” (Joss)
Before Xander actually embarks on his journey, he goes upstairs and
encounters Joyce. He imagines her in a scene reminiscent of the famous
scene from The Graduate between Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft,
inspiration for the Simon & Garfunkel song “Mrs. Robinson”. “[W]hat I
was really saying with that was Xander is looking for love, not just trying to
get into the pants of every pretty girl he’s friends with, but really looking
for some comfort, some love that he’s clearly lacking from his family life.”
Joss.
Xander really does think about sex all the time. He said so in Earshot and
we have no reason to disbelieve him. We know he’s enamored of Buffy, so
the fact that his dreams fantasize about Joyce too is not all that surprising. If
there were another Summers woman, Xander might be interested in her too.
;) Note that in parts of their conversation Joyce’s lips don’t move even
when we seem to hear her speak; we know it’s Xander’s dream putting
words in her mouth.
The Initiative doctors and soldiers who stare at Xander in the bathroom are
acting just as Michel Foucault described society; see my post on Goodbye
Iowa. Their observation alone is enough to make Xander change his
behavior. Xander’s problem is that he hasn’t yet figured out how to actually
make his life better. When he left the bathroom he simply ended up in his
basement. “And now we find that the door leads to his basement, and of
course this becomes a constant theme for Xander, the way disguise is for
Willow. The journey always seems to end up in the same place for Xander,
and it’s the place he doesn’t want to be. Partially, because it gives him a
sense of failure, and partially because of something in there that frightens
him.” Joss.
Upon leaving the basement he finds Buffy, Giles and Spike outside. Buffy
calls him “brother” which is how Xander now realizes that Buffy sees him.
Xander apparently once envisioned himself as a Watcher, but now rejects
that because he has to “keep moving forward”. Like a shark. On land.
His dream then circles back to other evidence of his failure, this time the
food truck where he and Anya had the embarrassing conversation about sex
in WTWTA. His conversation with Anya exposes two of his fundamental
concerns:
ANYA: Do you know where you're going?
(Xander looks at her, surprised.)
ANYA: I've been thinking about getting back into vengeance.
He can’t hold those thoughts for long, though, and his mind drifts back to
sex, this time a fantasy about Willow and Tara (as with Joyce, their lips
don’t move during much of the “dialogue”). At this point the network was
still censoring any actual lesbian kissage, so all we saw was Xander’s
reaction. Even so, “This is the kiss, the longest lesbian kiss on tv. They
actually asked us to cut down his reaction shot, but we held it for as long as
we could, because we thought it was amusing to have the biggest kiss and
not show anything.” Joss.
Xander’s trip to UC Sunnydale expresses his unsuitability for college; that’s
not his way out either. Everyone there speaks French to him, which is
exactly how he’d feel not understanding the courses in college. “Everybody
speaking a different language, everybody is ahead of him, everybody is
growing up, moving on and he’s stuck and he doesn’t understand why. He
can’t figure anything out, which is part of what his dilemma is about.” Joss.
If you don’t speak French and don’t have a transcript, here’s the scene:
GILES: (??) Ce n'est pas le temps pour des jeux. [This is not the time for
games.]
(Anya approaches.)
ANYA: Xander. (Fake French woman's voice) Il faut que tu viens avec nous
maintenant. On t'attends. [You have to come with us now. They're waiting
for you.]
GILES: C'est que j'ai vous dire. [That's what I said.]
XANDER: Honey, I don't... I can't hear you.
(Anya takes his hand.)
ANYA: C'est pas importante. Je t'escorte. [It's not important. I'll take you.]
GILES: Allons-y la. [Let's go.]

From the moment they pick him up in the hallway and turn him upside
down through the dialogue with Principal Snyder, his dream becomes a
shot-by-shot reenactment of Apocalypse Now. It’s brilliant. Snyder speaks
for all authority figures as Xander sees them – telling him he’s worthless.
His final trip to the basement shows us the reason why: “The evil father
there, a real problem. The heart of his story, the heart of his misery. He can’t
stop being a Harris, that’s his real fear.” Joss.
Giles’s dream.
A New Man: “When kids go off to college, they don’t need their parents as
much and they don’t communicate with them as often. At this stage of
Buffy’s progression to adulthood, we’d therefore expect Giles to feel
neglected. In fact Giles was feeling useless as early as Wild at Heart, when
he showed up at the Bronze very awkwardly, and then later when he was
watching game shows on TV and appeared over-eager to see Buffy.”
His effort to hypnotize Buffy as his dream opens exposes some of the more
questionable aspects of the Watcher/Slayer relationship:
GILES VOICEOVER: You have to stop thinking.
(Fade to Buffy's face, looking pleased. The reflection of the watch moves
across her face.)
GILES VOICEOVER: Let it wash over you.
BUFFY: Don't you think it's a little old-fashioned?
GILES: This is the way women and men have behaved since the
beginning...

Giles doubts that he still functions as a Watcher, or that he should. The

scene at the carnival tells us that Giles, much like all parents, still sees
Buffy as a child. That’s one option, but the presence of Olivia suggests
another: “Giles’ big problem is he can’t decide who he wants to be. Should
he be going off and being a father, having a real life, what’s going on.”
That’s why we see Olivia, crying, sitting on a coffin next to the baby
carriage.
Spike calls him on his indecision:
GILES: (very confused) What am I supposed to do with all of this?
SPIKE: (offscreen) You gotta make up your mind, Rupes.
SPIKE: What are you wasting your time for? (Pose, flashbulbs)
SPIKE: Haven't you figured it all out yet, with your enormous squishy
frontal lobes?

The scene in the Bronze emphasizes his indecision. “We just stuck Giles’
living room in the bronze. This just highlights Giles’ problem because
should I raise a family? Should I be a rock star? Or should I give the boring
exposition in every episode of Buffy? And of course we combine the two
by getting him to get up and sing the exposition.” Joss. The band on stage
for his song was Four Star Mary, the real life Dingoes.
I think you can interpret Giles’s attempt to untangle the power cords as a
metaphor for what he does in his role as Watcher. But though he claims that
he can defeat the First Slayer using only the power of his intellect, in fact he
can’t.
Buffy’s dream.
Fear, Itself: “Buffy's fear is fear of abandonment, i.e., that every time she
cares about someone she'll be deserted. Worse than even this is her fear that
the reason people abandon her is that there’s something wrong with her, that
it’s her fault.”
Her dream opens with a reference to the past, namely to Faith’s dream in
This Year’s Girl. That was a prophecy then and this scene adds to it. We’ll
see the results next episode. Tara’s comment that the bedroom clock is “all
wrong” refers to Buffy’s dream in Graduation Day 2 and is also a prophecy
which we’ll see fulfilled in S5.
Her actual dialogue with Tara sets the theme of her dream:
BUFFY: (looking back at bed) The guys aren't here, are they? We were
gonna hang out (looks at Tara) and, watch movies t-
TARA: You lost them.
BUFFY: No. (Looks confused) No. I think they need me to find them.
En route to looking for them – and note that she doesn’t find them until she
wakes up – Buffy stops briefly to talk to her mother. Buffy’s keeping her
mother walled off from the rest of her life. “[S]he ignores her mother when
she does ask for some help because she’s off doing the next thing.” Joss.
When Riley greets Buffy with “hey there killer”, that suggests that she’s
concerned that he won’t accept her Slayer side. She fears that she is, indeed,
nothing other than a killer. A bit later we’ll see “the side of her that really is
primal, and we can see the demon within, sort of, and Riley can’t seem to
handle that.”(Joss): “Riley: Okay, killer... if that's the way you want it. I
guess you're on your own.”
Buffy’s view of Riley sitting there with Adam (yes, that’s him without the
makeup) shows that she’s worried that Riley still truly belongs to the
Initiative. Whether you see the Initiative as “college” or as “society” or
both, the fact that they’re drawing up a plan for world domination suggests
that he still is influenced by his programming. “[Riley] playing Buffy’s fear
of what he could be, the Government incarnate, the businessman, the suit,
evil corporate CIA guy. This shows that the relationship is not entirely
stable, and even though she loves him, in her dream he is someone who
doesn’t get her and who doesn’t belong in her world.” Joss.
Adam and Riley have to go off and name things, which is interesting on two
counts. First, giving names to things was one of the Biblical Adam’s roles
in Genesis. The other is the contrast between their attitude towards names
with that of Willow and Tara: “Someone actually pointed out to me
something I hadn’t noticed, which was they [Willow and Tara] talk about
letting something tell you its name, and then Riley talks about naming
things, specifically. The idea of the masculine and feminine version of how
to experience the world. The feminine version of letting it come to you and
the masculine version of sort of conquering it and codifying it yourself.
That is actually someone on the internet who mentioned that.” Joss.
Why is it the First Slayer who attacks them? In my reading it’s because
Buffy’s determination to become an authentic adult threatens her friends.
Buffy herself worries that this is true, that her Slayer side will cause her to
become cold, unfeeling, and isolated from her friends. The attacks of the FS
come when the victim’s secret fear stands exposed: when Willow stands in
front of the classroom; when Xander faces his father; when Giles tries to
unravel the cords; and when Buffy rejects the FS’s insistence on “no
friends, just the kill.” Buffy’s confrontation with the First Slayer
demonstrates that at some level Buffy herself doesn’t believe that is
inevitable. She can choose. When she does, her friends wake up.
Shadowkat: “I found Buffy's dream unlike the other three to be very
existentialist. (Assuming I understand existentialism). She basically was
telling the powers that be - that she sets her own course, makes her own
decisions, not them. She doesn't believe in fate. She will be more because
she chooses to. It makes her a wild card - sets her outside the boundaries.
When we grow up - we take charge of our own lives, we stop letting others
tell us how to live them. Age may factor into this to some extent - but I've
always believed that the true sign of maturity is when you start taking
responsibility for your own actions and the consequences of those actions
and stop blaming others for them and stop waiting for someone else to tell
you what you should or should not do.”
“You think you know ... what's to come ... what you are. You haven't even
begun.”
Trivia notes: (1) Riley’s description of the Initiative as the “Bay of Mutated
Pigs” refers to the Bay of Pigs debacle under President Kennedy. (2) The
movie Apocalypse Now was based on the Joseph Conrad novel Heart of
Darkness, which is why Willow asks Xander if he has something “less heart
of darkness-y”. (3) Buffy’s costume for the play was based on the musical
Chicago. (4) Willow’s concern that the performance will be Madame
Butterfly refers back to her nightmare in Nightmares. (5) The cheese man’s
words in Giles’ dream – “I wear the cheese. It does not wear me.” –
reference the 1998 film The Man in the Iron Mask. Joss: “What is the
meaning of the Cheeseman is the question I get asked constantly, which
shows me that we are getting it right because he is the only thing which has
no meaning.” (6) When Buffy’s dream begins, she still has the cut on her
head from The Yoko Factor. (7) Buffy’s statement about being a fireman
when the floods roll back refers to the Gospel song “God Gave Noah the
Rainbow Sign”.
 Season Five
Buffy v. Dracula
It obviously helps, in watching Buffy v. Dracula, if you’re familiar with the
Dracula story, beginning with Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, because this
episode contains a great many references to its various versions over the
years. I’ll note the ones which aren’t explained (more or less) in the
episode.
Xander becomes Dracula’s servant like the character Renfield in Stoker’s
novel and later works. Xander’s actions after coming under Dracula’s thrall
generally follow those of Renfield. We can also see, very roughly, Riley as
Jonathan Harker, Giles as perhaps Van Helsing, and Buffy as Mina Murray.
The plot of the episode is consistent with the book and movies, though with
necessary adaptations.
In the novel, Dracula serves as a metaphor for unrestrained sexual desire.
The book was written in the Victorian Age, so that was the supposed
temptation for young women. That’s where the biting = sex metaphor took
hold, and we see this focus throughout the episode.
However, sex isn’t really the same issue today that it was in the late 1800s,
so the key point had to be changed. What Dracula offers Buffy here (in
addition to sex) is knowledge. Knowledge about herself. The episode brings
up a point which will become increasingly important over the remaining 3
seasons, namely what it means to be the Slayer. Being the Slayer is
indispensably necessary to Buffy’s journey to adulthood. It’s that which
allows her to slay the demons which are metaphors for the challenges we
face in life.
That doesn’t mean that being the Slayer is an unalloyed good, however. As
we’ve seen repeatedly in S1-4, and as I’ve mentioned along the way, being
the Slayer imposes severe personal costs on Buffy. If you think about it,
there’s something inherently problematic in using one part of “you” to
challenge (or “slay”) other parts. Necessary, yes, but not without
consequences.
As with so many things, we saw this issue foreshadowed in Restless. Adam
questioned whether Buffy is, as she might say, of the good:

OTHER GUY (unnamed, but the same actor who played Adam):
Aggression is a natural human tendency. (Looks at Buffy) Though you and
me come by it another way.
BUFFY: We're not demons.
OTHER GUY (Adam): Is that a fact?

Now, in the episode which directly follows this, we see Buffy lying restless
(intended) in bed next to Riley. When she leaves him to go out and hunt – a
bit like Spike, really – Dracula poses a direct challenge to her:
BUFFY: Do you know what a Slayer is?
DRACULA: Do you?...
DRACULA: I came to meet the renowned ... killer.
BUFFY: Yeah, I prefer the term slayer. You know, killer just sounds so...
DRACULA: Naked?
BUFFY: Like I ... paint clowns or something. I'm the good guy, remember?
DRACULA: Perhaps, but your power is rooted in darkness. You must feel
it.

Remember that Riley called her “killer” in her dream in Restless. Then
later,

DRACULA: No, you are different. Kindred….

DRACULA: …I have yearned for you. (Sits on the bed next to her) For a
creature whose darkness rivals my own….
DRACULA: All those years fighting us. Your power so near to our own...
Then he tempts her with the same words Tara used in Buffy’s dream in
Restless (the fact that they’re the same will be more obvious if you’re
watching on DVD than it was to those of us who had to wait 4 months
between the two episodes):
DRACULA: (whispering) You think you know ... what you are ... what's to
come. You haven't even begun.
Buffy looks at his arm, at his face. Takes his hand in both of hers and puts
her mouth on the bloody wrist.
DRACULA: Find it. The darkness. Find your true nature.
I’ll talk more about Drac’s claim later on. For now you might want to think
about whether his claim is true and, if so, what that might mean in light of
him using Tara’s words. He is the bad guy, after all.
For the moment, it’s Buffy’s reaction I want to focus on. At the end of the
episode Buffy rejects Drac’s offer to join him in darkness:
BUFFY: You know, I really think the thrall has gone out of our relationship.
But I want to thank you for opening up my eyes a little.
DRACULA: What is this?
BUFFY: My true nature.
Using the Slayer power is good; completely giving in to it is not. I’m
speculating a bit here, but Joss is a known fan of Westerns, especially those
of John Ford. Dracula’s challenge to Buffy reminds me of the great John
Ford film The Searchers. The film provokes the question: at what point do I
become what it is I fight? I think Joss may have drawn on it – The
Searchers certainly inspired his show Firefly – for this episode (see trivia
note 5 for more). Here’s an edited summary of the plot from Wikipedia, my
emphasis added:
“The year is 1868. Ethan Edwards returns from the Civil War, in which he
fought for the Confederacy, to the home of his brother Aaron in rural
northern Texas. Despite hints and supposition that Ethan has been up to no
good, the movie's early scenes never explicitly frame Ethan for
wrongdoing. … Shortly after his arrival, a Comanche raid leaves his brother
and sister-in-law Martha, his nephew, Ben, all dead, and his two nieces,
Lucy and Debbie, abducted, and the family homestead burned down.
After the funeral, a group led by Captain Clayton goes in search of the
raiding party. When they discover the location of the encampment, Ethan
wants to attack immediately, before daylight. Clayton points out to Ethan
that the Comanche generally kill their hostages at the first notice of a raid,
which is something that Ethan already knows. This is the first sign that
Ethan is willing not to bring the girls back alive. …
One of the group, Brad Jorgensen, also Lucy's fiancé, says that someone
will have to kill him to make him stop looking for Lucy. Aaron's adopted
son, Martin Pawley, who is 1⁄8 Cherokee, feels the same way, and with the
two of them, Ethan continues to pursue the Comanche. The three of them
find where the main trail goes one way and four horses take off to the right,
into a tight canyon pass. Ethan tells them that he will follow the small trail
and that the two of them should stay on the main trail. When Ethan returns
he is distracted and seemingly upset, but doesn't say anything. He also
seems to have lost his Confederate Army long coat. Later Brad is out on
scout duty on foot and returns to Ethan and Martin saying that he has found
the Comanche camp, and has seen Lucy. At this point Ethan tells Brad and
Martin that it wasn't Lucy, that he had already found the murdered body of
Lucy in the canyon. He had wrapped her body in his coat, and buried her
with his bare hands. Brad, enraged, mounts his horse and charges into the
encampment alone, dying in a fruitless, suicidal attempt to avenge Lucy.
Ethan and Martin lose the trail when the winter blizzards come. … Ethan
and Martin continue to search for Debbie, a search that goes on for five
years. During that time, she grows into adolescence and is taken as mate by
Scar, the chief of the Nawyecka band of Comanche. Scar is presented as
the cultural mirror image of Ethan. He hates whites every bit as much
as Ethan hates Indians. Once Ethan realizes that Debbie has been
mated to Scar, he undergoes a change. He no longer wants to rescue
Debbie; he wants her dead, believing that a white woman being a
Comanche's "squaw" is worse than death. Martin follows in hopes of
stopping Ethan from killing the girl. When Ethan and Martin are alone with
Debbie the first time, Ethan draws his pistol to murder his niece but Martin
shields her with his own body. Ethan fires the pistol to kill Martin in order
to get a clear shot at Debbie but his aim is ruined when he is struck by an
Indian's arrow just as he pulls the trigger. Ethan and Martin have to run for
cover and Debbie escapes execution by her uncle.
Eventually Ethan, Martin, and the Texas Rangers find Debbie again….
Martin kills Scar and Ethan scalps the dead chief. Martin tries to prevent
Ethan from killing Debbie, but it is Ethan himself who realizes how close
he has come to destroying the last link to his family and how, in the act
of scalping Scar, he himself has become what he hated so much. Instead
of killing Debbie, he lifts her in his arms just as he did when she was a
child. Ethan brings Debbie to the safety of friends and then walks away.
The film, which opened with a near-identical shot of another doorway,
slowly revealing the film's landscape, finishes with a reversal: the film's
players enter the darkness within the doorway, and the door closes, just
before the end title, leaving Ethan isolated outside where he turns and
wanders away into the wilderness.”
Ethan’s fate is what Buffy seems to fear in her conversation with Giles after
she dispatched Dracula. My friend Rahael from AtPO described it perfectly:
“Buffy fears that she is more monstrous than anything she slays.” That’s
the theme of the season.
Here’s Marti Noxon describing the episode on the DVD commentary:
“Thematically, what we were going for was that Dracula represents a kind
of dark side that Buffy feels she has in her. …

The scene in which Dracula makes Buffy bite him continues to explore the
theme we had explored in season four, which was how much of her power
comes from inside her that is a killer. And we went as far as to have her
actually take blood from Dracula because, in a way, we were saying it’s
already there.

This is the side of the Slayer she has to make peace with. Either she’s gonna
go all the way and embrace the darkness or she’s going to find a way to live
with it.

Those are constant themes in our show, which is about how you deal with
power, and how you deal with your own darker impulses without becoming
self-destructive or destructive to other people.”
Understanding what her power means – that is, understanding herself – may
help her avoid Ethan’s fate:
BUFFY: (after a moment, softly) You haven't been my Watcher for a while.
(Giles stops pouring) I haven't been training ... and I haven't really needed
to come to you for help.
GILES: (sadly) I agree. (sets down the teapot)
BUFFY: (gestures helplessly, gets up to pace) And then this whole thing
with Dracula ... it made me face up to some stuff. (Giles looks concerned)
Ever since we did that spell where we called on the First Slayer ... I've been
going out a lot. (Giles looks surprised) Every night.
GILES: Patrolling?
BUFFY: Hunting. That's ... what Dracula called it. (pacing) And he was
right. He understood my power better than I do. He saw darkness in it.
Shot of Giles looking very concerned.
BUFFY: (sits down again) I need to know more. About where I come from,
about the other slayers. I mean, maybe ... maybe if I could learn to control
this thing, I could be stronger, I could be better. But ... I'm scared. I know
it's gonna be hard. And I can't do it ... without you. I need your help. (pause)
I need you to be my Watcher again.
If you’re watching for the first time, the ending must be a WTF moment.
Trust me, it was for all of us. You can’t say you weren’t warned, though.
Two prophetic dreams foretold it. In the opening dream in This Year’s Girl,
Faith told Buffy “Little sis coming. I know. So much to do before she gets
here.” Then, in Restless, when Buffy left Tara to look for her friends, Tara
called after her, “Be back before dawn.” We won’t learn it until the next
episode, but her name is Dawn.
Trivia notes: (1) Buffy’s “witch-fu” is a play on kung-fu, which actually
refers “to any study, learning, or practice that requires patience, energy, and
time to complete”. (2) Dracula arrives in a storm at night, just as he does in
the novel. (3) Willow calls herself the “computer whisperer”, playing on the
movie and book The Horse Whisperer. (4) Lestat, whom Buffy mentions to
Dracula, is the lead character in a series of novels by Anne Rice (who was
herself mentioned in the S2 episode School Hard). (5) When Buffy tells
Dracula that calling her a killer makes it sounds like she “paints clowns”,
that’s a reference to mass murderer John Wayne Gacy. John Wayne was the
star of The Searchers, and I’m inclined to see the reference to his namesake
as supporting my speculation. A later episode in S5 will also be based on a
John Ford Western starring John Wayne. In addition, there is the fact that
Spike refers to Riley as “cowboy” – it can’t be a reference to Riley’s role as
“cowboy guy” in Willow’s dream in Restless because Spike had no way to
know of that. It seems like Joss or writer Marti Noxon just had westerns on
the brain. (6) Xander’s reference to Sesame Street is to the puppet Count
von Count, who is modeled after Dracula. (7) Vlad the Impaler, the
historical source for the Dracula legend, was a Prince of Wallachia
(Romania) in the late 1400s. (8) Buffy has been bitten twice in the same
place, once by the Master and once by Angel. It’s the scar there which
Dracula sees. However, the dialogue seems to refer only to Angel. (9) The
three sisters Giles encounters are the brides of Dracula. (10) Xander got the
funny syphilis in Pangs.
 Real Me
I like Real Me quite a bit, but I’m kind of trapped by my no spoilers policy
when it comes to writing about it. The episode is telling us so much about
the rest of the season that anything I say might give away key details of plot
or metaphor.
We know from experience with previous years that the first 3 episodes of
each season set the stage for events to come. Real Me foreshadows the plot
of the season finale, which I won’t spoil, but it also introduces us to Dawn.
Early on we get a clue that Dawn’s arrival was foreshadowed. From Buffy’s
dream in Graduation Day 2:
Buffy looking down: "There's something I'm supposed to be doing."
Faith: "Oh yeah. - Miles to go - Little Ms. Muffet counting down from 7-3-
0."
In the scene outside the Magic Box, the crazy man tells Dawn “I know you.
Curds and whey.” That’s an explicit reference back to the “Little Miss
Muffet” line (“Little Miss Muffet sat on her tuffet/eating her curds and
whey”). This is in addition to the prophetic dreams from This Year’s Girl
and Restless which I discussed in my Buffy v. Dracula post. The crazy man
then tells her what we in the audience know but those inside the show don’t:
“You don’t belong here.”
If Dawn’s arrival was foreshadowed so often and so long before, we know
she must be important. Indeed she is. But since I can’t talk about the details
yet, I want to emphasize one aspect of Dawn’s role in S5. I’ve argued
repeatedly that other characters can serve as metaphors as well as being
characters in their own right; the events of Primeval and Restless made this
explicit. It won’t surprise you, then, to learn that I think Dawn plays a
metaphorical role as well as being a character. I’m not going to say, yet,
what she stands for, but Buffy will eventually tell us in the season finale. If
Dawn is here to teach us something about Buffy – and that’s the whole
point of the entire show in my reading – then Dawn’s metaphorical role
ought to lead us to wonder about the title of this episode and who it refers
to.
For discussion later, I want to list some of Dawn’s characteristics which we
see in Real Me. She keeps a diary. She loves Willow, she loves Xander, she
loves her mother. She thinks Giles might not like her because he’s so old,
she finds Buffy’s training boring, and she resents the fact that Buffy is
always telling her what to do even if, in some sense, she idolizes her sister.
She likes Tara, she’s not so sure about Anya. Interestingly, she expresses no
opinion about Riley. She feels isolated at times, and she gets to be the child
of the family in a way that Buffy wishes she could. I’ll come back to these
in the finale.
The teaser shows us Buffy starting her journey of self-exploration with
Giles, the one she said she wanted to make at the end of Buffy v. Dracula:
“GILES VOICEOVER: Focus inward. Let the world fall away….” At this
point, Dawn interrupts the session. That’s not merely the kind of thing a
younger sister would do, it’s directly related to Dawn’s role this season.
Some of what happens in this episode is very subtle. There are looks, for
example, which will become meaningful only in hindsight. The fact that
they’re here demonstrates how far in advance certain stories were planned.
Trivia notes: (1) Riley’s mention of “the invasion of Normandy” refers to
the D-Day landings in World War II. (2) Giles lost his last car when Spike
crashed it in A New Man. He hasn’t driven one since. (3) Willow’s intent to
take drama class was mentioned in The Yoko Factor and became part of her
dream in Restless. (4) The name of the dead shopkeeper, Mr. Bogarty, was a
joke based on Angelus calling the Magic Shop “the local boogedy-boogedy
store” in Passion. (5) Buffy refers to the Magic Shop as a deathtrap because
previous owners were killed in Passion and Lovers Walk. (6) For non-
native-English speakers, this dialogue contains a pun: “WILLOW: You're
on Dawn duty. (Buffy looks annoyed.) BUFFY: Oh, duty.” The word
“dooty” (pronounced like “duty”) is slang for “feces”. It’s a way for Buffy
to say “Oh shit” without being censored. (7) Harmony’s love of unicorns
was, believe it or not, shown when we saw her hanging a unicorn poster in
The Initiative. (8) When Xander greets Dawn with “Dawn patrol”, that’s a
reference to a 1930 movie of that name. (9) Xander’s “Here comes the
judge” quotes a famous line from the 1960s comedy show Rowan &
Martin’s Laugh-In. (10) Xander tells Harmony that he doesn’t want to get
into a hair pulling contest with her because they previously did that in The
Initiative. (11) Xander’s “Ruffles have ridges” refers to the old advertising
slogan for the potato chip company. (12) Xander’s mention of the Fortress
of Solitude refers to Superman’s fortress. (13) Buffy’s mention of “the life
expectancy of a Spinal Tap drummer” refers to the movie This Is Spinal
Tap. (14) Giles watched Passions with Spike because, as we learned in
Something Blue, that’s Spike’s favorite show.
 The Replacement
Three episodes into the season and as usual we’ve gotten the themes which
will play out the rest of the year, as well as foreshadowing of the major plot
lines. Fortunately, The Replacement gives us a theme I can discuss even
now because it doesn’t require spoilers. It also sets up a plot point for later
which I will hold off discussing until it comes up.
This is an episode which appears to tell us a story about Xander but in fact
tells us something that’s probably true for all of us. We all have good and
bad aspects of our personalities, just as we see with Xander. One Xander is
somewhat childish, one very mature :
WILLOW: (turns back to him) Xander, you sound a little ... you have to
help me figure this out, you know.
ScruffyXANDER: But I never help. I get in trouble and Buffy saves me.
WILLOW: That's not true! Sometimes we all help save you. (realizes that
was unhelpful) And sometimes you're not in trouble.
ScruffyXANDER: I'm just ... another great humiliation. (Willow looks
sympathetic) But this time it's even worse. This demon, he's like taking my
life, and everyone's treating him ... Everyone's treating him like a grown-
up! Will, I'm starting to feel like...
WILLOW: Like what?
ScruffyXANDER: Like ... he's doing everything better. He's smarter, and ...
(shakes head) I don't know, maybe I should just let him have it.

But Toth began the episode intending to use his device on Buffy, and since I
think the central metaphor of the series is that “we are Buffy”, the fact that
Xander’s situation has universal application means that I think we should
interpret the “split personality” idea as it applies to her. Both Buffy and
others have long sensed that her Slayer half and her “real” half are separate
and distinct. That’s been a persistent theme from the very beginning of the
show. There are lots of examples; here’s one from Season 1, Never Kill A
Boy On The First Date:
Owen: It's weird.
Buffy: What is?
Owen: You! One minute you're right there. I've got you figured. The next,
it's like you're two people.
***
Owen: Buffy... (leads her away) What's the deal? Do you wanna bail on
me?
Buffy: No! No... no... uh... You remember when you said I was like two
different people? Well, one of them has to go. But the other one is having a
really, really good time, and will come back. I promise.”
Or take this example from Surprise:
Buffy: What am I supposed to do until then?
Giles: Go to classes, do your homework, have supper...
Buffy: Right. Be *that* Buffy.
In this very episode, Buffy raises this sense of separation with Riley and he
gives her an answer that’s at least partly true:
BUFFY: Riley, do you wish-
RILEY: No.
BUFFY: No? You don't even know what I was gonna say.
RILEY: Yes, I do. You wanted to know if I wished you got hit by the ferula-
gemina, got split in two.
BUFFY: Well, you have been kind of rankly about the whole slayer gig.
Instead of having slayer Buffy, you could have Buffy Buffy.
RILEY: Hey. I *have* Buffy Buffy. Being the slayer's part of who you are.
Riley’s correct, of course, but Buffy has known this since at least What’s My
Line:
Kendra: You talk about slaying like it's a job. It's not. It's who you are.
Buffy knows it, but she can’t accept that as the full answer. The fact that she
told Giles that she wants to find out more about being a Slayer suggests that
there’s a deeper issue here which Riley hasn’t understood but which Buffy
is starting to grasp. Much of the rest of the season will be devoted to
exploring that issue, and it’s going to do that in the context of split
personalities.
Speaking of Riley, his words to Xander at the end were obviously a shock
to Xander and maybe to the audience as well. He has some good reasons to
say it, though. He told her that he loved her in The Yoko Factor, but she
didn’t respond in kind. Nor did she here when he said it again in the car.
A couple of scenes foreshadowed it: Buffy’s dream in Restless, which I
discussed in my post, suggested that she had reservations about Riley
directly related to his view of her as the Slayer, and vice versa; and Riley
showed his unhappiness with the brief look he gave Buffy in Real Me when
she handed him the phone and told him to get Anya to the hospital while
she rushed out to rescue Dawn. I shouldn’t read too much into a look, but
when I re-watch that scene with the hindsight of Riley’s statement here, the
look says to me that he’s annoyed at being left behind to clean up the
kitchen instead of getting to go out with his team.
One obvious response to Riley would be that love is a spectrum, not an
“on/off” switch. I’d agree that Buffy doesn’t love him the way he loves her.
The issue, one that’s been debated since we got contrasting views in Beauty
and the Beasts and Lovers Walk, is just how all-consuming love should be.
The episode opened with him telling her “Hey Buff, maybe you oughta
leave the work behind sometimes. You're not always on slayer duty, you
know?” Although Riley claimed that he “got” the whole Slayer package,
it’s not clear that he really understands what that means. His belief that she
can just put “Slayer duty” aside demonstrates that he doesn’t really get it. It
is, as Kendra said, “who you are.”
Riley’s life to-date has been very different from Buffy’s. He was on the
conformity track; she has always gone her own way. He wants to rescue her
(The Initiative), or to protect her as in this episode: “He mentioned Buffy?
Where do we find him, and how hard can I kill him?” This demonstrates
that he doesn’t understand key facts about the Slayer – she’s actually
stronger and doesn’t need his protection. I think I’m safe in suspecting that
there’s a feminist point being made here as well.

Trivia notes: (1) Willow previously mentioned Xander doing the Snoopy
dance in Passion. (2) Xander’s “take my life, please” seems to be a play on
the old Henny Youngman joke “take my wife….please”. (3) Xander seems
to have forgotten that Willow did handle her evil twin quite well in
Doppelgangland. (4) When ScruffyXander told Anya “Look in my eyes.
Can't you see it's me?”, he may have been thinking of Buffy and Giles in A
New Man. (5) When Buffy refers sarcastically to Giles’s car as “ultimate
driving maching my ass”, she’s referencing the old BMW slogan. (6)
There’s a general resemblance between this episode and the Star Trek
episode The Enemy Within. However, the “kill us both, Spock” line which
both Xanders quote actually comes from the Star Trek episode Whom Gods
Destroy. (7) Xander’s “fond” memories of the basement are all from
previous episodes: Spike slept in his room in Hush; he and Anya drowned
the Pargo demon in Something Blue; and he got his heart ripped out in
Restless. (8) Xander’s “SuaveXander has left the building” plays off “Elvis
has left the building”. (9) Toth’s magic device was called a “ferula-gemina”.
A ferule is a stick or cane, and gemina is related to “Gemini”, which means
“twins” in Latin. In short, it’s a “twin stick”. (10) I think this is fairly well
known, but Nick Brendan’s twin brother played Xander in some scenes in
this episode.
 Out Of My Mind
If one theme of S5 is, as I said regarding The Replacement, “split
personality”, then an episode entitled Out Of My Mind seems like an
obvious sequel. There are 2 stories here of mental issues, those of Riley and
Spike, both of whom go a bit crazy about Buffy (or because of Buffy,
depending on how you see it). I guess I could include Joyce and her fainting
spell as a mental issue, but I’ll leave her aside for now because that’s a bit
unclear. I might also include Buffy, since her behavior in the teaser seemed
to be another display of the “hunting” we saw in Buffy v. Dracula. And
since I think every episode is about Buffy in some way, this might be a clue
that what I’m about to say about Riley and Spike will eventually come back
to her. Not necessarily in this post, though.
At the end of S4, in Primeval, we saw Riley remove the chip from near his
heart. That was metaphor, as I noted, and it’s carried over here in Out Of My
Mind. The operation on his heart now is necessary because his heart is
metaphorically breaking – Buffy doesn’t love him. And the more his heart
breaks, the less he believes that he can be the kind of man she would love.
Xander, understanding what’s going on after what Riley told him at the end
of The Replacement, too subtly tries to tell Buffy this: “Like, I had this
friend once, who really liked this girl, and ... he got all worried that maybe
she didn't like him back....” Nobody understands him.
Riley’s concerned that the government will convert him into “Joe Normal”.
But in The Initiative he described himself as “Joe Regular” and in Goodbye
Iowa Buffy said that Riley was supposed to be “Mr. Joe Guy”. Riley now
sees the real him (heh) as inadequate for Buffy. He now feels that he needs
superpowers because he wants to join her in the workplace:
RILEY: Hey, hope I didn't get in the way.
He puts his arm around her. She gives a fake smile.
BUFFY: Of course not. I-I was just ... startled. And, you know I don't ...
love the idea of you patrolling alone.
RILEY: Not much for bench-warming. …
RILEY: (grinning) Hey, wanna go again? Come on, I bet this place is just
teeming with aerodynamic vampires.
He’s trying too hard to prove himself. “Afraid of a little competition?” he
asks her later, projecting his own insecurities onto her. His heart broken,
Riley loses his mind a bit. He thinks he needs to keep what the government
artificially gave him in order to hold on to Buffy:
RILEY: I go back ... let the government get whimsical with my innards
again ... They could do anything that- Best-case scenario, they turn me into
Joe Normal, just... (sighs) Just another guy.
BUFFY: And that's not enough for you?
RILEY: It's not enough for *you*.
BUFFY: Why would you say that?
RILEY: Come on. Your last boyfriend wasn't exactly a civilian.
BUFFY: So that's what this is about? You're going to die, all over some
macho pissing contest.
RILEY: (shakes his head) It's not about him. It's about us. (Buffy shakes her
head, not understanding) You're getting stronger every day, more powerful.
I can't touch you. Every day, you're just ... a little further out of my reach.
His government-issued power is a false source of strength, as we know
from S4. Yet, at the same time, it’s hard to resist the feeling that he can’t
stand the implicit comparison to Buffy and that he’s trying to prove
something to himself. Graham gets right to this other half of Riley’s
problem:
GRAHAM: But you know you don't belong here, right? (Keeps walking
and talking although Riley has stopped walking and is staring at his back)
This town? I mean, you're nothin' here.
RILEY: Hey. (Graham stops walking, turns to look at him) What are you
saying?
GRAHAM: Come on, man. You know it's true. There's nothing for you
here.
RILEY: There's her.
GRAHAM: Okay, right, there's her. And? You used to have a mission, and
now you're what? The mission's boyfriend? Mission's true love?
Riley looks at the floor, then walks on, past Graham.
GRAHAM: You belong with us.
After the operation, Riley looks no more convinced than before that Buffy
loves him. He’s obviously disappointed when she tells him she needs to go
look after her mother, rather than staying with him. Whether he’s right to
feel that way is arguable, but it’s pretty clear that he does.
Spike’s also going crazy because of Buffy. At this point she’s his motivation
for getting the chip out of his brain:
SPIKE: [I’m gonna] bathe in the slayer's blood. Gonna dive in it. (with
relish) Swim in it.
When the doctor fakes the operation, Spike is driven nearly around the
bend:
SPIKE: Buffy, Buffy, Buffy! Everywhere I turn, she's there! That nasty little
face, that ... bouncing shampoo-commercial hair, that whole sodding holier-
than-thou attitude.
HARMONY: Well, aren't we kinda unholy, by the-
SPIKE: She follows me, you know, tracks me down. I'm her pet project.
Drive Spike round the bend. Makes every day a fresh bout of torture.
He stops running, picks up a headstone and throws it against another.
Harmony cringes as the dust showers her.
HARMONY: Spike!
SPIKE: You don't understand. I can't get rid of her. She's everywhere. She's
haunting me, Harmony!
Spike’s dream at the end may seem like it came out of the blue, and perhaps
it did: Something Blue. You never know what consequences might follow
from magic spells. It could very well be that the marriage spell there had the
ramifications we see here.
Less speculatively, Spike’s been obsessed with Buffy for a long time now.
In vampires it’s hard to separate obsession from affection.
Trivia notes: (1) Explaining how Buffy’s conversation with Willow about
the French Revolution connects to the episode requires a bit of background
and some guesswork. Roughly, Jean Paul Marat was a radical journalist
who helped turn the population of Paris away from the moderate Girondins
and towards the more radical Jacobins. He was assassinated by a woman
Girondist who stabbed him in the heart after pretending to admire him. It’s
the stab in the heart which, I think, connects the story to Riley. To clarify,
I’m not saying that Buffy is the assassin, though Riley might very well see
it that way. (2) Willow’s “I feel like a witch in a magic shop” plays off the
saying “I feel like a kid in a candy store.” (3) In the James Bond novels, Q
is the person (or branch; it’s not entirely clear) who provided tools and
equipment which Bond needed. Q from Star Trek is, well, more of a God-
like character. The training room is obviously more like the former. (4)
Spike’s line “Oh Pacey you blind idiot. Can't you see she doesn't love you?”
refers to the TV show Dawson’s Creek which was on the same network at
that time. (5) When Harmony says she’s “on the lam”, she means she’s
running away from the law (in this case supposedly Buffy). (6) The doctor
referred to Riley’s tachycardia, which is the technical term for rapid
heartbeat (tachy = fast, cardia = heart). (7) Riley referred to the Initiative
using chemical treatments on the soldiers, which we saw in Goodbye Iowa.
(8) We saw Riley playing basketball because Marc Blucas played college
basketball for Wake Forest and professionally in England.
 No Place Like Home
No Place Like Home introduces the villain of S5. Her name is Glory and it
shows up in the transcript, though nobody speaks it in this episode; we’ll
learn it soon enough. In Real Me we were introduced to Dawn and I raised
the question whether she served as a metaphor, at least for some purposes.
The villains almost always serve a metaphorical role, so we now should be
asking whether Glory does and, if so, what that role is. There is, I think, a
small hint in The Replacement, but it’s pretty obscure except in hindsight.
In addition, we’d expect the metaphor to fit within the season themes which
I’ve previously identified. I’m hinting, but I don’t want to spoil, so as with
Dawn I’ll discuss Glory’s metaphorical role in detail in the finale.
For now, just as I did with Dawn, let’s keep track of what we do know
about Glory. She’s almost impossibly self-centered. She’s super strong even
though she appears to be human and no bigger than Buffy. She certainly
kicked Buffy’s ass. She’s more than a little deranged, and whatever she did
to the poor security guard (we’ll find out in a few episodes) involved his
brain. I think all these characteristics are very meaningful.
The craziness fits in perfectly with what we’ve seen so far: a crazy man
confronted Dawn in Real Me; The Replacement showed us split
personalities; Riley and Spike both went a bit crazy in Out Of My Mind.
Now Glory shows up. She acts crazy and says to Buffy “Are you crazy?”.
There has to be a connection here, and there is. That connection arises
directly out of Glory’s metaphorical role in the season.
Spike continues down the crazy path in this episode. He’s now lurking
outside Buffy’s house, with one of my favorite lines in the series: “Out. For.
A. Walk…. Bitch.” Vampires don’t fall in love with Slayers, so it’s
understandable that Spike doesn’t know how to behave in that situation.
Besides, it’s unclear if vampires know how to behave when in love anyway.
Think Spike and Dru.
I want to keep track of Riley even though we don’t see much of him in
NPLH. He reassures Buffy that “I really am ok”, but if he is it’s not for lack
of provocation. State of Siege added this in comments: “In this episode, a
tendency of Buffy's—one that has been there since throughout S5, although
in a less pronounced form: to use sex (well, kissing) to mask her lack of
need for Riley or her general desire to have him be elsewhere. It is a small
detail, but I have found it a telling gauge to their relationship.”
I left open Joyce’s situation in my discussion of Out Of My Mind, but now
we learn that she is indeed having a problem and that it’s, well, not
necessarily “mental” but certainly in her head. This was actually signaled
previously – it was easy to miss, but Joyce got a headache in The
Replacement:
JOYCE: (sighs, puts hand to her forehead) This must be my "two teenage
girls in the house" headache. I thought it felt familiar.
BUFFY: Good work, Dawn. You gave her a headache.
DAWN: I did not! (to Joyce) Did I give you a headache, Mom? I'm sure
part of it is Buffy's.
Segueing from Dawn, Glory says the following in her deranged rant: “Not
now, Mommy's talking! Wriggling, piling, prowling, crawling, clowning,
cavorting, doing it over and over and over and over until someone's gonna
sit down on their tuffet and make this birthing stop!” The highlighted phrase
is another reference to the Faith/Buffy dream in Graduation Day which
prophesied Dawn’s arrival (“Little Miss Muffet”), and what follows relates
to the roles Glory and Dawn play in the season. This tells us that Glory and
Dawn are connected in some way, as we learn when Buffy rescues the
monk.
The question answered in No Place Like Home, at least somewhat
cryptically, was actually asked by Joyce in Out Of My Mind:
Joyce turns away from the stove, holding the two plates. Suddenly she stops
and blinks as if dizzy. Dawn looks up from unwrapping the prize.
JOYCE: (confused) Oh, what is the... (looks at Dawn) Who are you?
“She is the Key.” Dawn is the Key to the season and Glory wants her. And
if it’s all about Buffy, this means that Dawn is the Key to Buffy.
BUFFY I didn't ask for this! I don't even know... what is she?
MONK Human... now human. And helpless. Please... she's an innocent in
this.
Trivia notes: (1) The episode title is a reference to The Wizard of Oz.
Dorothy says it when she returns to Kansas. It seems clearly intended to
apply to Dawn. (2) NPLH aired on October 24, 2000. The events in the
teaser took place two months previously, i.e., at the end of August 2000. (3)
State of Siege provided an important trivia note: “the untranslated word [the
monks] repeat is "cloveka" (with haceks, the little upside down hats, on the
c and the e), which is the vocative for "human" in Czech, meaning that they
are calling the living energy into human form.” (4) To make money “hand
over fist” (Buffy’s comment to Giles) is to make it very quickly. (5) Ben’s
suggestion to Buffy of a radioactive spider bite is a reference to how
Spiderman got his powers. (6) Willow teasingly called Giles a “capitalist
running dog”, which is a literal translation of a Chinese communist insult
meaning “lapdog”. (7) Note Joyce’s words to Buffy just before Buffy
discovers through her trance that Dawn isn’t really her sister: “You’re so
grown up.”
 Family
I see Family and NPLH as a two-parter; Family opens the same night as
NPLH ended. Both episodes deal with someone who’s not technically a
member of the family, but who is accepted into it through love. One deals
with Buffy/Dawn, the other with Willow/Tara, the teaser highlighting both
stories. Tara’s story of the kitty can even serve as an allegory for what
happens to Dawn and to her:
WILLOW VOICEOVER: Tell me a story.
TARA VOICEOVER: Okay. Once upon a time, there was, um ... a kitty.
She was very little, and she was all alone, and nobody wanted her.
WILLOW VOICEOVER: This is a very upsetting story.
TARA VOICEOVER: Oh, oh, but it gets better.
TARA VOICEOVER: 'Cause one day the kitty was running around in the
street and a man came, and swooped her up...
TARA: And took her to the pound. …
WILLOW: (cuddling kitten) Did the kitty get chosen by some nice people?
TARA: Well, now you ruined the ending.
The two episodes parallel each other in important ways:
Tara and Dawn are both outsiders who feel left out of the SG.
From Real Me: “TARA: (OS) Poor Dawn. … It's just ... I, I think it's
tough for her, not being able to ... well, allowed to, you know, help.
WILLOW: Help? TARA: Oh, you. You guys. The slayer circle.
WILLOW: Well, Buffy doesn't really need ... a-and I think Dawn's a
little young. TARA: I-I know, you're right. It's just hard. That outsider
feeling. Willow looks over at her. WILLOW: Tara ... you're not an
outsider.
TARA: Well, yeah. I kinda am.”;
In Real Me Buffy thinks Dawn may be a demon or evil. That’s
the concern about Tara in Family. Just to give you some idea of how
far in advance this point was planned, in Goodbye Iowa Tara
deliberately ruined the spell to find the demon: “Willow: Thespia,
goddess, ruler of all darkness, we implore you, open a window to the
 world of the underbeing. (Both blow but Tara surreptitiously lowers
her hand and dumps her powder under the bed spread while Willow is
actually blowing her powder.)” Willow even refers to that spell in this
episode: “WILLOW: … I was thinking. Maybe we could try that, that
spell, you know, the one to find demons? TARA: That didn't work.”
We’ve had a lingering doubt about Tara ever since: who or what is
she? Can she be trusted? Those doubts were reinforced by Tara’s look
in this scene in Real Me (I mentioned it in my post there):
“WILLOW: You're one of the good guys. (Tara's smile disappears and
she pulls away, disengaging herself from Willow's embrace. Willow
doesn't notice her expression.)”;
Buffy “pulled back the curtain” to see Dawn’s true nature, while
Tara “lifted the veil” so that Buffy could see what Tara thought would
be her own demon side;
Glory demanded the return of her Key, Mr. MacLay demands
that Tara return to her family, and both find their true home;
We learned the origin of Dawn in NPLH just as we learn the
origin of Tara here;
At the end of Family, Willow tells Tara that it’s “magic” which
causes her to love Tara (“TARA: Every time I- (takes a deep breath)
even when I'm at my worst ... you always make me feel special.
Willow smiles. TARA: How do you do that? WILLOW: Magic.”). It’s
magic which generated Buffy’s feelings towards Dawn (“BUFFY: My
memories... my mom's? MONK: We built them.”).
On the surface, Family demonstrates that Tara is part of Buffy’s family, but
in a deeper sense it reinforces Buffy’s decision to accept that Dawn is. Joss:
“When she realises “Dawn is not actually my sister” and says “I don’t care,
I feel a need to protect this girl” – it’s about accepting that family is part of
your life, even when you think of yourself as independent, and it’s about the
extraordinary love that a family can bring you. And we’d very much said
Buffy’s love interest is going to be her sister for year five. We knew way
back when. It actually started with a conversation I had with Doug Petrie in
year three, where we said well, they’re going to college and we’ll do that
crazy freedom in year four, and in year five, let’s bring it back to family.”
Two quick, related points about Willow and Tara’s relationship. First, the
witch/gay metaphor is front and center in this episode, as it has been since
Hush. All the dialogue about Tara being a “demon” and the references by
Mr. Maclay to that being the source of her witchcraft could apply equally to
her being gay. And did you notice the crystal “toy” Mr. Maclay picked up
next to the bed?
Second, the scene in the teaser with Tara and Willow actually in bed
together seems so natural nowadays that it’s easy to forget just how
UNusual it was when it first aired. Another scene of two women in a bed
playing with a cat? As Whistler might say, “Hello to the imagery!”. This
was a BFD at the time, as Joss kept pushing the envelope with respect to
what could be shown on TV with gay couples.
Although the episode focuses on Tara (and Dawn, in my reading), there are
quite a few scenes in Family which affect the ongoing seasonal plot. Buffy
“could definitely use a break from all this craziness”, but there’s plenty of it
in Family. Leaving aside for now the crazy people filling up the hospital,
I’ll just talk about the regular characters. Dawn “makes [Buffy] crazy.”
Buffy, in turn, seems to have that effect on Riley and Spike.
Riley told Buffy in NPLH that he was “ok”, but we see here that he’s gone
further round the bend. Hanging out in Willy’s Place is borderline suicidal;
he’s probably safe only because they know his relation to Buffy. He thinks
he’s being daring and proving his ability to handle the dangers, but really
he’s not escaping Buffy’s protection, he’s taking advantage of it without her
knowledge or input. As a result of going off and being foolish, he wasn’t
present in that scene where Buffy declared “we’re family”.
Spike has gone from wanting to kill Buffy in OomM to saving her life here
in Family. You have to wonder what a vamp psychologist would say about
that.
We got another clue about Glory in Family as well. Buffy described the
new villain as “kind of like Cordelia”. This is just as significant a clue as
the ones we were given in NPLH.

Trivia notes: (1) The teaser builds on an incident from Out Of My Mind
towards a plot development which will be important at the end of S5 and
the centerpiece of S6. (2) Buffy’s reference to Glory as “Miss Congeniality”
refers to the movie of that title which came out in 2000. (3) Megan Gray
(Sandy) also played the girl bitten in the Bronze by VampWillow in
Dopplegangland, suggesting that VampWillow sired her then. (4) Amy
Adams played Cousin Beth. It was one of her very first acting jobs.
 Fool For Love
Episode 7. We expect something dramatic and important from Episode 7
and we certainly get it from Fool For Love. It’s a fan favorite and in my
personal top 20. The whole episode is beautifully constructed, but I have to
give special praise to the way Spike’s fight with the NY Slayer intercuts
with his present dialogue/fight with Buffy. At the end, the past Spike talks
directly to Buffy in the present. Brilliant.
The most important feature of the episode is that it employs the literary
device of the unreliable narrator (Spike). Watch the first two transitions
between his present dialogue with Buffy and the scenes we see from his
past. In each case, Spike’s claim about his past is directly refuted by what
we see after the cut. I’ll give you the first example; the second is the same:
“BUFFY
Were you born this big a pain in the ass?
SPIKE
What can I tell you, baby? I've always been bad.
CUT TO:
INT. LONDON (1880)- VICTORIAN PARLOR- NIGHT
Spike, then the human William, is sitting and composing poetry off in the
corner of a dinner party. The spirited laughter of the party-goers can be
heard in the background. William's hair is long and unruly and he's dressed
as a proper gentleman, complete with tie and reading spectacles. He's
awkward and bookish- none of the confident swagger we're used to.”
The only thing bad about William was his poetry. Spike was in no way
“always” bad. He created his persona after Drusilla sired him. “Was he
always tough, was he always bad? It was much more interesting to make
him a foppish dandy in the beginning and have him turn into Spike. What
you'll notice too, if you're watching carefully is that you'll see James
[Marsters] transform from this guy here, having his feelings hurt, being this
dandy poet. Piece by piece he will turn into Spike throughout this episode.
Here he's got different hair, different clothes, glasses, a different accent
even and no scar over his eyebrow. And you will see one by one him
acquire all these things. So he literally builds Spike piece by piece.” (Writer
Doug Petrie, DVD commentary.)
One way to interpret this process is that we, the viewers, are seeing Spike’s
actual memories of what happened. What he told Buffy was likely
something quite different, though we have no way to know with certainty.
We definitely should doubt that he told her some of the more embarrassing
points, such as Cecily’s “You’re beneath me.” That would undercut his
carefully cultivated self-image in front of someone he’s trying to impress.
Now, if it’s true that these flash cuts completely undermine what Spike has
just said to Buffy (and it is), consider (1) whether he told her the truth or
told her lies about his past, that is, whether he told her what we saw or
something else; and (2) assuming, as seems likely, that he told her at least
some lies, whether we should trust anything else he tells her in the present
dialogue. On the latter point rests a crucial interpretation of the season
finale.
For all Spike’s braggadocio in this episode, the message he delivers to
Buffy takes no credit for himself in his most (in)famous feats, namely
killing the two Slayers. “That final gasp. That look of peace. Part of you is
desperate to know: What's it like? Where does it lead you? And now you
see, that's the secret. Not the punch you didn't throw or the kicks you didn't
land. Every Slayer... has a death wish.” Spike didn’t kill the Slayers; they
wanted to die. Note that we have no idea if this is true – the Slayers
themselves don’t get to speak. All we know is that Spike makes this claim
and that it’s against his interest to claim it.
As I see it, there are 2 reasons to believe Spike and 3 to disbelieve him.

He's credible because what he says underplays his own abilities and
attributes his success to the Slayers wanting to die. In addition, there's the
fact that he does hit a nerve with Buffy. We’ve seen since Faith’s arrival in
S3 the sex and death and love and pain issues of Slayers and vampires.

The reasons we shouldn't believe him are (a) that he's doesn't know those
Slayers well enough to judge their mental state and, in one case, never even
spoke to her; (b) that we don't actually see them "want" to die in either case;
and, (c) that as I emphasized, the episode itself undercuts Spike's narrative.

There's a point of logic here as well, since Spike reasons from the particular
to the general: even if we assume that the two Slayers he killed did have a
death wish, that wouldn't necessarily mean all others did or that Buffy
herself does.

I do think it can be read either way, and I'll have more to say later on.
Let’s talk about the implications of his claim. In my Introduction, I said that
if I were asked to identify the single most important message communicated
by BtVS, my response would be this: accept responsibility. I’ll continue by
quoting myself:
“This theme appears early in the very first episode, Welcome to the
Hellmouth:
“Buffy: Oh, why can't you people just leave me alone?
Giles: Because you are the Slayer. (comes down the stairs) Into each
generation a Slayer is born, one girl in all the world, a Chosen One, one
born with the strength and skill to hunt the vampires...”
If Buffy didn’t accept her responsibility as The Slayer, there’d be no story
to tell. That’s why the Prologue to every episode in Season 1 recites that “In
every generation there is a Chosen One. She alone will stand against the
vampires, the demons and the forces of darkness. She is the Slayer.” (My
emphasis.)
Note that word, “alone” and its complements, “One” and “the”. That’s
responsibility, all right. There’s nobody who can take her place, no higher
power to aid her:
“Buffy: (exhales) You don't have anything useful to tell me, do you? What
are you, just some immortal demon sent down to even the score between
good and evil?
Whistler: (impressed) Wow. Good guess. (grins)
Buffy: (steps up to him) Well, why don't you try getting off your immortal
ass and fighting evil once in a while? 'Cause I'm sick and tired of doing it
myself.” Becoming 2.
One consequence of death is that it removes the responsibility we all accept
as authentic existentialists acting in the world. The Slayer bears the ultimate
in that responsibility: she alone can save the world from the demons, the
vampires, and the forces of darkness. And it’s only by her death that she can
pass that responsibility to another. The Slayers he killed, Spike says, wanted
to let go of that responsibility; it had become too much for them to bear.
Keeping in mind the good reasons to be skeptical of Spike’s claims, the
message to Buffy that only death allows the Slayer to pass on her
responsibility strikes me as correct and consistent with what we’ll see later
in the season.
What makes the whole sequence particularly brilliant is that every bit of
Spike’s description of his encounters with the previous Slayers is rife with
sexual innuendo. We know he’s now in love with Buffy. At the end of the
scene in the alley he insists that she wants to “dance”:
“His passion aroused, Spike leans in to kiss her. She backs away in horror.
BUFFY
What the hell are you doing?
He grabs Buffy by the arms, his words coming in a breathless pant.
SPIKE
Come on. I can feel it, Slayer. You know you want to dance.”
Everything Spike says or does regarding the two Slayers has a sexual
implication. He’d previously said he could have “danced” all night with the
NY Slayer. He got off on the death of the Chinese Slayer in a blatantly
erotic scene with Dru, and insists that Buffy does when she slays: “I
suppose you're telling me you don't?” He uses terms with double meaning
throughout the night (“How many of my kind reckon you've done?”). Even
his description of the Slayers’ deaths reads that way: “That final gasp. That
look of peace. Part of you is desperate to know: What's it like?” And how
will that happen? When he “slips in” and has himself “a real good day”.
Spike’s whole discussion of the Slayers “wanting” death nearly screams out
that he’s talking about the Little Death – orgasm – as well. The erotic
metaphor of the vampire here overlaps completely with the death of the two
Slayers, with Spike’s feelings for Buffy, and with the essential point of the
episode as it affects the finale. It’s beautifully done.
So given the double meaning, what did Buffy mean when she said, “Say it's
true. Say I do want to [“dance”]. It wouldn't be you, Spike. It would never
be you. You’re beneath me.” I think the whole point of the dialogue is that
you can read it either way. She rejected his sexual advance, of course, but
she’s also telling him that she’d never let him be the one to kill her even if
she got to the point where she “wanted” to die.
In fact, we could interpret the whole episode as one of projection on Spike’s
part. Whereas Angelus always remained in control and wanted his victims
helpless, Spike was in for the thrill. He needed to be close to the edge:
“Come on. When was the last time you unleashed it? All out fight against a
mob, back against the wall, nothing but fists and fangs? Don't you ever get
tired of fights you know you're going to win?”
He sought out the Slayers because they alone could give him the rush he
craved. He dances right to the edge of death. And, of course, he has
experienced it – it made him feel alive for the very first time.
Because the interpretation of FFL so strongly affects the interpretation of
the season’s conclusion, I’ll have more to say about it when I discuss the
last two episodes.
Some additional points:
The physical injury Buffy suffers at the beginning of the episode – a stab in
the gut – serves as a metaphor for the emotional one at the end (Joyce’s
need for a CAT scan to evaluate a condition much more serious than anyone
thought).
Riley’s behavior towards the vamp who staked Buffy veers wildly from
protective to reckless. He may have seen Buffy’s vulnerability as his
opportunity to prove that he’s her equal. All he really proves is that he’s
rash.
We could have a big debate even now about the meaning of Spike’s
behavior in the last scene. Why didn’t he kill Buffy? I’m holding off on that
for a while because it’s nearly impossible to say anything meaningful
without spoilers. I will say that I think it’s a key moment in the progression
of his feelings about Buffy.
Trivia notes: (1) Remember that word “effulgent”. It means “glowing”. (2)
The taunts William suffers at the party – “They call him William the Bloody
because of his bloody awful poetry!”; “I'd rather have a railroad spike
through my head than listen to that awful stuff!” – use the words which
described Spike when we first saw him in School Hard: “He's known as
'William the Bloody'. Earned his nickname by torturing his victims with
railroad spikes.” Puts a whole new light on Spike, doesn’t it? (3) The
reference to Spike as a “bloody awful poet” gave rise to a Spike-centric fan
club called the Bloody Awful Poet Society (spoilers at link). (4) When
William collided with someone on the street after leaving the party in tears,
if you look closely it was Angel walking with Darla and Dru. (5) In FFL we
see that Drusilla sired Spike. In School Hard, Spike referred to Angel as
“my sire”. We can fanwank this – Angel as his “grandsire” – but it’s
contradictory. (6) Spike taking the coat was inspired by the Frank Miller
comics series Sin City. (7) This is the second episode to use the phrase
“here endeth the lesson.” The Master used it in Never Kill A Boy On The
First Date, as Spike does here. It will be used once more in S7. It’s the
standard closing after a Bible reading in traditional services. (8) Fool For
Love was shot at the same time as the AtS episode Darla and many of the
flashbacks were used in both episodes, albeit from a different perspective.
The different perspectives give a Rashomon quality to the scenes and create
still more uncertainty about the “truth” of what we’re shown. (9) The scene
with Dru and the chaos demon refers to Lover’s Walk: “I caught her on a
park bench, making out with a *chaos* demon! Have you ever seen a chaos
demon? They're all slime and antlers.” (10) Note that Spike got a memento
from each Slayer he killed: the scar over his left eye courtesy of the first,
the duster he wears from the second.
 Shadow
If you can overlook the poor quality of the snake demon, Shadow is another
good episode. Joyce’s illness is the emotional core of the episode for Buffy.
I may be reaching, but I see Joyce’s “shadow” as a metaphor for the shadow
of uncertainty cast on Buffy’s journey. If I’m right about that, the season’s
focus on split personalities makes it natural that Joyce’s illness is in the
brain.
Interestingly, what’s hidden in the “shadow” is Dawn. We get this from
Glory’s spell (my emphasis):
GLORY: (To the snake demon) The power is yours to see what is unseen.
To find what is shrouded in shadow. Already, you know what I seek. I have
given you form, now find for me the key.
Shadow opens the morning after Fool For Love and it turns out Spike isn’t
the only fool for love. Riley’s inability to keep up with Buffy is really
getting to him. Spike successfully preys on the exact point of Riley’s
insecurity, and we see that Riley has no real response even if Spike’s claims
about Buffy are dubious: “Buffy's got a type, and you're not it. She likes us
dangerous, rough, occasionally bumpy in the forehead region.
(patronizingly) Not that she doesn't like you ... but sorry Charlie, you're just
not dark enough.” Of course, had Riley not spent his morning making the
tomb go boom, he might have actually been there for Buffy.
Riley also criticized Buffy for not taking him along when she went after
Glory, but that’s exactly what he did in FFL, as Xander tells him directly.
“Riley gets darker and darker throughout this season, and I think [going
after the vampires all by himself in FFL] was kind of a turn for him.”
(Doug Petrie)
Going back to Sandy is strong evidence that Riley was, as he admitted to
Xander, “just a little crazed”. It certainly was crazy, for more than one
reason. While Buffy was waiting all by herself in the hospital and while
Dawn could have used some protection in the Magic Shop, Riley was
indulging his insecurities with a vampire. Letting Sandy bite him was
stupid. Buffy would see it as a betrayal, just as Riley did (with less
justification) when she “let” Dracula bite her. I mean, imagine how Edward
would react if Bella went out and let herself get bit by someone else, or
even just made out with him in a car.
If getting bit was stupid, staking Sandy, vampire though she was, for doing
what he wanted is a new low for Riley. I’ll revisit this point when we get to
Into the Woods.
There’s an irony in all this, one that Dawn’s comment to Riley brings front
and center. Buffy was emotionally invested in Angel, though she had sex
with him just once and spent most of S3 not even kissing him. We see Buffy
much more physically demonstrative with Riley, yet he’s convinced she’s
not feeling the emotional connection. “She doesn't get all worked up like
that over you.” And that’s the other half of Riley’s problem. It’s the same
tension we’ve seen since the dueling attitudes toward love we were given
by Mr. Platt in Beauty and the Beasts and Spike’s famous “Love isn’t
brains” speech in Lover’s Walk.
Riley desperately feels left out by Buffy, but can’t recognize that he’s
demanding to intrude on both her Slayer duties and her personal trauma.
Buffy needs to be strong for Joyce and Dawn. It’s very hard to take on that
role while being “weak” so that Riley can be the one to comfort her, which
is what he seems to want. Besides, Buffy has always been prone to hold her
emotions close and not confide in others. Riley’s demanding something
from her that’s contrary to her basic nature.
Riley’s holding a double-edged sword: he’s upset because she won’t give
him the passionate attention he craves, but he’s so focused on his own needs
that he isn’t giving her the support she needs. From the viewpoint of an
unbiased observer, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that he’s being selfish
under the circumstances. As Xander tells him, Buffy can’t fight Joyce’s
tumor, so needs to confront something she can fight (note that she actually
can’t fight Glory – there’s a metaphor there). Riley is actually ducking the
real confrontation because he’s unwilling to face up to his own fears.
Trivia notes: (1) Since Dawn asked, a CAT scan is, as Buffy said, similar to
an x-ray. The letters stand for “computed axial tomography”. (2) The two
recent de-invitation spells Spike mentioned were done in BvD (Dracula)
and Real Me (Harmony). Spike actually got his invite in Becoming 2 and
that has never been revoked even though he was far from harmless for
much of the time. (3) Spike’s “sorry Charlie” refers to the commercials for
StarKist Tuna. (4) Anya’s strong reaction to Xander’s wish for a cult of
bunny worshipers relates to her fear of bunnies which we saw in Fear,
Itself. (5) This is the episode where we learn Glory’s name. (6) When the
cobra turns into the monster, Dreg shouts “He is arisen.” That phrase is a
take-off from Matthew 28:6, which refers to Jesus. (7) Giles didn’t have the
Aleister Crowley album the customer wanted. Crowley was a famous
occultist and mystic. AFAIK, he never made an album; it’s a joke. (8) Buffy
strangling the snake demon reminds me of Princess Leia with Jabba the
Hutt in Return of the Jedi.
 Listening to Fear
The Queller demon in Listening to Fear might very well win a contest for
lamest demon in the series. The episode also suffers, I think, from the far
too obvious metaphorical vampire whorehouse. I’m not fond of this
metaphor. Don’t get me wrong. LtF is not a bad episode like, say, I Robot,
You Jane is bad. There are important developments here, both in plot and
metaphor. It just suffers a bit from weak execution. That said, I do want to
praise the scene of Buffy crying privately as she washes the dishes to the
sound of her mother’s deranged ramblings. SMG really sells that scene.
Riley let the SG down when he failed to show up for their slay date, instead
spending his time in the aforementioned “whorehouse”. Aside from the fact
that the metaphor’s an anvil, I never really saw Riley as the type to “stray”
in this way. Sandy, ok; that can be explained by his obsession about Angel
and Dracula. The suck job we see him getting in the teaser is less plausible
to me, and I say that as someone who’s not a big fan of his.
Riley also lied to everyone about not wanting to do research because he
wanted to summon the commandos. As he has before, Graham called him
on it:
GRAHAM: You found a stiff in the woods and called us in? Don't you
usually call your girlfriend for this kind of thing?
He grins. Riley gives him a dirty look.
We as viewers learn in LtF that Ben has some connection to Glory. He
seems like a nice guy, a caring doctor, but think about what Ben has done
here: he deliberately caused the murder of half a dozen mental patients.
Maybe this is a good thing – after all, now those patients can’t say anything
which might reveal Dawn’s nature to, say, Glory. It’s unclear if this is why
Ben summoned the Queller, though it’s probably his best reason.
In my essay on Choices, I discussed the distinction between
consequentialist ethics and deontological ethics. The former judges ethical
decisions by their impact on others. A consequentialist might very well
justify Ben’s action depending on what the consequences would be if Glory
were to find Dawn. It’s a conditional approval because we don’t know (yet)
what would happen if she did, and we don’t know (yet) if Ben knows. In
contrast, a deontologist would argue that those innocent victims (doubly
victims, in fact – made crazy by Glory, killed by the demon) have a right to
life which can’t be erased simply because others might benefit from it.
A parallel debate about the proper moral course will be central to the season
finale.
Xander guessed that Glory was responsible for the Queller demon, but it
turned out to be Ben instead. Glory is the one creating the epidemic of
mental patients, as we (but not Buffy) now learn: The crazy man we see in
the hospital who’s later the first victim of the Queller demon was the
security guard from No Place Like Home. It’s not expressly stated, but
Glory caused his madness by what she did to him in that episode.
Moreover, we also learn that those with mental problems can recognize that
Dawn doesn’t belong. In effect, Glory is creating her own “key detectors”,
parallel to the Geiger counters used by the commandos.
The basic rule of the show is that the demon tells us something
metaphorically about Buffy. What we see in LtF is that Glory is
inadvertently, unknowingly, creating the ability to see Dawn’s true nature,
i.e., that she is the Key. By summoning the Queller demon, Ben is, in
essence, repressing the discovery. Translating this to Buffy, the episode tells
us that some part of Buffy is resisting the knowledge of what Dawn
represents, even as other parts try to tell her. Consistent with this, Dawn
expresses doubts about her own reality, doubts which get to the heart of
Buffy’s challenge for the season and fit perfectly with Dawn’s metaphorical
role:
DAWN: (teary) She hates me.
BUFFY: (kneeling beside the bed) No.
DAWN: She called me a thing.
BUFFY: She loves you. Okay? She's not herself. (puts her hand on Dawn's)
I told you what the doctor said about the tumor.
DAWN: (shakes head) No, not just Mom. People. They keep saying weird
stuff about me.
BUFFY: Are you talking about the man in the hospital?
DAWN: He called me a thing too. And there was another one. Weird guy
outside the magic shop. (Buffy looks concerned) He said I didn't belong. He
said I wasn't real. (Buffy sighs) Why does everybody keep doing that?
What's wrong with me?
Joyce then tells us directly what we inferred from the previous episode:
Suddenly Joyce gasps and sits up, staring at Dawn.
JOYCE: Don't touch me! You - you thing!
DAWN: (backing up) Mom, please!
JOYCE: Get away from me! You're nothing, you're, you're a shadow!
The fact that Joyce recognizes Dawn’s importance is therefore a critical step
towards Buffy’s end-of-season revelation:
JOYCE: No, I guess it isn't. I do know I was ... pretty out of it, and I had ...
not-not a dream ... exactly, more like I had this ... knowledge, i-it just came
to me like ....truth, you know? (Buffy frowns) Even though it didn't
seem...possible, even though I shouldn't even think such things.
BUFFY: What?
JOYCE: That Dawn...
Buffy looks very startled.
JOYCE: She's not ... mine, is she?
Buffy stares at her mom, then looks down. She comes to a decision and
looks Joyce in the eye.
BUFFY: No.
Joyce absorbs this for a moment.
JOYCE: She's ... she does belong to us, though.
BUFFY: Yes, she does.
JOYCE: And she's important. To the world. Precious. (Buffy nods) As
precious as you are to me.
Buffy smiles and nods again. Joyce nods back.
JOYCE: Then we have to take care of her. Buffy, promise me. If anything
happens, if I don't come through this-
BUFFY: Mom-
JOYCE: No, listen to me. No matter what she is, she still feels like my
daughter. I have to know that you'll take care of her, that you'll keep her
safe. That you'll love her like I love you.
BUFFY: (teary) I promise.
Trivia notes: (1) When Willow tells Giles she doesn’t want to be the one to
find the bodies, she’s probably remembering her experiences in Prophecy
Girl, Doomed, and Real Me. (2) Contrary to Willow’s statement, the
Tunguska event was in 1908, not 1917. (3) Dreg referred to himself as a
“humble postulant”. A postulant is, generally, someone who makes a
request or demand. It also has a more specific sense of a candidate for a
monastery. The more general sense seems meant here.
 Into the Woods
The title of Into the Woods is ironic, of course. The success of Joyce’s
operation means that she’s now “out of the woods”, but Riley left to join a
commando operation in the jungles of Central America. Buffy’s distress at
his departure means that she’s not yet out of the woods emotionally.
I have a take on the events of ItW that’s fairly cynical, particularly with
respect to Xander’s dialogues with Buffy and Anya. In order to explain my
position on those, I need first to explain how I see Riley and Buffy. Here’s
the way I said it 10 years ago and I still see it pretty much the same way:
“The principal complaint Riley had about Buffy was that he loved her more
than (he felt) she loved him. His feelings towards her were more intense
than (he felt) hers were towards him. I would emphasize 2 points about this:

1. By saying this, Riley seems to be adopting the Spike theory of love

("Love isn't brains, children, it's blood boiling...."). [Edit to add: Riley even
asks Buffy to hit him, just as Spike did in Fool For Love: “You're the
Slayer. Do something about it. Hit me. Come on. One good swing. You
know you want to.” h/t Anonymous] I thought there was general agreement
that this was an immature notion of love. If this is Riley's standard, he's just
as wrong as Spike.

2. This is a cheap shot by Riley. He can know the intensity of his own
feelings, but he has no way to judge the intensity of Buffy's.

We, the audience, can't see inside either one of them. I personally didn't see
Riley show any great passion towards Buffy (as distinct from what he said).
In fact, by sleeping with Faith/Buffy he showed a lack of passion -- he
engaged with the body rather than the person.

Nor did I see any diminution of passion in Buffy. What I did see was that
she was overloaded with stress brought on by her obligations to Dawn and
her mother's illness. To me, Riley's insistence that she engage emotionally
with him on these counts was pure selfishness on his part. It gets back to
whether his view of love is mature or not -- a mature view allows one's
partner to engage emotionally somewhere else when the need arises. The
immature Spike view says "me, me, me".

Riley never could accept his diminished role after the destruction of the
Initiative. He kept intruding into Buffy's space in order to satisfy his own
ego, then blamed her for shutting him out. He didn't know how to deal with
a woman strong enough to handle pressure without his manly support.”
The one change I’d make in this today is that I now think Riley was right on
one point – Buffy doesn’t love him, at least not the way she loved Angel.
We could get into long debates about whether that intensity of love is good
(see Spike in Lover’s Walk) or bad (see Mr. Platt in Beauty and the Beasts).
Bottom line is, the passion wasn’t there on Buffy’s side.
In no way, shape, or form does this mean that I think Buffy is somehow at
“fault”. Words like “fault” and “blame” don’t belong in the discussion when
it comes to whether or how much you love someone. As Xander put it in
Prophecy Girl, “you either feel a thing or you don’t”. As was true then,
Buffy doesn’t, at least not in the sense Riley wants/needs.
Nor is Riley “wrong” to love Buffy more than she loves him, assuming he
does. No, he is at fault, but not for that reason. His faults are three: he hasn’t
really been able to accept that he’s not Buffy’s equal when it comes to
Slaying; he didn’t try to talk to Buffy about his concerns at a time when that
might have helped, instead waiting until now to deliver an ultimatum; and
he behaved stupidly, recklessly in the meantime. The problem is not that
Riley went to the vamp trulls; that’s merely a symptom. The problem is
with Riley’s attitudes and expectations, which I’ve been discussing in the
posts on the previous episodes. It wasn’t Buffy’s job to find him a new goal
in life beyond being the mission’s boyfriend. That was his job, and his
failure to do so led ultimately to the break.
One more point before I get to Xander’s advice to Buffy. As I see it,
Xander, no doubt with good intentions, succeeded in making her feel guilty,
feel that she had failed by “not being there” for Riley. For the moment it
doesn’t matter if he’s right in his claim that she “shut down”. I’m just
saying that I interpret what he says and how she reacts as a guilt trip.
Consider, in particular, these lines:
I think you mean convenient. I think you took it for granted that he was
gonna show up when you wanted him to, and take off when you didn't.
You shut down, Buffy. And you've been treating Riley like the rebound guy.
When he's the one that comes along once in a lifetime.
The other reason I describe it as a “guilt trip” is that Xander gave his speech
to Buffy, not Riley. He had chances to talk to Riley but he never did. In a
relationship, both parties have it within their ability to resolve the issues. By
the simple fact of raising the issue only with Buffy, Xander put this
responsibility exclusively on her.
We could see Xander’s advice in metaphorical terms – Xander as her
metaphorical heart – which would imply that Buffy is guilt-tripping herself
about Riley. Let me explore whether that’s deserved or not by treating the
issue as a straightforward one of plot and character. The answer there will
tell us if she deserves the guilt, whether self-imposed or placed on her by
Xander.
Now let’s take a look at what he told her. Two of his arguments stand out.
First, there’s Xander’s whole “he’s the one” claim. I have no doubt Xander
was sincere when he said this. Notwithstanding the problems in the
Buffy/Riley relationship which I’ve mentioned, I think that Xander honestly
believes that Buffy should love Riley as “the one that comes along once in a
lifetime”. Xander loves Buffy, and has ever since he first laid eyes on her.
He knows she doesn’t love him that way, but deep inside he thinks she
would if only he were good enough. Xander sees Riley as a “better
Xander”, one without the flaws Xander knows he has. That’s possibly true:
I see Xander’s character as the mid-point on a spectrum which runs
Jonathan – Xander – Riley. If Buffy did love Riley as Xander says she
should, that would vindicate Xander’s hatred of Angel and confirm that
Buffy deserves to be on the pedestal where Xander places her.
Very few viewers, however, would agree that Riley was Buffy’s ideal beau.
While Riley did have a few supporters, I think it fair to say that the majority
of viewers at the time would have said that Angel would be much better for
Buffy than Riley was. That was true when ItW first aired and I’ve seen
nothing since to indicate that it’s changed. Deep inside, Buffy knows this.
She knows that she has never told Riley that she loves him, despite 2 clear
opportunities (The Yoko Factor and The Replacement) and a third chance in
Out Of My Mind. She did tell Angel that she loved him.
Here’s the way my friend shadowkat phrased it: “Nice speech. Were you
fooled? Yep. So was I. But it always nagged at me. Why? Because when I
was Buffy’s age, I did the same dumb thing – I got desperate, I got scared, I
decided that if I lost this guy, there would never be another one which
meant I’d have to be alone, forever. And that would be bad. Buffy doesn’t
run after Riley, because he’s the long-haul guy or because she loves him.
Buffy runs after Riley – because she is afraid of being alone. Her mother’s
sick. Her sister’s not real. This is the only normal guy that she liked who’s
ever taken an interest in her. What if there’s no one else? Can she really
afford to be picky? She didn’t hear what Xander said.”
Buffy has always had a great deal of insecurity about her relationships with
men. Hardly surprising, given what has happened to her. In addition, she
was very emotional when Xander spoke to her because Riley himself had
just laid a guilt trip on her. Add to this her complete trust in Xander (she
owes him her life, after all), and it's clear that she was very susceptible to
what Xander said.

And what did Xander say? He reinforced what Riley had said: that she had
shut down; that Riley was a "once in a lifetime guy"; that if she (not Riley,
she) “really [thought] you can love this guy – I’m talking scary, messy no-
emotions-barred need", that is, the Spike version of love, she needed to
"beg" Riley to stay. This speech went far beyond telling Buffy to search her
heart. It told her what to find there.

Buffy ran to the helicopter because Xander told her to. She came back,
naturally, feeling even more insecure than before about her relations with
men. And Riley never once looked out the window.
Second, Xander says she should have seen it coming:
“XANDER: No? Good, so you and Riley *aren't* imploding? (Buffy turns
to face him in surprise) It doesn't take a genius. What I can't figure out is
how you never saw it coming. BUFFY: What? Who told you? XANDER:
Nobody told me anything, Buffy. It was right in front of my Xander face.
The guy would do anything for you.”
This is astonishingly unfair; part of it is a flat lie. Xander had the clues, no
doubt, but the incidents happened with only him as a witness: Riley
expressly told Xander “but she doesn’t love me” at the end of The
Replacement; the look on Riley’s face when he learned Buffy had gone to
stop Glory in Shadow. It was right in front of his Xander face, yes, but that
doesn’t mean it should have been obvious to Buffy (and note that Xander
himself never bothered to tell her). By telling her that she should have
picked up on clues she never saw, Xander is putting guilt on Buffy that she
doesn’t deserve – Riley is the one at fault for not communicating his
feelings to Buffy more directly (he’s a psych grad student, after all).
In addition, there was so much Xander didn't know and didn’t bother to find
out. He didn't know that Riley had slept with Faith in WAY. He didn't know
about the vamp trulls. He didn’t witness Riley's ultimatum to Buffy earlier
in ItW. He didn’t know about Riley’s insecurity and emotional neediness in
the face of Buffy trying to deal with her mom and sister. He didn’t know
about Dawn. Because he lacked this critical information, he had no business
judging Buffy's behavior towards Riley or her feelings about him. He was
manipulating her; with the best of intentions, but manipulating nonetheless.
In the emotion of the moment, Buffy believes Xander. She trusts him, as she
should. But Xander’s wrong. He always hated Angel and that colors his
judgment, biasing it in favor of Riley. The irony of his speech is that
Xander increases Buffy’s pain at Riley’s departure by making her feel guilty
when it’s not at all clear that she should; by making her believe that the loss
was greater than it was; and by getting her to race after Riley and fail to
arrive on time, thereby exacerbating her guilt.
All the relief from the success of her mother’s operation was undone by
Riley’s departure and Xander’s guilt trip.
I’ve framed the discussion above fairly strongly, so I thought it would be
interesting to reproduce a (heavily edited) thread from AtPO in
October/November 2005. I edited for brevity and cut out most of my own
comments because I incorporated them above:
Sunshine: “I read [Xander’s words] as suggesting to Buffy that she put
aside the shock of seeing Riley with the vamp girl (not sure of the proper
terminology here) and ask herself if she really has feelings for Riley. I think
this is sound advice - do not make life altering decisions in the passion of
the moment. That doesn't seem so outrageous so I must be missing
something. As far as Riley, he wasn't a favorite character of mine but I think
Buffy did in fact hold back her feelings with him and did push him away. …
Maybe she should have pushed him away, maybe he wasn't the right guy for
her but I saw one of those circles of misunderstanding and hurt that are
often so hard to break. I see Xander as saying "Don't pile hurt upon hurt,
don't react out shock and pain, consider what you have and what you want,
and act accordingly".
Manwitch:
"do not make life altering decisions in the passion of the moment."

This is Buffy's position towards Riley. Riley forces, f-o-r-c-e-s, a grossly

unfair ultimatum on her: Forgive my whore chasing ("whore chasing" was
the term you were looking for) immediately, in fact, don't just forgive my
whore-mongering quest for suck jobs behind your back while your mother
was on deaths door, but acknowledge your responsibility for my actions.

In the context of what is actually happening between Riley and Buffy,

Xander’s intervention on Buffy is almost perfectly defined as a "petulant
self-righteous sanctimonious lecture."
Sunshine: “I do believe Buffy bears some responsibility for the state of
Buffy/Riley relations. In my experience, very few relationship implosions
are the fault of just one of the participants. … I think Buffy did hold back
and he sensed this lack of commitment. He acted inappropriately and she
certainly would have been justified in telling him to get lost, but is this
really what Buffy wanted? … I belief that finding that right person is so
damn difficult that when you do have a candidate, do not toss this person
aside without considering exactly what you have and what you will lose….
I think we are prone to making rash decisions, especially in the heat of the
moment. Sometimes, one person has to overlook the hurt and say “I forego
my justified counter-attack and I forgive you. What we have is worth
fighting for.”. If this is what Xander is suggesting, then I agree with him.”
Sophist (me): “Xander approaches her while she's in a state of serious
emotional distress and (obviously) not thinking all that clearly.

He then says, in order, the following (minor editing): [Quote of Xander’s

whole speech]
I see this sequence not as one which lays before Buffy a free and open
opportunity to examine her feelings, but an intimidation process in which
Xander tells her the "right" answer and only then says she should decide:

1. He puts the onus on her instead of Riley.

2. He tells her she should have seen it coming.
3. He makes no response to Riley's betrayal.
4. He insists that it's her decision (when actually it's just as much Riley's).
5. He tells her to beg Riley to stay.
6. He tells her she treated Riley badly.
7. He tells her Riley is the one in a lifetime.
8. He tells her that she should "decide" if she can love Riley.

If that's not emotional abuse, I don't know what is. Buffy was emotionally
vulnerable, yet Xander made no effort to find out why, he just started off
telling her she was in the wrong wrt Riley. After reiterating that it was her
fault, he tells her Riley is "the one". Only then does he offer her the
"choice" of begging Riley to stay.”
Finn Mac Cool: “What it comes down to is the importance of compromise
in making a relationship work. For Buffy and Riley, they could never have a
functioning relationship as long as both stubbornly clung to how they
thought the relationship should be. Now one can argue that Riley should
have been the one to compromise, that he was in no position to demand
anything of Buffy. The funny thing is that your feelings don't always listen
to your sense of right and wrong. In order for Riley to have a reason to stay
without Buffy compromising was if Riley could accept her vision of a
"dependable" relationship. From all we saw of Riley throughout Season 5, it
looks as though he's not capable of that. …

That leaves the onus of the decision squarely on Buffy's shoulders. If Riley
can't change, then Buffy's options are either to change for him or let him go.
When Xander first runs into Buffy, she doesn't seem to be considering the
option of change, going so far as to say she doesn't have a choice in the
matter. Now I would hold nothing against Buffy if that were the case; if that
were the truth of her feelings, then she and Riley broke up because,
ultimately, their views on love were simply incompatible. Xander's little
speech, however, puts Buffy's refusal of an emotionally open but vulnerable
relationship in the context of "won't" not "can't." Xander admits it's not fair
that Buffy has to make this choice, but, just like with right and wrong, that
really doesn't factor into it. “If he’s not the guy, if what he needs from you
just isn’t there, let him go. Break his heart and make it a clean break. But if
you really think you can love this guy – I’m talking scary, messy no-
emotions-barred need, if you’re ready for that then think about what you’re
about to lose." Xander basically described the intense yet painful sort of
relationship that Buffy had with Angel and that Riley hoped to have with
her, and says that, if she is still capable of that kind of love, then she has to
consider the consequences of not changing; he acknowledges that she might
not be capable of loving Riley the way he wants, but it clearly seems that he
was right to bring up the other possibility, as Buffy comes to the conclusion
that she can go for the deep sort of passion with Riley.”
Finn Mac Cool: “Upon looking at it, the Buffy/Riley relationship was a lot
like a gender-reversed version of an archetypal tale: woman falls in love
with man; woman marries man; woman gives up a promising career to be
with man; woman finds herself with little life beyond caring for the house,
her children, and her husband; man spends most of his time at work or out
with friends, reserving little attention for her; woman then either lives the
rest of her life unfulfilled, cheats on husband, and/or leaves him. Riley gave
up his military career in order to be with Buffy, finding that, now that he's a
mere mortal dating a superhero, he's expected to stay out of the big,
apocalyptic matters Buffy deals with, whereas, in his old life, he would
have rushed right in. Riley feels he's not getting the attention or respect
from Buffy he needs, so he cheats on her with someone who can give him
attention, and finally threatens to leave unless Buffy (Riley's metaphorical
husband) agrees to change how their relationship functions. I don't know
about you, but I usually feel sympathy for the woman in the archetypal
story described above, so I naturally find myself sympathizing with Riley
when put in a similar situation. He wanted to be with Buffy, but he couldn't
base his life around one person if she wasn't willing to include him in her
life more.”
Manwitch: “Look, when someone cheats on their partner, betrays their
trust, and I think it’s fair to say what Riley was doing with the Vamp fits in
this category, they can plan on sleeping on the couch that night. If, having
been caught, their response is to go on a five year vacation, then they have
no interest in continuing the relationship regardless of what they say. If they
do want the relationship to continue, they are willing to surrender what may
or may not be their last chance at rejoining the military in favor of working
on the relationship. You can't work on the relationship if you’re not
together. Riley's ultimatum is ipso facto a declaration that he is done with
the relationship. Nothing Buffy can say will change that. She knows it,
which is why she doesn't say it. See, if their relationship was going well,
Buffy would not tell Riley to stay. She would give him self-determination.
So for him to pretend that this decision, that he has clearly already made
and which is only his to make, actually depends on her is just an incredibly
disingenuous way of trying yet again to knuckle her under.

Riley did not leave the military for Buffy. His awareness of Buffy and
Buffy's values and the way Buffy fought for the right vs. the way the
military did may have played into his decision. But there was no "Buffy I
love you I'm leaving the military." Nor did she ever put that on him. Buffy
never discouraged him from participating in the fight. She asked him not to
go alone after she herself had just nearly been killed. That's not out of line.

If you watch the episodes again and try not to hear whatever Riley or
Xander says as gospel truth, you might see that they are sooooo
wroonngggggg. You will notice that Buffy forgives her attempted murder
by Riley's boss, she forgives Riley's attack on Willow and other moments
when commando interference threatened willow's life. She forgives
numerous unjustifiable moments of abuse from Riley, including a gun
pointed in her face. She forgives his sleeping with her arch enemy. Through
all of this, she loves him, does the down and dirty with him, gets him the
help he needs, busts him out of prison, and asks him, repeatedly, to be of
integral help in the fight. She has to go fight Adam, but stops to save Riley
first and lets him know that she needs his help.

Later, when Buffy's sister is the key and her mom is ill, Buffy asks Riley to
watch Dawn and to not make Buffy cry. Riley is incapable of doing this. He
wants to blather on about his masculinity, which, again if you watch all the
episodes of their relationship, is of primary concern to Riley throughout. He
is the man. …

I just don't see how people believe Riley's complaint that Buffy disengaged
from him. If the writer's meant that, I think they blew it. When you have an
arguably feminist show with an arguably strong female character, you can't
suddenly throw in traditional relationship power dynamics and expect them
to be taken at face value. Buffy had been there for Riley through his many
times of need, she had been very forgiving of his MANY shortcomings, and
she had told him reasonably specifically in her times of stress what she
needed from him.

Riley's response to that is to cheat on her, give her an ultimatum, and claim
that she's pushing him away and people believe him?!?!”
Ok, enough about Riley, I need to get back to Xander and his speech to
Anya. Again starting with metaphor, Xander was delivering the speech
Buffy felt, after Xander’s prodding, that she should have given to Riley. But
since the reality of her relationship with Riley doesn’t match the guilt she
felt, we should look closely at the Xander/Anya relationship to see if his
deeds to date match what he told Anya.
From the metaphor I’ve used repeatedly in these posts, Xander is Buffy’s
heart. Her inner uncertainties about Riley over the past year have been
reflected in Xander’s treatment of Anya, with Anya loving Xander more
intensely just as Riley (says he) loved Buffy. At no time before this episode
had Xander treated Anya as if he was “powerfully, painfully” in love with
her. I think it fair to say that he treated Anya much worse than Buffy treated
Riley. He frequently corrected her to her face and belittled her to his
friends. Let me give some examples:
Anya: (indignantly) Xander. You haven't been paying any attention to me,
tonight. Just peddling those processed food snacks. I don't know why.
Xander: (around mouthful) Well, let me put it in a way you'll understand.
Sell bars. Make money. Take Anya nice places. Buy pretty things. (The I
in Team)
XANDER: My girlfriend. Mistress of the learning plateau. (Where The Wild
Things Are)
WILLOW: How many kids?
XANDER: I dunno, a whole herd of them. And some parents to boot.
(Buffy glances at him, then looks past him and smiles) It was kind of
embarrassing, which, welcome to life with Anya. (Where The Wild Things
Are)
XANDER: An, you can help by making this a quiet time. (New Moon
Rising)
XANDER: (to Anya) An, we talked about the employee-employer
vocabulary no-nos. That was number five. (Shadow)
This is not the behavior of someone “painfully, powerfully” in love. In light
of these comments, it’s not surprising that Willow expressed skepticism that
he loved Anya (The Replacement), nor that Buffy called him on it here
when he was telling her how much she should love Riley. As a result, I see
Xander’s speech to Anya much the same way I see his advice to Buffy –
perhaps with good intentions, but more likely to create greater heartache.
One final point about Buffy’s behavior here as it reflects on her and on
Riley’s staking of Sandy. The vamp “whorehouse” offered for pay the same
thing Riley got from Sandy in return for a few drinks. I think we’re
supposed to be disturbed by Buffy’s reaction to learning that such places
exist. It’s not just her determination to shut it down when there were greater
evils she could deal with, it was her anger in setting the place on fire. More
to the point, it was her decision to slay the female vamp who ran at the end
of the fight in the alley. As Xander tells her, “you’re acting like a crazy
person.” (Note the mention of “crazy” yet again.) Xander’s wrong a lot, but
he’s right about this.
Now, obviously, these were vampires and Buffy always has a plausible
reason to slay them. The problem here is that she acted out of anger at
Riley, not out of any real sense of duty. It’s morally problematic. And that
brings us back to Riley staking Sandy. Any moral qualms we felt (and
should feel) at Buffy staking the last vamp apply with extra force to Riley’s
situation in Shadow. After all, he either solicited Sandy to bite him or he
consented; Buffy did nothing of the sort. I see Buffy’s reaction here as a
post hoc commentary on Riley.
Trivia notes: (1) The failure of Buffy and Riley to communicate was
signaled from the very beginning of their relationship in Hush. (2) Dawn
played the game of Life with Anya in Real Me. (3) The movie Anya wanted
to see about a chimp playing hockey was Most Valuable Primate. (4) The
part of Giles’s banner that was blocked by his head reads “Gurnenthar’s
Ascendance”. I have no idea who or what Gurnenthar is; it’s probably just
made up. (5) Riley’s demand that Buffy hit him reminds me of Spike’s
reaction to Dru in Lover’s Walk: “She didn't even care enough to cut off my
head or set me on fire.”
 Triangle
I love Triangle, partly because I think it’s hilarious, but mostly because of
Xander’s response to Olaf’s offer of a “Sophie’s Choice”: “that’s insane
troll logic”. The only right answer is to refuse to choose. Well, that and
have Buffy come in and save the day.
Triangle occupies the same relative point in the season that Ted,
Gingerbread and The I in Team did, and it serves a similar role: it gives us
the problem Buffy will face in the season finale, but doesn’t quite give us
the answer. It’s also setting up some plot points regarding Willow’s magic
for S6 which I can’t spoil.
Unfortunately, the combination of a mostly humorous episode with
important spoilers means I don’t have much to talk about. I’ll just note a
few items of interest and let this be the least controversial Buffy post on the
internet today. [That last sentence referred to an explosion of
controversy regarding the discussion on another site about an episode from
S6.]
The demon – in this case Olaf – always tells us something important about
Buffy. The point of Triangle is to move Buffy past Riley, at least for the
present. The episode accomplishes this using Willow and Anya. They
argued about who was at fault for Olaf, but in my view Willow’s magic
spell was a conduit for Anya’s internal feelings. Prefiguring the role she’ll
play in the penultimate episode of S5, Willow’s magic served to release
Anya’s pent-up resentments:
WILLOW: Hey Anya, whatever really has you mad, why don't you just say
it, like you do every other thought that stomps through your brain?
ANYA: (stands up) I believe I have said it.
WILLOW: No. You haven't. Come on. Let it out! (My emphasis.)
And out pops Olaf, the guy who made Anya really mad when he cheated on
her. We can see this metaphorically: Olaf cheated on Anya, as Riley had
with Buffy. By defeating Olaf, Buffy becomes able to put her sense of
betrayal behind her. She also reinforces her faith in romance:
OLAF: What are you fighting for, minuscule blonde one? Your friends?
(gestures to Anya comforting Xander) These two? (chuckles) They will
never last….
BUFFY: (OS) Their love... (punching noise, Olaf grunts) will last ... (punch,
grunt) forever! (punch, sound of Olaf falling to the floor)
Speaking of Buffy, Xander and Anya open the episode with a discussion of
Buffy’s relationship debris, but it seems to me that they get it very wrong.
Anya’s statement is the key mistake, though Xander validates it when he
doesn’t disagree: “She couldn't make it work with Angel, and then she let
Riley go away.”
It was hardly Buffy’s fault that the relationship with Angel didn’t work. The
curse was outside of her control. And as I’ve argued over the last several
posts, she didn’t “let Riley go away”. He left on his own.
Spike continues to fail to understand humanity, providing a counterpoint to
Anya, who’s just beginning to. Willow isn’t entirely wrong about Anya, but
she is a bit unfair. Anya’s making some progress – frustratingly slow
progress, perhaps, but progress nonetheless. Spike truly doesn’t understand
why he shouldn’t get credit for not feeding off of bleeding disaster victims,
nor that he’s not likely to win points with Buffy by feeling her up when
she’s thrown on top of him. Perhaps if we were grading on a curve….
I haven’t mentioned this before, but the comparison of Anya to Spike is
instructive on several levels. Anya spent 1000-odd years as a demon, and
she’s now in recovery. I assume we’re supposed to see Anya as having a
soul, though this hasn’t been stated explicitly. This leaves Xander in an odd
position when it comes to Angel and to Spike. He hates both of them, but
it’s pretty hard to distinguish Angelus’s crimes from Anyanka’s. If
anything, she had lots more time to commit them, and she had the aid of
magic to inflict whatever vengeance her “client” wanted. By falling in love
with Anya, Xander has seriously undermined his judgmental stance vis-à-
vis Bangel.
Anya also serves as a reminder that Spike is chipped. Just as she’s learning
to be human; just as Angel spent 100 years brooding his way to human; so
Spike is now trying to understand what’s involved. The question for the
viewer is whether he can do this without a soul. If you haven’t seen beyond
this episode yet, I’ll say that there will be an answer to this question, so
keep it in mind going forward.
Trivia notes: (1) I’m just going to assume that everyone who’s not Anya
knows The Cat in the Hat. (2) Willow did a spell to create light in Out of
My Mind. The spell she mentions here seems to be an enhancement of that
one. (3) As Buffy says, there actually is a sign at SeaWorld which says "The
first five rows will get wet." (4) Willow’s reference to Olaf as “Lord of the
Hammers” seems like a direct tribute to Lord of the Rings. (5) D’Hoffryn
offered Willow Anya’s old job in Something Blue. (6) It’s possible there’s
another reference to Something Blue when Willow wishes Buffy was there
and then wishes for a million dollars. (7) Willow’s lips broke up Xander and
Cordelia in Lover’s Walk. (8) Anya’s mention of a world without shrimp
harks back to Superstar. (9) They rebuilt the Bronze after this episode. It’ll
be new and different in future episodes. (10) Joss was reportedly very upset
that a particular word was left out of the episode. He needed it for the
finale.
 Checkpoint
Checkpoint is the feel good episode of S5. Who among us can resist a good
smackdown of the Watcher’s Council? Better yet, Buffy does that by raising
an issue which will be crucial for the series henceforth: “Power. I have it.
They don't. This bothers them.” Yes, it’s about power. That word gets used
9 times in the episode. But exactly what “power” consists of or what it
might mean is subject to lots of interpretation; we get one here, but there
will be others.
Why is the episode called Checkpoint? In my view, it’s because Buffy has
nearly reached adulthood. The purpose of the “review” is to confirm that
she’s ready for it. That’s the challenge Quentin puts to her: “you're dealing
with grownups now”. Quentin demands proof that Buffy’s “prepared for it”,
referring to information about Glory, but also, I think, meaning the
challenges of adulthood more generally. That was the point of the
Cruciamentum in Helpless, to which there are several references here, and
it’s the same tactic the Council still employs.
There’s a clear feminist point being made here as well. All those telling
Buffy how weak and powerless she is – that is, how unready she is to be
treated as an adult – are men (except for Glory; as a God, she doesn’t
count). If you notice, one of the women of the WC (sounds like a calendar, I
know) makes coffee for Quentin when he sits down to give Giles his
ultimatum at the Magic Shop.
The physical test is actually a metaphor for Buffy’s situation this season:
TRAVERS: Philip will attack the dummy. The Slayer's job is to protect it.
Do you understand?
BUFFY: Protect the dummy.
TRAVERS: As if it were precious.
His use of the word “precious” takes us back to Joyce in Listening to Fear:
JOYCE: And she's important. To the world. Precious. (Buffy nods) As
precious as you are to me.
Buffy smiles and nods again. Joyce nods back.
JOYCE: Then we have to take care of her. Buffy, promise me.
Quentin forced Buffy to defend the dummy while blindfolded. So far this
season, she’s had to protect Dawn, blindfolded by her lack of knowledge of
what she’s fighting against in the form of Glory.
Ultimately, though, this isn’t a test of Buffy’s physical prowess or her
knowledge, it’s a test of Buffy’s confidence in her readiness. When she talks
to Giles in the Magic Shop she’s uncertain: “Am I gonna be able to get
through this review? … They're gonna expect me to ... to be like a Slayer
and, and know stuff, but I'm just me and I don't know anything….” What
she discovers in her confrontations with Glory and the Knights is her
confidence in her own power.
Buffy gives the WC proof of that confidence when she calls their bluff.
She’s the one holding all the cards, and she knows it. When she first
encountered Quentin she called him “Mr. Travers”. In her speech at the end
she and he were on a first name basis. She’s ready to be an adult.
Buffy learns a lesson too. No sooner does she tell Spike that “I never need
you” than she needs him to protect Dawn and Joyce.
I’m deliberately leaving discussion of the Knights until we learn more about
them.
Trivia notes: (1) Note yet again the parallel between the school
subject/lesson and the events of the episode: Buffy realizes that the Council
is trying to play the same power game as her professor. (2) Buffy has her
dates wrong on the Vikings. It was roughly 1000, not 1400. (3) On the TV
show Forever Knight, Rasputin actually was a vampire as Buffy implied to
the professor. That would also be implied in the AtS episode Why We Fight.
(4) Metaphor check when Xander references Primeval: “I was the heart part
of a super-Buffy.” (5) Joyce asked Spike about the character of Timothy
Lenox from the soap opera Passions. We know from several previous
episodes that Spike loves that show. (6) Bangers and mash, for the non-
Brits out there, is sausages and mashed potatoes. Blood sausage is actually
made with blood. (7) Buffy’s reference to the “Everyone Thinks We're
Insane-O's Home Journal” is presumably a play on the Ladies Home
Journal. (8) At the end of the episode, Quentin reveals that Glory isn’t a
demon, she’s a God. There was a big clue to that earlier in the episode:
“GLORY: (to Buffy) … You should get down on your knees and worship
me!”
 Blood Ties
Blood Ties sets up crucial plot and thematic points for the finale. Like the
show generally, it uses the real life experiences of teenagers via metaphor.
Thus Dawn, like many 14 year olds, perhaps particularly those who are
adopted, feels alienated from her family and “not real”. She cuts herself
because she’s come to doubt her own reality: “Am I real?”. In this case, the
“real” experiences become a metaphor for the “reality” of the plot line –
Dawn’s sense of alienation upon learning that she’s the Key. In my view,
Dawn’s role as metaphor as well as character means that her sense that she’s
“not real” is telling us something important about Buffy. I’ll leave that
cryptic for now, but this dialogue seems relevant to me:
BUFFY: It's not that simple! We're not gonna be able to fix this with a hug
and a kiss and a bowl of soup! Dawn needs to know where she came from,
she needs real answers.
JOYCE: (sits) What she needs is her sister, Buffy, not the Slayer.
In the end, Buffy assures Dawn that she is indeed real, and again it’s
metaphorical: “It’s Summers’ blood.”
The Knights were chanting “The Key is the link. The link must be severed.”
Well, we know that Dawn is the Key, so she’s the reference here, although
the Knights don’t seem to know she is. Since she’s the Key, she must
therefore be the link. The question is, what two things does she link? And
why, from the perspective of the Knights, must that link be severed? The
answers to these questions are related to Dawn’s reality and metaphorical
role.
The obvious question to ask is whether the Knights of Byzantium
themselves serve a metaphorical purpose. I’m not entirely certain, but my
best guess is that they’re simply a fairly obvious reference to the militant
Christian orders of the Middle Ages like the Knights Templar. Their
determination to “sever” the Key is, in this reading, a reference to the way
religion demands sacrifices of those things which are most precious, as well
as a reminder of the paternalism of that worldview.
In my post on The Replacement, I said that the themes of the season had
been established. Blood Ties is the first episode to reveal a part of one
theme. Prior to this episode we knew there was some connection between
Ben and Glory. We now learn that they morph into each other. This explains
Ben’s confidence in Listening to Fear, that Glory can’t harm him. But it
also brings us back to The Replacement, which, it now becomes clear, was
telling us something important about the season arc. In that episode, Xander
learned that he needed all aspects of his personality in order to “be” Xander.
We now see that Buffy’s foe for the season is someone who seems to have
separate and distinct personalities also – one’s a normal human being, the
other’s super powerful and not entirely sane. I’ll have more to say on this
topic when we get to Intervention and The Gift.
Trivia notes: (1) There’s a very subtle moment in the teaser which sets up
what will happen in the episode Tough Love. (2) Spike’s candy box was
wrecked because he used it to hit the Buffy mannequin in Triangle. (3)
Spike suggested that Dawn watch Teletubbies, which was a children’s TV
show. (4) Spike compared Dawn to Little Red Riding Hood because a big
bad wolf might get her on her way to the Magic Shop. (5) Dawn’s
flashbacks in the Magic Shop are, in order, to Listening to Fear, Real Me,
and Shadow. (6) Xander described Glory has having a “jones” for the Key.
“Jones” is a slang term meaning strong desire or craving. (7) Glory
described Ben as “gentle Ben” which was the title of a TV show and movie
about a bear. There was a previous reference to the show in Pangs. (8)
Buffy suggested looking at the carousel because that’s where Riley and
Dawn went in Shadow. Also, Buffy presumably has the false memories of
Dawn’s birthday party there which Dawn described to Riley. (9) Glory
wanted Dawn to “start singin”, which is American slang for “start talking”.
(10) Glory used the expression “fox in my henhouse”, a slang expression
which means that the wrong person has been allowed into something (foxes
obviously being bad news for chickens). (11) The Latin word Willow used
for her spell, “discede”, means “disperse” or “separate”. (12) Buffy’s
mention of Dawn having a get-out-of-jail-free card comes from the game
Monopoly.
 Crush
At some point in time between Fool For Love and Crush, Spike began to
acquire a very strong following among fans. He’d always been a popular,
but secondary, character. Now many fans became fascinated by his story
such that he became as important to them as, say, Willow and Xander were.
Some fans were beginning to ship him with Buffy (Spuffy). Writer David
Fury pissed off a lot of Spike’s fans by ridiculing the idea of Spuffy in
public and with Buffy’s line in Crush about Spike being a “serial killer in
prison”. Since Crush is so Spike-centric, it’s a good episode to examine in
order to see what it tells us about him. I’ll start by discussing his role as the
(other) vampire in love with a Slayer.
It’s an interesting dynamic. Buffy told Spike she never needed him in
Checkpoint, only to take Joyce and Dawn to his crypt because, it turned out,
she did need him to protect them from Glory. In Blood Ties we saw (1)
Spike protect Dawn; but (2) help her break into the Magic Shop; for which
(3) Buffy blamed him; only to realize that (4) it was really her fault that she
hadn’t told Dawn; and (5) she then asked Spike to help her look for Dawn.
Now, at the start of Crush, Buffy tells him to get lost again:
BUFFY: (frowns) What are you doing?
SPIKE: (frowns) Wha, what do you mean what am ... I ...
BUFFY: Here? At this table? Talking to me. Like we're some kind
of talking buddies.
SPIKE: Well, I saw you ... sitting here alone. Thought, I don't
know, you could, maybe do with a bit of, uh, you know, company.
Buffy raises her eyebrows at him. Spike frowns.
SPIKE: Suit yourself!

Given these apparent mixed signals, it’s not surprising that Spike’s
confused. He’s incapable of understanding the context, namely that when
Buffy asks for his help she’s not expressing romantic interest, she’s doing
her job. If you want to say she’s using him, I probably wouldn’t argue. But
because he’s a vampire, Buffy doesn’t see him as a suitable partner
regardless of how her behavior might appear to him (see dialogue with
Dawn quoted below).
He doesn’t help matters by his actions in Crush. While there’s no denying
the chemistry between JM and SMG, Spike’s behavior is hardly the stuff of
romance. Although Buffy doesn’t know it, Spike was treating Harmony like
crap. Well, ok, it’s just Harmony, but still. More significantly, and equally
unknown to Buffy, he also went along with Dru when she killed the 2
people in the Bronze and he fed from one victim himself. This seems to
have been part of his plan to make Dru trust him in order to get to Buffy,
but letting 2 people be killed for that purpose further emphasizes to the
viewers the difference between soul and chip. Spike can’t act on his demon
instincts, but that doesn’t mean he can understand human ones.
The stake out was an obvious sham. Letting Dru tase Buffy and then tying
Buffy up and threatening to kill her isn’t exactly a turn on.
His offer to stake Dru in return for Buffy’s agreement to “give him a
crumb” is more interesting. In S1, Angel proved himself to Buffy by staking
Darla. That differed in two important ways from what Spike did here. First,
Angel didn’t demand anything in return. Second, Angel didn’t threaten to
let Darla go free and have her way with Buffy.
If Spike isn’t doing anything in Crush to make himself attractive to Buffy
(or any sane woman), why then is Buffy so concerned that there’s
something in *her* that made her attractive to Spike? Obviously she’s
insecure because Riley just left town, as did Angel before him. But there’s
more: consider that Spike’s long-time girlfriend was Drusilla, an insane,
cold-blooded killer (both parts of which are rubbed in our faces during this
episode). Buffy’s concern must be in part based on a fear that Spike sees
similar qualities in her: maybe she herself is becoming cold and predatory.
Remember this dialogue from Buffy v. Dracula:
BUFFY: (gestures helplessly, gets up to pace) And then this whole thing
with Dracula ... it made me face up to some stuff. (Giles looks concerned)
Ever since we did that spell where we called on the first slayer ... I've been
going out a lot. (Giles looks surprised) Every night.
GILES: Patrolling?
BUFFY: Hunting. That's ... what Dracula called it. (pacing) And he was
right. He understood my power better than I do. He saw darkness in it.
I think there’s even more to this point, but that would take us into spoiler
territory so I’ll leave it for Intervention.
Buffy also has serious Angel issues. She certainly doesn’t want a repeat of
her experience with Angelus. For Buffy, the distinction between a soul and
a chip is crucial even if Dawn doesn’t think so:
BUFFY: He's a killer, Dawn. You cannot have a crush on something that is
... dead, and, and evil, and a vampire.
DAWN: Right, that's why you were never with Angel for three years.
BUFFY: (quietly) Angel's different. He has a soul.
DAWN: Spike has a chip. Same diff.
Buffy has to believe in the difference. It would be impossible for her to go
out every night and slay vampires if they weren’t inherently evil (see my
long discussion of this point in my post on Amends). Worse yet, it would
raise the question why Spike could choose to love her but Angelus couldn’t.
I doubt she wants to face that possibility; that’s why she crushes Spike’s
hopes at the end.
Enough of romance for now. Let’s talk about Spike more generally. I don’t
want to leave the impression that only shippers were involved in the
controversies about Spike. That may seem like I’m implicitly limiting
Spike’s fan base to them or even dismissing them, when I’m not. For many
of Spike’s fans, what was important was not that Spike was succeeding with
Buffy, but that he was trying.
If you see Spike as Alex from A Clockwork Orange, then at this point it’s
an open question which way the show will go. It could be the chip will
enable his redemption, that he’ll gradually learn human behavior from his
inability to give reign to his demon instincts. That, remember, was the idea
behind the operant conditioning Alex received in the novel. Alternatively, it
could be that the “soul canon” remains in effect, meaning that Spike can’t
be redeemed without one, as Buffy suggests in her rebuke of Dawn.
The arguments about Spike’s path generated enormous controversy on the
Buffy discussion boards. In fact, it’s not possible to overstate just how much
controversy there was. I’ll give some very early, and relatively tame,
contemporary examples across the spectrum of this debate:
“Maybe I'm a hopeless romantic but I'd like to believe that if he wants he
can change. It doesn't have to be easy. … I always thought that Spike has
the intelligence and imagination to be able to control his own actions. i.e.:
Cogito ergo sum. I think I am good therefore I am good.”
“As much as I love the character I personally love him for his role as a
villain and an Id without inhibition. … To me the chip does not equate with
a soul a la Angel and I don't believe that the gang is at all being too hard on
Spike.
… Spike wants Buffy in my opinion because of his unlife-long obsession
with Slayers and his doing her favors like watching Dawn and her mother
or battling at her side are driven by the motivation to attain her love not by
the motivation to do good. What alternative does he have? With that chip in
his head he can't be the predator he was and he doesn't have the core group
he once had with Darla Dru and Angelus. I believe that the Buffy lust stems
from him needing something once again to save him from another
mediocrity: life without evil. … What's changed is that he can't do the
killing he'd normally be performing.”
“Spike is more than just an enemy. He is a brutal, mass murderer. Instead of
visualizing Spike or some other vampire prostrating himself before you and
confessing his love, visualize Jeffrey Dahmer confessing his love to you.
Now ask yourself how you would feel about Jeffrey Dahmer. Would the
idea that he loves you entice or repel you? Would it make your feel good
about
yourself that a cannibalistic murderer finds you attractive?

To me, the question is not "Why isn't Buffy nicer to Spike?", it's "Why
didn't Buffy stake Spike a long time ago?"
To get a sense of David Fury’s view, and to have some fun with multiple
levels of irony (some of which I’ll have to explain later), let’s return to the
dialogue between Willow and Tara discussing the plot of The Hunchback of
Notre Dame:
WILLOW VOICEOVER: I just don't see why he couldn't end up with
Esmerelda.
WILLOW: They could have the wedding right there. Beneath the very bell-
tower where he labored thanklessly for all those years.
“TARA: No, see, it can't, it can't end like that, 'cause all of Quasimodo's
actions were selfishly motivated. He had no moral compass, no
understanding of right. Everything he did, he did out of love for a woman
who would never be able to love him back. Also, you can tell it's not gonna
have a happy ending when the main guy's all bumpy.”

The problem is, Tara’s description is totally wrong. Fury later admitted that
he completely screwed up the message of the book in that dialogue. He
wanted to make a point about Spike and his unsuitability for Buffy in order
to set the tone for the episode, but the actual message of the story of
Quasimodo is that his love redeems him. As Harmony would say, Oops.
There will be more fuel to this fire very soon. The Great Internet Spike
Wars were just beginning.
Trivia notes: (1) When Xander called Spike “Evil Dead”, that refers to the
movie and comic book series of that name. (2) Buffy’s general cluelessness
during the conversation about Quasimodo prefigures her shock when Dawn
tells her that Spike has a crush on her. (3) Charles Laughton starred in the
1939 movie version of Hunchback. (4) Buffy’s mention of the singing
gargoyles refers to the 1996 movie. (5) Joyce ended up with two shipments
of Greek amphorae, which were large storage containers used by the Greeks
for olive oil and wine. (6) While waiting in the car with Buffy, Spike began
to sing “I want to be sedated” by the Ramones. (7) Spike’s conversation
with Dru summarizing her recent activities refers to 3 AtS episodes: To
Shanshu in LA, The Trial, and Redefinition. (8) Harmony’s description of
Dru as “Queen of the Damned” refers to the Anne Rice novel of that title
and the movie made from it. (9) Harmony also referred to Dru as Morticia,
from the 1960s TV show The Addams Family. (10) Buffy’s description of
beating Spike up as “like third base” is American sexual slang. (11) Joyce’s
recommendation to Buffy to “nip this in the bud” is an American idiom
meaning “stop it before it gets too far”. (12) When Dru accuses Spike of
taking her chair before the music stopped, she’s referring to the children’s
game Musical Chairs. (13) He may have screwed up with Hunchback, but
Fury does get one of the best of the show’s many Shakespeare references:
“We can love quite well. If not wisely.” (Othello, Act V, sc. 2.) (14) During
the fight in Spike’s basement, Dru grabbed Buffy’s face and looked into her
eyes, apparently intending to hypnotize her like she did Kendra in
Becoming 2.
 I Was Made To Love You
Pygmalion, or I Was Made To Love You:
This has never been one of my favorite episodes, mostly because I’ve
always found the metaphor somewhat confusing. While listening to her
friends talk in the Magic Shop, Buffy seems to identify herself with Warren:
“ANYA: Why would anyone do that [make a robot] if they could have a
real live person? WILLOW: Maybe he couldn't. Find a real person. BUFFY:
Oh, come on. The guy's just a big wedge of sleaze, don't make excuses for
him. WILLOW: I'm not, I'm just saying, people get lonely, and maybe
having someone around, even someone you made up ... maybe it's easier.
(Shot of Buffy looking pensive.) TARA: But it's so weird. I mean, everyone
wants a nice normal person to share with, but this guy, if he couldn't find
that, I guess it's ... kinda sad. (Shot of Buffy staring at her hands.)”
Writer Jane Espenson confirms this when she says “When Buffy’s talking
with Warren about his break-up with April, she’s actually identifying with
him, because she did a lot of the same stuff with Riley that he did with
April.” I think that’s a really weird interpretation of both the Buffy/Riley
relationship and the Buffy/Warren conversation, so let’s look more closely
at what Buffy says in her conversations with Warren and April.
When Buffy’s talking to Warren in the house, I interpret her words to mean
that she sees herself as April and Warren as Riley:
WARREN: Okay, I didn't really dump her, as much as I, uh, went out, and,
uh, didn't come back. (Buffy stares) I left her, I ... left her in my dorm room.
BUFFY: (angry) You left her in your dorm room?!
WARREN: Well, I figured I could just kinda get away until her batteries
gave out. Which should have been days ago.
BUFFY: Did you even tell her? I mean, did you even give her a chance to
fix what was wrong?
JE apparently believes Buffy was the one who failed to give Riley a chance
to fix things, but that’s a pretty odd reading of the events leading up to Into
the Woods. The salient feature of Warren’s behavior, which Buffy expressly
calls him on, was that he left April in his room and skipped town. As I read
it, Warren maps to Riley because both left town without giving their
respective girlfriends a chance to fix the problems. Buffy maps to April
because neither one was told there was a problem that needed to be fixed
(or was told only at the last minute in Buffy’s case).
Now we get to Buffy and April:
APRIL: I rechecked everything. I did everything I was supposed to do. I
was a good girlfriend.
BUFFY: I'm sure you were.
APRIL: I'm only supposed to love him. If I can't do that, what am I for?
What do I exist for?
BUFFY: I don't know. (shakes head) It isn't fair. He wasn't fair to you.
Buffy correctly tells April it was Warren’s fault that he left her. Buffy can’t
be identifying with Warren because he was the one who left town and Buffy
didn’t do that. Besides, Warren was kind of a sad human being and perhaps
a sleaze, which Buffy most definitely is not, so I can’t see how we’re
supposed to compare her to him. In addition, in Blood Ties Buffy was
blaming herself for Riley’s departure; to keep the equivalence she’d have to
blame April for Warren’s departure. That would make no sense, and she’s
doing the opposite of that in the dialogue above.

Buffy also seems to identify with April in the episode generally. She first
decides she needs to be a better girlfriend. Then she sees the result of that
with April and realizes that’s the wrong route; hence she cancels her date
with Ben.
Given the discrepancy between JE’s comments and what I consider the
natural reading of this episode in light of Into the Woods, the whole
metaphor seems clumsy to me. Anyway, since I get confused on the
metaphor, I’m not wild about the episode overall.
In comments, aaron and State of Siege convinced me that there’s a more
charitable reading. I’ll give their take, slightly edited:
Aaron: “I think whether Buffy identifies with Warren or April (or Katrina,
even) is less important than that she's sort of trying to identify with all of
them (or at least parts of all of them). She's still not over Riley and she still
doesn't quite get what her relationship future will be like. She's questioning
a lot of things about herself, about men, about her romantic outlook, etc.
In a normal life (and especially a normal TV life), one would hope that
Buffy would use this time to figure things out about herself, to grow a bit.
But hers is not a normal life, and with the interruption that is to come, she
has to put those questions on hold.

In that sense, I think the episode is kind of fascinating. It's as if the writers
(intentionally or not) set up a typical TV situation (young woman gets her
head on straight, re: boys), and then structurally interrupt that situation with
the many tragedies to follow….
State of Siege: IWMtLY exemplifies one of the things I like best about the
BtVS as a whole: it is willing to show its heroine confused without adding
that additional layer, so common in most television, that tells us what she
should—and thus eventually will—be feeling and how we should interpret,
indeed judge, her. I have always found that layer condescending to both
character and reader, and its absence has been one of the signs of respect
Joss accords his characters and viewers.
Aaron: This, right here, is what I was getting at and you put it so well. I
think that lack of telegraphing is part of what makes the episode confusing
at first. And what I really love (as I guess I've already mentioned) is, not
only do they not tell us how we should feel about Buffy, but with the
coming episodes, they cut off her path to understanding in a way that delays
her understanding and our ability to decide how to feel about it for many
many episodes to come.”
However you see the Buffy/Riley/Warren/April comparisons, there’s the
whole issue of whether we’re supposed to see Spike’s obsession with Buffy
as in some way comparable to April’s obsession with Warren. There seems
to be a comparison. Giles and the SG rather forcefully, one might even say
cruelly, reject Spike’s attempt to get to Buffy through them. The scene then
cuts immediately to the boys at the café cruelly deceiving April about
Warren. I can’t tell if we’re supposed to see a comparison there.
Perhaps we’re supposed to compare Spike’s obsession with Buffy to
Warren’s not-so-healthy attitude towards women. I’m not sure about this
either, but if we assume it’s true then it raises some issues. Was it morally
wrong for Warren to have built April? Perhaps we shouldn’t care since she
wasn’t technically sentient and he doesn’t seem to have infringed on any
person in building her. He also said that he expected to love her, so his
intentions at least weren’t evil. Then again, he designed her to be
submissive to him, and that’s not so healthy. Spike’s robot order is different,
since he’s using things he stole from Buffy and the robot will presumably
be similar to her. That’s more invasive, even if no person is actually
harmed.
Other aspects of the Buffy/Spike situation are also interesting. Following up
on my post on Crush, where I suggested that Buffy was concerned that
something about her made her attractive to Spike, she expressly states this
in the teaser:
BUFFY: (punches) Spike! (more punches) Spike wants me, how obscene is
that?
GILES: Well, it is very strange. I can't imagine what he's thinking. (stands)
Uh, not, not that you're not, uh, attractive...
BUFFY: (stops punching) I feel gross, you know, like, like, dirty.
She resumes punching.
GILES: That's ridiculous, you can't be responsible for what Spike thinks or,
feels.
BUFFY: (stops punching) Well, aren't I responsible? I mean, something
about me had to make him feel that, right? Something that made him say,
"woof, that's the one for me!" …
BUFFY: That's my secret to attracting men. You know, it's simple really,
you slap 'em around a bit, you torture 'em, you make their lives a living
hell-
XANDER: Buff...
BUFFY: ...and sure, the nice guys, they'll run away, but every now and then
you'll meet a real prince of a guy like Spike who gets off on it.
OTOH, did you notice the look on Buffy’s face when Spike went up to
April at the party? He clearly did it to make her jealous, and Buffy’s face
suggested there might be something to that, her words notwithstanding. As I
said in my last post, the dynamic here is fascinating.
Since I was very critical of Xander’s behavior in Into the Woods, I should
make a point of his reaction to Buffy’s concern about Spike’s attraction to
her:
BUFFY: It's just ... I just wanna know that there's gonna be another good
one. One that I won't chase away.
XANDER: There will be. Promise. He's out there, he could come along any
minute.
BUFFY: Yeah, and the minute after that I can terrify him with my alarming
strength and remarkable self-involvement.
XANDER: What? I don't think you're like that.
BUFFY: Maybe I could change. You know, I could, I could work harder. I
could spend less time slaying, I could laugh at his jokes, I mean, men like
that, right, the, the joke-laughing-at?
XANDER: Or maybe you could just be Buffy, he'll see your amazing heart,
and he'll fall in love with you.
Getting back to Warren, I said that he was kind of a sleaze, but he’s not
completely without sympathy. Building a sexbot isn’t high on the list of
noble efforts, but he’s kind of sad in being so lonely that he felt he had to do
that, as Tara suggested in the quote above. Here’s how Adam Busch
(Warren) described his character: “I don’t see Warren as a villain. I don’t
see him as a typically evil person, that’s what’s so great about him. I think
he’s a human being. He has flaws and he has positives and he’s always
given the chance for redemption and he’s always given that moment where
he can do the right thing that he never ever does because he is flawed and
he does have a lot of issues and an inability to communicate or talk to
anyone or really explain what it is that he wants.”
While it sometimes gets neglected or forgotten because of what happens at
the end, it turns out that the events of IWMTLY will have a significant
impact on the rest of Season 5 and are seminal for all of Season 6. It’s
important to keep them in mind.
Oh, and April’s words immediately before she shuts down are not random
or accidental.
Trivia note: (1) Before this episode aired, rumors were swirling that the
network wanted Britney Spears to play the role of April. Just think what we
all missed. (2) The Anya/Tara scene is one of just two in the entire series
(the other was when they went into Giles’s bathroom during the fight in The
Yoko Factor). (3) You can tell this episode aired in the early days of the
internet by Tara’s comment that “everyone’s spelling is really bad”. (3)
Spike’s “if looks could stake” plays off the expression “if looks could kill”.
(4) Warren Beatty is a well-known American actor from the ‘60s and ‘70s.
(5) Warren Harding was elected President in 1920. (6) Willow mentions
“code red”, which is typical shorthand for a fire (at least in CA hospitals).
(7) “Code Pink” is an anti-war women’s group. (8) Buffy’s description of
Joyce’s date as “Prince Charming” refers to a stock character from fairy
tales. (9) As is fairly well-known, Amber Benson (Tara) and Adam Busch
(Warren) were a couple for a number of years.
 The Body
There’s a lot of television I’ve never seen, so I can’t say The Body is the
very best episode of any show ever. I can’t even say that it’s the very best
episode of Buffy, because it has close competition (IMO) from Passion and
OMWF. It’s a real tribute to the show, in fact, that an episode as incredibly
good as The Body can have competition for “best” and that still others are
nearly as good. What I can say is that The Body has to be on a very short list
among the greatest television episodes of all time.
It’s also among the hardest to re-watch – viscerally painful and raw. No
matter how often I see it, I find myself tearing up during at least 4 scenes
(“Mom. Mommy?”; “We’re not supposed to move the body.”; Dawn’s
meltdown; Anya’s monologue). The complete absence of background music
heightens the effect. So does the absence of metaphor. In a show devoted to
metaphor, the very lack of it here emphasizes the realism and makes the
events that much harsher. From Joss’s commentary:
“And so what appears to many people as a formal exercise, no music,
scenes that take up almost the entire act, without end, is all done for a very
specific purpose, which is to put you in the moment, that moment of
dumbfoundedness, that airlessness of losing somebody.”
The Body is so powerful and so well done that there isn’t much to offer by
way of commentary. I’ll just make a couple of points.
I’ve said many times before that I believe the school lessons always relate
to the episode in some way. The art lesson was to draw “negative space”:
TEACHER: Okay. Remember, we're not ... drawing the object.
TEACHER: We're drawing ... the negative space ... around the object.
I think Joss uses Joyce’s body as the object and draws the negative space
around it throughout the episode. He notes in his commentary that every act
begins with Joyce’s body as the focus of the camera. We then see the way
the events surrounding it serve to define it. The scene in which Dawn
breaks down is a smaller example of drawing negative space within a single
scene.
Groovypants made a great point in comments: “The one thing that really hit
me that I never noticed before is that the first thing Anya says to Buffy is "I
*wish* that Joyce hadn't died." It's like, for a thousand years, wishes had
made things happen for Anya and now that she doesn't have that anymore,
she has no way to actually deal with anything serious, but she says the wish
anyway because it’s the literally only thing she knows.”
Also in comments, deidre asked whether I thought the vampire in the
morgue was distracting. Here’s my response:
“I remember thinking on first watch that it was kind of distracting. Joss
explains it in his commentary like this:

"But the idea of the vampire is that it is an intrusion, it does belong here the
way Tara finds herself the only one sitting with Buffy and not feeling like
she belonged. But she actually she had something to offer. But life goes on,
and on BtVS, that means horrible things happen.

And this fight was done differently than any other fight I've done before. I
made it as much of a gross wrestling match as I could, you know, hands in
the face, and of course, pulling the sheet off of Joyce, in the worst way
possible. But rather than a great cool kickboxy fight I made this like a
genuine struggle. I wanted to stress the reality of it."

I get what he's saying, even though the scene did pull me out of the
moment, so to speak, at first. Now I accept it as part of the episode. It's kind
of like sitting down to deal with the bills after your mother dies -- a
grinding reminder that life doesn't stand still.”
I should add that my metaphorical reading of the series, Buffy slays
vampires in the course of growing up. Dealing with her mother's death is, of
course, a major step in forcing her to adopt an adult role.
The very last scene – Dawn with her finger poised like that of God in the
Sistine Chapel – had some fans speculating that her “keyness” would enable
her to bring Joyce back to life. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that this is
not the case. Here’s Joss’s comment:
“The fact of death being physically real and physically unreal is expressed
here in the last shot after Dawn says those words, words that cannot be
answered by anybody, and reaches out to touch her mother in a show that's
all about physicality. This girl needs to know, to understand. But never
touches her. And that was done very specifically. And some people were
like "oh that means next week Dawn's going to heal her with her key
powers!" and I was like what show were you watching? It meant - we want
to touch it, but it isn't there. And to go out just before she touches it was just
to express that, to express what I've been talking about the whole way.
There is no resolution there is no ending, there is no lesson, there's just
death.”
Trivia notes: (1) Joss had Joyce’s death planned far in advance. He told
Kristine Sutherland before S4 began that he would kill her character in S5.
(2) Joyce died of an aneurysm. Compare this line from the opening episode
of S4, The Freshman, which Joss wrote: “Buffy: Can't wait till mom gets
the bill for these books, I hope it's a funny aneurysm.” (3) Joss will work
again with the “negative space” theme in the Firefly episode Objects in
Space. (4) This episode is the first time we’re shown Willow and Tara
kissing. Joss fought a long battle with the censors over this issue, and even
threatened to quit if they cut this scene. (5) The sentence “strong like an
Amazon” comes from the song “Amazons” by Phranc. Joss liked the song.
(6) Xander mentioned Glory’s threat to come after Buffy’s friends and
family, which Glory made in Checkpoint. (7) Joss’s fascination with the
Avengers appears again in Xander’s line “the Avengers gotta get with the
assembling”. (8) Myles McNutt had a terrific review of the episode which
you can read at [Link]
project-the-body-buffy-the-vampire-slayer/ (9) If you’re interested in
technical stuff, this description by Joss of the scene when Buffy tries to
resuscitate her mother may interest you:
“Now this shot this is one long take and it bears watching exactly how long
it is especially because Alan Houston the camera man had his camera on his
shoulder the whole time and was running around. It wasn't a steady cam. He
had no harness because I wanted the urgency of handheld. So he kept
recreating frames, recreating frames. This is a very difficult thing to do,
kneeling down, getting up. It was an extraordinary piece of camera work,
and of course, an extraordinary piece of acting from Sarah, where I made
her do this about seven times. To go from the extremity of first finding her,
the helplessness of not knowing what to do, all of the things that Sarah had
to go through in this, she had to go through many many times. And you
know, every take was extraordinary.”
 Forever
Forever provides an opportunity for Buffy to grieve, while giving us a
major clue to Dawn’s role this season. It also raises some disturbing issues
about other characters which will be explored at more length later on.
Regardless of what you think of Spike’s behavior before this episode, he got
something right in Forever: bringing Joyce flowers without a card. Before
this, everything he did was designed to bring attention to himself as a
method of getting Buffy’s respect: “Look at me, I’m doing what humans
think is good” (e.g., not feeding off of bleeding disaster victims). The lack
of a card shows that he actually did understand Joyce in some way.
At least since Becoming, Joyce had treated Spike as if he were just one of
Buffy’s friends. She listened to him after Dru left him. She made him cocoa.
She told him jokes about amphorae. She acted, in a way, like his mother
might have. It’s odd to think that a vampire could recognize this, but
perhaps Spike’s chip has prevented him from acting on his instincts and left
open the possibility for another kind of reaction.
OTOH, helping Dawn with the resurrection spell may reflect his liking for
Joyce, but ranks pretty low on the good judgment scale. The easy way to
see why it’s bad judgment is to quote the reasons Dawn gives for wanting to
do it: she hurts; “I don't have anybody.” These are selfish reasons, they’re
what Dawn wants without reference to Joyce or anyone else.
Dawn’s attempt may have been selfish, but it was understandable to an
extent. She’s young and innocent; she didn’t seem to realize what she was
getting into with Doc. As she says, consistent with her metaphorical role
this season, she also feels like Buffy’s ignoring her:
DAWN: I don't have anybody.
BUFFY: What?! Of course you do. You have me!
DAWN: No, I don't. You won't even look at me. It's so obvious you don't
want me around.
BUFFY: That's not true.
DAWN: (harshly) Yes it is. Mom ... died, and it's like you don't even care.
Buffy’s breakdown at the end, which proves to Dawn that she desperately
needs her mother, just as Dawn does, and that she needs Dawn as well,
takes place in the very room where Buffy found her mother’s body in the
opening to The Body. This is no accident: when Buffy hears the knock on
the door, she says the words “Mommy? Mom?”, the exact reverse order of
her words in The Body (reverse because now Joyce is coming back).
Spike had good (well, you get my meaning) company in his poor decision
to help Dawn. Willow’s action in drawing Dawn’s attention to the book
(and lying about it to Tara) raises a good many issues about both her
judgment and her character. William B in comments: “I'd argue that if
Willow really strongly believed that Dawn's Right To Know overwhelmed
Tara's concerns, she should just give Dawn the book openly rather than hide
it from Tara. The fact that she hides it from Tara shows that she either 1)
partially knows that Tara might be correct but is trying to dismiss it, and so
knows she can't handle an argument with Tara about it; or 2) doesn't trust
Tara to be convinced by Willow's arguments even if Willow is correct. I
think that it's a combination of the two; I think 1 is closer to the objective
truth (which is that Tara has a very good point) and 2 is closer to how
Willow rationalizes it, but even if Willow were entirely right and Tara
entirely wrong, Tara has a right to be included as Dawn's co-guardian for
the night.”
We know Willow doesn’t like to see people in pain – and this was pretty
much the same reason Spike gave for helping – but using magic to make it
go away didn’t work very well for Willow in Something Blue and was
nearly a disaster here. This seems to be a case when a real strength – not
wanting to see others suffer – can lead to very dubious responses.
Willow has always wanted to help. As early as The Harvest she “needed”
to: “Buffy, I'm not anxious to go into a dark place full of monsters. But I do
want to help. I need to.” Back then she helped by using her computer skills.
Now she relies more and more on magic. It may seem like the two are
similar, in that both involve arcane knowledge which Willow has worked
hard to acquire, but beyond that they aren’t all that similar. Computers
behave in predictable ways because science, by definition, operates within
the laws of nature and therefore can’t change the fundamental character of
the world. Putting aside the fact that Willow doesn’t treat magic like science
(e.g., she doesn’t experiment on small things first), magic isn’t limited like
that. It has the potential, if one is powerful enough, to change the natural
order of things. Tara tries to deny this, but Dawn isn’t fooled:
TARA: (steps forward) Of course you wanna bring your mother back, and
... I wish we could, but it's not possible.
DAWN: Why? You guys do magic for all kinds of things.
WILLOW: We do, but...
TARA: This is different. Magic can't be used to alter the natural order of
things.
DAWN: But all you do is mess with the natural order of things. You, you
make things float, a-and disappear, and-
TARA: But we don't mess with life and death….
WILLOW: I'm not even sure it's possible, Dawn. I mean, I've ... seen things
on resurrection, but ... there's books and stuff ... but I guess ... the spells ...
backfire?
TARA: That's not the point.
WILLOW: That's not the point. The, the point is it's bad ... because ...
TARA: Because witches can't be allowed to alter the fabric of life for
selfish reasons. Wiccans took an oath a long time ago to honor that.
DAWN: So it's possible ... to bring someone back? They wouldn't have
taken an oath if they didn't know they could do it.
TARA: Maybe they could, but we can't.
WILLOW: She's right, Dawn. It's too dangerous.
Tara’s “can’t” really means “shouldn’t” when Dawn presses them. The
more accurate reason is that every use of magic has to be balanced against
the potential for drastic and unforeseen consequences.
This brings us back to an important distinction which arises out of the basic
philosophical view of the world we’ve seen within the show. To get at this,
we need to consider what it is that’s wrong about resurrecting the dead on a
show which, after all, uses magic for many reasons. I think it relates back to
the distinction I noted in S3 between revolution and rebellion (posts on
Gingerbread and GD2). Revolution is wrong because it attempts to remake
the fundamental nature of the world. Failure to respect the limits of the
world leads to tyranny and cruelty.
Death is inherent in the human condition. Resurrection is therefore a
revolutionary act – that is, bad in Joss’s view and in the view of Albert
Camus – because it tries to overcome this inherent fact of the human
condition. I’ll have more to say about this in S6.
Then there’s the emotional cost. Imagine how either Dawn or Buffy would
have reacted had Joyce come back “wrong” (to use Tara’s word). That
would have been devastating to the way they want to remember her. Worse
yet, Buffy might have had to destroy the thing which now walked the earth
wearing her mother’s face. That’s a whole new level of trauma. There’s
another reason, related to this one, but it involves spoilers so I’ll discuss it
later.
Some additional points:
A good measure of Buffy’s sense of guilt and lack of confidence in being a
grown up can be seen in this part of her talk with Angel:
BUFFY: (shakes her head) I don't know. I keep thinking about it ... when I
found her. If I had just gotten there ten minutes earlier...
ANGEL: You said they told you it wouldn't have made a difference.
BUFFY: They said ... "probably" ... wouldn't have made a difference. The
exact thing they said ... was "probably." I haven't told that to anyone.
In fact, neither the paramedics nor Dr. Krieger used the word “probably”
when they told her that there was nothing she could have done.
The episode title seems to apply in some way to Angel as well as to the fact
of death. Buffy says she wants Angel to stay “forever”, but they both are
reminded by her kiss that the curse is “forever” too.
Dawn reinforced the message of Blood Ties by behaving much like Buffy.
She was brave, impulsive, and ultimately did the right thing. Spike even
comments that she’s “Bitty Buffy”.
The brief shot of Giles listening to “Tales of Brave Ulysses” hearkens back
to Band Candy. That was the song he and Joyce listened to in his apartment.
Note the last line we hear from the song: For the sparkling waves are
calling you to kiss their white-laced lips...
Doc humming “Peter and the Wolf”, though, has a very different
implication.
Trivia notes: (1) The episode bears a loose relationship to the short story
“The Monkey’s Paw”. (2) Buffy previously mentioned that her father was in
Spain in Family. (3) The funeral service we hear for Joyce is from the
Anglican service. (4) There’s an extremely subtle clue in this episode which
helps explain something which happens in the finale. (5) Ben previously hit
Jinx in Checkpoint. (6) Dawn invoked Osiris in her spell. He was the
Egyptian god of the afterlife. (7) Those of you who watched on DVD don’t
realize how lucky you are. In the original run, seven weeks separated The
Body and Forever.
 Intervention
He who does battle with monsters needs to watch out lest he in the process
becomes a monster himself.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
For all that there’s a good deal of humor in Intervention, it’s got a very
serious point to it. This episode lays out in express terms Buffy’s feeling of
separation between her human half and her Slayer half, a feeling which we
saw prefigured in The Replacement, and which has been reinforced since by
the recognition that Glory and Ben actualize the “separate parts in a single
body” which Buffy feels. Buffy’s concern now is that the Slayer side is
winning, that she’s becoming “hard”:
“BUFFY: … I'm just ... starting to feel ... uneasy about stuff.
GILES: Stuff?
BUFFY: Training. Slaying. All of it. It's just ... I mean ... I can beat up the
demons until the cows come home. And then I can beat up the cows ... but
I'm not sure I like what it's doing to me.
GILES: But you've mastered so much. I mean, your strength and resilience
alone-
BUFFY: Yeah. Strength, resilience ... those are all words for hardness.
(pause) I'm starting to feel like ... being the Slayer is turning me into
stone….
BUFFY: I don't know. To slay, to kill ... i-it means being hard on the inside.
Maybe being the perfect Slayer means being too hard to love at all.”
The parallel to Glory becomes obvious with her first words after the teaser:
“GLORY: (annoyed) He's getting stronger. I'm losing him, I'm losing
control of him.”
In short, Buffy has recognized that, like Ethan Edwards in The Searchers,
she risks becoming what she hates. In the words of the Spirit Guide, she’s
“afraid that being the Slayer means losing [her] humanity.” We’ve come full
circle back to her conversation with Giles in Buffy v. Dracula. To put this in
terms of the metaphor of slaying as growing up, I’d say that Buffy feels that
the steps she has needed to take to become an adult make her hard, cold,
and unfeeling.
Her concern had to be reinforced by the failure of her friends to recognize
that Spike’s sex toy wasn’t actually her. Contrast this to the immediate
reaction they had to April in IWMTLY:
BUFFY: So, what do you guys think she is? I mean, this may sound nuts,
but I kinda got the impression that she was a-
TARA: Robot.
Everyone nods in complete agreement.
The Spirit Guide reassures Buffy that she still has the capacity to love and
tells her that it’s that love which will lead her to her gift. There’s some
doubt that Buffy believes this – even when she returns from the desert she
learns that it’s gotten so bad that her friends can’t tell her apart from a robot.
And the Delphic nature of the Spirit Guide’s advice still leaves a last
challenge for Buffy to solve her dilemma in the finale.
While I personally have a very Buffy-centric view of the show, I can’t
ignore the debates about Spike which were a constant on the internet by this
point. Before this episode, Spike’s attempts to ingratiate himself with Buffy
were mostly pathetic. You could feel for him, but only because he had no
chance. Viewers who were skeptical of Spike regularly accused him of
selfishness in his “good deeds” because those came across as fairly
transparent attempts to attract Buffy’s attention rather than as internally
motivated. I find it very hard to argue for any such motivation in
Intervention. If he did hold out from Glory’s torture in an attempt to
impress Buffy, he did so at the risk of his own (un)life. That would pretty
much defeat the purpose of impressing the girl.
Still, there were those who did make that argument. Here’s part of a debate
I had with another AtPO poster, Random, in 2004:
Random: “Buffy notes: "What you did, for me, and Dawn ... that was real."
Unfortunately, she obviously wasn't paying close enough attention...he
never said he did it for Dawn. He didn't. Nor did he do it for the sake of the
world at large. There's not really that much confusion here. He was quite
clear on his motivations, and they were based on love...but a selfish love
nonetheless. It was a dramatic scene, but not essentially different from him
risking his unlife battling the forces of darkness by her side or impulsively
charging a Hellgod and getting bitchslapped for his troubles. Eros is not just
the basic act of sex, after all. Certainly it most often manifests as sexual
drive …. But it essentially describes desire [my note: this is a very
Nietzschean way of looking at eros] . …. Spike had a clear understanding of
exactly what would happen to the object of his eros if he gave up Dawn. He
almost certainly knew what would happen to him two seconds after he gave
Glory what she wanted. So he acted accordingly and worked to escape. The
episode made obvious that the whole "loosened chains/kicked by a Hellgod
and sent flying" thing wasn't entirely unplanned. I tend to look at the events
of Intervention as a variant of those of Becoming -- Spike being love's bitch
and acting accordingly. Certainly, there is a little more overt nobility and
less overt pragmatic self-interest in the former, but the basic impulse is the
same.”
Sophist: “I think you need to account for this dialogue from the previous
episode (Forever):

Dawn: You don't have to be all nice to me. I know why you're doing this.
Spike: Do you now? Enlighten me.
Dawn: (frowns, stops walking) Spike, I'm not stupid. You're, like, stalking
my sister. (Spike stops, turns to look at her) You'd do anything to get in good
with her.
Spike: (takes a few steps closer; firmly) Buffy never hears about this, okay?
(looks around) Found out what I was doing, she'd drive a redwood through
my chest.
Dawn: Then, if you don't want credit, why are you helping me?
Spike: (looking at the ground, quietly) I just don't like to see Summers
women take it so hard on the chin, is all. (looks up, speaks angrily) And I'm
dead serious. You breathe a word of this to Buffy, I'll see to it that *you*
end up in the ground. Got it?
Dawn: Yeah. Got it.

I think Spike's behavior with Glory is more complex than your post makes
it out. Sure he knew Glory probably would kill him once he told. But at the
same time, she eventually would kill him if he did NOT tell her. His best
option, then, was to cooperate with her from the beginning and try to
ingratiate himself with Glory like he did with Adam. But he didn't.”
As for what Spike’s behavior said about him as a moral agent, I’ll let Finn
MacCool and manwitch set out the grounds of debate:
Manwitch: “In Intervention it’s an act of will on Spike's part for basically
altruistic reasons. And when he does it, he has no reason to believe anyone
will ever know what he did.

… I think good behavior and its consequences can come from all kinds of
motivation and still be good. Just like evil can still be derived from good
intentions and just and honest motivations.”

Finn: “I wouldn't call what Spike did in "Intervention" altruistic. Yes, he

never expected to get anywhere with Buffy by not telling Glory about
Dawn. However, part of loving someone is a desire for their happiness, and
Spike knew that giving Glory the info would lead to Buffy being immensely
unhappy or even dead. Now, if Dawn weren't the Key, if some random
stranger on the street that Spike happened to know about were the Key, then
Spike would be altruistic for keeping hush hush. I guess I just don't see
looking out for the welfare of someone you love but no one else's doesn't
strike me as altruistic.

P.S. Yes, good deeds done for selfish reasons are still good deeds, but that
doesn't necessarily make the person who does them a good person.”
Manwitch: “Well this is that whole Kantian/Cartesian idea that the action is
separate from the actor. You have the deed and you have the doer. Does the
quality of the deed determine the quality of the doer? or does the quality of
the doer determine the quality of the deed? or is there no relationship
between the qualities of deed and doer?

Nietzsche says there is only the deed. I lean that way myself. What does it
mean to have a "good" person, independent of their action?

altruism Regard for others as a principle of action; unselfishness

I suggest that Spike showed regard for others, as in other than himself, in
giving his comfort, health and life for Buffy, especially given that
supposedly as a soulless fiend, he had no reason for making such a
sacrifice. Spike's love, at that moment, was a sacrifice of self, as love
should be. That's why it’s a turning point for Buffy. It’s no longer the
obsessive stalking predatory love that Spike typically displays. It is, as she
says, "real." Spike was ready to die, with no one knowing why, no one
knowing that he had done what he did, simply for care of someone else.
That seems altruistic to me. I think we're just emphasizing different aspects
of the word.”
As you can tell from my quoted passage above, I’m with Buffy -- what
Spike did in Intervention, that was real.
Trivia notes: (1) For an explanation of the hokey-pokey, see the link. (2)
The language Giles spoke during the ritual was Swahili. (3) Buffy’s
greeting to the mountain lion – “Hello kitty” – refers to the Japanese Sanrio
character. (4) Buffy recognized the desert landscape because it’s the same as
that in Buffy’s dream in Restless. (5) When Dawn took Anya’s earrings, a
really obsessive viewer (ahem) might remember this scene from Becoming
1: “Buffy: (worried) You're not from Bullock's, are you? 'Cause I-I meant
to pay for that lipstick.” Dawn’s seemingly trivial action sets up a plot point
for S6. (6) Xander asked RobotBuffy about her “Vision Quest”, referring to
the 1985 movie of that name. (7) It’s understandable that Willow would get
upset about the Salem Witch Trials. (8) Willow’s “less Satanic than thou”
description of the Salem judges plays off the phrase “holier than thou”. (9)
The First Slayer told Buffy “Death is your gift.” Compare this to Spike’s
statement in Fool For Love: “Death is your art.” (10) Spike’s claim to be as
“impure as the driven yellow snow” plays off the phrase “pure as the driven
snow”. The latter means something very pure; snow is only yellow when
someone pees on it. (11) Glory questions whether Spike is “precious”,
perhaps a reference to Gollum in Lord of the Rings. Remember that Joyce
referred to Dawn – the actual key – as “precious” in Listening to Fear, and
that Quentin told Buffy to protect the dummy “as if it were precious” in
Checkpoint. (12) Willow’s and Xander’s discussion of the previous
“intervention” with Buffy refers to the S3 episode Revelations. (13) Anya
refers to Buffy as being in “denial. That usually comes before anger.” The
reference is Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and the Stages of Grief. (14) Buffy
killed the “key-sniffing snake” in Shadow. I believe the mention of this fact
in Intervention is related to the subtle clue I mentioned in my notes on
Forever. (15) The Price is Right was a long-running game show which
originally appeared in 1956. Bob Barker was the host of the show for 25
years, and for 25 years before that of the show Truth or Consequences. He’s
still alive, which probably means he actually is older than dirt.
 Tough Love
Who’s the object of Tough Love in this episode? One obvious answer is
Dawn, given Buffy’s treatment of her. Or maybe it’s Ben getting the advice
to “take responsibility”. Perhaps it refers to the fight between Willow and
Tara. It could mean any or all of these, but in my view the title refers to
Buffy.
The teaser usually gives us a clue, and in this case the clue comes from Ben
talking to his evil half right after getting that “tough love” advice:
BEN: This is so unfair. You're taking everything away from me. Everything
I worked for, I earned, I care about. These are my choices, this is my life,
and you're ruining it!
Later on we see Buffy make the same complaint right after Giles refuses to
help her:
BUFFY: I can't do it, Will. Don't worry. It's not like I don't have a life. I do.
I have Dawn's life.
The connection appears right in the teaser. Buffy says “when I’m more
myself again” and we segue to Ben trying to explain why he’s been gone
for 2 weeks and then turning into Glory. I think that’s emphasized when the
doctor tells Ben to “take responsibility”. That’s not just a theme of this
episode, it’s a theme for the entire show.
It seems harsh for Giles to tell Buffy that she’s the one who must deal with
Dawn given Joyce’s recent death, but it’s just what he should say in light of
Dawn’s metaphorical role: “I may be a grownup, but you're her family. Her
only real family now. She needs you to do this.”
It also fits the “growing up” theme – Buffy has to learn to take on an adult’s
role: “She needs me. (Giles looks sympathetic) Me, the ... grownup. (more
confidently) The authority figure. The, the strong guiding hand and, and
stompy foot that is me.” Buffy no longer has Riley or Joyce or Giles to fall
back on. The first two are gone and Giles just told her she’s on her own.
That’s what it feels like when we become adults – that we’re all on our
own. That’s both true and not true, for Buffy and for us, but Giles’s refusal
to get in the middle of Buffy’s relationship with Dawn is consistent with the
sense of loneliness which accompanies adulthood. Metaphor and storyline
fuse together seamlessly here.
Buffy’s situation should call to mind this dialogue from the S2 episode Bad
Eggs:
“Buffy: I'll just lay that one off on my partner. (looks up, worried) Who'd I
get?
Willow: Well, there were an uneven number of students, and you didn't
show, so...
Buffy: (in shocked disbelief) I'm a single mother?
Xander: (nods) No man of her own.
Buffy: Do you know what this says about me? That I am doomed to lead
my mother's life! (paces back to them) How deeply scary is that?”
I think Tara’s behavior in the face of Glory’s threats reflects how Buffy
treated her in Family. Before Family, Tara was concerned that she was an
outsider, that she didn’t fit in. I think it’s also notable that Glory confuses
Tara for Dawn, reinforcing the way the two were equated prior to Family.
Tara’s courage now is, IMO, born in part of the love she got from Buffy and
Dawn and can now reciprocate. That courage is all the more impressive
because Tara made clear her horror of brain sucking in Blood Ties:
“TARA: She, she, she's a brain-sucker? (Willow and Tara exchange a look)
GILES: She, um ... (leans over to read from book) "absorbs the energies
that bind the human mind into a cohesive whole." Once drained, all that's
left behind is, uh-
BUFFY: Crazy people.
GILES: (pouring more tea) Which is, I'm afraid, why there's been a marked
increase in the ranks of the mentally unstable here in Sunnydale.
TARA: At least vampires just kill you.”
Note the way the magic/lesbian metaphor plays back and forth in the
argument between Tara and Willow. They might seem to be talking about
magic, and then Willow says no, this is about being a lesbian, but it’s really
all the same – part in metaphor, part in “real” terms.
Willow’s reaction to Glory’s assault on Tara reminded me of Giles’s in
Passion. I can’t say either one is very sensible, but I’m kinda with Spike on
this: “I’d do it.” The important thing to take away from Willow’s attempted
revenge is somewhat subtle and I missed it the first time: her eyes turned
black, like Doc’s did in Forever. That’s a sign, not only of Willow’s anger,
but of the nature of the forces she invoked.
As Buffy’s metaphorical spirit, Willow expresses Buffy’s helpless rage at
Glory. Whether the violence was cathartic or whether Willow just
recovered, the ending shows that Willow reached a point where she could
recognize that others could understand her pain even if they hadn’t
personally experienced it. Buffy first told Willow that she couldn’t
understand: “Look, Willow, I know that you mean well, but you just don't
understand, and there's no way that you could.” Then Tara said it: “I mean,
you can't really know what it's like to-“ But at the end, Willow
acknowledges Buffy’s ability to understand: “BUFFY: I understand.
WILLOW: (nods) I know you do.” That’s a way for Buffy to understand the
point too.
Trivia notes: (1) The phrase “tough love” was apparently coined in 1968.
(2) When the senior doctor sarcastically suggests that Ben disappeared as a
result of eating Twinkies, that refers to the “Twinkie defense”. (3) Glory’s
phrase “pardon my French” is an American idiom meaning “excuse me for
swearing”. (4) When Xander tells Anya “a watched customer never buys”,
he’s playing off the old saying that “a watched pot never boils”. (5) When
Xander refers to Dawn as “Dawn Giovanni”, he’s making a joking
reference to Don Giovanni. (6) Buffy’s litany of rules for Dawn includes
Ben Franklin’s saying “early to bed, early to rise [makes a man healthy,
wealthy and wise]”. (7) “Hospital corners” refers to making one’s bed with
the sheets folded perfectly. (8) Willow’s reference to Miss Minchin’s Select
Seminary for Girls is a reference to the book The Little Princess. (9)
Willow’s spell invokes Kali, Hera, Kronos and Cassiel.
 Spiral
Spiral makes explicit the full implications of The Replacement. We’ve
known since Blood Ties that Ben and Glory share the same body, but the
consequences weren’t spelled out until now. Since Glory and Ben share the
same body, they can’t exist apart from each other: “Kill the man and the
god dies”. In case it’s not obvious, I’ll state unequivocally the choices
Gregor presents to Buffy: kill Ben to destroy Glory (though when he says
this the characters themselves don’t know that Ben is Glory); or kill Dawn
to save the world from Glory. You should be thinking about these choices
and the moral issues they raise as we move towards the finale.
As long as we’re at it, there’s no reason to limit the moral issues to Buffy.
What’s Ben’s ethical obligation? If you were in his shoes, would you feel
obligated to commit suicide to prevent Glory from going back home? And
if you think Ben has the obligation to save the world by destroying himself,
what then would you say of Dawn? If either or both have the obligation to
destroy themselves, is it therefore Buffy’s obligation to help them?
I’m deliberately stalling on Buffy’s choices and on the issues raised by Ben
and Dawn because I’ll get to them in the next two episodes. The beliefs of
the Knights raise a related point, though, which I do want to explore here.
The Knights offer essentially two reasons for attempting to kill Dawn: the
Key is too dangerous; and “such is the will of God”. It’s the latter
justification which raises a deep philosophical problem.
Any system of morality based on belief in a divine being has two possible
ways to explain moral actions:
1. The act is good in itself and can be justified by moral reasoning
such as deontological ethics (as discussed in previous posts on
Choices and Listening to Fear). Systems of morality which don’t rely
on belief in divinity are limited to moral reasoning in order to explain
“good” and “bad”.
2. The act is good because God told me to do it. What God tells me
to do is by definition good.
Here’s the problem: if an action is good because it can be shown to be good
by standard moral reasoning, then there’s no need for God. If an action is
good because God ordered it done, then we need to know if God ordered it
because the act was good in itself – in which case the fact that God gave the
order is irrelevant – or if God ordered it arbitrarily. Arbitrary orders from
God can seem quite evil. A classic example appears in the Biblical story of
God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. And a God who
orders evil done in his name is perhaps not a God who should be
worshipped.
Thus, commands from God create two possible moral answers, but both
paths seem to call into question the need for God. There’s a formal term for
this problem: it’s called the Euthyphro Dilemma:
“Socrates in one of the early dialogues debates the nature of the holy with
Euthyphro, who is a religious professional. Euthyphro is taking his own
father to court for murder, and though ordinary Greek morality would
condemn such an action as impiety, Euthyphro defends it on the basis that
the gods behave in the same sort of way, according to the traditional stories.
… Socrates's problem with the traditional stories about the gods gives rise
to what is sometimes called ‘the Euthyphro dilemma’. If we try to define
the holy as what is loved by the gods (and goddesses), we will be faced
with the question ‘Is the holy holy because it is loved by the gods, or do
they love it because it is holy?’”
If the gods only love something which is already holy, then we don’t need
the gods. If someone argues that something is holy simply because the gods
do it, like Euthyphro did, then we’re going to see that person as committing
a wrong.
Bringing this back to Buffy, in her conversations with Gregor he gives some
lip service to the idea of the dangers involved if Glory were to obtain the
Key. He also makes a consequentialist argument to Ben when he urges Ben
to kill Dawn: “You can save all their lives by ending one.” Gregor
obviously expects this argument to persuade Ben, and it’s a form of
argument we’ve seen several times before, notably in Choices with Wesley
arguing against trading the Box of Gavrok in order to ransom Willow. We’ll
see it again very soon.
However, Gregor’s own motivation seems to be that destroying the Key is
“the will of God”. I say this is his real motivation because the danger posed
by the Key might be addressed in ways other than destroying it (e.g., hiding
it). Gregor rejects the alternatives, indicating that his fundamental
motivation rests on divine command. Buffy then gets right to the heart of
the Euthyphro Dilemma: “What kind of god would demand her life for
something that she has no control over?”
Buffy’s question suggests her own answer, but we’ll see more of her
reasoning in the finale.
Spiral also raises another moral issue. I’ve seen it argued that Buffy
violated her code by killing humans. I think this is wrong for two reasons.
First, the Knights aren’t the first humans to die because of Buffy. In order
we have (1) Amy’s mother in Witch; (2) the zookeeper in The Pack; (3)
Coach Marin fell into the sewer with the fish monsters after Buffy tripped
him (Go Fish); (4) the Tarakan assassin whom Buffy killed on the ice rink
in Surprise What’s My Line (h/t local-max) was seemingly human; (5) the
terrorist Gruenstahler brothers who shot each other to death after Buffy
threw her corsage onto one of them (Homecoming); and (6) Gwendolyn
Post, whose hand she chopped off in Revelations.
In Coach Marin’s case, she did try to save him but failed. In cases 1, 2, and
6, there’s a good argument that the humans tried to access mystical powers
and therefore brought themselves within Buffy’s jurisdiction. This applies
to the Knights as well – human they were, but the Knights were intruding
themselves into the mystical and that’s Buffy’s jurisdiction.
The other 2 cases involve humans whose deaths Buffy caused, one directly
and one indirectly (but intentionally). One was self-defense and the other a
combination of self-defense and defense of Angel, which leads us to the
next point. I think we have to distinguish self-defense situations from
Buffy’s ordinary Slayer duties. Buffy doesn’t track down human criminals,
but if one attacked her I have no doubt she’d defend herself. She has yet
more justification for defending the helpless and innocent Dawn and the
others with her like Tara.
Local-max suggested in comments that the Knights pose a harder question
than the other examples I gave: “While Buffy's killing the Knights is
justifiable, I think we should be more uncomfortable with it than the other
examples listed, because, well, all the other examples were people who
were clearly being evil by most measures. … The Knights' goal is to protect
and save the world. They are not wrong that Dawn endangers the world.
Killing people in self-defense when those people are working from a flawed
but well-meaning moral system is trickier than killing people in self-
defense when they are acting clearly immorally, I think. I still support
Buffy's choice ultimately and think it is in character though.”
Here’s my response:
“Your point about the Knights being a tougher call is well-taken. I'd still say
Buffy was correct, but the reasoning is more complicated. Suppose there's a
train coming and it's out of control. It will kill 5 people unless something is
thrown onto the track to stop it or divert it. You, seeing the emergency, try
to throw me onto the track. Do I have the right to claim self-defense in
order to stop you? I think I do, but that's not entirely clear. If, for example, I
need to kill you to defend myself, there will be 6 deaths (yours and the
other 5). If you throw me on the track, there will be one (mine). From a
social POV, one death seems preferable. To a strict deontologist, my right
supersedes and the 5 deaths are just an unfortunate accident.

Dawn's situation, and Ben's, raise this issue to the ultimate because the fate
of the whole universe is at stake.”
Some additional points:
Buffy’s plan to run away fits perfectly into the metaphor of growing up
which I see as the main theme of the series. I’ll explain this in more detail
in the finale when I discuss Glory’s metaphorical role.
What we see of the Knights in Spiral reinforces the suggestion I made in
my post on Blood Ties about their metaphorical role as religious and
patriarchal. The General’s name, Gregor, was the name of a number of
Popes (Gregory). Dante’s name association is fairly obvious, as are the
clerics, the attire, and the weaponry. Xander’s reference to the Crusades
adds another link.
I think one could argue that the confrontation with the Knights takes place
in the desert to show both the barrenness of the world if Dawn were to be
destroyed and to represent Buffy’s mental state from the stress she was
under.
Note the parallel between Dawn and Buffy. Dawn has it within her to
destroy the universe. Buffy has struggled all season with the destructive
force the Slayer within her represents.
Trivia notes: (1) Spiral is an homage to the movie Stagecoach, or at least
the chase scene from that movie. Stagecoach was the first “talkie” Western
by Joss’s favorite director, John Ford. Ford later made the movie The
Searchers, which I discussed in my post on Buffy v. Dracula. For
Stagecoach Ford plucked from obscurity an actor named John Wayne and
the rest was history. (2) Gotta love Dawn’s use of the phrase “bring it on” in
describing Buffy’s confrontation with Glory in the street – Clare Kramer
(Glory) was in that movie. In the same narrative Dawn also used the phrase
“she’s all that”. SMG was in that movie. (3) The rocket launcher Xander
mentioned was, of course, used by Buffy in Innocence. (4) Anya mentioned
the “creepy cartoon rabbit”, meaning Bugs Bunny, and the “nice man with
the speech impediment”, meaning Elmer Fudd. Giles’s sarcastic suggestion
of painting a tunnel on the side of a mountain refers to a stock cartoon
event. (5) Buffy pulled out Adam’s uranium power core in Primeval. The
obvious reason for mentioning the rocket launcher and the joining spell was
to emphasize just how powerful Glory was. (6) Xander twice mentioned
Sergeant Rock, a famous comic book character. (7) Spike’s phrase “put the
hammer down” is American slang meaning to push the accelerator pedal to
the floor. (8) Spike’s phrase “toss your cookies” is American slang meaning
to vomit. (9) Xander referred to Spike as “undead man walking”, which is a
reference to the movie Dead Man Walking. (10) When Anya held up a can
of food (I use the term lightly), it was a can of SPAM. (11) The scene where
Buffy throws the axe into the chest of the Knight very much resembles the
scene in Checkpoint where she threw an axe into the dummy. (12) Florence
Nightengale, mentioned by Spike, was a famous nurse. She would have
been very well known to William as a result of her work for the British
Army during the Crimean War. (13) Note that Willow’s eyes turned black
both when she created the barrier and when she brought it down. (14)
Willow mentioned Heckle and Jeckle, also cartoon characters. (15) One of
the mental patients in the hospital was the man who confronted Dawn in
Real Me. (16) Buffy’s mention of The Outer Limits was to the 1960s TV
show of that name. (17) Ben promised not to leave until he’d worn out his
welcome. That was prophetic, in a way. (18) Spike’s description of the
Knights as “the Renaissance Faire” refers to the American theme fairs of
that name. (19) Spike’s description of Gregor as “General Armour-All”
refers to the auto care product Armour All.
 The Weight Of The World
It may seem, to steal a line from Willow, as if The Weight of the World is
mostly filler, but in my view it serves a very important purpose: it shows us
that Buffy rejects – or maybe overcomes – Spike’s claim in Fool For Love
that Slayers have a death wish. In order to show this I need to go through
the dialogue very carefully, so bear with me.
I’ll start with a reminder of what Spike said in FFL:
SPIKE Death is on your heels, baby, and sooner or later it's gonna catch
you. And part of you wants it... not only to stop the fear and uncertainty, but
because you're just a little bit in love with it. Death is your art. You make it
with your hands, day after day. That final gasp. That look of peace. Part of
you is desperate to know: What's it like? Where does it lead you? And now
you see, that's the secret. Not the punch you didn't throw or the kicks you
didn't land. Every Slayer... has a death wish.
Spike’s claim is a very particular instance of a more general issue, namely
that the Slayer wants an end to the responsibility. A Slayer can avoid her
responsibility in lots of different ways. Dying is one way, of course, but the
example of Faith gives us a different way and Buffy will give us yet another
here in TWOTW (see below).
In my post on FFL I agreed that Slayers will want, sometimes, to lay their
burdens down, but suggested that there were good reasons to be skeptical of
Spike’s specific claim that they all want to accomplish this by giving in to a
death wish. In order to understand how and why I think TWOTW
undermines Spike’s “death wish” theory, we need to follow the entire
dialogue in which Willow forces Buffy to confront her sense of guilt over
Glory taking Dawn. I’ve edited it slightly for clarity, added the italics, and
combined the various scenes (which are otherwise separated by cuts to
different characters):
“WILLOW: What happened here?
Shot of Buffy #2 watching.
BUFFY #1: (not turning) This was when I quit, Will.
Shot of Willow standing beside Buffy #2, both staring at Buffy #1.
WILLOW: You did?
BUFFY #2: Just for a second.
Shot of Willow and Buffy sitting in the darkened bedroom.
BUFFY VOICEOVER: I remember.
Cut back to the magic shop.
BUFFY #1: (facing Willow) I was in the magic shop.
BUFFY #2: I put a book back for Giles.
BUFFY #1: Nothing special about it. And then it hit me.
WILLOW: What hit you?
BUFFY #2: I can't beat Glory.
BUFFY #1: Glory's going to win.
WILLOW: (turns to Buffy #2) You can't know that.
BUFFY #2: (turns to Willow) I didn't just know it.
BUFFY #1: (staring at nothing) I felt it. Glory will beat me.
BUFFY #2: (looks away) And in that second of knowing it, Will...
BUFFY #1: I wanted it to happen.
WILLOW: Why?
BUFFY #1: I wanted it over. This is ... all of this ... it's too much for me.
BUFFY #2: (staring at nothing) I just wanted it over.
BUFFY #1: If Glory wins ... then Dawn dies.
BUFFY #2: And I would grieve. People would feel sorry for me. (looks at
Willow) But it would be over. (looks away) And I imagined what a relief it
would be.
Willow looks over at the bookcase. Buffy #1 yet again puts the book on the
shelf.
BUFFY #2: I killed Dawn.
Willow frowns, looks at Buffy #2.
WILLOW: Is that what you think?
BUFFY VOICEOVER: My thinking it made it happen.
Cut back to the magic shop.
BUFFY #1: Some part of me wanted it. And in the moment Glory took
Dawn...
BUFFY #2: I know I could have done something better. But I didn't. I was
off by some fraction of a second.
BUFFY #1: And this is why...
BUFFY #2: ...I killed my sister.
Willow frowns, looks from one Buffy to the other. Buffy #1 puts the book
on the shelf again.
WILLOW: I think Spike was right back at the gas station. (loudly) Snap out
of it!
Buffy #2 looks at Willow in surprise. Buffy #1 whirls away from the
bookcase.
BUFFY #1: What?
BUFFY #2: What?
WILLOW: All this ... it has a name. It's called guilt. (the two Buffys
exchange a look) It's a feeling, and it's important. (to Buffy #2) But it's not
more than that, Buffy.
The Buffys both look pensive.
WILLOW: You've carried the weight of the world on your shoulders since
high school. And I, I know you didn't ask for this, but ... you do it every
day. And so, you wanted out for one second. So what?
BUFFY #2: (pensive) I got Dawn killed.
WILLOW: Hello! Your sister, not dead yet! But she will be if you stay
locked inside here and never come back to us.
BUFFY #2: (looking at Buffy #1) But what if I can't?
WILLOW: Then I guess you're right. And you did kill your sister.
Willow turns and starts walking toward the magic shop entrance. Buffy #2
turns to her in alarm.
BUFFY #2: Wait!
Shot of Willow and Buffy sitting in the bedroom.
BUFFY VOICEOVER: Where are you going?
Cut back to magic shop. Willow turns back.
WILLOW: Where you're needed. Are you coming?
Shot of Buffy #2 staring at Willow. Behind Buffy #2, Buffy #1 walks up to
the bookcase and puts the book on the shelf. Pauses.
Closer shot of Buffy #1 as she turns toward the others.
Cut to the real Buffy in the chair in the bedroom. Suddenly with a start she
comes to, sits up straighter, looks around, breathing heavily. Longer shot of
her and Willow sitting there. Willow stares at Buffy.
Buffy turns to face Willow again. Suddenly she bursts into tears.
Willow gets up off the bed and kneels beside Buffy's chair, puts her arms
around Buffy and holds her as she cries.”
Let’s look at the specific words Buffy used, the ones I put in italics: “I
quit”; “I wanted it [Glory to beat me] to happen.”; “I just wanted it over.”;
“If Glory wins ... then Dawn dies. And I would grieve. People would feel
sorry for me. But it would be over. And I imagined what a relief it would
be.”
At no point in this long dialogue does Buffy ever say she wanted to die.
What she says is that she wants an end to the responsibility of taking care of
Dawn. Death is one way for this to happen, but Buffy never suggested that.
In fact, her words suggest the contrary, namely, that after Dawn died she
(Buffy) would still be alive to grieve and to know that people felt sorry for
her.
The essence of Spike’s claim is that the slayers he killed “gave up”. As I
said in my Introduction, Buffy stands for the whole world. As the Slayer,
she bears the responsibility for the world. The pressure Buffy faces is the
pressure of being the Slayer while preserving Dawn. This is absolutely
critical to Dawn’s metaphorical role in the season, but it doesn’t mean
Buffy has a death wish. There was a moment when Buffy wanted out of that
responsibility, and her guilt feelings over that very understandable desire
sent her into catatonia when Glory took Dawn. Buffy interpreted her desire
to end her responsibility as failing Dawn (who is certainly part of her
responsibility). When Willow tells her to get over her guilt, Buffy does.
She’s not going to give up, she’s going to keep fighting. Whether Spike was
right or wrong about the Slayers he killed, he’s wrong about Buffy.
Metaphorically, it had to be Willow who brought Buffy back. Buffy
suffered a temporary failure of the spirit, so her metaphorical spirit was the
one to reach her.
The fact that Ben and Glory are beginning to merge tells us that we’re at the
cusp of a very significant change of some kind. The barriers are breaking
down, just as Gregor told Buffy in Spiral: “Once the key is activated, it
won't just open the gates to the beast's dimension. It's going to open all the
gates. The walls separating realities will crumble. Dimensions will bleed
into each other. Order will be overthrown and the universe will tumble into
chaos….” To drive the point home, Giles repeats this in nearly identical
words at the end of TWOTW. It’s storyline, but it’s metaphor too.
The dialogue between Ben and Glory mirrors the one between Willow and
Buffy. Follow the scene with Glory and Dawn when they first get to the
room under the tower the crazy folk are building. After Dawn names Buffy
as one person “who can take it here”, the scene cuts to Willow talking to
Buffy. It then shifts back to Dawn and Glory, at which point Glory morphs
into Ben. In their dialogue, Ben represents the typical adult. He struggles
against what Glory represents (see my next post), but can’t see a way to
preserve both Dawn and himself so he eventually gives in to Glory.
We shouldn’t be surprised that Ben was willing to hand Dawn over to Glory
to serve his own convenience. He seemed like a nice enough guy, but his
basic attitude was revealed in Listening to Fear when he summoned the
Quellar to “clean up Glory’s mess”, by which he meant “kill Glory’s
innocent victims”. His conversation with the minion in Spiral also seemed
to suggest that he’d put his own interests first.
In my view, it’s too harsh to say that Ben had an obligation to kill himself.
There are many times when individuals sacrifice themselves for the sake of
others. We call them heroes, but we don’t say that anyone has an
“obligation” to be a hero. We just recognize them for it after the fact. When
Ben gave up the fight against Glory and gave Dawn back to her, we know
that he’s no hero.
Trivia notes: (1) SMG was in Australia filming the first Scooby Doo movie
at the time TWOTW was shooting. She had only limited time available for
this episode. (2) A Kewpie Doll is a child’s toy from the early 20th Century.
(3) Spike’s gesture in putting his finger on his nose when Anya seems to
understand that Ben is Glory comes from the party game Charades. (4) The
man working with the blowtorch when Glory brings Dawn to the tower is
the crazy man who approached Dawn in Real Me. (5) Glory’s mention of
unleashing Armageddon refers to the Christian belief that a battle at the site
of Megiddo (Armageddon) will signal the end of the world. (6) Glory’s
words to Dawn hang a lantern on the fact that the two of them have
metaphorical roles: “Being human? It's like a costume for girls like you and
me. Being something else, *that's* what we are.” (7) When Willow is inside
Buffy’s mind, there’s an image of Willow standing by the fire Buffy saw in
Intervention. (8) Willow remembers that the First Slayer tried to kill them
all in their dreams in Restless. (9) Glory’s description of herself as the “one-
eyed chicklet in the kingdom of the blind” plays on the aphorism of
Desiderius Erasmus that “In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is
king.” (10) Spike refers to Xander as “Special Ed” which is short for
“Special Education”, i.e., what Americans call (or used to call) the classes
for the mentally disabled.
 The Gift
From the moment Buffy has her epiphany on the tower, I start losing it, no
matter how often I’ve seen The Gift. Joss Whedon always said that he never
worried too much about plot details if he could cut through to the emotional
truth. In S5 I think he combined plot and emotional truth incredibly well.
While my views on which is the best season are intense but variable, to
quote Anya, on a given day S5 is my favorite season.
I’ll start with the ending, because that’s the whole point of the season.
Indeed, it’s the whole point of the series. Buffy’s dive off the tower is the
end of her journey. As you know, my view is that Buffy’s journey was one
of becoming an adult. As I read it, her dive represents the fact that she’s
leaving childhood behind and launching herself into the new dimension of
adulthood. James Marsters: “Thematically, I think that [Joss] tied up his
original premise, which is how does a young child become an adult and
pass through adolescence. And all of us vampires are just metaphors for
those problems. I think that in the moment that she sacrificed her life to
save her sister she became a true adult.”
The key (pun very much intended) to the episode is that it finally tells us the
answer to the question we should have been asking since Dawn first
appeared: who or what is Dawn? I’m talking metaphor here, and so is Buffy
when she gives us the answer: “She’s me. … Dawn ... is a part of me. The
only part that I --”. To coin a phrase, Dawn is Buffy; Buffy is Dawn.
This doesn’t mean we have to see Dawn as representing part of what Buffy
actually is, though that’s certainly possible. It does mean, at the very least,
that we should see Dawn as how Buffy sees herself (in part; Dawn serves
more than one metaphorical purpose – see below).
Now I can revisit the opening episodes to see how they set up this theme
and the story line. In The Replacement we saw Xander split in two, creating
a competent, mature half and a childish, inept half. Both were Xander, one
mature, the other immature. The same principle applies to Dawn and Buffy.
Both are Buffy.
What part of Buffy is Dawn? We can see her as the child part, or perhaps
the human part, the vulnerable part of Buffy. The Replacement hinted at this
throughout. Aside from the mature/childish contrast, it used key (heh)
phrases associated with Dawn. When the two Xanders confronted each
other in front of Anya, SuaveXander told his twin “You don’t belong here.”
That’s what the crazy man told Dawn in Real Me. Or there’s this:
“ScruffyXander [to Willow]: “I get in trouble and Buffy saves me.” That’s
what Buffy does with Dawn.
The whole point of the season is that Buffy needs to learn to incorporate
Dawn into her life. In metaphor, she needs to find a way to preserve her
childlike innocence as part of her adult persona. It’s something Buffy learns
gradually. At the beginning of the season she almost resents Dawn’s
presence. She accepts her in Family and takes responsibility for protecting
her starting in Shadow and continuing through the rest of the season, even
though she doesn’t quite see Dawn as “real”. The uncertainty about Dawn’s
existence (references to her as a “shadow”; “am I real?”; all of Blood Ties)
are because Buffy’s not sure her human, innocent self still exists after all
she’s gone through as the Slayer (Intervention).
Blood Ties demonstrates Dawn’s reality and Buffy confirms it
metaphorically at the end of that episode – “It’s Summers’ blood” – but she
doesn’t make the connection in real terms yet. The stress of her mother’s
death, on top of everything else she’s been through over the last 5 years,
leaves her feeling hard and emotionless, so she treats Dawn harshly in
Forever and again with resentment, almost, in Tough Love. That’s exactly
the opposite of what she needs to do. That final revelation comes only on
the tower.
The question is, why does Buffy have to learn to keep some part of herself
childlike and innocent as she enters adulthood? To answer that we have to
talk about what Glory represents.
It’s never said explicitly, though they drop clues. In IWMTLY Buffy says
that “I've had it with super-strong little women who aren't me.” That
obviously refers to Glory as well as April, both of whom resemble Buffy in
this and other respects. Buffy tells Giles in Family that Glory “was kinda
like Cordelia”, expecting us to remember that Cordelia was Buffy’s shadow
self, what she could have been: “Before I was the Slayer, I was... Well, I, I
don't wanna say shallow, but... Let's say a certain person … we'll just call
her Spordelia, looked like a classical philosopher next to me.” (From
Helpless.)
Glory is Buffy’s Slayer side, or at least what Buffy fears her slayer half
could make her as an adult: insane and super-powered. Insane because the
harsh reality of adulthood is enough to make the whole prospect of
adulthood seem crazy, which is why there’s an emphasis throughout the
season on the way Buffy and others act crazy, Glory made people crazy, etc.
Super-powered because Buffy is. Remember how Riley described what
pure SlayerBuffy would be like in The Replacement? “The slayer half
would be like slayer concentrate, pretty unkillable.” That pretty much
describes Glory.
As is the case with Dawn, Glory isn’t necessarily what Buffy’s slayer half
actually is, but what Buffy fears it could be. Glory – Buffy’s fear of what
adulthood might entail – came from out of Buffy’s mind, which is why the
episode of that title immediately preceded Glory’s first appearance.
The net effect of this is that Glory is Buffy too. Glory and Dawn are the
two halves of Buffy. One side is how she sees herself, the other is her fear
of what becoming an adult might make her. Slayer Buffy needs to avoid
becoming a hard, ruthless killer, and she does this by preserving her inner
child, her human half. In metaphor, all adults need to preserve their inner
child in order to avoid becoming hard and unfeeling as adults. Just as was
the case with Xander in The Replacement, Buffy needs both to survive.
The split personality theme also appears with Glory and Ben. Ben, like
Dawn, exists in his current form only as a result of magic, but he represents
the opposite side, the wrong path to take. In TWOTW Ben had the chance to
protect Dawn, but rejected that route for selfish reasons. We’re supposed to
see his failure in stark contrast to Dawn’s willingness to sacrifice herself
and Buffy’s actual sacrifice in The Gift. Buffy sacrifices herself for her
sister, Dawn was willing to sacrifice herself for the world. Ben refuses to
sacrifice himself for anything, not for Dawn and not for the world. Ben
represents, ultimately, a selfish form of adulthood that willingly sacrifices
others for its own benefit.
Now let’s go back and see just how magnificently the season set these
themes and brought them to fruition in the plot. In Buffy v Dracula, Drac
told Buffy that her power was rooted in darkness and Buffy recognized her
fear that being the slayer was making her hard; she needed to understand it
better. As it turned out, what she needed was to be able to maintain a
connection – to link; “the Key is the link” – to her humanity. That’s
introduced at the very end of the episode in the form of Dawn.
The Knights wanted to “sever” the link because they represent a faction
which doesn’t want Buffy to become an integrated, whole adult. If Buffy or
any woman became an authentic adult, that would threaten the patriarchal,
traditional world view because a woman would be seen as an equal.
Real Me opens with Buffy seeking her true self: “GILES VOICEOVER:
You are the center. And within you, there is the core of your being ... of
what you are.” Buffy’s search is interrupted when Dawn interferes,
knocking over the crystals and demanding to leave. In part, at least, Dawn
is Buffy’s true self, the core of what she is.
In Real Me, Dawn tells us about herself, but what she’s really telling us all
along is about Buffy. That whole episode isn’t about Dawn at all; it’s about
how Buffy’s human half sees the world. Think about this language from
Dawn’s first voiceover (the first meaningful words we hear her say):
“Nobody knows who I am. Not the real me. It's like, nobody cares enough
to find out. I mean, does anyone ever ask *me* what I want to do with my
life?” That’s Buffy talking about herself.
If you recall, I made a list of Dawn’s attributes in my post on Real Me. Here
they are again: “She keeps a diary. She loves Willow, she loves Xander, she
loves her mother. She thinks Giles might not like her because he’s so old,
she finds Buffy’s training boring, and she resents the fact that Buffy is
always telling her what to do even if, in some sense, she idolizes her sister.
She likes Tara, she’s not so sure about Anya. Interestingly, she expresses no
opinion about Riley. She feels isolated at times, and she gets to be the child
of the family in a way that Buffy wishes she could.”
Just to tick off quickly the similarities, Buffy kept a diary when she was
younger (Angel, Ted); Giles called Buffy to her Slayer destiny in Welcome
to the Hellmouth and has pushed her ever since (From Nightmares: “I
should have been more c... cautious. Taken more time to train you. But you
were so gifted. And the evil was so great.”) As a result, he tends to have
little patience for Buffy’s less adult moments (“I'm serious, Buffy, there's
going to be far less time for the sort of flighty, frivolous-….” Real Me);
Buffy has a mixed relationship with Anya (see, e.g., Superstar or Buffy v.
Dracula); Riley is pretty self-explanatory at this point; Buffy’s sense of
isolation is well-established; and the whole point of the season is that Buffy
needs to overcome the belief that she has to suppress her human/child side
in order to become an adult.
Buffy accepted Dawn into her family in the episode of that name, but she
didn’t yet realize Dawn’s importance to her. She wasn’t sure that Dawn was
even real. In Blood Ties Dawn cuts herself (prefiguring her fate in The Gift)
and asks, “Am I real?”. That’s really Buffy’s question about Dawn; she’s
not sure after all these years of Slaying that there’s any humanity left. Buffy
may not be sure of her humanity – she’s still unsure in Intervention – but all
season long we’re shown that Dawn’s flaws are Buffy’s flaws, her strengths
of character are Buffy’s too – think Buffy’s klutziness throwing knives in
Helpless or breaking the ice cream machine in The Initiative, “Bitty
Buffy’s” courage in Forever. “It’s Summers’ blood.”
Buffy told Riley in Real Me that “*She* gets to be a kid, and she acts like
it's the biggest burden in the world. Sometimes *I* would like to just curl
up in Mom's lap and not worry about the fate of the world.” That’s what we
all feel like when it comes to growing up. Childhood is simpler; adulthood
is scary. It would be so much easier if we could just curl up and let Mom
take care of it all. Buffy even tries running away from her destiny, first in
Spiral then, a different way, in TWOTW. That’s what we’d all like to do.
We don’t need to run away from adulthood, though, we need to grow up.
What S5 is telling us is that we can preserve some part of our childhood
when we do. In fact, it’s essential that we do that (see more below).
Real Me also set up The Gift in the plot outline. The basic story of Real Me
was that Dawn was kidnapped and tied up by an evil blonde woman with
super powers who threatened to kill her. That, in substance, was Glory’s
plan too. Both whined to Dawn while she was a captive and Harmony
promised Spike that Buffy would “be dead by sunrise”.
Spike’s promise to defend Dawn “till the end of the world” has to be
understood in the context of the metaphor. Dawn is Buffy’s human half;
Spike has now pledged to defend Buffy’s human self. He’s not in love only
with the Slayer, but devoted to the whole of Buffy. It’s interesting, too, that
Buffy commends her better half to Spike’s care. Spike had told her in Fool
For Love that he would slip in and have himself one good day. Buffy got
“that final gasp, that look of peace” and it turned out to be the worst day of
his unlife.
Now let’s look at some of the issues raised by The Gift.
The One Who Walked Away From Omelas
Ursula LeGuin wrote the famous short story I’ve linked above (I modified
the title slightly to make it refer to Buffy in particular). If you haven’t read
it, please do now; it’s very short. I think the connection to the points I’m
now going to discuss will be obvious.
The events of The Gift pose two controversial moral dilemmas, both
involving Giles: Should Buffy save Dawn or save the world? Was Giles
right to kill Ben? Let’s take them in that order.
I can understand Giles’s point about Dawn. It’s a standard utilitarian
argument: save the greatest number. It seems irrefutable. And the fact that
Giles has sent out an innocent (Buffy) every night for 5 years, risking her
death to protect the world, means that Giles has come to accept that as part
of his role.
But while I understand Giles, three reasons convince me that Buffy was
right about Dawn and he was wrong. First, Joss signaled his own view of
the issue in Triangle. There, Xander – Buffy’s metaphorical heart – faced
what was structurally the same “Sophie’s Choice” dilemma that Buffy faced
in The Gift, when Olaf told him to choose between Willow and Anya. What
did Xander do? He refused to choose – “that’s insane troll logic” – even at a
cost to himself personally (Olaf broke his arm and threatened to kill him).
That’s exactly what Buffy did in The Gift when faced with the choice
between Dawn and the world. Buffy wasn’t willing to kill her innocent
charge – the Slayer is not just a killer after all – but she was willing to die
for her. Killing Dawn turned out to be unnecessary, which is pretty
devastating to Giles’s argument.
Joss: “The question of what is a Slayer which we brought up in the very
first episode [i.e., Buffy v. Dracula], what does it mean, does it just mean
being a killer? And answering that with “No, it means living in a world
where life and death are an issue and putting your life on the line.” That’s
what she learns about being a slayer, and it’s a beautiful thing.”
Second, the plan to kill Dawn was the plan of Gregor and the Knights. Does
anyone think they were right after all? That Buffy should have handed
Dawn over to them? That Ben was right to kill the mental patients in
Listening to Fear? Maybe it’s just me, but Dawn’s life seems a lot more
valuable than the lives of those who want to hack her to pieces in order to
save their own. The Knights and Glory were both willing to use Dawn as a
means to their end; Buffy saw Dawn as an end in herself.
Dedalus, one of the posters at AtPO, expressed this point very well. After
quoting Buffy’s recognition that “she’s me”, he continues:
“Now compare with our old friend Schopenhauer -

‘How is it possible that suffering that is neither my own nor of my concern

should immediately affect me as though it were my own, and with such
force that it moves me to action? This is something mysterious, something
for which Reason can provide no explanation ... This presupposes that I
have to some extent identified myself with the other and therewith removed
for the moment the barrier between 'I' and 'not-I.' Only then can the other's
situation, his want, his need, become mine. I then no longer see him in the
way of an empirical perception, as one strange to me, indifferent to me,
completely other than myself; but in him I suffer, in spite of the fact that his
skin does not enfold my nerves.’

I do think it is profound. A morality that is not forced by external means or

threats, but one that truly springs out of a spiritual or psychological
realization. It's not a commandment to treat others as you which to be
treated, but rather a living impulse after which you cannot help but treat
others as you wish to be treated because you and the other are in fact one.
The self is transcended and the unity of all life presents itself.

And isn't this really what was going on in The Gift? If it is, it means Buffy's
epiphany is more far reaching than simply what it means to be a Slayer ...
it's about what it means to be human. And face it, you just don't get that on
most television shows.”
Karen pointed out in comments that the view of the Knights represents the
sin of despair: “I really like the argument that the choice between Dawn and
the world (and Xander’s insane troll logic choice between Anya and
Willow) is a false choice. And this is where I think the Knights have also
put themselves into the position of believing a false directive from their
God. They (and Giles) think that the choice is preordained, predestined.
Thus they deny free will, the chance for a third unorthodox option. From a
Christian point of view, they’ve fallen into the sin of despair, they’ve denied
the opportunity for the working of Divine Providence through them by
losing faith, in themselves if not in a deity.”
Third, we have to account for the metaphor. Buffy’s “real me” is not just
innocent, she represents the part of Buffy who will balance her slayer
powers with human love and innocence. Ben’s “sister” is insane and will
destroy the world. Dawn needs to be protected, Glory – i.e., Buffy’s fear –
needs to be subdued.
Dawn, as her name metaphorically suggests, also represents the future.
She’s that part of childhood that we need to preserve as we face the fears
that adulthood presents, the part that does not bear the weight of the world.
It’s no accident that the events on the tower occur as day breaks, just as
April said in IWMTLY: “it’s always darkest before [the dawn].” Daybreak,
dawn, has always been the poetic image for the promise of a new day, a
new future.
Dawn represents the future, not just for Buffy but, because Buffy stands for
all of us, for the whole world. Would the world be worth saving without
that, without promise for the future? Not in my view, no, and certainly not if
achieving that hollow victory forces Buffy to murder her own sister. Flesh
of her flesh, blood of her blood (h/t fresne).
Buffy didn’t sacrifice herself to save the world as it is, she sacrificed herself
to save Dawn and what she represents of what the world may be.
Buffy didn’t just walk away from Omelas killing Dawn, of course. She also
refused to kill Ben. Was Giles right to kill him? For a deontologist, killing is
generally wrong, though it might be justified for some on the ground that
the person had done something to deserve death. Even assuming Ben had
done something of that nature, a deontologist might respond as Gandalf did
to Frodo, when Frodo suggested that Gollum deserved death: “Deserves it!
I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve
life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in
judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.”
It’s more complicated when we consider Giles from the consequentialist
perspective. IMO, the answer depends on what Giles knew and when, and
on what his motivation was.
Xander raised the idea of killing Ben in the Magic Box. He rejected his own
suggestion in the face of silence from the others on the ground that Ben was
an “innocent”. Interestingly, Giles said nothing at this time, but the
consensus seemed to be that killing Ben was something they could not do.
Now, Ben certainly was not innocent, but Giles didn’t know the things we
know. He didn’t know that Ben summoned the Quellar demon. He didn’t
know that Ben turned Dawn over to Glory. He didn’t know whether Ben
would voluntarily sacrifice himself to save the world from Glory. He did
know that Ben probably saved his life in Spiral, which makes the killing
particularly ruthless.
Nor can we be sure of the exact timing of the killing. Buffy told Ben that
Glory “missed her chance”, which implies that the time had passed for her
to use the Key. OTOH, we then see that the breakdown between worlds
didn’t begin until Buffy got to the top of the tower. Somewhere in that time
Giles killed Ben, so it looks like Glory could possibly have made it if she
had re-emerged.
Then again, Giles didn’t say that he was killing Ben in order to save the
world, as would be the case if Glory could have made it. What he said is
that he was killing him to save Buffy, with the world as a purely secondary
consideration: “And sooner or later Glory will re-emerge, and ... make
Buffy pay for that mercy. And the world with her.” Since it’s not clear that
Glory could in any way use the Key in the future, maybe Giles meant that
Glory could kill people or brainsuck them; bad, certainly, but not
apocalyptic. His primary motivation seems to have been protecting Buffy.
The thing is, though, that Buffy didn’t need protecting, and never for a
moment thought of killing Ben to save herself. She was just minutes (at
most) away from her dive off the tower, doing so to save the very person
Giles had wanted her to kill. And if he had thought it necessary to kill Ben
in order to prevent Glory from using the Key, he was too late for that also
thanks to Doc. Both of his most convincing motivations are therefore
invalid – his act saved neither the world nor Buffy. I don’t know if that
makes his action meaningless, but it makes it hard to justify his decision
except on the ground that it was right to kill an “innocent” (as far as Giles
knew) in order to stop Glory from brainsucking future victims.
This leaves us to consider Buffy’s actions on the tower. I often hear fans
call her leap a suicide. Two factors convince me that it wasn’t suicide. First,
Buffy stopped Dawn from jumping before she herself made the decision to
jump. Buffy was going to carry out her plan to defend Dawn to the end,
meaning Buffy had to stay alive to do that. In fact, she was so determined to
live to protect Dawn that she earlier had threatened to kill her best friends if
they came near Dawn. Buffy’s decision to jump came only when she
realized that she had an alternative that could save Dawn while also
protecting the world.
What happened when Buffy had her epiphany? In The Replacement, Riley
told her that being the Slayer was part of who she is. On the tower she
realized that Dawn – her human side – was equally a part, even a more
important part. Like Xander in The Replacement, she recognized that she
needed both halves to be complete. She integrated her two halves, which
means she grew up, became an adult. She could now close the split in the
universe, which was the metaphor for the internal sense of separation she’s
felt from the very beginning of the series (e.g., NKABOTFD).
Second, we know it wasn’t suicide from her decision in TWotW to keep
fighting. Buffy’s last words re-emphasize the decision she made in TWotW
not to run away from her responsibility as The Slayer. She tells Dawn “But
this is the work that I have to do.” She’s not ducking her responsibility by
committing suicide, she’s accepting it by sacrificing herself for Dawn.
When she goes on to tell Dawn that “the hardest thing to do in this world is
to live in it” – a very existentialist sentiment – she’s warning her of the
difficulty that comes with responsibility. It demands courage: “Be brave.
Live. For me.” And, again, who is the Dawn to whom Buffy is giving this
advice?
Suicide is a confession of defeat. Buffy wasn’t defeated. She beat Glory –
her fears – into submission. She found a way to save her own humanity in
the form of Dawn. Adulthood no longer holds any terror for her. Dawn was
breaking into sunrise when she dove.
Joss said, “"Buffy" is hard [to write] because it is completely grounded in
human experience. Every episode has to be about what, you know, what it
feels like to go through a certain period in your life. In the rite of passage
that is your life. We can never do an episode that is purely fantastical and
exciting because the show is about growing up.”
In five seasons he took her from shallow teenager to heroic adult. And he
did it brilliantly.
Trivia notes: (1) The S5 DVDs don’t show the actual “previously on”
introduction when The Gift first aired. You can find that intro on the S7
DVDs as an easter egg. (2) The five previous apocalypses to which Giles
referred: The Harvest; Prophecy Girl; Becoming 2; The Zeppo; and
Doomed. (3) If you’re wondering how Olaf suddenly became a troll god,
and his hammer the hammer of a god, the reason is that he was supposed to
have been described that way in Triangle. The word “god” was left out of
that episode for some reason and Joss was upset about it. At least that’s the
rumor. (4) When Spike tells Xander that “blood is life”, that repeats a
phrase which appeared twice in Buffy v. Dracula. Yes, I think that’s
intentional. (5) Buffy found the Dagon Sphere in No Place Like Home. (6)
Spike tried and failed to lift Olaf’s hammer in Blood Ties. (7) Glory’s
reference to Buffy’s friends as her “cartoon pals” is probably a reference to
Scooby Doo. (8) Previous references to the Slayer as a killer can be found in
Who Are You?; Restless; and Intervention. The idea goes back at least to
Faith in S3 (see my post on Consequences). (9) Anya “skedaddled” in
Graduation Day 1. (10) Buffy locked Spike out after the events of Crush.
She invites him back in here. Note the metaphor in her position vis-à-vis
Spike: Buffy stands above him on the stairs, representing their respective
status. (11) The St. Crispin’s Day Speech is from Henry V, Act IV, sc. iii.
(12) Xander’s exclamation “Shpadoinkle!” comes from Cannibal, the
Musical. (13) When Xander says that “the glorified bricklayer picks up a
spare”, he’s using a term from bowling. (14) Giles kills Ben by suffocating
him, just as the Quellar demon Ben summoned killed the crazy people. That
may be its own commentary on Giles’s act. The fact that Giles chose a
method which wouldn’t leave a mark also suggests that he didn’t want to
face the moral judgment of the SG for his action. (15) If you were
wondering how Doc knew about Dawn, there was a very subtle clue: his
tail. We saw it in Forever, and it looked reptilian: “From underneath his
bathrobe a greenish, scaly tail pokes out.” Put that together with this
dialogue from Blood Ties: "The key is also susceptible to necromanced
animal detection, particularly those of canine or serpent construct." My
emphasis. (16) In Graduation Day 2 Faith’s words to Buffy -- “Little Miss
Muffet counting down from 7-3-0” -- refer to the fact that two years (730
days) from that day Buffy will die. This is that date. Note that in GD2 Buffy
substituted her own blood for that of Faith. (17) Faith also told Buffy in
GD2 that Buffy had “miles to go [before you sleep]”. That’s taken from the
Robert Frost poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”. The words
of the poem are generally taken to mean that you have duties to fulfill
before you rest. Those words therefore describe Buffy’s journey from then
to her dive off the tower. (18) A related reference occurs in Buffy’s dream
in Restless, a year later, when Buffy looks at a clock which says 7:30 and
Tara tells her “that clock's completely wrong”. (19) In Who Are You, Faith
finds Buffy’s credit card and uses it to buy an airline ticket. She reads off
the number and then the expiration date: 5-01. The Gift aired in May 2001.
(20) The Gift was the last episode to air on the WB. The show moved to
UPN for Seasons 6 and 7.
 Bargaining 1 & 2
I need to begin S6 with some comments about how I see the season in the
overall context of the series. I saw S1-5 as tracking Buffy’s progress to
becoming an adult. As I read The Gift, she dived off the tower into
adulthood. The natural consequence of that reading is that S6-7 should be
understood as dealing with the first stages of Buffy’s journey as an adult.
In all previous seasons, Joss never knew if the show would be renewed for
another season. At the end of S5 the show moved to a new network and he
had a two year deal. I see S6 and S7 as one long, extended story about
Buffy’s adult journey. That, in my view, explains both why Joss didn’t write
the finale to S6 (the only finale he didn’t write), and why S6 ends on a
cliffhanger.
Because of the move to the new network, because UPN had a very relaxed
view of “standards and practices” (i.e., censorship), and because Buffy
moved into new territory as an adult, S6 made some daring choices. There
are very dark passages, very adult themes; naturally, the taste for such
things will vary, especially given the contrast with previous seasons.
To say that S6 was controversial would be understating the situation a lot. I
doubt there’s ever been a more controversial season on any show (not that I
could measure such a thing anyway). As if further evidence of this were
needed, the Mark Watches reviews of S6 episodes within the last few
months generated raging internet debates over 10 years after the original
air date. I guess I should be impressed that the show can inspire such
emotion over such a long period of time, even if things got more than a bit
out of control. Still, what happened there was just a small sample of the
fights which took place in real time.
The season as a whole was controversial, one particular metaphor was
controversial, and one episode, Seeing Red, became probably the most
controversial episode of any TV show ever. Since I think the social impact
of the series is important, I’ll be discussing all of this in addition to the
individual episodes as we go along.
In previous seasons we saw Buffy learn from the mistakes of others. The
show used devices such as “shadow self” (Cordelia, Faith) to tell us what
she should not do, leaving Buffy herself to learn to follow the right path
after seeing the wrong one. This changes to some extent in S6 and S7, and I
think that the change is one reason why these two seasons are so
controversial among fans. In these two seasons, Buffy often learns from her
own mistakes, as adults generally do. That is, we see her take the wrong
path initially, only to figure it out by the end. Many people felt that this
made her unsympathetic as a character. I disagree – I see that as true to life
and as making her character less remote, as superheroes so often are.
My overall assessment, up front, is that S6 was like A Tale Of Two Cities: it
was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The peaks of S6 are
(JMHO) the highest of any season. Unfortunately, I have very strong
criticisms of one part of the story. Whether you love it or hate it, though,
there’s nothing else like S6 in the whole history of television.
“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”
Joss wrote the season openers every year except in seasons 5 and 6. I don’t
know why he didn’t write the opener in S5, but he had a very good excuse
for not writing Bargaining in S6. We’ll see the result in, yes, episode 7.
The title – Bargaining – has multiple meanings in the episode: Willow
bargains for Buffy’s life; the vampire attempts a bargain with the demon
bikers. Most important, though, is that “bargaining” is one of the five
“stages of grief” hypothesized by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. The reference to
the five stages is very clever on multiple levels, but I want to remind you in
particular of this dialogue from Intervention, which I obviously think is
intentional:
ANYA: We’re just kind of thrown by the you having sex with Spike.
BUFFY: The ... who whating how with huh?
ANYA: Okay, that's denial. That usually comes before anger.
Denial and anger are, respectively, the first two stages, bargaining is the
third.
As applied in its original form – to impending death – bargaining “involves
the hope that the individual can somehow postpone or delay death. Usually,
the negotiation for an extended life is made with a higher power in
exchange for a reformed lifestyle. Psychologically, the individual is saying,
‘I understand I will die, but if I could just have more time...’” Quote from
link.
It’s worth asking whether someone in these episodes promised to be better –
to reform her life – as part of a bargain, and what that might mean
metaphorically:
DAWN: You told me I had to be strong ... and I've tried. (tearful) But it's
been so hard without you.
Buffy still has eyes closed, frowning.
DAWN: I'm sorry. I promise I'll do better, I will! (still tearful) If you're with
me. Stay with me ... please. I need you to live.
In my view, we need to interpret this via the metaphor. Dawn isn’t the Key
anymore, but she still has a metaphorical role as Buffy’s inner child. Buffy’s
inner child wants her slayer half – the adult half – to pay more attention to
her, and promises to be better in return. Keep that metaphor in mind as we
go through S6.
But remember also that there are 2 more stages; I think those are critical for
understanding this season. That’s a hint.
Willow’s behavior in Bargaining touches on the debate regarding Buffy’s
refusal to kill Dawn in The Gift: what price is worth paying, when does the
end justify the means? It seems to me that when Willow sacrifices the fawn
she’s metaphorically sacrificing her own innocence. She tells Tara that the
ingredient was “vino de madre”. Literally translated, that means “wine of
the mother”. Symbolically, it means “blood of Mother Earth”. Note the
color change of Willow’s clothing: she’s wearing white in the scene with
the fawn, red afterwards. She’s stained with blood. Will she ultimately think
it’s worth that price?
Making matters worse is the fact that Willow concealed her actions from
Tara and everyone else. I was a bit surprised that Tara went along with the
idea, but it seems likely that pressure from Willow, her own sense of
wanting Buffy back, and an unwillingness to ask the hard questions about
Willow’s methods led Tara to agree.
For all that Willow gets a lot of criticism for resurrecting Buffy, she has
some good arguments to make on her side. One is the one she emphasizes
in these episodes, namely, the need to rescue Buffy from Hell. If you
honestly believed someone was in Hell, I assume you’d be willing to do a
lot to try to get her out. Medieval Catholics paid lots of money for
indulgences to keep themselves and their loved ones out of “mere”
purgatory or to shorten their time there. The incentives are huge.
In addition, there’s the fact that we as a society go to fairly great lengths to
preserve life. Doctors try their best to restore a beating heart or otherwise
bring back someone from the brink of death. Willow’s actions are consistent
with that.
There are personal and consequential arguments too: Willow
understandably misses her best friend. She recognized Buffy when Xander,
Anya, and Tara didn’t; Buffy’s especially important to Willow, and there’s a
good metaphorical reason for that in S6. Bear in mind also that Willow’s
been saddled with a great deal of responsibility, and it’s clear that she’s
barely held herself together except with the thought that Buffy might be
brought back: “Nothing, it was all for nothing. Buffy's gone. She's really
gone.” She’s obviously been leading the SG in the nightly war against
vampires, but Sunnydale needs a Slayer. Giles strongly implied this in the
teaser and the invasion by the demon bikers reinforces Willow’s exercise of
responsibility to restore the Hellmouth’s guardian.
Against all these, though, are some pretty serious downsides. Willow didn’t
just conceal her methods from everyone, she and the others hid the very
deed itself from Giles, Dawn, and Spike, all of whom had a right to know.
It’s doubtful that Willow considered the full price of her spell, assuming she
knows it. The gang seems never to have considered bringing Faith into
Sunnydale in order to establish a new guardian. There are some other
downsides in addition, one of which we’ll see next episode.
I’ll talk more in my next post about what it means for Buffy to be back. For
now I’ll just make one point. Buffy’s first words were “Is this Hell?”.
Writer Marti Noxon refers to the destruction Buffy sees as “the external
manifestation of Buffy’s inner turmoil.” Buffy must have thought that her
sacrifice in The Gift had been for naught. When she looks out over the
tower, remembering back to the events of The Gift, it’s hard to tell if she’s
thinking of suicide or if she believes she needs to jump again in order to
save the world from the Hell it appears to be.
A final comment:
I’m not at all a fan of the demon bikers. The writing of them is over the top
and needlessly heavy-handed. Worse yet, most demons on the show serve a
metaphorical purpose. If there is one here, I don’t get it.
Trivia notes: (1) Xander’s “great googly moogly” comes from Maggie and
the Ferocious Beast. (2) Xander referred to The Fury when Willow used
telepathy to talk to him because that movie involved a girl with psychic
powers. (3) Spike mentioned Dadaism after some of the Buffybot’s word
salad. See the link (and recall that Buffy used a similar expression to
Xander in The Freshman). (4) The fact that Dawn’s class created a high-
tech, futurist society after reading Walden is surely intended as irony.
Thoreau’s purpose in living by himself in the woods was to “see if I could
not learn what [life] had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that
I had not lived." That may refer to Buffy’s situation here. (5) Tara
mentioned that they could perform the spell because Mercury was in
retrograde. Mercury was the messenger god. One of his duties was to guide
the souls of the dead to the underworld. In astrological retrograde, Mercury
would then do the opposite, meaning guide the souls of the dead back to the
world. (6) Willow’s invocation to the fawn – “Adonai, Helomi, Pine”, etc. –
comes from a 17th Century book of demonology called The Lesser Key of
Solomon. The specific words are from the “Prayer at Calling”, which you
can find here. (7) Tara’s “Grr! Arrgh!” as they bid goodbye to Giles is an in
joke because it was taken from the closing credits of the show. (8) Willow
calls on Osiris to resurrect Buffy, and it was Osiris whom Dawn invoked in
Forever. (9) In Nightmares (S1) we saw that Buffy’s nightmare was rising
out of a grave as a vampire. Here she has to claw her way out of her coffin
just like one. SMG, as I mentioned in my notes on Nightmares, is somewhat
claustrophobic and was not happy that Joss made her do this again after he
promised not to. (10) Razor’s “I’ll service ya, girl toy.” is a pun. To
“service” someone in American slang is to have sex with them. The phrase
“girl toy” is a play on “boy toy” and may also refer to sex toys generally.
(11) Xander’s “We got trouble. Right here in Hellmouth City.” plays off the
lyrics from the song “Trouble” in “The Music Man”. (12) Tara’s spell
invoking Aradia to find Willow is the same one Willow used in Fear, Itself.
(13) Xander’s comment about Tara being Tinkerbell recalls Tara’s comment
to Willow in Out of my Mind: “TARA: How'd you do that? With the light?
WILLOW: Oh, you know. You taught me. TARA: I taught you teeny
Tinkerbell light.” (14) NORAD, which Xander mentions, is the North
American Aerospace Defense Command, and he means the headquarters. In
short, it’s the command central for a nuclear war. “Defcon 1” is the highest
level of alert. (15) “Gentlemen, start your engines” – what Razor says when
they destroy the Buffybot – is the phrase used to start the Indianapolis 500.
(16) Xander referred to the demon bikers as “the wild bunch” after the
movie of that title. Some of the events in Bargaining 2 bear a general
resemblance to the movie. (17) Xander’s “the better to cut you down to
size” plays off the dialogue in the story Little Red Riding Hood. (17) The
UPN Standards & Practices department was much more lenient than the
WB’s. We see evidence of that here with Willow and Tara kissing in a
romantic way (something the WB never allowed) and will see much more
later. (18) For those watching on DVD, there was a lot of discussion over
the summer between S5 and S6 about whether another Slayer would be
called upon Buffy’s death. The answer is that there would not. The reason is
that calling the new Slayer works only for one death. The Slayer line runs
through Faith now, and has since Kendra died. It’s important to add that
while Joss said this, that doesn’t mean the characters within the series
realize it.
 After Life
“From her mother’s womb untimely ripp’d”
I want to begin this post with a brief digression into the Hero’s Journey. I
decided that any mention of that before After Life would spoil new viewers
about Buffy’s death and resurrection. I think the steps on the Journey from
here on out are sufficiently vague that I can talk about them without
spoiling anyone.
You can see more at the link, but I’ll walk through a brief explanation of the
Hero’s Journey here. Joseph Campbell developed the idea of what he called
a “monomyth”. Campbell argued that most myths and legends follow a
similar outline. He arrived at his classification from theory based in Jungian
psychology. I don’t want to get sidetracked with debates about that, so my
description of Campbell’s work will be entirely pragmatic.
What Campbell did was compare various myths and legends across cultures
and down the ages. He found that he was able to define similar elements in
most, if not all of them. It’s important not to interpret “similar” as
“identical”. He didn’t mean that all myths are identical in form or content.
Nor did he mean that the creators worked off of a common prompt. The
stages he identified might happen in different order in different myths;
some myths might leave out a stage altogether. But in general, any story of
a hero was likely to incorporate certain basic ideas.
Buffy’s journey is the journey of a Hero – “she’s a Hero, you see” – so I’ll
give a quick example of how hers can fit into Campbell’s structure. The
first stage of the journey is the Call to Adventure. We see this in the very
first episode, when Giles calls her to her Slayer destiny (with a little fudge
to account for the movie):
“Buffy: Oh, why can't you people just leave me alone?
Giles: Because you are the Slayer. Into each generation a Slayer is born,
one girl in all the world, a Chosen One, one born with the strength and skill
to hunt the vampires…”
The Hero refuses the Call, which Buffy certainly did in Welcome to the
Hellmouth, and perhaps (as I argue) during all of S1. In order to answer the
Call, the Hero gets supernatural aid, which Angel delivers to her in WttH in
the form of a cross. As I mentioned in notes to that first episode essay,
Angel’s name comes from the Greek word meaning “messenger” and the
supernatural implications of that name in this context are fairly blatant.
After a variety of additional stages, we get to the stage of Apotheosis, a
Greek word which means literally “near God”. This usually involves the
death of the Hero, hence my postponing of the topic until this episode.
Quoting from Wikipedia (all quotes from the link above), “When someone
dies a physical death, or dies to the self to live in spirit, he or she moves
beyond the pairs of opposites to a state of divine knowledge, love,
compassion and bliss. A more mundane way of looking at this step is that it
is a period of rest, peace and fulfillment before the hero begins the return.”
When we learned at the end of After Life that Buffy had been pulled out of
heaven, that established that she was in the “period of rest, peace and
fulfillment before the hero begins the return.”
The next two stages consist of the Ultimate Boon and the Refusal of the
Return. I mention these stages for the obvious reason that I believe they
describe the events of S6 and S7, though in reverse order. Keep them in
mind as we watch:
“The ultimate boon is the achievement of the goal of the quest. It is what
the person went on the journey to get. All the previous steps serve to
prepare and purify the person for this step, since in many myths the boon is
something transcendent like the elixir of life itself, or a plant that supplies
immortality, or the holy grail.”
The receipt of the “Ultimate Boon” helps explain the Christ imagery we
saw in The Gift. Buffy’s bringing something back with her, something of
value to the world, whether she knows it or not. She began her journey to
adulthood on her own behalf, but now there’s more at stake.
Before we get there, though, the Hero must be reluctant to return to the
world: “Having found bliss and enlightenment in the other world, the hero
may not want to return to the ordinary world to bestow the boon onto his
fellow man.”
Note that the “refusal of the return” fits in smoothly with the “stages of
grief” metaphor introduced in Bargaining. After Life serves as the third part
of a trilogy with Bargaining 1 and 2, or perhaps a coda to them. In After
Life we learn that Buffy isn’t grieving because of impending death, she’s
grieving at the loss of her time in heaven. She didn’t ask to return and
doesn’t want to. Think about it this way: Buffy gained entry to heaven
partly because of the way she lived her life and partly as a result of a
moment of grace when she sacrificed herself for her sister. She has no
guarantee that she’ll have access to that in the future. No wonder she
appears so different to her friends.
Buffy’s reaction isn’t just important to this one episode. The same rule
holds true in S6 as in all previous seasons, namely the first three episodes
set the themes for the season. Some of those themes are relatively obvious,
such as the stages of grief metaphor, the Hero’s Journey sequence, the issue
of how Buffy handles her return, and the impact of the events of Bargaining
on both her and on her friends. All these appear in the opening trilogy and
set the template for S6.
Let’s put some of this in terms of the metaphor of adulthood. One way to
interpret what was meant by “bargaining” is that Buffy wants to postpone or
delay her adulthood. If I could just have more time….
We now learn that Buffy has been torn out of heaven by her friends.
Consistent with what I said about Buffy reaching adulthood in The Gift,
IMO what Buffy experienced and has now lost is the sense of euphoria
which comes when we first realize that we’ve made it all the way to
adulthood, though we can also see it as a period of nostalgia for the
childhood she’s left behind: “I was happy. At peace. I knew that everyone I
cared about was all right. I knew it. Time ... didn't mean anything ... nothing
had form ... but I was still me, you know? And I was warm ... and I was
loved ... and I was finished. Complete.” It was the period of rest, peace, and
fulfillment before beginning her Return.
We need to imagine how the Hero feels on reaching this point: Success!
Completion! Then she’s snapped back to reality, just like the rest of us are
when we reach adulthood. It’s depressing when we realize that adulthood is
actually hard. She’s now feeling as if she was ripped out of childhood
prematurely (hence my quote at the top of the essay).
The title of the episode reinforces this. “After Life” seems like a play on
“afterbirth” (though there are multiple meanings to the title, as usual).
Taking it this way, Buffy has been reborn as an adult after her life as a child.
The demon – also an “afterbirth” of sorts – I see as a metaphor which could
be interpreted a couple of different ways. My preferred reading is that it
represents Buffy’s anger, even rage, at the way her friends pulled her back
into the responsibilities of adulthood. That’s evident when Buffy sees the
pictures of her friends turn to corpses. The demon’s words express that
anger, first at her friends:

BUFFY (possessed by the demon): (low hoarse voice) What did you do?
Do you know what you did? You're like children. (Willow and Tara sitting
up in bed staring in fear) Your hands smell of death. Bitches! Filthy little
bitches, rattling the bones. Did you cut the throat? Did you pat its head?
Buffy grabs a crystal ball off a nearby table and throws it at them. Willow
and Tara shriek as it smashes on the wall above their heads.
BUFFY: (shouts) The blood dried on your hands, didn't it?
TARA: Oh my god, oh my god.
BUFFY: (shouts) You were stained. You still are. I know what you did! …
DAWN: (low hoarse voice) All of you did it. You stupid children. (the
others all staring at her) Did you think the blood wouldn't reach you? I
smell the death on you. Look at what you've done!”
Then it turns on Buffy:
DEMON: (whispery voice) You don't belong here.
DEMON: (O.S.) Did they tell you, you belonged here?
DEMON: Did they say this was your home again?
DEMON: Were you offered pretty lies, little girl?
DEMON: Or did they even give you a choice?
DEMON: You're the one who's barely here. Set on this earth like a bubble.
The nature of the demon, I think, reinforces its role as metaphorical anger.
It’s temporary and will dissipate in time, just as anger does, unless we give
it substance. Buffy’s struggling with her anger when Willow’s spell causes
that anger to manifest. That allows Buffy to choke off her anger by
beheading the demon, but the unfortunate consequence is that this
metaphorically prevents Buffy’s anger from fading away. We could see the
beheading of the demon as preventing Buffy from being destroyed by her
anger, but it also means cutting off the catharsis that rage might have
provided.
Buffy then does in “real life” what she just did in metaphor – she represses
her anger by thanking her friends for bringing her back, telling them pretty
lies in the process.
When Dawn tells Buffy that the others “just want to see you happy”, Buffy
reacts entirely in character: she sacrifices her own feelings for the sake of
her friends. It’s incredibly painful. She thought she had made one last
sacrifice, but it turns out that life continues to demand more.
Willow continues to hide the details of her spell even from Tara, denying
that she understood what the “hitchhiker” said about the spell even as those
words described what Willow did with the fawn. Her eyes turned black
again when she – not Tara, just Willow – made the demon solid. Not good.
Spike’s angry comment about magic – “there’s always consequences” –
seems to refer not to the potential that a spell will go wrong, but to things
which happen outside the spell itself, what we might call collateral
consequences. Is Spike’s statement consistent with what we’ve seen to date
in the show? Not as far as I’m concerned. The only example of “collateral
consequences” before this episode was in Superstar (and, arguably, Restless
or, very indirectly, Becoming 2).
Marti Noxon said that “On Buffy, we play with the idea of witchcraft or
magic, and it’s always about the intention of the person who uses it. Magic
per se is not a bad thing. What they do with it is either going to be good or
bad.” This strikes me as inconsistent with Spike’s statement, since his word
“always” is obviously wrong given what Marti said.
That’s a nitpick at this point. For me, the episode is made in two scenes:
“every night I save you”; and the ending with Spike and Buffy. Both are
heartbreaking.
Trivia notes: (1) The Mercurochrome Spike wanted to use on Buffy’s hands
is an old antiseptic no longer sold in most countries because it contains
mercury. (2) Spike’s concern that Buffy might come back wrong no doubt
arises from his experience with Doc in Forever, when Doc warned of that
possibility. (3) Angel was feral in Beauty and the Beasts. Willow
remembers that and uses it to justify Buffy’s behavior to Tara. (4)
“Thaumogenesis” is a portmanteau word meaning “originating in magic”.
(5) Buffy’s “Those of us who fail history? Doomed to repeat it in summer
school” plays off the aphorism by George Santayana that “those who cannot
remember the past are doomed to repeat it.”
 Flooded
I didn’t like Flooded when it first aired, nor for a long time after. I’ve
changed my mind, and now I think it’s pretty good. Why?
The key point that I didn’t know years ago is that “Flooding” is a term from
psychology:
“It works on the principles of classical conditioning—a form of Pavlov's
classical conditioning—where patients change their behaviors to avoid
negative stimuli. According to Pavlov, we learn through associations, so if
we have a phobia it is because we associate the feared object or stimulus
with something negative.
A psychotherapist using flooding to treat a phobia might expose a patient to
vast amounts of the feared stimulus, hence if the patient suffered from
arachnophobia, the therapist might lock them in a room full of spiders.
While the patient would initially be very anxious, the mind cannot stay
anxious forever. When nothing bad happens the patient begins to calm
down and so from that moment on associate a feeling of calm with the
previously feared object.”
What is Buffy “flooded” with in this episode? Adult responsibilities,
exemplified by her financial problems for which the money-grubbing
demon is a metaphor. I should emphasize that Flooded is NOT an episode
about Buffy’s financial problems; those are just a synecdoche for her
overall concerns about adult life generally. It’s fear of adulthood which is
her problem. The fact that the plumbing failed in the basement – flooding it
– tells us that her fear is subconscious. And, of course, the nerds are classic
arrested adolescents – what Buffy must avoid.
Did it work? Well, at the end of the episode Buffy left Giles and Dawn to
deal with the cleanup and other problems while she rushed off to Angel.
What makes the “flooded” metaphor especially good is that it also works
other ways as well. Buffy’s fascination with the water flowing down the
drain may suggest how she sees her life right now. In his review for the AV
Club, Noel Murray identified some others:
“The episode opens with Buffy trying to fix a leaky pipe in the basement
—“We meet at last, Mr. Drippy!”—and instead causing water to gush out
from every available hose and spigot. It’s a funny little pre-credits blackout
sketch, but also a hell of a metaphor. Fixing some immediate problem—
like, say, bringing Buffy back from the dead—can cause even greater
problems if you don’t understand the underlying issues. Later in “Flooded,”
a returning Giles will tell Willow this same thing outright, calling her
“stupid” and arrogant for attempting a spell so dark and uncontrollable.
When Willow boasts about her mastery, Giles dismisses it, saying, “There
are others in this world who can do what you did; you just don’t want to
meet them.” To which Willow snaps, “I’m very powerful, and maybe it’s
not such a good idea for you to piss me off.” What’s the “gushing water” in
this scenario? The dark forces that Willow may have unleashed on the
world when she brought Buffy back? Or Willow’s growing cockiness?”
Noel’s comment references the passage in the episode which garnered the
most attention, namely, the fight between Willow and Giles. I want to talk
about it in detail, so I’ll quote the bulk of it here:
GILES: (over his shoulder) You're a very stupid girl.
Willow pauses chewing, slowly stops smiling and frowns.
WILLOW: What? Giles...
GILES: (turns to face her) Do you have any idea what you've done? The
forces you've harnessed, the lines you've crossed?
WILLOW: I thought you'd be ... impressed, or, or something.
GILES: Oh, don't worry, you've ... made a very deep impression. Of
everyone here ... you were the one I trusted most to respect the forces of
nature.
WILLOW: Are you saying you don't trust me?
GILES: (intensely) Think what you've done to Buffy.
WILLOW: I brought her back!
GILES: At incredible risk!
WILLOW: Risk? Of what? Making her deader?
GILES: Of killing us all. Unleashing hell on Earth, I mean, shall I go on?
WILLOW: No! (stands) Giles, I did what I had to do. I did what nobody
else could do.
GILES: Oh, there are others in this world who can do what you did. You
just don't want to meet them. (turns away again)
WILLOW: No, probably not, but ... well, they're the bad guys. I'm not a bad
guy. (upset) I brought Buffy back into this world, a-and maybe the word
you should be looking for is "congratulations."
GILES: Having Buffy back in the world makes me feel ... indescribably
wonderful, but I wouldn't congratulate you if you jumped off a cliff and
happened to survive.
WILLOW: That's not what I did, Giles.
GILES: (angry) You were lucky.
WILLOW: I wasn't lucky. I was amazing. And how would you know? You
weren't even there.
GILES: If I had been, I'd have bloody well stopped you. The magicks you
channeled are more ferocious and primal than anything you can hope to
understand, (even more angry) and you are lucky to be alive, you rank,
arrogant amateur!
Let’s look at this from both sides. Willow had to have been shocked by
Giles’s reaction. She was very proud of what she’d accomplished.
Moreover, she could reasonably have expected Giles to understand how
extraordinary her accomplishment was and had no reason to think he would
disapprove. While others have expressed doubts about her magic in the past
(notably Oz in Fear, Itself), Giles never has since Willow volunteered to
restore Angel’s soul in Becoming. During that time he often encouraged her
to do spells (Something Blue; Primeval; The Replacement) or said nothing
when she performed one which was obviously useful (Choices; Blood Ties;
The Weight of the World). Giles strongly implied in the Bargaining 1 teaser
that Sunnydale needed a Slayer, and he admits that he’s happy that Buffy is
back. Willow could reasonably believe that Giles would be forgiving of her
actions now that she was successful, even if he presumably wouldn’t have
given her permission beforehand.
I think Willow came to see Giles as a surrogate father. Her affection for
him, and his for her, was obvious in Buffy v. Dracula and when he left in
Bargaining. Instead of the praise she expected, he lashed out at her. He
didn’t discuss it, he didn’t insist on the details of the spell, he didn’t ask her
for her reasons. He didn’t really have the factual basis for his accusations
(even if he was probably right). I see Willow as feeling hurt by the violence
of his reaction, so her anger was pretty natural, though threatening Giles
was over the top.
But from Giles’s perspective, he’s not Willow’s “surrogate father”. He’s
Buffy’s, and his duty is to her. Willow is so pleased with herself that she
isn’t seeing the real problems Buffy’s having, but Giles can. Willow’s
boastful pride to the contrary, the spell was far from perfect. She resurrected
Buffy in her own coffin, from which she had to claw her way out. No one
was there to greet her (not Willow’s fault, but still); she wandered all over
town dazed and confused; and, while still suffering the trauma of
resurrection, had to rescue her friends from demon hellions. Willow doesn’t
know it yet, but her spell actually yanked Buffy out of heaven, a fact which
Buffy is concealing in order to spare Willow’s own feelings. And those are
just the consequences we know of to this point; there may be more later.
One more point about Willow. She is, as I’ve suggested repeatedly, Buffy’s
metaphorical spirit. In my reading of S6, Willow’s story will parallel
Buffy’s thematically precisely because Buffy’s crisis in S6 is largely a crisis
of the spirit. You should pay particular attention to Willow’s storyline in S6
with this idea in mind.
Xander’s continuing refusal to tell anyone about the marriage suggests a
fear of commitment which appears similar to Buffy’s reluctance to commit
to adulthood (“No job? I wish.”). It also will parallel another story line
which I’ll discuss beginning in episode 9, with Xander’s metaphorical role
prominent in that. For now, the way Xander keeps dodging Anya might
bring back memories of this dialogue from The Gift:
Anya stares at him a moment, then slaps him across the face.
XANDER: Can I take that as a "maybe"?
ANYA: You're proposing to me!
XANDER: Yes...
ANYA: You're proposing to me 'cause we're gonna die! And you think it's
romantic and sexy and, and you know you're not gonna have to go through
with it 'cause the world's gonna end!
Like Willow and Xander, Dawn’s metaphorical role is important to S6.
There’s a hint of that in her dialogue with Tara:
DAWN: Oh come on, Tara. I am so old enough to do research. Do you
really think I'm not mature enough?
TARA: I think you're very mature for your age ... but you're still only
fifteen.
DAWN: Right, fifteen. As in *teen*ager. You know, if you don't let me look
at the pictures, I'm gonna learn everything I know about demons on the
street.
Tara sighs, hands her a book.
TARA: Knock yourself out.
DAWN: Thank you. See? (sits) No biggie. I can totally handle it.
Season 6 often gets accused of dropping the metaphors, and it does at some
crucial times, but they are present and the metaphorical roles of Willow,
Xander, and Dawn are critical to the season.
I found Flooded frustrating on first watch because it was so obvious that
Buffy’s friends aren’t helping her adjust: “I just, I feel like I'm spending all
of my time trying to be okay, so they don't worry. It's exhausting.” They
don’t laugh at her jokes, they offer no solutions to her problems, they harp
on her emotional withdrawal, almost everything they say is awkward or
wrong, and they fight about her where she can hear them. What they’re
doing is expecting her to behave as if nothing had happened to her, which is
precisely the source of her concern. At the same time, they aren’t
necessarily behaving very much like adults themselves. What I now realize
is that Flooded fits right in with the season.
Two final points:
I’ve seen lots of debate regarding the role of the 3 nerds (above and beyond
being arrested adolescents and a warning to Buffy). Viewers usually fall
into one of two camps: they represent the audience, and the writers are
making fun of us; they represent the writers. I go with the second
interpretation. I see them as little kids telling stories to each other – just
what the writers are doing when they hash out the show. There’s a lot of
meta-commentary in S6 and even more in S7, and I’ll mention it from time
to time.
For purposes of the seasonal arc, it’s worth taking some time to satisfy
yourself on the identity of the real scary monster(s) in this episode.
Trivia notes: (1) Xander’s “we should start gathering up two of every
animal” refers, of course, to Noah’s Ark. (2) Xander claims to be supportive
like a flying buttress, which is a term from architecture. (3) The use of a
gun (by the bank guard) is rare on the show and will be meaningful later in
the season. (4) Warren’s “back things up a parsec” uses a term from
astronomy. It’s a measure of distance equal to 3.26 light years (a bit over 19
trillion miles). (5) The original plan for the nerd trio was to use Brad Kane
(Tucker Wells in The Prom; the voice of Jonathan singing in Superstar) as
the third member. Brad was unavailable, so Tom Lenk (previously one of
Harmony’s minions in Real Me) was substituted as “Tucker’s brother”,
Andrew. (6) The nerds make so many Star Wars and Star Trek references
that I’m not going to even try to annotate them all. I assume they’re familiar
to most viewers. (7) Willow’s mention of the Blair Witch refers to the
movie of that title. (8) Giles’ argument with Willow about magic reminds
me of what he told her in Becoming 1: “Giles: (very concerned) W-
Willow... channeling... such potent magicks through yourself, it could open
a door that you may not be able to close.” (9) Buffy calls the demon a
“mook” which is a slang term for an unpleasant person. (10) Buffy’s “no…
more…full…copper…re-pipe” is a reference to the movie Mommie
Dearest. (11) Giles’s reference to getting knocked unconscious brings to
mind Cordelia’s comment in Gingerbread: “Cordelia: Things are way out
of control, Giles. First the thing at school, and then my mom confiscates all
of my black clothes and scented candles. I came over here to tell Buffy to
stop this craziness and found you all unconscious... again. How many times
have you been knocked out, anyway?” (12) Angel learned that Buffy was
alive in the AtS episode Carpe Noctem.
 Life Serial
Without straying into spoilers, I can say that I think Life Serial foreshadows
some very important themes for S6, including what some of the characters
will do later on. Note particularly in each of the first 3 vignettes what the
nerd is trying to accomplish with Buffy and how he goes about it. As we get
to later episodes I’ll come back to this; for now, avoiding spoilers limits
what I can say about the episode. As this promise of future relevance
suggests, Life Serial is an important episode. The additional fact that I think
it’s hilarious makes it one of the highlights of the season for me.
As usual, the classroom lesson relates to the theme of the episode. Note that
the teacher’s name is Mike and see trivia note 1. Here’s the dialogue from
that scene:
“MIKE: Social Construction of Reality. Who can tell me what that is?
(many students raise their hands including Willow) Rachel.
RACHEL: A concept involving a couple of opposing theories, one stressing
the externality and independence of social reality from individuals. (Buffy
looks confused) MIKE: And the flip side? (many hands raised) Steve?
STEVE: That each individual participates fully in the construction of his or
her own life….
WILLOW: (lowers hand, speaks to Mike) Because social phenomena don't
have unproblematic objective existences. They have to be interpreted and
given meanings by those who encounter them.”
Cutting through the jargon, what they’re collectively saying is that there are
competing theories about the extent to which people have control over their
own lives. The question is whether individuals (1) live their lives under the
influence of external events over which they have no control (remember my
post on Goodbye Iowa about Foucault and the extent to which society tries
to mold us into conformity); or (2) can actually play a role in creating their
own lives, at least in part by interpreting what others are doing, namely by
deciding on their own what meaning to attribute to the actions of others and
thus how they themselves will respond to those actions. See more here.
The remainder of the episode then consists of Buffy searching for
alternative ways of living her life – trying them out serially, to emphasize
the pun – as she faces challenges which require her to interpret and give
meaning to the actions of others. Buffy’s unable to do that; she fails to
understand what the Trio are doing and therefore isn’t able to discover how
their actions are affecting her life. As of now, Buffy is acting as if Rachel’s
definition was correct: the world exists external to her and she’s simply
buffeted (heh) by those events. Or, to use Spike’s wording, “So you, uh, just
what? Gonna let this whoever play you till it figures out what kills you?”
And Buffy gives her own answer: “I let the demon set the rules.”
The nerds don’t do anything to Buffy in the 4th vignette, but it still follows
the same principles I mentioned above. I’ll discuss this when we get to
episode 10.
Trivia notes: (1) The title, as usual, has multiple meanings, but one of them
seems to be a reference to the old commercials for Life Cereal. (2) Warren’s
“Francis 7, this is Logan 5” is from the 1976 movie Logan’s Run. (3) The
picture Buffy looks at in Tara’s art book is Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Theresa.
I’m not certain, but I suspect the message is that Buffy appears lost in
ecstasy while time passes. (4) Tony’s phrase “out on the DL” uses a
baseball term meaning “disabled list” and used for players unable to play
because of injury. IOW, he’s got men out sick or injured. (5) Tony’s
reference to Buffy as “Gidget” refers to the 1960s TV show of that name.
(6) J-boxes, which Danny was supposed to put in, are junction boxes for
electrical connections. (7) The petrified hamsters are apparently in the
basement because Giles said in Tough Love that nobody was ever satisfied
with them. (8) The Star Trek:TNG episode where the Enterprise kept
blowing up was Cause and Effect. (9) The X-Files episode where the bank
kept exploding was Monday. (10) Warren’s “the mummy hand has ceased to
be” and Andrew’s “it is an ex-mummy hand” both play off the Monty
Python routine of the Dead Parrot. (11) Presumably Spike’s motorcycle is
the one he took from the demons in Bargaining 2. (12) Final Jeopardy is the
last round on the TV show Jeopardy. (13) Dr. No was the first James Bond
film. Sean Connery starred as Bond. (14) Warren’s “don’t make me pull
over” is what parents stereotypically say to children in the car when they’re
misbehaving. (15) The check Giles gave to Buffy was for $10,000. The
prop was auctioned on eBay in August 2004 and sold for $990.
 All The Way
All the Way is a very light episode, though with some disturbing incidents
along the way leading up to an ending that should be very disturbing
indeed. Still, the main plot seems like fluff, but I don’t think it is. IMO, this
episode serves a structural purpose similar to that in Bad Eggs. As I pointed
out then, Bad Eggs had a strong sexual theme because Buffy was about to
have sex with Angel in the very next episode (Surprise). The events of All
the Way are setting up some events which will take place in the next three
episodes. Of course those future events are All About Buffy.
The episode seems Dawn-centric, but there’s an important point about
Buffy as well. She’s not failing in her adult responsibilities just because she
needs money (Flooded) or lacks a career path (Life Serial). At the end of All
the Way she outright shirks her parental role, forcing Giles to discipline
Dawn. We might excuse her lack of money as not her fault at all, and we
might cut her some slack on the life path because, after all, she’s not even
21 yet. But for her to fail Dawn after the events of S5 is a sign that
something is very wrong. You can see that from the look on Giles’s face.
There’s plenty of metaphor too, though we won’t see the payoff for a while.
Xander (Buffy’s heart) represses his obvious doubts and announces the
engagement to Anya. Again I don’t want to spoil things, but this seems
important to me for understanding Buffy’s path. I’ll discuss this in
connection with episode 10.
Willow (Buffy’s spirit) very seriously abuses Tara. This will turn out to be
extremely important for Buffy’s journey in S6, both in plot and in metaphor.
The cause of their fight was Willow’s use of magic: unnecessary at first,
downright crazy later on. This is an important point of departure for S6.
Where magic was a metaphor for the love between Willow and Tara in S4
(e.g., Who Are You?) and S5 (e.g., Family), it’s now become a source of
friction. The metaphor is shifting, though this is more obvious in hindsight
than it was at the time, and this shift resulted in some confusion in the
audience.
On its own terms, erasing Tara’s memory of their fight is easily the worst
thing Willow has done thus far. It’s a violation of Tara’s mind and integrity,
one which is particularly offensive in light of what Glory did to Tara last
season. Willow isn’t treating Tara as an equal, as a subject (to use the
existentialist term), but as an object to be manipulated for her own
convenience. She’s treating Tara no better than Warren treated April.
I’ve seen viewers compare the forget spell to Willow’s spell in Something
Blue, but I see that previous spell as intrinsically different. In Something
Blue, Willow cast the spell to control herself. That was unwise, and it
backfired so that it ended up affecting others, but she didn’t intend that.
Here, for the first time, her intent was solely and exclusively to harm
another person (I don’t count Glory). Willow is using Tara, and that’s
inexcusable.
Willow’s proposed spell to shift the patrons at the Bronze into an alternate
dimension can safely be described as insane. Her success in resurrecting
Buffy has obviously given her an arrogance which is incompatible with the
prudent use of the power she possesses.
The one thing I can say on Willow’s behalf is that underlying her arrogance,
she’s still fundamentally insecure, just as she has been from the beginning.
What self-confidence she has is completely tied up in her ability with
magic. Thus, when anyone challenges her use of magic, she interprets that
as questioning the very source of her self-confidence. For this reason, the
way Giles confronted her in Flooded seems to have had the opposite of its
intended effect, and set the stage for Willow to resist even Tara’s much
gentler criticisms here. Then Tara innocently mentioned Giles, and that’s
what set Willow off. The consequences will reverberate throughout the
remainder of the series.
Trivia notes: (1) For non-English speakers, to “go all the way” is American
slang for having sexual intercourse. When Zack and Justin use it to talk
about Dawn and Janice, the dialogue makes full use of the “biting = sex”
metaphor. (2) Xander is geographically challenged. Katmandu is a city (in
Nepal), not a country, and it’s landlocked. (3) Giles is a bit confused too –
Ahab was not a pirate. (4) Anya’s joke about angels named Charlie refers
to the TV series Charlie’s Angels. Anya’s hair is like that of Farrah Fawcett,
who starred on that show. (5) Xander’s promise to teach Anya to play
“Shiver Me Timbers” is a pun. It’s a stereotypical pirate expression as well
as a euphemism for the penis (hence Tara’s response that she’s not much for
the timber). (6) Dawn taking the coin involves a plot point which began in
Intervention and will come to fruition later in the season. (7) Spike’s
reference to The Great Pumpkin is to the annual Charlie Brown Halloween
special on TV. (8) Buffy refers to previous Halloween episodes when she
reminds Giles about costumes which take over your personality
(Halloween) and Irish fear demons (Fear, Itself). (9) Kaltenbach is
humming the song “Pop Goes the Weasel” when we first see him. (9)
Buffy’s “you caught us with our parties down” plays off the phrase “caught
with his pants down”, meaning surprised. (10) Janice and Dawn use the
same device to fool their parents/guardians as the SG used in Surprise. (11)
Janice’s reference to her mother as “the Mominator” plays off the
Terminator. (12) Zack’s reference to Kaltenbach as “looney tunes” is an
American slang expression meaning he’s crazy. (13) Zack’s “Pumpkins.
Very dangerous. You go first.” plays off a similar line in Raiders of the Lost
Ark. (14) Xander’s “once more into the breach” paraphrases Henry V’s
speech at Harfleur in Henry V, Act III. (15) Dawn’s claim that she never
pays for lipstick recalls Buffy’s words in Becoming 1: “You're not from
Bullock's, are you? Cause I-I meant to pay for that lipstick.” (16) Willow
silenced the crowd at the Bronze using the Arabic word “sukut” (silence).
She returned the room to normal with “tukulum” (talk). (17) Buffy refers to
Dawn “parking” which is American slang for finding a private spot to park
the car and make out. (18) Justin’s “trick or treat” is what American kids
say when they go door to door on Halloween.
 Once More With Feeling
I’ve watched Once More With Feeling more than any other episode
(Becoming and Chosen are close), and I think I like it better every time.
There are so many clever, subtle points that I can’t possibly mention them
all, so I’m just going to hit the main issues.
Joss gave extensive commentary, part of which explains his goal in the
episode:
“The important thing was to set up not just this show, but the rest of the
season, the rest of the series. The episode before, the episode after. … I
didn't want to say, "Look! We're better than a TV show!" I wanted to say,
"You can do all of this in an episode of television. It just depends on how
much you care." And because I think one of the other things about musicals
is everybody saying, "Oh, look! We're taking you outside the world of
television. We're better than the world of television." Which of course
drives me crazy. I love TV. I love what you can do with it. And to be able to
go this far emotionally, and be this silly on a regular old episode of
television – albeit eight minutes over – is a way of saying, "This is just an
episode. This is just what we do. It's not better, it's just TV in all its glory."
And the way I celebrate musicals, I celebrate this medium; and hopefully
that comes through a little bit too.”
I’ll start with the most important fact about Buffy: she’s depressed. We
learn this in the teaser, with Buffy staring blankly at her suddenly different
alarm clock and then coloring a page all in black. She tells us that she’s
depressed in the opening song. Joss: “This number here – very much in the
Disney tradition, what Jeffrey Katzenberg would call an 'I want' song. …
the song where the heroine tells you exactly what it is she's missing in her
life. Which in Buffy's case is her life: she just doesn't feel connected.”
Follow the lyrics, with my emphasis added to make the point:
Every single night, the same arrangement
I go out and fight the fight.
Still I always feel this strange estrangement
Nothing here is real, nothing here is right.
I've been making shows of trading blows
Just hoping no one knows
That I've been going through the motions
Walking through the part.
Nothing seems to penetrate my heart.
I was always brave, and kind of righteous.
Now I find I'm wavering.
Crawl out of your grave, you'll find this fight just
Doesn't mean a thing….
She does pretty well with fiends from hell
But lately we can tell
That she's just going through the motions….
Will I stay this way forever?
Sleepwalk through my life's endeavor?....
Going through the motions
Losing all my drive.
I can't even see
If this is really me
And I just want to be-
Aliiiiiive.
Buffy’s description of her emotional state fits with the symptoms of
depression:
“Depression is a medical illness that causes a persistent feeling of sadness
and loss of interest. Depression can cause physical symptoms, too. … [I]t
affects how you feel, think and behave. Depression can lead to a variety of
emotional and physical problems. You may have trouble doing normal day-
to-day activities, and depression may make you feel as if life isn't worth
living.”
Her other 2 songs reinforce the theme: “I touch the fire and it freezes me/I
look into and it’s black….I want the fire back”. The fire, of course, is
emotion. She’s not feeling any, a classic symptom of depression (“blunted
affect”). Later she begs Sweet to “give me something to sing about”.
There’s no melody when she reveals that she’s been pulled out of heaven.
Even her participation in “What Can’t We Face” is more fatalistic than
optimistic. Joss: “she says what appears to be a rousing chorus of ‘We can
handle this, we're a great team’, but what she's actually saying is ‘I'm bored,
it means nothing to me, they've got nothing new.’"
The fact that Buffy is depressed should come as no surprise. I mentioned in
my post on Bargaining that the title referenced the third of the stages of
grief; depression is the fourth stage. As in every other season, episode 7 is
giving us the key to the season, just as Joss specifically stated in the passage
I quoted above.
If we translate this back into life terms, Buffy devoted her late teenage years
to achieving the goal of adulthood. Now that she got there, she finds that it
isn’t some glorious, heavenly state, it’s hard work. She doesn’t want to do
it, so she’s “going through the motions” of her slaying. She’s listless and
lifeless, passively aggressively refusing the return to reality to put it in
Hero’s Journey terms. As we’ll see, slaying isn’t a job that she can
sleepwalk through, it requires commitment and dedication. The absence of
these will have significant consequences. Joss is setting up the season,
indeed the rest of the series, right here in this episode.
What makes OMWF such a great episode – it would almost certainly win a
fan vote for single best/favorite episode – is that it doesn’t “merely”
establish Buffy’s arc, it gives us important information about each of the
core 4. I’ll take them in turn.
Joss explains Giles’ song this way: “He's singing about, you know, it's
every parent's dilemma. ‘I want to take care of you, but eventually I have to
teach you to take care of yourself.’” This is a very basic theme common to
all parents. Buffy has to make decisions on her own now, but she’s not
doing that (as we saw at the end of All the Way, an incident Giles mentions
here). The whole point of Giles’s role from here on out is that he needs to
remain involved in Buffy’s life but not to the point of making decisions for
her. She’s going to need to learn from her own mistakes; as I mentioned in
my post on Bargaining, I think a lot of fans struggled with this even though
it’s a very natural life transition.
Note that when Giles tries to explain how he’s “standing in the way”, Buffy
doesn’t hear him. She doesn’t want to. Metaphorically, Giles is useless at
this point. Buffy’s crisis is one of the spirit, not the mind.
Dawn feels stifled, which we see when Giles takes the book away from her
in the teaser, from her insistence that she can stay alone in the house, and
from her brief song: “Does anybody even notice/does anybody even care?”
Her dance was an effort to escape confinement. I’ll suggest that this is a
metaphor for the journey her character will take in S6.

In his commentary, Joss says: “Here we see in this dance how [Sweet’s]
bringing Michelle– bringing Dawn – to a more mature, almost sexualized
place; that she's been saying "I'm ready to go here, I'm ready to grow up",
but she's not sure that she is. And as in a classic fairy tale, which is the
feeling I wanted to get from this particular sequence, the demon shows her
a little bit more of herself than she knew was there. And although it
frightens her, she comes out the wiser for it after he's defeated.”
This follows very naturally from the events of All the Way, but I should also
note the metaphor in All the Way: Dawn is Buffy’s inner child, and Dawn
kissed a vampire, just as Buffy did all the way back in Angel. That’s what
Buffy herself does at the end of OMWF. There’s additional foreshadowing
in All the Way which I’ll mention in two more episodes.
Although Xander just committed publicly to Anya in All the Way, we now
see that “committed” is the wrong word. He’s harboring important doubts,
notably about Anya’s fundamental nature (“am I marrying a demon?”). He
told Anya in Into the Woods that he was “powerfully, painfully” in love
with her. The inner doubts revealed in OMWF call that declaration into
serious question.
Maybe he’s right to harbor those doubts. Anya spent 1000 years as a
demon, inflicting untold harm on humans. While we’re assuming she now
has a human soul (it’s never stated), her actual understanding of human
nature remains a work in progress (e.g., The Body). Xander has to confirm
for himself that Anya really is “reformed”. More importantly, Anya herself
has to do so.
Separate sentence to emphasize the point: their relationship stands in
obvious parallel to that of Buffy and Spike, now that Buffy took the next
step and, putting aside her doubts for the moment, kissed an actual vampire
(which I’ll discuss in succeeding posts).
Joss had a fairly whimsical take on making Xander the guilty party: “Just
for fun. Just because we didn't see it coming.” Joss aside, Xander’s
invocation of Sweet was (and remains) very controversial among fans. Not
only did he fail to learn his lesson in Bewitched, Bothered & Bewildered,
but in this case it appears that multiple people actually died. His motives, of
course, were much better this time, but the consequences reinforce the
theme, mostly relevant to Willow, that magic is not a toy.
The spell is consistent with his song: he'll never tell because he's
deliberately blinding himself to the problems. He's not seeing how serious
Buffy's situation is, he's completely blind to Willow, and he's repressing his
own doubts about Anya. Given that he himself created his problem with
Anya, it's not surprising that he'd want to escape rather than deal with it.
That's pretty much going to be true for everyone in S6.
Sweet can be defeated, but not killed, as Joss explains: “And to me it was
never about killing him, because ultimately he represents something you
can't kill off. And so rather than that I thought it would be better if he had
his own send-off, a little reprise of his bluesy number, which would contain,
of course, the title of the piece. As a way of saying, "I've done my work,
and you can't really undo it." He's not a guy you kill. Even though people
die – he's a demon, don’t get me wrong; just because he wears really well-
designed costumes doesn’t mean that he's anything other than a villain – but
he is the musical, incarnate. And he's all around us; and that's where we put
him. We made sure that he ended up in the air, more than life, settling all
over them. It's a symbol thing, you know.”
This brings me to the one person who didn’t sing: Willow. There are
various explanations why she didn’t. The real world reason is that Alyson
Hannigan was uncomfortable with her voice and begged Joss not to make
her sing. Within the story, the explanation that I like best is that the point of
Sweet’s magic was to force the characters to reveal their inner selves – “all
those secrets you’ve been concealing” – but Willow can’t reveal her inner
self because her whole persona is devoted to concealing it (see her dream in
Restless).
I also see Willow’s relative silence as consistent with the fact that she
represents Buffy’s spirit. DEN at AtPO suggested at the time that Willow,
like Buffy, was already burned out before Sweet even appeared:
“We all process BtVs through our own matrices. Some posters are students
of religion or philosophy. Others know literature. I study war, and suggest
that there may be some useful parallels and comparisons to be drawn from
that field as well. More even than Buffy, Willow resembles to me one of
those teenagers of the "Greatest Generation" who became a fighter pilot or a
Marine rifleman and spent four years learning to do what they had to in
order to survive. That experience did not always produce judgment and
maturity in other areas of life.

Willow has been fighting on the Hellmouth since she was sixteen. More
than Xander, more even than Giles, she has been what Buffy calls her in
"The Gift:" "my big gun." She has no Slayer powers (goddess knows she's
been seriously hurt enough times) and no Watcher. Willow's hacking and
her magic alike have been developed to fight evil. She has held things
together, rallying the Scoobies time and again when Buffy was absent, or
non-functional--or dead! Indeed, I believe Willow has never had any time
off the line since the show began!

If we extend this "combat" matrix, it is no wonder that by now Willow's

judgment is poor; that she uses threats rather than reason in her interaction
with Giles; that she compounds mistakes in spellcasting by casting more
spells. She doesn't question herself in the musical because she can't afford
to: she might break. Even the forgetting spell on Tara, inexcusable in any
principled sense, can be interpreted as the act of a person who can no longer
bear the limited stress of a lover's quarrel.

None of the above is meant to give Willow what another thread on this
board calls a "get out of jail free" card. I do wish, however, to suggest that
Willow is no less burned out than post-resurrection Buffy. She has her own
version of the thousand-yard stare.”
While Willow didn’t sing, the fall-out from her “forget spell” in All the Way
reveals a great deal about Willow to Tara: “God how can this be/Willow
don’t you see/there’ll be nothing left of me?” Willow’s fear of confrontation
has created a far more fraught confrontation to come.
We don’t get to that confrontation in OMWF, so I’ll hold off discussing it
and deal with another issue which I see discussed often on the net and
which Groovypants specifically raised in a comment to my post on All the
Way. I’ll talk about it only with some trepidation because I know that
people have very strong reactions about the issue.
The issue is rape. In order to discuss that, I need to set up the facts as we
saw them. At the end of All the Way, Willow performed her “forget” spell
and erased Tara’s memory of their fight. Though the chronology isn’t
completely certain, it appears that the events of OMWF begin the next
morning when Tara finds the Lethe’s Bramble under the pillow, but mostly
continue on the day after – the scenes skip to a night patrol in which Buffy
sings the opening number and then to the following morning when she
walks into The Magic Box. Later that afternoon – say, 45 hours after the
spell – Willow and Tara had sex as Tara sang “I’m under your spell”. She
was, both metaphorically and literally. Some viewers claim that when
Willow had sex with Tara after erasing her memory, that amounted to rape.
There are two ways we can look at this claim. One is that, regardless of how
it appears in real life, it was rape within the show. I discussed this point in
my Introduction and it happens all the time in performance art. An easy and
slightly related example would be Buffy and Angel having sex. We can be
very sure that David Boreanaz and Sarah Michelle Gellar did not actually
have sex in that scene. It was merely filmed to make it appear that they did.
Nonetheless, within the show itself it remains true that Angel and Buffy had
sex. This is a dramatic convention and applies to a nearly infinite variety of
plot events.
We therefore need to decide first if Willow’s behavior was treated as rape
within the show. The answer (a mild spoiler, I guess) is that it was not. At
no time in the series will it ever be described that way. As far as I’m
concerned personally, that’s the end of the inquiry. In a dramatic sense, it
doesn’t matter what we would call the events if they occurred in real life,
any more than it’s important that DB and SMG didn’t “really” have sex.
What’s important is how we’re supposed to interpret the events within the
show.
Nevertheless, the issue remains controversial so I’ll move to the next step.
What viewers seem to mean is this: that if Willow’s behavior had occurred
in real life, it would (or should) have constituted rape. We have to be careful
of this, because, of course, her behavior included magic, which doesn’t
exist in real life. I’ll try to suggest a real life parallel, but the fact that the
events are entirely fictional and can’t possibly “occur in real life” suggests
that we need to be very cautious in how we interpret them.
Whether her behavior “should” be treated as rape is far too complex for me
to address in a blog post. I’m going to limit myself to whether it does under
CA law. Even with that limit, I’ll have to leave out a great deal of real legal
analysis here, including important factors such as principles of statutory
construction. This is a blog post, not a legal brief.
I’ll start with the text because all legal analysis starts with the text.
California Penal Code Section 261 defines rape and I’ll quote the basic
parts:
(a)Rape is an act of sexual intercourse accomplished …under any of the
following circumstances:
(1)Where a person is incapable, because of a mental disorder or
developmental or physical disability, of giving legal consent, and this is
known or reasonably should be known to the person committing the act.…
(2)Where it is accomplished against a person's will by means of force,
violence, duress, menace, or fear of immediate and unlawful bodily injury
on the person or another.
(3)Where a person is prevented from resisting by any intoxicating or
anesthetic substance, or any controlled substance, and this condition was
known, or reasonably should have been known by the accused.
(4)Where a person is at the time unconscious of the nature of the act, and
this is known to the accused. …
(5)Where a person submits under the belief that the person committing the
act is the victim's spouse...
(6)Where the act is accomplished against the victim's will by threatening to
retaliate in the future against the victim or any other person, and there is a
reasonable possibility that the perpetrator will execute the threat….
(7)Where the act is accomplished against the victim's will by threatening to
use the authority of a public official to incarcerate, arrest, or deport the
victim or another, and the victim has a reasonable belief that the perpetrator
is a public official….
(b)As used in this section, "duress" means a direct or implied threat of
force, violence, danger, or retribution sufficient to coerce a reasonable
person of ordinary susceptibilities to perform an act which otherwise would
not have been performed, or acquiesce in an act to which one otherwise
would not have submitted. The total circumstances, including the age of the
victim, and his or her relationship to the defendant, are factors to consider
in appraising the existence of duress.
(c)As used in this section, "menace" means any threat, declaration, or act
which shows an intention to inflict an injury upon another.
While it’s a bit simplistic for full legal analysis, we can pretty much rule out
any argument that Willow’s behavior could be considered rape under (a)
(1), (2), (4), (5), (6), or (7). Her actions simply don’t fit any of those
categories. [Note the discussion in comments about the possible application
of (a)(1). Spoilers there, of course.]
That leaves subsection (a) (3). Now, her behavior doesn’t fit literally within
the words of (a) (3) because Willow didn’t administer any “substance”
(rohypnol, say). This is where the analogy of fiction to real life begins to
break down. At best, we can say that Willow did something “like”
administering a “substance”.
The problem is that there is no real life “substance” which has the very
narrow, limited effect of her spell. Willow temporarily blocked one
particular memory of a specific event. The “substances” we’re familiar with
tend to affect all mental faculties at once; the victim is unconscious or
completely lacking in the ability to reason. One’s a scalpel, the other’s a
broadaxe. Being unable to remember a particular fact strikes me as
intrinsically different from being entirely unable to exercise conscious
judgment.
To illustrate the difference, I’ll try an analogy. The best I can do for a real
world example is to compare Willow’s behavior to a lie. Suppose my
partner wants me to do something which is very important to her, but I fail
to do it. She asks me about it and I don’t want to fight so I lie and say I did
it. We then have sex, which we wouldn’t do if we just had a big fight.
If you accept my analogy (and you certainly don’t have to), it seems
unlikely that most people would consider this rape, at least not within the
meaning of the statute. Unlike the case with drugs, a person who has been
told a lie has full conscious judgment and understands the nature of the act.
In addition, it’s hard to define the kinds of lies which would result in
criminal liability. The statute recognizes a particular kind of deception –
impersonating the victim’s spouse – but that’s a lie which changes the basic
nature of the act. Most lies are far less significant and “little white lies” are
common and not generally criminal. Whether other lies should be
considered or not, they aren’t under the existing law.
I can’t stop the analysis with this argument, however. Legal reasoning may
begin with the text, but it seldom stops there. Only in cases where the text is
capable of only one meaning do we lawyers ever look just at the text, and
that’s very rare. What’s often true is that a text seems plain and
unambiguous to us, but other people see nuance there. That’s not surprising
– it’s the same issue we face in analyzing a TV show or a poem.
This bothers some people. They want legal answers to be fixed,
determinate. If a text is plain to them, it must be plain to everyone else and
those other people who read it differently are just being dishonest. The legal
system is a bit more open than that, and one of its solutions to the problem
of meaning is to look to see how other courts have interpreted similar
problems. Maybe they see something we don’t.
The problem in this case is that this brings us back to the lack of real world
comparisons for fictional events. There aren’t going to be any cases
“similar” to Willow’s spell because there aren’t any real world actions
“like” it.
If a viewer is willing to compare Willow’s behavior to giving Tara a date
rape drug, despite the problems with that analogy mentioned above, then
there will be cases supporting a finding of rape. If not, then it’s going to be
hard to find support for any legal argument that it’s rape, regardless of how
you may feel philosophically.
That conclusion may seem tame, though it’s pretty easy to see that I
personally don’t consider Willow a rapist. She’s plenty guilty, just not of
that. The fact that I can’t absolutely rule out the alternative just means that,
to paraphrase LOTR, lawyers are like elves and will say both yea and nay
when you ask them for advice.
One final comment on the episode as a whole: it’s an absolute disgrace that
Joss Whedon never won an Emmy.
Trivia notes: (1) Anyone who’s interested in the music of this episode, or of
the show generally, should read Music, Sound, and Silence in Buffy the
Vampire Slayer. (2) The line “she ain’t got that swing” is presumably a
reference to the Duke Ellington song, “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t
Got That Swing)”. (3) Xander’s “respect the cruller” line is a reference to
the movie Magnolia. (4) David Fury was the mustard singer, while Marti
Noxon got the parking ticket and Joss himself was one of the pallbearers in
the graveyard scene. The choreographers, Adam Shankman and Anne
Fletcher, were dancers in the parking ticket scene. (5) Dawn mentioned
pterodactyls, which were (very roughly) winged reptiles capable of gliding
or flying. (6) Joss mentions in the commentary that Dawn’s backpack was
actually his. (7) Dawn took the talisman which was lying on the counter,
thereby setting up Sweet’s threat to take her to the underworld and
continuing a plot point which will be important later. (8) Tara referred to
bacchanals, which are basically drunken revels. (9) When Giles said that he
was a “hair’s breadth from investigating bunnies”, there’s probably a pun
intended. The phrase “a hair’s breadth” means “very close”. The word
“hare”, meaning a bunny, sounds like “hair”. (10) Willow said she wasn’t
“large with the butch”, which is a slang expression meaning she’s not
particularly masculine (as a stereotype of lesbian women). (11) Xander’s
use of the phrase “get-a-roominess” is Joss-speak for the phrase “get a
room”, used to describe couples who are getting too romantic in public.
(12) The demon’s name is Sweet, though that’s never spoken on the show.
His “That’s entertainment” refers to the movie of that title. He was talking
about the man who died while dancing, which was an homage to Hans
Christian Andersen short story The Red Shoes. Continuing to dance
helplessly is also perhaps a metaphor for Buffy’s situation. (13) When
Xander says that under California law Anya will own half of his waffles,
he’s referring to California’s system of community property under which
(simplifying) spouses own half of all property acquired during marriage.
(14) Xander got syphilis from the Chumash spirit in Pangs. (15) Anya
mentioned David Brinkley, who was a long time news anchor on NBC. (16)
Anya’s “I take the Fifth” refers to the Fifth Amendment of the US
Constitution, under which accused criminals need not testify against
themselves. (17) Anya mentioned the “fourth wall”, which is an imaginary
wall that would separate the stage from the audience if it were real. To
“break the fourth wall” means to have the actor directly address the
audience rather than another actor. (18) Anya’s description of her song as
“retro pastiche” means it’s in an old style and consisted of a variety of parts
combined from different artists. For a “book number” see the link. (19)
Giles’s reference to the police “taking witness arias” uses an opera term to
describe a song. (20) Yma Sumac was a famous Peruvian soprano. (21)
Spike’s song is titled “Rest in Peace” which is the phrase traditionally put
on tombstones. James Marsters played the guitar for the song. (22) Spike’s
“I can’t find my sweet release” is a sexual statement: he can’t have sex with
Buffy. (23) Tara assured Dawn that the “lord of the dance” was not the
scary one, referring either to Nataraja, the depiction of the Hindu god Shiva
as he dances to destroy the universe, or to Michael Flately’s musical of that
title. (24) Sweet’s minions all wear masks depicting former US president
Richard Nixon. (25) Sweet’s reference to a “soft-shoe” is to a tap dance
performed in shoes without the hard metal taps which make the clicking
sound you hear from a tap dancer. (26) Sweet’s reference to buying Nero a
fiddle is to the story that the Roman Emperor Nero fiddled while Rome
burned. (27) The flower Willow used for her forget spell was called Lethe’s
Bramble. Lethe was one of the 5 rivers of Hades in Greek mythology. If
you drank from it, you immediately forgot everything. (28) Spike
commanded Sweet’s minion to “sing” which is American slang meaning
“talk”, and in context is a pun. (29) Spike’s “someday he’ll be a real boy” is
a reference to Pinocchio. (30) When Buffy says that Dawn’s in trouble so it
must be Tuesday, she’s referring to the fact that the show appeared in the
US on Tuesday nights and that she’s constantly rescuing Dawn. (31) The
opening guitar theme to “Walk Through the Fire” sounds very much like
that in Paul Simon’s “Sounds of Silence” (which happens to be my favorite
song). This may be coincidence, but the opening lyrics of “Sounds of
Silence” fit the depression theme perfectly: “Hello darkness my old friend,
I’ve come to talk with you again.” (32) Compare Buffy breaking down the
door at the Bronze to the scene in The Harvest where she can’t – it’s a sign
of how far she’s come. (33) Xander asked Sweet if he had to be Sweet’s
“queen”, making a pun on the word which means both female royalty and a
gay man. (34) Spike’s “get your kum-ba-yayas out” refers to the old Negro
Spiritual song “Kumbaya”, as well as (probably) to the Rolling Stones
album “Get Your Ya Yas Out”. (35) Spike’s mention of seventy six
trombones refers to the song of that title in the musical The Music Man.
(36) Musicals frequently end with a kiss, as formerly separated lovers
overcome the impediments to their relationship. Joss noted the genre
tradition – “the curtains close on a kiss, God knows” – while subverting it
by having Buffy kiss Spike. I’ll discuss this in more detail in two more
episodes.
 Tabula Rasa
Because it comes right after the astonishing OMWF, and because the
proverbial shit is about to hit the proverbial fan in the next two episodes, it’s
easy to overlook just how good Tabula Rasa is. I’d say it’s Rebecca Rand
Kirshner’s best work, and it’s the last episode of S6 before the controversy
begins.
The episode opens with 2 moments of insight: Buffy’s that she’s not
actually duty-bound to save Spike’s life; and Willow’s that “I was so
selfish”. Both insights are lost by the end of the episode, and that’s a real
sign of how S6 will go, somewhat like the Magic Box sequence in Life
Serial.
One reason why the episode is so well-constructed is that we don’t just see
the characters’ innate personalities once they lose their memories. No, we
see them as they see themselves. This is most noticeable with Spike and
Buffy – Buffy sees herself as a superhero, Spike sees himself as on a path to
redemption – but it’s true of the rest as well. Whether those are accurate or
beneficial self-images is another thing entirely.
Note the way the couples interact once they lose their memories. Lots of
inferences to draw there, some of which I’ll leave alone in order to avoid
spoilers. Though they aren’t a couple, per se, Buffy connected immediately
with Dawn. Dawn may feel stifled, as I mentioned in my previous post, but
Buffy still sees her as an integral part of her life.
Willow’s path recreates the one she has taken in life: first attracted to
Xander, then recognizing that she’s “kinda gay”. Tara hangs back as if she’s
unsure, but the attraction is there before the spell breaks.
“Joan” and “Randy” behave much like Buffy and Spike have been. Spike
has an exalted image of himself: “I must be a noble vampire. (Buffy looks
dubious) A good guy. On a mission of redemption. … I'm a hero really. I
mean, to be cast such an ugly lot in life and then to rise above it. To seek
out better, nobler things. It's inspirational, isn't it? And the two of us...
(gestures from Buffy to himself) natural enemies, thrown together to stand
against the forces of darkness. Utter trust. No thought of me biting you, no
thought of you staking me.” Buffy’s pretty skeptical and doesn’t seem all
that interested, but she doesn’t try to slay him and she is kissing him again
at the end.
I’ll leave any other discussion of relationships with a cryptic reference to
the Sherlock Holmes story Silver Blaze.
There’s a parallel being drawn between Giles and Tara, but with an
important distinction. Both see themselves as enablers and follow through
on their determination to leave partly for that reason, but in Tara’s case she
has the additional justification of needing to leave for her own safety and
self-respect, given how Willow has treated her. Willow has come a long
way since she was an insecure girl mooning over Xander, but she’s back
crying in the bathroom just as she was in Enemies. And as was true in
Something Blue, Willow didn’t really cast the forget spells to make the
other people feel better, she did them to make herself feel better.
It’s worth considering just what it is that Willow is doing wrong. In All the
Way, Tara told her that she was “doing too much magic”. I can think of a
few possible meanings for this. One is that Willow is using magic
unnecessarily, like the decorations in All the Way. Another is that magic is
like a pool of water and Willow is drawing too much out of the pool. A
third might be that using magic too often increases the risk of unforeseen
consequences to oneself or to others – see Spike’s comment in After Life,
but also my post questioning the accuracy of his view. Tara implies it’s the
third possibility she has in mind when she says “It's not good for you,
Willow. And it's not what magic is for.”
I can see how Tara might use that third argument in an effort to persuade
Willow, but I don’t think it really gets at the crux of Willow’s problem. In
fact, the whole “too much magic” notion seems problematic to me. In my
view, the problem is not “too much magic” but something much more
obvious: abuse of power. Willow is using her magic to force others to
conform to her own desires. Tara told her flat out how selfish she was:
“you're helping yourself now, fixing things to your liking. Including me.”
We might wonder why Tara stayed with Willow even as long as she did. If
Willow had erased my memory, I wouldn’t have needed a second example.
The answer, I think, aside from the fact that Tara really does love Willow, is
that Tara knows that she herself did something pretty bad in Family. Her
spell there was purely selfish, like Willow’s here, but it affected more than
one person and actually put them in physical danger. Willow’s first “forget”
spell didn’t affect others nor did it put anyone in danger, but her second one
did both. Tara learned from her mistake. Willow not only repeated hers, she
made it worse. Much worse.
It’s not clear that Tara’s departure will help Willow stop her downward
spiral. It may very well have the opposite impact, just as Giles’s harsh
words did in Flooded. The problem is that at this point it isn’t about
Willow, it’s about Tara’s own safety. For more on Tara, see the comments
here. Spoilers, of course.
I think it’s worth asking questions about Giles. Yes, Buffy is avoiding
adulthood with him around. Yes, Giles has felt increasingly superfluous
since the beginning of S4 (he also tried telling Buffy to handle things on her
own in The Freshman). But at the end of Life Serial Giles said he wanted to
be seen as a “rakish uncle”, and he behaves rather uncle-ish here rather than
fatherly. He’s convinced himself that his departure will be good for Buffy,
but those of us watching can’t help wondering if it’s what Giles thinks he
needs. It’s clear and understandable that he doesn’t want to be the
disciplinarian, but there is lots of middle ground between that and leaving
town.
Xander, consistent with his “nothing to see here” line in OMWF, decides
not to worry about Buffy’s return (“Me like Buffy. Buffy's alive, so, me
glad.”). He then leaves the room when Tara and Willow fight. In the past
he’s never hesitated to call out his friends when he thinks they’re wrong
(and sometimes when they aren’t). Now he’s deliberately shielding himself
from discomfort.
Xander laughed when his memories returned because he remembered King
Ralph. What did Buffy remember? Being ripped out of heaven. In a very
real sense, she had to live through that all over again. Thanks Willow.
I happen to like Joss’s taste in music, but I think the ending of TR works
incredibly well even for those who don’t. I also think it’s a real tribute to
AH’s acting that we actually feel sorry for her as she sits and cries, even
though Willow has no one to blame but herself.
Trivia notes: (1) The title is Latin for “blank slate”. (2) There are lots of
references to Restless in TR. The loan shark, aside from being a visual pun,
refers to Xander’s dream in Restless: “XANDER: You gotta have
something. (Looks at Buffy) Gotta be always movin' forward. BUFFY: (like
a proud little kid) Like a shark. XANDER: Like a shark with feet and ...
much less fins. SPIKE: (like a proud little kid) And on land!” (3) Spike’s
suit is the same one he wore in Restless. (4) Spike’s request for asylum is a
pun: he wants to be protected, Xander interprets his suit as showing that
Spike has lost his mind. (5) Allen Funt was the host of the TV show Candid
Camera. (6) The memory loss bears some resemblance to the Star
Trek:TNG episode Conundrum. (7) Giles referred to Spike as “like a son to
me” in Xander’s dream in Restless. (8) Buffy’s choice of the name “Joan”
suggests Joan of Arc. Martyr complex much? (9) Spike’s suspicion that
Giles is “bound to have some classic midlife-crisis transport” may remind
you of Buffy’s conversation with Giles in Real Me: “BUFFY: Giles, are you
breaking up with your car? GILES: Well, it did seduce me, all red and
sporty! BUFFY: Little two-door tramp.” (10) Tara’s suggestion that it’s
Halloween may refer to the episode of that title. (11) Spike’s claim to “help
the helpless” refers to the slogan of Angel Investigations in Angel the
Series. (12) The scene where Giles fights the skeleton is a tribute to the Ray
Harryhausen film, Jason and the Argonauts. (13) Willow’s “I think I’m
kinda gay” line is what she said in Doppelgangland about VampWillow.
(14) Xander remembered seeing King Ralph, which was a 1991 movie. (15)
Spike’s “from dust to dust” when he slayed the two vampires echoes the
funeral service from the Book of Common Prayer (Anglican). (16) Anthony
Stewart Head told Joss before S6 that he wanted to spend more time with
his family in England. That’s the real world explanation for why Giles left,
though obviously we need to treat it as part of the storyline. There are, by
the way, terms which differentiate between real world explanations and in-
story ones. The former are called Doylist, the latter are Watsonian. For the
background, see here.
 Smashed
Smashed was very controversial when it aired, mostly because of the fact
that Buffy and Spike went All The Way, and judging from recent internet
debates about the episode it remains that way today. Given that, I might as
well say up front that I think Smashed is brilliant – as in top 15 brilliant –
and mostly because of the whole 4th act, including the ending. Regardless of
what I think of Buffy’s choice to have sex with Spike, I think the portrayal
is incredibly good. The house falling down is, of course, a metaphor (Joss
added it) which should give some hint about the meaning of it all.
This probably counts as trivia, but a few years ago TV Guide did one of its
“25 Best Of” articles. This article rated the “25 Best Sex Scenes in TV
History”. The scene from Smashed was No. 1 (and see trivia note 21). IMO,
it’s certainly one of the best dramatic scenes in the whole show, and that’s a
very high standard indeed.
Those who weren’t part of online fandom at the time can’t even begin to
comprehend the intensity of the Spike Wars which followed this episode.
Lots of fans insisted that Spike was on the road to redemption and that he
was good for Buffy. Rob from AtPO:
“I also don't agree that Spike is "evil." Whatever one's own opinion may be
about Spike having changed since the series began, I don't think there is any
doubt that now on the show, Spike's personality is a shade of gray, not black
or white. The rule that all vampires are evil does not apply anymore, and I
believe that makes Spike's story all the more compelling and fascinating.
Even before he was "chipped," he was capable of more love and emotion
than most other vampires, as evidenced by his love for Dru. This is a further
extension of that.”
Others were just as adamant that canon hadn’t changed, that vampires were
evil, and that Buffy had degraded herself by having sex with an evil,
disgusting thing. As an example, here’s Malandanza from AtPO:
“There is something of the adolescent in Spike's passion for Buffy -- he is
the boy in the locker room sulking because she won't "put out," throwing
tantrums when he doesn't get his way (as in Crush and OMwF),
manipulating her friends…, using and discarding poor Harmony to pass the
time until Buffy comes to her senses -- all the while convinced that he is
irresistible and she is just being coy. Under the "Big Bad" bluster there is a
sensitive poet -- but dig a little deeper and you find that under the sensitive
poet is a creepy, egocentric misogynist….
Idealistic? Spike? Machiavellian is more like it. He plots and schemes to
gain Buffy's affections. He befriends Buffy's mother and sister and attempts
to ingratiate himself (belatedly) with her friends. He systemically works on
breaking up Riley and Buffy (playing Iago to Riley's Othello). … Spike isn't
tilting at windmills -- he is the pragmatic vampire. He works steadily
towards his goal of bedding Buffy….
Spike will not be redeemed -- he will never be a "real boy" -- he is not on
the path of redemption, nor has he ever been. His past good works were for
one thing -- to get Buffy. Now he had her, and everything's changed. I doubt
we'll be seeing sensitive Spike any longer than we saw sensitive Parker.”
I’m quoting two very polite people from a very polite board; lots of Spike
threads devolved quickly into screaming matches and nearly every thread
eventually became a Spike thread. A little Wordsworth (describing the
French Revolution) conveys the atmosphere:
“'Twas in truth an hour/Of universal ferment; mildest men/Were agitated,
and commotions, strife/Of passion and opinion, filled the walls/Of peaceful
houses with unquiet sounds./The soil of common life was, at that time,/Too
hot to tread upon…”
Remember that Spike’s story continues to be that of Alex from A
Clockwork Orange (see my post on The Initiative). The essential (heh)
question with Spike is whether the chip is training him away from his
violent tendencies such that he’s on a path to redemption, as he claimed in
Tabula Rasa, or whether the chip simply restrains the violent actions of an
unreformed criminal/vampire. The usual expression among viewers was the
“soul canon”: was it still necessary to have a soul in order to be redeemed
(Angel), or was it now possible to be at least on a path to redemption
without one?
On one side there were Buffy’s own words: “SPIKE: A man can change.
(She again stops walking and faces him.) BUFFY: You're not a man. You're
a thing. … An evil, disgusting, thing.” There was also Spike’s insistence
that Buffy “came back wrong” and virtually everything else he says in the
fourth act. That wasn’t seductive, that was abuse – he was reinforcing her
sense that she didn’t really belong in the world any more.
The redemptionists pointed in response to the alley scene, which I’ll quote:
Cut to an alley. The young woman walks along, still hugging herself,
looking nervous. Suddenly Spike steps out in front of her. She screams.
SPIKE: That's right, you should scream.
She tries to get away but he moves to intercept her. She looks scared.
SPIKE: Creature of the night here, yeah? (indicating himself) Some people
forget that.
He advances on the woman. She backs away, shaking her head fearfully,
backs up against a wall.
WOMAN: Please.
SPIKE: She thinks I'm housebroken. She forgot who she's dealing with.
WOMAN: Anything you want, please-
SPIKE: Just 'cause she's confused about where she fits in, I'm supposed to
be too? 'Cause I'm not. (pacing back and forth) I know what I am. I'm
dangerous. I'm evil.
WOMAN: (scared) I-I'm sure you're not evil.
SPIKE: Yes, I am. I am a killer. (moves closer to her) That's what I do. I
kill. And, yeah, maybe it's been a long time, but ... it's not like you forget
how.
He gets up very close to the woman, who is panting fearfully.
SPIKE: You just ... do it. (nervously) And now I can, again, all right? So
here goes.

The dialogue doesn’t really do justice to the amount of hesitation James

Marsters showed on Spike’s face, nor to the tone in his voice. Spike fans
insisted that his hesitation represented progress, that no other vampire
would have conducted such an internal dialogue or even hesitated. Writer
Drew Greenberg: “Does he want to bite the girl or does he want to want to
bite the girl? He has to do a lot of convincing of himself. So what does that
mean?”
Those on the other side attributed his hesitance to the expectation of pain,
not to any “moral” judgment; only the latter could lead to redemption in
their eyes, and Spike didn’t show it.
I personally was of Rob’s view at that time, that is, the view that the “soul
canon” was no longer in effect and that Spike’s actions during and after
Intervention showed moral development. To contrast my own view I’ll
offer one more quote, this one from Traveler:
“When Spike first started going all ga ga over Buffy, I thought it was really
funny. I had a little bit of sympathy for him, but I didn't particularly care to
see them hook up. However, after he withstood torture on her behalf, I
began rooting for him more and more. Since then, he has saved her life and
the lives of her loved ones countless times with no expectation of reward.
That plus he's a hopeless romantic. How can you not want to see someone
like that get the girl?

So, OMWF should have been a wonderful episode for a Spike/Buffy

shipper, because we finally get to see them kiss. The problem is Buffy's one
little line, "this isn't real." In one move, Joss gave us what we wanted most
and made it almost worthless. Buffy kisses Spike, but it doesn't mean she
loves him.

Then, Tabula Rasa took things one step further. After this episode, I was
fully convinced that Spike was on the path toward some kind of redemption
and would eventually be someone that Buffy could truly love. At this point,
my biggest fear was that Buffy would continue to abuse him.

And then came Smashed... which turned everything on its head. Spike tries
to isolate Buffy by telling her that he is the only person for her. He
immediately tries to kill a mortal when he thinks his chip isn't working.
Finally, he tells Buffy that she isn't human and they have sex. But this sex
isn't about love; it's about lust and power and control. Once again, the
writers give us what we want and then make it worthless. No more
redemption for Spike. No love between Buffy and Spike. In fact, it is as if
the writers are telling us that Spike's love was never real. Buffy tells Spike
that he doesn't love her; he loves pain. And Spike tacitly agrees with her!
Indeed, he seems to be satisfied with the physical relationship, just as he
was with the Buffybot. It's as if all the incredible things he did for Buffy, all
the really beautiful ways in which he proved his love for her, were all a lie!
All the growth and changes we've seen in his character were erased in one
episode.”
So how should we interpret the fact that Spike can hit Buffy? Local-max
offered this in comments: “I think that Spike's ability to hit Buffy is partly
about his being able to affect her emotionally. In season five, he may have
been able to sting -- but he couldn't really, really hurt her, and if he tried the
"come back wrong" stuff then she would have, as she did in Fool for Love,
get angry for a moment and then shrug him off. He can hurt her physically
now because he can hurt her emotionally.”
As I see it, it’s a metaphor for how Buffy feels about herself: wrong.
Staying on the metaphor theme, it seems pretty clear that the episode is
paralleling Willow (Buffy’s spirit) and Buffy. Willow is abusing others with
magic and throwing off restraints, reflecting Buffy beating up Spike and
then casting off her own restraints. The scene in the Magic Box where
Buffy, Anya and Xander talk about Willow makes this parallel express:
XANDER: Tara thinks Willow is doing too much magic. And she's not the
only one. BUFFY: I know. But I-I think she'll be fine. You know, it's, it's
Willow. She of the level head.
ANYA: Well, those are the ones you have to watch out for the most.
Responsible types. BUFFY: Right, she might go crazy and start
alphabetizing everything.
ANYA: I'm serious. Responsible people are ... always so concerned with ...
being good all the time, that when they finally get a taste of being bad ...
they can't get enough. It's like all (gestures) kablooey.
BUFFY: That's not true.
ANYA: Okay, not kablooey, more like bam. …
XANDER: It's gotta be seductive. (Buffy looks up in alarm at the word
'seductive.' Her eyes widen.)
XANDER: (OS) Just giving in to it. Going totally wild.

And, of course, the fourth act cuts back and forth between Willow/Amy and
Buffy/Spike.
Why would Buffy react so strongly and be so disturbed when Spike tells her
she came back wrong? Because of what happened in Forever:
BUFFY: You have no idea what you're messing with. Who knows what you
actually raised, what's gonna come through that door!
DAWN: (tearful) No, I-I know. It'll be her.
BUFFY: No. Tara told me that these spells go bad all the time. People come
back ... wrong.

When Spike proved that he could hit her, that also confirmed Buffy’s
internal sense of feeling wrong now. “Rat. You? Dead.”, one of my favorite
bits of dialogue in the series, pretty much describes it. That sense of being
“wrong” was precisely the thing which released her remaining inhibitions
about sex with Spike. If she’s already “wrong”, she no longer needs to do
the right thing.
One more event contributed, IMO, to the sex. In the teaser Spike yelled
after Buffy “It's only a matter of time before you realize I'm the only one
here for you, pet. You got no one else!” Buffy started to approach Willow
just after the teaser, which was brave of her in light of the way Willow’s
spells have affected her in S6. Nonetheless she started the conversation,
only to hear Willow tell her that “it's nice, having another magically-
inclined friend around.” On top of all the rest, I think Buffy couldn’t be sure
that Willow was really there for her any more (in metaphor, her spirit
wasn’t there). It made Spike’s abuse seem true.
Willow, in turn, obviously felt the loss of Tara, despite the bold face she put
on in The Magic Box, and, I hope, remorseful about Buffy too. She needed
someone to be there for her, but didn’t think she could turn to Buffy. Drew
Greenberg: “There’s this undercurrent of loneliness and sadness [with
Willow]”. The sense of isolation each of them felt, combined with Willow’s
obvious pride in using magic to de-rat Amy, therefore reinforced the
downward spiral. In comments, local-max suggested that Amy’s release
from her cage parallels Spike’s newfound ability to hit Buffy, and the
impact is similar in each case. I’d add that Amy serves also as a metaphor
for Willow deciding to release that part of her which she’s kept caged up all
these years.
One final point to consider before getting to Wrecked. During their research,
both Xander and Buffy praised Willow for hacking. “XANDER: All right,
back to basics. A little old-fashioned state-of-the-art hacker action. BUFFY:
That's great, Will, I haven't seen you do that in a long time.” It would be
hard, in my view, to provide a convincing moral justification for hacking as
opposed to Willow’s use of magic instead. There are some distinctions:
hacking uses natural rather than supernatural tools; and the collateral risk to
others is non-existent except in very unusual cases of hacking. Still, the
failure of anyone to articulate any such distinction probably helps explain
Willow’s path from hacker to magic.
Trivia notes: (1) The word “smashed” is US slang meaning drunk (or
drugged). It usually has the connotation of being extremely drunk. (2) Buffy
called Spike “Jessica Fletcher”, who was the detective hero of the TV series
Murder, She Wrote. (3) Buffy’s “get your rocks off” in reference to Spike is
sexual slang meaning an orgasm. (4) Amy turned herself into a rat in the S3
episode Gingerbread. (5) Willow’s spell de-ratting Amy was in Italian. A
rough translation is “What was, is no longer. What was done, undo. The
danger passed, the trial no more, set it right.” (6) Andrew’s descent into the
museum using the harness mimics a scene from the movie Mission
Impossible. (7) Jonathan tells Andrew that they’re not breaking into
Langley, which is where CIA headquarters is located. (8) Larry came out as
gay in Phases and he died in Graduation Day 2. (9) Amy’s “have you heard
about Tom and Nicole” refers to the divorce of Tom Cruise and Nicole
Kidman. (10) Dawn drank her milkshake to wash down the Raisnettes,
which are chocolate coated raisins. (11) Tara’s request that Dawn eat
something that’s not “gummi green” refers to Gummi Bears. (12) The
movie Tara and Dawn saw where all the inner city kids taught their coach a
lesson was Hardball. (13) Warren’s “size is everything” refers to the 1998
movie Godzilla. (14) Spike’s reference to Warren as “nimrod” is American
slang for a stupid person. (15) Andrew hadn’t seen Red Dwarf, which was a
British science fiction sitcom. (16) The first band we see in The Bronze is
Virgil. They later turn into the Halo Friendlies. (17) The name of the
woman in the Bronze, Brie, was presumably a cheese joke based on Amy’s
time as a rat. (18) When the obnoxious guy in The Bronze referred to
Willow as “Ellen”, he was referring to Ellen Degeneres, who came out as a
lesbian a few years before Smashed aired. (19) When Anya told Xander he
was reading a “D&D manual”, she was referring to Dungeons & Dragons.
(20) Xander called Spike “Captain Peroxide”, referring to the chemical used
to bleach hair. (21) The ending scene, as filmed, had even more sex in it
than the version shown on air and on DVD. You can see the original here.
 Wrecked
Wrecked added a lot of fuel to the fires of controversy over S6. The string of
episodes from Wrecked through Seeing Red is surely the most controversial
stretch in the show’s history. I think it’s fair to say that the majority of fans
of the show didn’t like the magic/drugs metaphor, meaning that Willow’s
story line now joined Buffy’s in the internet screaming matches debates.
Two members of my family stopped watching the show after this episode.
Let me start with the Buffy of the episode before I analyze the controversial
aspects of the metaphor. The basic idea is that Willow lets magic take her
over, as Buffy does Spike. Both are escapist:
“WILLOW: I just ... it took me away from myself, I was ... free.
BUFFY: (looks down, pensive) I get that. More than you- (breaks off).”
That’s the parallel, made obvious in several scenes, including the research
in The Magic Box, the conversation between Buffy and Spike while they
search for Dawn (note the drug use double entendres), and the ending.
Buffy’s crisis of the spirit continues, with Willow’s incapacity reflecting
Buffy’s internal lack of spirit.
Spike’s behavior in Wrecked continues a theme introduced in Life Serial. I
mentioned in my post on Life Serial that each of the four vignettes
foreshadowed the behavior of the characters later in the season. Spike’s is
the first one we see. He told her in Life Serial that “You're a creature of the
darkness. Like me.” Most of his dialogue with Buffy here in Wrecked
develops that theme: “I may be dirt ... but you're the one who likes to roll in
it, Slayer. You never had it so good as me. Never.” That certainly doesn’t
sound like what Buffy (or anyone) needs. This was more ammunition for
those who insisted Spike was evil. Of course, then he helped Buffy rescue
Dawn.
Buffy, in turn, is abusive to Spike. She repeatedly insults him, lending
plausibility to Spike’s claim that she’s using him while adopting the
pretense of purity. Since I talked about Spike’s behavior and Buffy’s
response in my last post, I’ll move on to the next controversy.
Now to what’s generally called the “magic/drugs” metaphor. I’ve modified
my thinking on this issue a lot over the years, and what I’ll give below is
only my latest interpretation. It’s certainly not consistent with many things I
said at the time.
Like all metaphors, this one is capable of multiple interpretations (that
being the whole point of metaphor). It seems to me that the most plausible
are the following, but each has its problems:
(1) Magic is a drug. This makes no sense within the confines of the show.
Never before had doing spells been shown or said to result in a craving to
do more spells. Some people (like me, at the time) pointed to The Dark Age
as supporting the “magic makes you high” theme. However, the dialogue in
that episode doesn’t actually say that; I misread it back then. What it
actually says is that the feeling of power that came from temporary
possession by a demon caused euphoria, a “high”. Here’s the dialogue:
“WILLOW: … (reads) 'Eyghon, also called the Sleepwalker, can only exist
in this reality by possessing an unconscious host. Temporary possession
imbues the host with a euphoric feeling of power.' *** GILES: I was
twenty-one, studying history at Oxford. And, of course, the occult by night.
I hated it. The tedious grind of study, the... overwhelming pressure of my
destiny. I dropped out, I went to London... (exhales) I fell in with the worst
crowd that would have me. We practiced magicks. Small stuff for pleasure
or gain. And Ethan and I discovered something... bigger. BUFFY: Eyghon.
GILES: Yes. One of us would, um... (nervously pours a drink) go into a
deep sleep, and the others would, uh, summon him. It was an extraordinary
high!”
The “it” in Giles’s last sentence refers not to the magic used to summon
Eyghon, but, as the passage Willow read shows, the possession of the host
by the demon.
Nor, if magic were like, say, cocaine, would it have been plausible for Giles
and the rest of the SG to encourage Willow to use it so often. Neither would
that analogy make any sense for the W/T arc in S4-5. No, magic isn’t “like”
a drug in any way meaningful to the show.
There was lots of discussion in comments about this issue, all of which are
worth reading. Karen suggested that Willow’s problem might be similar to
gluttony. We need food for nourishment, but overdoing it creates problems.
The issue is one of balance. Sadly, we won’t see the issue addressed this
way.
As another solution, State of Siege offered this: “What makes the addiction
trope potentially brilliant, what would have made it brilliant had it been
executed properly, is that makes sense as a way for Willow and the SG to
avoid dealing with her problems… —the very pain and difficulty of giving
up magic, to cost to Willow, would have been so great to have made it seem
like a possible solution… even as it was clear it was an avoidance, creating
terrible tension for the rest of the season, as we waited to see how this
played out.” Again, though, this is not the route the show will go.
(2) Abusing drugs is like abusing power. Lots of viewers, including me
early on, took this as the most reasonable interpretation because Willow’s
storyline previously appeared to one of increasing abuse of her power (as
I’ve argued in my posts to date). The text doesn’t offer much support for
this reading. The problem is that seeing drug use as similar to abuse of
power is hard to square with the dialogue we hear or the images we see.
When Willow went to Rack, she wasn’t abusing power, she was allowing
Rack to abuse her in return for the “high”. As her dialogue with Buffy at the
end shows (quoted above), Willow herself saw her actions as escapist. That
also seems like the best way to read Buffy’s parallel story of sex with Spike.
The idea of escapism is also consistent with the fact that drugs don't make
you feel powerful and they don't give you control – what they do is provide
you with a means of escaping yourself. This leads us to….
(3) Magic was a way for Willow to escape from herself, or at least what she
most feared about herself. She uses it as a tool, and that gives her power
that she never had before. “But I mean ... if you could be ... you know, plain
old Willow or super Willow, who would you be?” It’s all about her. I’ll let
Rufus from AtPO explain it:
“I find I'm happy with the drug metaphor because it allows us to see just
how dependant Willow has become on artifice or something that shouldn't
be real to have an identity. What was once used for the benefit of others is
now used to bolster Willows scant self worth. When Willow was in bed
with the shakes I saw that as reality attempting to put the witch back into
the jumper of the high school years. Her need to be special as much
physical as mental. Willow going "cold turkey" leaves her defenceless from
her own self doubt and fear of being exposed as a fake. Willow needs her
magic to be more than she thinks she already is. To not be able to use it has
brought reality into her dreams of grandeur.”
This seems consistent with Buffy’s conversation with Willow about magic
taking Willow away from herself. Whether it’s consistent with Willow’s arc
prior to S6 is more problematic. Yes, Willow has always been insecure, but
she’s been insecure about very specific things, namely, her personal
appearance and her value to others. She certainly never lacked for self-
esteem about her schoolwork, say, or her hacking (she’s proud of that even
here in Wrecked).
Magic wasn’t her route to overcoming the particular insecurities she did
have. She didn’t take up magic to attract Oz – they became a couple before
she ever did a single spell. He didn’t stay with her because of magic either,
in fact he cautioned against it (Fear, Itself). Nor did Willow take up magic
as a means of attracting Tara. She was already using magic long before that.
It would speak poorly of Tara if her attraction to Willow was based on
magic rather than on Willow (as Buffy tells her at the end of Wrecked). It
would also be problematic for the metaphor used in S4-5 (see below).
Willow didn’t use magic to become Buffy’s friend either, though it’s
certainly arguable that she used hacking to stay involved in Buffy’s life in
S1-3 and that magic served the same purpose in S4-5. Whether Buffy saw it
that way or not, and I think she didn’t, Willow might have.
While we can speculate about Willow’s internal motivations, the official
reason Willow pursued magic was expressly stated in the series. In Choices
she told Buffy “I mean, you've been fighting evil here for three years, and
I've helped some, and now we're supposed to decide what we want to do
with our lives. And I just realized that that's what I want to do. Fight evil,
help people. I mean, I-I think it's worth doing. And I don't think you do it
because you have to. It's a good fight, Buffy, and I want in. … And, besides,
I have a shot at being a bad ass Wicca, and what better place to learn?” In
my view, Willow pursued magic not to solve her self-esteem problem, but
to fight evil.
One way to avoid this problem is to argue that Willow used magic to fight
evil, but also found along the way that it contributed to her self-esteem. It’s
hard to deny that this could be true, but it’s also hard to find text to support
it. For example, Willow denied that she was Buffy’s “big gun” in The Gift
and the idea never seemed to have occurred to her. She even denies to Rack
that she has power. Thus, if magic might be a boost to Willow’s self-esteem,
she doesn’t seem to have noticed it. Willow can’t be using magic to boost
her self-esteem and yet be completely unaware of that.
This leaves one last possibility, namely that Willow wants to believe that
magic makes her valuable to others on one level, but deep inside she’s not
sure that it does. This form of insecurity is common among successful
people, who sometimes remain insecure about their own accomplishments;
that insecurity even drives them to accomplish more. Seen in this light, her
magic can be seen as a plea to be noticed, just as her hacking was. It would
explain her insistence that nothing would go wrong with the resurrection
spell and her boastful statement to Giles that “I’m very powerful.” (h/t State
of Siege) While this is certainly possible, it’s also true that most of the time
her spells have been directly helpful to Buffy and had no obvious
connection with Willow’s internal issues.
On the other hand, arguably consistent with the “escapist” theme, Willow’s
use of magic in S1-5 was sometimes a response to the pain and helplessness
(h/t State of Siege) she felt. We could interpret that as pain arising from an
internal sense that she’s not worth much. An episode like Something Blue is
the perfect example of when Willow did use magic for her own benefit,
though it’s not entirely clear that her pain stemmed from lack of self-esteem
or simply that Oz left (the two can, of course, be related). The magic which
she used there to alleviate the pain, however, ended up increasing it, which
would seem to discourage the idea of using magic to avoid pain. Tough
Love is another possible example of Willow using magic to avoid pain, with
similar dubious consequences, and Fear, Itself is arguable. Whether a
couple of examples from previous seasons suffices to validate the metaphor
in Wrecked as consistent with Willow’s character arc is something each
viewer has to decide.
State of Siege suggested that magic use actually reinforces Willow’s lack of
self-worth:

“I also think that magic works to wear away at Willow’s sense of self—not
because magic itself is evil, not because of anything magic is, but because
of Willow herself. This, I think, is what she is getting at in her conversation
with Buffy, and what we see in the later abuses: as her power grows, she
increasingly comes to depend on magic to solve problems, relies less and
less on her other powers, so that she becomes less sure about them—and
loses sight of the values bound to them. Thus, when faced with a very
human problem, she does not trust herself to solve it in a human way: there
was obviously a better way to solve the fight with Tara, but Willow was so
threatened by it (for reasons that you and others discussed at the time) that
she felt helpless and turned immediately to magic. … And I see the next
spell, in TR, as an extension of the same sense of powerlessness combined
with guilt and self-loathing…, first from the resurrection spell, and then
from the one on Tara alone. But this only compounds the guilt and self-
loathing, so she turns to Rack, giving him use of her magic so that she can
use his to completely escape: the guilt and self-loathing are utterly self-
corrosive, leaving her with almost no self at all, and her use of magic
becomes completely auto-telic, further corroding what little self remains,
leaving but the desire for further escape. But this is not addiction, even on a
metaphorical level, self-destructive as it may be.”
Leaving aside my issues with the magic/self-esteem issue, the larger
problem is that even if magic/drugs works well in describing Willow’s
internal problem, it fails completely when it comes to her behavior towards
others. It’s easy to say that Willow was fixing things to her own liking (as
Tara said in Tabula Rasa) because of her own insecurities. It’s just that this
doesn’t seem to express very well the real evil of what Willow did to Tara.
Willow’s moral failure was not her attempt to hide or escape from her own
failings – that was a merely personal flaw. Her great moral failure was the
fact that she violated Tara’s mind. One is an internal issue, the other is
external.
I’ll offer a real world example. Suppose I become addicted to heroin. That’s
a problem for me and may be a sign of internal “issues”. But if I steal
money from you to support my addiction, that’s a moral wrong done to you.
The fact that I took up heroin because of my own flaws doesn’t really get to
the separate and distinct issue of my behavior towards you. It’s that
disparity which weakens the “magic as escapist” metaphor; indeed, the drug
use metaphor actually avoids the serious ethical issues arising from the
external wrongs. And treating the issue as a physical “addiction” – “No
more spells. I'm finished.” – doesn’t solve either problem.
Whatever the “right” interpretation of the metaphor might be, there is no
doubt that the use of magic as metaphor underwent a significant change in
S6. As I’ve noted in previous posts, in S4 and S5 magic was a metaphor for
Willow and Tara’s relationship: a healthy, normal, loving relationship.
Reading the new metaphor on to the Willow/Tara relationship would cause
serious problems for some viewers – they took it as degrading the lesbian
relationship.
I don’t see it that way. There’s no reason a metaphor has to be used with
perfect consistency throughout 7 seasons of a TV show. That said, however,
the risk in switching a metaphor is that the audience will be confused, and
Wrecked is a perfect example of that. Metaphor works because it takes
advantage of double meanings. But if ambiguity is the soul of art, confusion
is its bane. The confusion would have more consequences later in S6.
My bottom line view then and now – on this I haven’t changed – is that the
magic/drugs metaphor was a serious mistake. I have two reasons for saying
this, one which appears now and one which I’ve mentioned but can’t
explain further until later in the season because of spoilers. For now I’ll just
say that, for me, the depiction was too clumsy and heavy-handed; it came
across like an After School Special, complete with the obligatory “tripping”
scene, the implied trade of sexual favors for drugs, Amy stealing to support
her sudden “habit”, and multiple clichés such as Willow in the shower
trying to wash her soul clean.
I know a lot of people were turned off by the seemingly relentless dark tone
of the show at this point. The dark tone even inspired a book title: Buffy
Goes Dark. That didn’t (and doesn’t) bother me, but I don’t have anything
particularly good to say about Wrecked. It’s one of my least favorite
episodes in the series, since I think it suffers from clunky dialogue (“meat
party in my mouth”??) and bad acting (from AH of all people, in her
breakdown scene), in addition to the poor choice of metaphor.
On the plus side, the scene of Buffy and Spike waking up after their night of
debauchery is very good, and Jeff Kober (Rack) is really good at playing
creepy characters (he was the crazed vampire Kralik in Helpless). Oh, and
the scene where Willow fills up Tara’s dress recalls what Tara sang in
OMWF: “Willow don’t you see, there’ll be nothing left of me.”
Trivia notes: (1) The title is a pun based on American slang. Willow
wrecked the car, which is a metaphor for the fact that she and Buffy are also
in the process of wrecking their lives. “Wrecked” is also a slang term for
“drunk” or “drugged”. (2) Amy said she could do “transmography”,
meaning she could transform people into different creatures (or vice versa).
(3) Anya apparently thinks highly of Martha Stewart’s skill at decoupage.
(4) Anya said Xander didn’t have to perform the rite of “self-flagellation”
which means literally to whip oneself, but is probably a double entendre for
masturbation. (5) Rack called Willow “strawberry”, which is (or was at the
time) street slang for a new prostitute. Willow’s red hair makes the allusion
especially apt. (6) Dawn said Buffy was “feeling all Joan Crawford”, which
is a reference to Mommie Dearest. (7) Dawn’s description of Buffy as “such
a pig after she kills things” refers back to Faith’s comment in Faith, Hope &
Trick that slaying made her “hungry and horny”. We’re supposed to make
the connection to Buffy’s sex with Spike. (8) Amy said she was about to
“boot”, a slang term for “vomit”. (9) Spike suggested a Lojack for Dawn,
referring to a product which allows you to track the location of a car.
 Gone
Notwithstanding the nearly disastrous consequences of Willow’s escapism
in Wrecked, and notwithstanding her conversation with Willow at the end of
Wrecked, Buffy finds herself drawn back into an even more extreme form of
escapism in Gone. Some viewers were frustrated with Buffy’s plunge back
into the depths, and Gone is generally a low-rated episode. But as I said
before, the Magic Box sequence in Life Serial was important in
foreshadowing a theme of S6 and we’re beginning to see that Buffy hasn’t
yet figured out how to “satisfy a customer [in this case herself] with a task
that resists solving.” This strikes me as very true to life for those suffering
from depression.
If one is really depressed, I guess it can seem like a good idea to take a free
pass from adulthood. Like the Trio (and Warren emphasizes it by telling
Jonathan and Andrew “You guys are so immature!”), Buffy’s entire goal in
Gone is to do juvenile things while avoiding responsibility. Her
conversation with Willow at the end may be a small step up from where she
was at the end of OMWF, in the sense that she’s now accepting life itself,
but she hasn’t reached the stage of accepting adult responsibilities. Spike
drives home the message: “Free of life? Got another name for that. Dead.”
We’re obviously supposed to dislike Doris (the social worker), but Buffy’s
behavior towards her is pretty hard to justify. It’s not that much different
from the way Willow and Amy treated the people at the Bronze in Smashed.
The big difference is that the patrons in the Bronze were entirely innocent,
while Doris certainly was not. She was officious, meddling, unsympathetic
and, despite her protestations, not all that interested in Dawn’s well-being –
note that she never even spoke to Dawn, who is 15 and capable of having
an informed opinion.
There was plenty in Gone to excite both sides of the Spike Wars. On the one
hand, Spike continues to insist that Buffy “belongs in the dark with him”:
“… he's always going on and on about being the only one that understands
me. 'We're alike, you and me. Birds of a bloody feather.'” That can easily be
interpreted as seducing Buffy to the dark side.
At the same time, though, Spike gave her the tough love advice I quoted
above. He also kicked her out because her self-destructive behavior was too
nihilistic even for him.
Then there’s Willow. If I’m right that S6 gives us a strong parallel between
Buffy and her metaphorical spirit, then we should interpret Willow’s
behavior in Gone in some way consistent with Buffy’s own actions.
Virtually all we see of Willow in this episode is her determined effort to go
“cold turkey” by avoiding magic altogether. We get a number of scenes
with the stereotypical behavior of an addict in that situation: cleaning out all
the magic supplies (don’t forget the candles!); drinking all the water;
shaking; temptation; etc.
This can’t be right. Buffy is escaping from herself – escaping from life – in
Gone. If Willow’s story is parallel, then we need to interpret her behavior as
escapist also. The natural consequence is that Willow’s problem is not
addiction, not to magic and not to anything else. Rather, Willow’s reaction
to her binge in Wrecked is itself a form of escapism from her real
problem(s).
This, I think, highlights one of my issues with the magic/drugs metaphor.
Because Wrecked and Gone rubbed the addiction “metaphor” in our faces,
most viewers took that as the actual message. And they didn’t like it. Going
forward, any viewer is likely to find S6 pretty frustrating if the addiction
metaphor is taken at face value. Much of the criticism of S6 stems from the
fact that Willow’s story plays as addiction despite the fact that this simply
can’t and doesn’t work.
Many viewers also disparaged Gone because they criticized Xander’s
behavior, or criticized the writers for making Xander seem like an oblivious
fool, for not recognizing what was happening in Spike’s crypt. I think this
criticism misses the point. Xander is so caught up in his own concerns
about his upcoming wedding (inviting D’Hoffryn?!) that he’s ignoring
Buffy’s problems and she, in turn, is ignoring his. Metaphorically, Xander’s
inability to “see” Buffy is just a way to say that he’s not recognizing her
coping problems, just as he has failed to see other things all season. Think
of Marcie in Out of Sight, Out of Mind, where she became invisible
precisely because people weren’t noticing her; it’s a similar dynamic from a
different perspective and Xander even references that episode here.
Nor should we be surprised by Xander’s behavior even without the
metaphor. He comes from an abusive family, as has been clear for quite
some time. Kids in such families often become adept at “not seeing” the
things happening right in front of them, just as Xander misses the dynamic
between Spike and Buffy in the kitchen and in the crypt. That would be too
painful for Xander, so he doesn’t “see” it.
What’s true of Xander is also true of the episode as a whole. None of
Buffy’s friends actually see her even before she becomes invisible. They
aren’t recognizing her issues any more than Xander is. The episode
therefore works on 2 levels: as Buffy’s own desire to escape from her life;
and as the failure of her friends to see what’s really wrong with her. Buffy’s
words to Willow sum it up for both, even though Buffy, as usual, takes the
blame on herself:
WILLOW: Okay, I deserve the wrath of Dawn, but ... why is she taking it
out on you?
BUFFY: Because I let it happen.
WILLOW: Buffy, I was the one who-
BUFFY: Who was drowning. My best friend. And I was too wrapped up in
my own dumb life to even notice.
Trivia notes: (1) SMG was absent during most of the shooting of this
episode, I believe because she was shooting the first Scooby Doo movie, so
they needed to have her on screen a minimal amount of time. She also
wanted to get her hair cut so they worked that into the story line. (2) Dawn
mentioned Kokopelli, a fertility god and a trickster worshiped by Native
Americans of the Southwest. (3) Andrew wanted their invisibility ray to be
“more ILM, less Ed Wood.” Industrial Light and Magic is the visual effects
company founded by George Lucas. Ed Wood made very low budget genre
films. (4) Willow said she deserved the “wrath of Dawn”, which is probably
a pun on the Star Trek movie The Wrath of Khan. (5) Xander’s “Good
Godfrey Cambridge” refers to an American comedian of the ‘60s and ‘70s.
(6) Xander accused Spike of trying to “mack” on Buffy, which is American
slang meaning Spike was trying to seduce her. (7) Buffy tried to divert Ms.
Kroger by pretending that Spike used the word “crib” rather than “crypt”,
the former being American slang for a house. (8) D’Hoffryn last appeared
in Something Blue. (9) Buffy’s line “S’awright” refers to a by-now fairly
obscure comic and ventriloquist from the 50s and 60s who used the stage
name Señor Wences. (10) Willow’s expression “jump off the wagon” is
American slang meaning that someone who stopped using alcohol or drugs
will start again. (11) When Buffy torments the woman in the park as “the
ghost of fashion victims past”, the reference is to the Ghost of Christmas
Past from the Charles Dickens story A Christmas Carol. (12) Buffy’s
exclamation “Yahtzee” when she finds Dawn’s file on Doris’s desk refers to
a dice game of that name. (13) The scene in which Buffy causes Doris’s
computer to print the phrase “all work and no play make Doris a dull girl”
is a reference to the movie The Shining. (14) The tune Buffy whistles as she
leaves Doris’s office is “Going Through the Motions” from OMWF. (15)
Willow’s “betcha by golly wow” comes from a song of that title by the
Stylistics. (16) Buffy’s reference to “Bizarro World” is to the Superman
comics. (17) Buffy’s “birds of a bloody feather” modifies an English idiom
which means that two things are alike. (18) Buffy’s “hey, I’m walking here”
comes from the movie Midnight Cowboy. (19) Buffy’s “unidentified flying
pizza” refers to the expression “unidentified flying object”. (20) Buffy
described Xander and Anya as “Muldering out what happened”, referring to
one of the heroes of the TV series The X-Files. (21) SMG’s delivery of the
single word “Wow” in response to Xander telling her she could die has
always struck me as exceptional acting; she delivered it in exactly the right
tone. (22) Warren describes Andrew as “Tucker’s brother”, referring to the
episode The Prom.
Doublemeat Palace
I’m reliably informed that people who’ve worked in the fast food industry
find Doublemeat Palace funny. Most viewers didn’t like it and it regularly
gets rated among the worst in the series. The episode doesn’t do much for
me either, but I do think there’s a point to it.
A number of viewers interpreted Buffy’s job as a return to the “Buffy has
no money” theme we saw in Flooded. That’s certainly present in the text,
but I think it makes more sense to see Buffy’s dead-end, soul deadening job
at the DP as a metaphor for how she sees her Slayer job at this point in her
life. Consider the dialogue as if the references were to what it means to be a
Slayer rather than a worker at the Doublemeat Palace: “We have a lot of
turnover here.”; “MANNY: In it for life. Like me. You wanna get
something out of this, Buffy? You'll do the same. You put the work in, and
ten years from now, you'll be where I am.”; “WIG LADY: Oh, you really
might make it, dear. Not like some of them, where suddenly you never see
them again. I can see you here a long time.”
Following the same thought, it’s also possible to interpret Buffy’s
conversation with Spike – seemingly referring to her job – as an attempt by
him to convince her that she should stop being the Slayer (at least in a
moral sense) and join him in the dark:
SPIKE: You're not happy here.
BUFFY: (quietly) Please don't make this harder.
SPIKE: You don't belong here….
SPIKE: This place'll kill you!

At the end of the episode, when Buffy says she would “like to not be fired”,
we can take that as referring to being the Slayer, rather than her DP job
(from which, after all, she has already been fired). She’s at least willing to
accept that she is the Slayer, but she’s still just going through the motions.
Progress of a sort, as “not wanting to die” represented progress in Gone.
Should we interpret this as progress in the sense of solving Buffy’s seasonal
dilemma? Not if you adopt my view of it. In my view, her problem is not
her failure to accept responsibility – that’s merely a symptom. She doesn’t
want to take responsibility because she’s depressed. Going through the
motions on her job may be a step above not doing her job at all, but it
doesn’t make her less depressed. If ending her depression is the goal, then
focusing on her “job” is a diversion.
I’ve said enough to this point about the addiction metaphor, so I’ll just add
that Willow’s continued focus on “addiction” should also be seen as a
diversion from her real problems. The text makes that problematic, but it’s
the only way I can see to make it work.
Sex with Spike continues to be Buffy’s escape. But what was once daring,
thrilling, hot enough to bring down the house, is now lifeless and tawdry in
the back alley.
Buffy’s relationship with Spike is, in my view, reflected in her metaphorical
heart’s doubts about the marriage and how he feels about Anya:
ANYA: When I was a vengeance demon, I caused pain and mayhem,
certainly. But I put in a full day's work doing it, and I got compensated
appropriately.
XANDER: Welcome to today's episode of 'Go Money Go!' I hear it daily.
WILLOW: Yep, for the rest of your life.
Xander looks dismayed, continues to contemplate that as Anya continues
talking.

Xander shouldn’t be seeing things just from his own POV, though. I thought
Halfrek made excellent points about Xander’s treatment of Anya, even if
she was obnoxious about it. I never thought he treated Anya very well.
That’s one reason why his speech in Into The Woods rang false to me – he
hadn’t ever acted like someone who truly loved her, as I documented in my
post then. His behavior hasn’t really improved since then, even bearing in
mind that Anya is difficult and that, as he told her in Graduation Day 1,
“That humanity thing's still a work in progress, isn't it?”. Anya’s faults
don’t excuse Xander’s, any more than Spike’s excuse Buffy’s. Some
examples of Xander’s lesser moments, not including the stall on
announcing their engagement and one other point which I’m leaving out to
avoid an important spoiler:
ANYA: Are we gonna see the body?
WILLOW: (shocked) What?
Xander looks annoyed, turns away. (The Body)

XANDER: Ahn, how's about we try being a bit less prejudiced, and a bit
more inclusive? Not us, (indicates himself and Willow, then points to Anya)
just you. (Tough Love)
ANYA: Piano!
XANDER: Because that's what we used to kill that big demon that one
time!
Buffy turns to look at them with a confused frown.
XANDER: No wait, that-that was a rocket launcher. (turns to Anya) Ahn,
what are you talking about? (Spiral)

XANDER: Anya, Giles is gonna leave the store to you when he goes. What
more do you want?
GILES: I'm not *leaving* the store to anyone. I'm going to England. I'm not
dead, I'm still a partner. (yanks the statue away from Anya)
ANYA: (sullen) Silent oversees partner.
XANDER: Who you should be very nice to, unless you want to end up
working at Video Hut. (Bargaining)
ANYA: Well, um, it's just ... we're minus a Buffybot. And, uh, Spike is
missing in action somewhere with Dawn, and Giles flew away, and, uh,
well you, you're looking a little magicked-out.
XANDER: Ahn honey, we're nearing your point, right? (Bargaining)
ANYA: Slaying vampires! (Xander looks embarrassed) Well, you're
providing a valuable service to the whole community. I say cash in.
Awkward pause. Xander still looks uncomfortable. Anya doesn't pick up on
it….
DAWN: Xander?
Anya looks at Xander. He continues looking uncomfortable.
XANDER: (reluctantly) Action is his reward.
Dawn gives Anya a "told you so" look. Anya looks annoyed, stands up.
ANYA: (angrily) Why don't you ever take my side? (Flooded)

GILES: Anya is a wonderful former vengeance demon, I'm sure you'll

spend ... many years of ... non-hell-dimensional bliss.
Xander smiles, looks a bit nervous.
GILES: Is she moving in with you?
XANDER: Um...
GILES: You know, with your combined incomes, you might think about a
down payment on a house.
XANDER: Like the kind you *live* in?
GILES: No rush. I'm sure you have plenty to think about with the
arrangements for the wedding and so on. You've got the rest of your lives to
plan the rest of your lives.
XANDER: (laughs, nervously) Yeah, yeah.
They sit there. Xander looks increasingly nervous. (All The Way)
ANYA: What? I'm just saying what everyone's thinking, (to Xander) right
baby?
XANDER: You are attractive and have many good qualities. (Tabula Rasa)
In comments, Aeryl said I was too hard on Xander: “As far as Xander and
Anya go, man I hope you are never outside MY relationship looking in.
While I agree that Xander is frightened to take their relationship to the next
level(and Anya is too eager, more on this when it's appropriate), I don't
necessarily see his tactless attitude as a symptom of the problems in their
relationship, more as a response to Anya's own tactless attitude(he was
much the same way with Cordy, and I don't think any of us doubt the
sincere affection he had for her)…. I think he's tactlessly honest, because he
cares, not because he doesn't.”
I think Xander loves Buffy, and always has, despite his tendency to put her
on a pedestal and then condemn her when she fails to live up to his image.
His feelings for Anya, however you see them, certainly aren’t as strong as
hers are for him. Just like Buffy and Spike.
Trivia notes: (1) Xander thought Jonathan had “learned his lesson” about
being a supervillain, but it’s not clear what he has in mind. The reference is
probably to Superstar, but Jonathan wasn’t a villain in that episode. (2) The
“Vulcan Woman” on Star Trek: Enterprise, mentioned by Willow, is T’Pol.
(3) Buffy said she felt like a “tool”, which is American slang for a loser. (4)
The movie Sleepless in Seattle, mentioned by Buffy, starred Tom Hanks and
Meg Ryan. (5) Manny’s expression “curiosity killed the cat” is an American
idiom meaning that asking too many questions gets you in trouble. (6)
Buffy told Dawn that she had waitressed “that summer in LA”, referring to
Anne. It’s interesting to speculate whether Dawn actually had memories of
that. (7) Buffy’s “variety is the spice of bad” plays off the expression
“variety is the spice of life”. (8) If Halfrek looks familiar to you, she should.
She’s the same actress (Kali Rocha) who played Cecily in Fool For Love.
(9) When Buffy ran through the DP shouting about that the meat was
people, the scene was an homage to the movie Soylent Green. There was a
similar scene in Earshot. (10) Xander and Dawn were playing the card
game “Go Fish”. (11) One of the weird things about living in LA is that you
can recognize the scenes where TV shows and movies are filmed. DP was
filmed at what was then a small hot dog place (now it’s a Coffee Bean) at
the corner of Palms and Sepulveda. (12) After this episode aired, Jane
Espenson gave some tongue-in-cheek interviews in which she was very
disingenuous about the demon. She said it had never occurred to them that
the penis-shaped demon which paralyzed its victims by spraying them with
poison, but missed when it aimed at a lesbian, who screamed and ran away
from it, after which it was killed when the lesbian chopped it off, could be
seen as in any way sexual.
 Dead Things
Dead Things epitomizes S6 for me. If a darker, more disturbing episode has
ever been shown on American network TV, I’m certainly unaware of it.
From the infamous “Bronze beta” scene (see trivia note 8) to Katrina
bringing the nerds up short with her rape accusation to her murder to the
haunting chords and matching lyrics of Bush while Buffy and Spike sense
each other’s presence to the nightmare time distortions to Buffy beating
Spike to her breakdown with Tara, the episode is one *intense* emotional
ride.
I think it’s bloody brilliant. For me, this episode is one of the highlights of
S6 – indeed, one of the 10 or so best episodes in the show’s history – and it
highlights for me why S6, though it may deserve criticism at times, was one
of the most daring and innovative seasons of television ever produced.
Some of those highlights:
First, there’s an important continuity note, namely that time distortion was
Warren’s “test” of Buffy in Life Serial, and here Warren’s the one who
thinks up the plan for taking advantage of the time-distorting demons. For
me, the spell is an allegory for Buffy’s sense of disorientation in her life, the
“wrongness” that she confesses to Tara.
I’ve previously noted that Spike’s “you belong in the dark with me” attitude
likewise mirrors his behavior in Life Serial. In Dead Things he actually
repeats those words as a prelude to sex with Buffy in the Bronze: “SPIKE:
(O.S.) You see ... you try to be with them... but you always end up in the
dark ... (whispering in her ear) ...with me. … That's not your world. You
belong in the shadows... with me.”
The basic ambiguity about Spike’s nature remains, though – he also fought
by her side and helped her kill 3 demons. More important, he took the
beating in the alley for her sake.
Second, we now see that the Trio’s immaturity isn’t very funny after all. It
may have all seemed like a juvenile game, even the attempt to see naked
women in Gone, but Katrina’s blunt accusation of rape puts a new light on
all that they’ve done to date. For most viewers, including me, her
accusation came as a shock because we’d allowed ourselves to get sucked
in by the childish nature of the Trio until now. In particular, we see Warren
revealed not as a geek, but as a psychopath. I think the writers did a terrific
job on this. Yes, he was creepy in IWMTLY, and yes, we had doubts about
him in Flooded and outright suspicions in Gone. Now he’s crossed a line,
and in his own words (Smashed) he’s not coming back from that. They built
this slowly enough to make his descent not just believable, but almost
inevitable.
Third, I thought Steven DeKnight was very subtle in the way Tara and
Willow seem to talk about Buffy when we know they’re really talking about
each other. Similarly subtle, note that Spike is warm and comfortable in his
crypt, while Buffy seems cold and isolated outside. I see this as a metaphor
for their relationship, even their current view of their respective lives.
Speaking of metaphors, being under the rug in the teaser seems like a pretty
obvious one too.
There was a lot of debate at the time about Buffy’s decision to turn herself
in. Karen argued in comments that Spike was right and that Buffy should
not go to the police: “She is wrong to do so, and Dawn is right to see it as
an escape. Faith and Spike are both wrong in trying to articulate an "eye for
an eye" balance as the REASON, but they are NOT wrong in recognizing
that conventional justice will not serve. Buffy does need to submit to
authority, maybe the Watcher's Council, or maybe her own judgment, adult
judgment, with this as a burden on her. It's exactly like Angel's burden. He
can't erase his past, but must recognize consequences and atone for it with
his future actions. Acting the martyr does not really represent acceptance of
consequences, and the police are not at all able to 'judge' Buffy in any way.
I'd even argue that part of the emotional challenge of growing up is
recognizing that sometimes one must bear the burden of one's guilt and act
as one's own judge, and move forward.”
Whatever side you take, it’s consistent with her behavior in Ted. In my
view, Buffy’s instinctive reaction was correct, though an argument could be
made that the Watcher’s Council, rather than the police, would have been
appropriate. She seems never to have considered calling Giles; at the very
least he could have reminded her of what he told her in Consequences:
“Giles: The Slayer is on the front line of a nightly war. Now, it's, it's tragic,
but accidents have happened.
Buffy: W-what do you do?
Giles: Well, the Council investigates, um, metes out punishment if
punishment is due. But I... I have no plans to involve them.”

Even if she had called Giles, her decision probably wouldn’t have changed.
Whether the WC is right in this is a separate issue, but compare their view
to Faith’s (below) and you can see that if Buffy rejected the one she pretty
much has to reject the other.
Buffy believes she’s being responsible by turning herself in, and so she is in
a way. That said, while Dawn’s reaction seems consistent to me as that of
someone who’s immature and thinking more of herself, there’s an element
of truth in what she tells Buffy:
DAWN: (almost crying) You don't want to be here with me. You didn't want
to come back. I know that. You were happier where you were. (crying) You
want to go away again.
BUFFY: Dawn...
DAWN: Then go! You're not really here anyway.
Certainly Buffy is quick to blame herself, in part no doubt because she feels
so wrong and even corrupt at the core at this point in her life, and this is
another way for her to give up. As AtPO poster Alcibiades put it, “She was
beating Spike up because he stood between herself and her greatest desire --
to lose herself back into powerlessness, lack of responsibility and spiritual
and emotional exhaustion.”
Dead Things emphasizes the similarity to Bad Girls in the way Spike
disposes of the body and his arguments to Buffy. Both parallel the actions
and arguments of Faith in Bad Girls and Consequences:
“BUFFY: I'll show them.
SPIKE: (coolly) Show them what?
BUFFY: (very angry) What ... did you do?!
SPIKE: (firmly) What I had to. I went back and I took care of it. It doesn't
matter now. No one will ever find her.”
***
“Faith: (faces Buffy) Okay, this is the last time we're gonna have this
conversation, and we're not even having it now, you understand me? There
*is* no body. I took it, weighted it, and dumped it. The body doesn't exist.”
“BUFFY: (tearful) A girl is dead because of me.
SPIKE: And how many people are alive because of you? How many have
you saved? One dead girl doesn't tip the scale.”
***
“Faith: (steps closer) Buffy, I'm not gonna *see* anything. I missed the
mark last night and I'm sorry about the guy. I really am! But it happens!
Anyway, how many people do you think we've saved by now, thousands?
And didn't you stop the world from ending? Because in my book, that puts
you and me in the plus column.”
I doubt we’re supposed to think that Faith was right all along. By repeating
Faith’s arguments after he asked her to trust him to “sort this out”, Spike’s
amorality stands revealed in a way that Buffy can’t deny. Her reaction –
beating him to a pulp – reflects not just her distaste at Spike’s ethical
blindness, but her own self-loathing for associating with someone who
thinks that way. Buffy is really beating herself, even as Spike bears the
brunt. Again the parallel is to Faith, this time to the beating scene in Who
Are You:
BUFFY: You don't ... have a soul! There is nothing good or clean in you.
You are dead inside! You can't feel anything real! I could never ... be your
girl!
***
Faith (in Buffy’s body): You're nothing. [Punch. Punch.] Disgusting.
[Punch. Punch.]
[“Buffy” grabs “Faith's” hair with both hands and bangs her head.]
Murderous bitch. [Bang. Bang...] You're nothing. [Bang. Bang...] [Switches
back to punches] You're [“Buffy” is now crying.] disgusting.

The fact that Buffy could abuse Spike like that is strong evidence to me that
she doesn’t love him. Their relationship has always incorporated an element
of violence, but never has it reached a point like this. The fact that he does
love her, so much that he willingly lies back and takes the beating for her
sake, means that she’s wrong either way: she shouldn’t love him because
he’s evil, as confirmed by his amoral arguments in the alley; if she doesn’t
love him, then she’s abusing him (not that he’s an innocent on that score
either), as I think she realized after the beating. The beating itself is the
outward manifestation of her emotional abuse of him previously (“you’re
…convenient”).
It wasn’t just the look of horror on her face as she left him bloody, her
dream foretold it. In her dream, Spike and Katrina trade places; Buffy
handcuffs Spike and stakes him/Katrina, drawing a clear parallel of guilt.
It’s her subconscious understanding that she’s responsible for the way she’s
treating Spike. She wants to be punished – that’s part of her motivation for
going to the police – but Tara offers her only compassion and the hard truth
that Spike truly does love her. I think she never really admitted that to
herself before. Buffy’s breakdown in the face of Tara’s compassion
demonstrates that punishment would have been easier for her to accept than
despair. That’s what makes her tears and her plea not to be forgiven so
heartbreaking.
Trivia note: (1) Remember Joyce pulling out the handcuffs in Band Candy?
Like mother, like daughter, I guess. (2) Buffy mentioned New Kids on the
Block, a boy band from the 80s and early 90s. (3) The record album
Jonathan pulled out was “Frampton Comes Alive”. (4) Jonathan used the
idiom “on the lam”, which means hiding from the police. (5) Andrew’s
“bazoombas” is a slang term for breasts. (6) Anya and Xander describe
Buffy as looking “pounded”, which is a pun. It means “tired or worn out”,
but it’s also a slang term for sex. (7) Warren’s suggestion that they solve
their problem with “one big stone” refers to the idiom “killing two birds
with one stone”. (7) Buffy mentioned Soul Train, which was a musical
variety show which ran from 1971-2006. (8) I need to explain the internet
description of the balcony sex scene as the “Bronze Beta” scene. When the
series moved off the WB network, they had to change the website because
The Bronze was owned by the WB. The new site got the name “Bronze
Beta”. The “joke” in the expression comes from the fact that the angle of
intercourse in the sex scene suggests anal sex. (9) Willow mentioned The
Brekenkrieg Grimoire. That means “Broken War Magic Book”. (10)
Buffy’s conversation with Dawn describes in metaphor the critical issue of
the season. Keep it in mind when we get to the finale. (11) When Buffy said
that “time went all David Lynch” she was referring to the American movie
director who is famous for surrealist movies.
 Older And Far Away
In S3-5, episode 11 gave us a clue to the season finale by presenting a
version of Buffy’s challenge in the finale and giving us a solution which
was either wrong (Gingerbread) or incomplete in some way (Triangle). For
reasons I don’t know, in S6, as in S2, it’s episode 14, Older and Far Away,
which gives us this clue. I won’t say anything more in order to avoid
spoilers.
I think OAFA is extremely well constructed – the demon trapped in the
sword, the gang trapped in the house. And Buffy feeling trapped in her life.
The title of the episode comes from the book Empire of the Sun, which is
the book Dawn’s class is discussing when she’s summoned to the
“counselor”. This is never an accident, so I’ll review the outline of the book
and note how I see it applying to OAFA.
The basic plot of the novel is the story of Jim, a young boy who is separated
from his parents in WWII. After barely surviving on his own amidst the
chaos of war, he ends up in a Japanese prisoner camp. There he’s safe and
secure, even if he’s a prisoner. However, the other prisoners simply ignore
him. When the war ends, he leaves the camp but soon returns there because
the world outside seems so insecure. He’s finally reunited with his parents,
but “for all their affection for him, they seemed older and far away.”
This reasonably summarizes Dawn’s view of her own life. She survived a
war last year (albeit not on her own), and now she’s feeling trapped.
Naturally the world outside seems unsafe to her, particularly since Buffy
was so overprotective of her last year and pays no attention to her (in her
view) this year. For all Buffy’s affection for Dawn, to Dawn she seems
older and far away.
Two flaws keep OAFA from being a great episode IMO. First is the
magic/drugs stuff which dominates much of the plot. I’ve given my views
on that issue before, so I’ll leave it at that except to note one glaring failure:
Tara’s “work without the net” advice is terrible. Whether it’s a good idea or
not for Willow to go “cold turkey”, only a crazy person walks a tightrope in
a dangerous situation without a net. The two situations aren’t comparable.
The second flaw involves Dawn. Dawn is feeling trapped, and we should
see this on the level of both story and metaphor. As metaphor, it works
perfectly: Dawn represents Buffy’s human, adolescent self, which Buffy has
locked up in the belief that she needs to do so as part of being an adult. This
is causing Buffy the psychic distress which we see played out by Dawn:
cries for attention, feelings of neglect by friends and family. Dawn’s
immature behavior is Buffy’s. It works for the episode, and it’s essential for
the seasonal arc.
As storyline, though, it doesn’t work quite so well. Dawn is a teenager, and
we’re all familiar with whiny, ungrateful teenagers (all too often from
personal experience ). The trouble is that from the outside, it’s real damn
hard to sympathize with a whiny teenager. Yet the end of the episode –
Halfrek’s final words about the failure to hear Dawn’s cries (“the cries
around you, you don’t hear at all”), Buffy’s decision to stay inside with
Dawn – leaves the impression that we’re supposed to be sympathizing with
Dawn. MT succeeds in playing a spoiled brat all too well for the sake of the
audience on this level.
Here’s an example of contemporary reaction which I’ll leave anonymous,
but which is pretty typical for the episode:
“Alright, I'm obviously already in disagreement with some posters about
this episode, so I'm just going to rant.

Dawn is fifteen years old, not eight. Not ten. Yes, I'm sure we were all
inconsiderate brats at at least some point in our teenage years, but great
googly-moogly, the whole house is in mortal danger and Dawn stomps off
because people 'don't want to spend time with her' against their will by
being trapped in a house? And what's all this 'child' nonsense? She is not a
child. She's almost sixteen, for crying out loud!

This episode starts showing us just how terrible poor Dawn has it, as her
sister gets 'called to work'…. Buffy does the concerned but overworked
mom thing as she heads out the door; I'm surprised she didn't remind Dawn
to brush her teeth. Dawn does the 'I'll be okay, sitting here alone, in the
dark, like a dog. You go ahead!' stiff upper lip guilt thing. Then she wanders
on over to the Magic Box to get a little face-time with the Scoobs. Those
horrid, unfeeling brutes put things like earning a keep and staying on the
wagon above shopping with Dawn (who has at least one friend, Janice, who
I'm sure could've gone with her) so Dawn is apparently forced to go by
herself and shoplift to fill that gaping attention hole left by her sister's...
friends. Yes, not being able to hang with your sister's friends is now a cause
of juvenile delinquency. Would that I had known such a handy excuse was
right around the corner in my formative years; I too might never have had
to pay for lipstick again. Somehow, though, I got the idea that STEALING
was WRONG, even without the benefit of having a twenty-one-year-old
hold my hand while I wandered the big store with the shiny, candylike tubes
of lipstick/jewelry/leather jackets to prevent me from taking what I wanted.

Then we get to the party itself; Dawn is once again trying to fit in with the
older. She listens politely enough, then as Buffy is opening her present
(noticing the security tag still on the coat) and tells her she likes it, Xander
and Anya wheel in Xander's hand-made weapons chest. Buffy immediately
goes to coo over the chest, which of course upsets Dawn mightily. Oh God
no, how dare Buffy like something her friend obviously spent hours crafting
with his own hands better than her five-fingered discount leather jacket,
which she told her she loved? Dawn, the ever-persecuted. She just gets
worse from there, and the thing is, everyone goes along with it! Even 'say
what I think' Anya cuts her some serious slack in order to goad Willow into
magicking them out of there.

Dawn proceeds to get pissy about everyone treating her like a kid with
Anya, everyone wanting to 'leave rather than be in the house with her' (at
this point, I'd say they have ample reason to want to get away, Dawn's just
icing on the cake) and the Scoobies once again make with the
understanding 'we were all teenagers once' schtick which I don't buy for a
minute. See, I was a teenager too, and the last thing I remember wanting to
do is spend time with my parents, my siblings, or my sibling's friends (well
okay, maybe sometimes I'd tag along with my sister). Now granted, I had
not lost my mother and almost lost my sister, but I rarely saw the former
because of work (or because I was out when she was home) and I never
once pulled the 'I want you to not work so you can stay home with me.' Of
course, I had impressed upon me at a young age just how important work
was to things like bill-paying and roof-keeping and food-buying.
Apparently Buffy's money troubles (she has no excuse for 'saving the world'
ignorance) have just slid right by Dawn.

Dawn doesn't want to be treated like a child. Hallie says 'none of you could
feel this child's pain because you were too wrapped up in your own lives!'
Well excuse the hell out of Buffy's friends for having their own lives,
including such selfish pursuits as _doing their jobs_ and _trying to get their
own lives in order vis a vis addiction_, or in Buffy's case _working a crap
minimum wage job to try and keep a roof/food/clothes yadda over a certain
ungrateful kid's head_ while _trying to keep people from being killed_ in
her off hours. So is Dawn a kid or not? She's a teenager, in that nebulous
between area, but so far she's been acting like an eight-year-old.”

The one thing to say in Dawn’s favor is that this is the one year anniversary
of her discovery that she’s not real (called back, to the distress of most
viewers, by the “get out” screams), and it’s been a tough year. She’s gone
from the center of everyone’s attention to an outsider who’s neglected.
Dawn isn’t wrong about that, she’s just immature in the way she tries to
compensate. When Joss said that the theme of S6 would be “oh, grow up”,
he meant it.
Trivia notes: (1) The story line of being trapped in the house is based on
Luis Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel. The movie also includes a witch
and references to drug addiction. (2) Dawn’s kleptomania began in
Intervention. I’ve called attention to it each time she’s done it. (3) Willow’s
“Spellcasters Anonymous” group takes its name from Alcoholics
Anonymous. (4) Buffy’s dialogue with Tara puns on the gay experience:
“TARA: So, is, um... (looks around) Spike coming? BUFFY: No. He may
be a chip-head, but ... he still doesn't play too well with others. BUFFY:
Besides, I'm definitely not ready to, to...TARA: (turns back) Come out.” (5)
Star Trek fans will have appreciated that Richard wore a red shirt. (6)
Willow’s described her gift to Buffy as a “back massager”, but it could
obviously be used as a vibrator as well. (7) Xander’s mention of a cornfield
refers to the Twilight Zone episode It’s a Good Life. (8) Buffy’s birthdays
are notoriously disastrous on the show. Previous birthday episodes include
Surprise/Innocence, Helpless, and Blood Ties. (9) Dawn said she was
“called out of class like I was a total J.D.”. The initials stand for the phrase
“juvenile delinquent”. (10) Drew Greenberg took advantage of Kali Rocha’s
roles as both Cecily (Fool For Love) and Halfrek to tweak the audience by
having Halfrek seem to recognize Spike.
 As You Were
Anyone who’s so obsessive as to rank all 144 BtVS episodes (ahem) will,
necessarily, have one which finishes dead last at No. 144. For me, that
episode is As You Were, one of only 2 episodes I actually dislike (the other
is Dead Man’s Party). I’ll summarize the reasons why without even
mentioning the “Mary Sue” nature of Mrs. Finn or the addiction dialogue.
The demon(s). The dialogue is hopelessly contradictory within the space of
10 lines: the demons are “rare” and “nearly extinct”, but they’re “breeders”:
“As soon as we put one Suvolte down, a dozen take its place. … One turns
into ten, ten becomes a hundred.” In which case they pretty obviously aren’t
“rare”. That’s why Buffy could refer to them as “tribbles”, creatures which
multiplied faster than the bunnies in Tabula Rasa. Nor is it very plausible
that Riley would forget to tell Buffy not to kill the demon.
Spike’s purported international arms dealing makes no sense, particularly
when sprung out of the blue in this episode with no lead-in. Among other
problems, how can Spike be a demon arms dealer when he's a social outcast
hated by all other demons and doesn't even have a telephone line (he used a
pay phone to call Buffy in Smashed)?
Nor is Spike noted for his competence: “He-he's too incompetent.”
Notwithstanding Todd’s reference to Machiavelli in the teaser, Spike
doesn’t exactly fit the image. As recently as Dead Things he couldn’t even
weight a body properly, and he has a long history of bollocksing up plans
beginning from his first appearance in School Hard. Perhaps the “arms
dealing” plot is satirical, but that’s not obvious and satire usually makes a
relevant point.
Riley ex machina (h/t Exegy). This episode reinforces my view that the
writers, particularly Doug Petrie, had a very different attitude towards Riley
than the fans, and misjudged their reaction to him. Does anyone really
believe that it’s Riley, rather than Angel, who would have the impact on
Buffy we see in this episode?
Sam told Buffy how “ripped up inside” Riley was about Buffy: “The only
thing that could ... help Riley work it out was time. Lots of time. Took him
a year to get over you.” This is sloppy. Riley left 14 months ago and has
been married for 4 months – so long ago that he implausibly forgot to
mention it. Assuming a month or two of “courtship” (his word in The
Initiative), he was over Buffy in 6-8 months max.
Riley's “pep talk” to Buffy in AYW brought to mind Xander's similar speech
in The Freshman. Both came when Buffy was down, confused and
ineffective (was it just me or were her initial attempts to fight the Suvolte
demon very unSlayer-like?). Xander's speech worked for me, Riley's didn't.
Why?

Xander, whatever his faults, worships Buffy. He has from the beginning. He
is the most ordinary of the characters. By ordinary, I mean he's not an
image, he's a person with flaws. His recognition of those flaws is both
endearing (sometimes) and the reason why we accept his hero worship;
people who don't recognize their own flaws generally worship only
themselves. Buffy could respond to him because she and we could see
Xander’s devotion.

Riley, in contrast, comes across here as a stereotype. He's the child from
Seventh Heaven or Ozzie and Harriet. Too good to be true. I think of him as
an image from the 50s of what we were all "supposed" to be. His character
has completely regressed – it’s as if the events of Goodbye Iowa through
Into the Woods never happened, and it’s doubtful that regression means
progress. The episode title even implies this.

When this Riley delivers his speech to Buffy, there is no sense of hero
worship in it because we can't believe this Riley sees Buffy as a hero. This
Riley sees himself in the heroic image. When delivered from this
background, his speech is condescending. Not "I admire you", but "You're
better than this", an attitude he made clear in his earlier comments like
"He's evil or had you forgotten that?" and "It doesn't really touch you".
Buffy reacted not because she felt his sincerity but because she felt his
reproach.
And he never asked about her mother.
The only way to read the episode as anything more than a writer’s
misjudgment, it seems to me, is to interpret the episode as a Buffy fantasy.
That is, we’d see it as her daydream about something that might happen to
take her away from a life she hates. I see two problems with such an
interpretation. First, there’s an episode coming up which uses this idea,
albeit in a very different way. Second, and more important, this theory runs
aground on the point I made above – it’s just not realistic that Buffy’s
fantasy would include Riley rather than Angel.
If we are supposed to see it as a daydream, it doesn’t really get Buffy
anywhere except to break up with Spike. That could be seen as progress,
particularly since she did it with respect. OTOH, as I’ve argued before, I
think the sex with Spike is a symptom, not a cause, of Buffy’s problems this
season.
On the subject of Spike, I think it’s important that Buffy referred to him as
William in the scene at the end. She was apologizing to the human being,
not to the monster: “I'm using you. … I'm just ... being weak, and selfish...
and it's killing me. … I'm sorry ... William.”
William became a monster because one woman rejected him and another
came along to affirm that monster. Now a woman has rejected the monster
while affirming the human. William/Spike’s life has come full circle.
Buffy’s apology raises an interesting issue about the nature of moral wrong.
In his book Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson made the
following argument against slavery:

The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of

the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism....Our
children see this, and learn to imitate it....The parent storms, the child looks
on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of
smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed,
educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with
odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his
manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.

I've always thought this a clever tactical argument. The only people who
could, in practice, eliminate slavery in Virginia in 1783 were the
slaveholders. Jefferson showed that it was in their interest to do so: by
abusing their slaves, they were killing themselves.
This is, if I'm not mistaken, the very effect Buffy attributes to herself. But
consider the case of slavery. Do we really think slavery a moral wrong
because of its effect on the slaveholder? And if not, how does this affect
your view of Buffy and the conclusion of AYW?
Trivia note: (1) The title is a military command which means to disregard
the previous order and return the situation before it was issued. (2) Spike’s
role as arms dealer, including the name “The Doctor”, was loosely based on
the story of Columbian drug lord Pablo Escobar. I’m no fan of the
magic/drugs metaphor, but I suspect this episode could have succeeded – or
at least fit better with the season themes – if they had stayed with the drug
dealer model. (3) Todd’s reference to the “glass ceiling” is to the way in
which women are unable to rise in a corporate hierarchy. (4) Todd
mentioned that he and Buffy don’t work at “Burger World”, which is where
Beavis and Butthead work. (5) Dawn brought Willow an “Arnold Palmer”,
which is iced tea and lemonade. (6) Todd used the word “zeitgeist”, which
means “spirit of the time”. (7) The scene where Riley shouts about the wild
bear was taken from the movie Men in Black. (8) Buffy’s “mazel tov” to
Riley is a Yiddish expression meaning literally “good luck” and in context
“congratulations”. (9) Xander referred to Riley as “love taker,
heartbreaker”, which is the title of a song by Pat Benatar. (10) Spike called
Riley a “tin soldier”, referring to the children’s toys. (11) Xander mentioned
Nick Fury from the Avengers. Ten years later… (12) Riley’s mention of
“bug hunts” is possibly a reference to Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers.
 Hell’s Bells
“We know what we are, but not what we may be.” Hamlet, Act IV, sc. 5.
Metaphorically, Xander couldn’t marry Anya. He’s Buffy’s “heart”, and this
season her heart is unsure, conflicted. We’ve seen that uncertainty in her
half-hearted pursuit of the Trio and in her relationship with Spike. We’ll
know Buffy has recovered from her malaise when her heart is sure again.
And vice versa.
Xander’s not just a metaphor, of course, he’s fully developed character in
his own right, so we need to look at this episode from that angle as well.
For me, there are three factors contributing to his decision to walk out. One
is his relationship with Buffy. The second is how much he really loves
Anya, an issue I’ve raised before in my post on Into the Woods. The third
factor is Xander’s own family background. I’ll discuss these in this order.
Xander, as I’ll discuss below, fears his own weaknesses. He’s able to
overcome those weaknesses, in part, because he sees himself as valuable to
Buffy. His vision suggests that when that's gone, there will nothing
worthwhile left in him. He also senses that he’s going to have to put Buffy’s
mission aside for Anya. The thing that makes him feel enough of a man to
believe that he can get married (his ability to help Buffy) is the same thing
he stands to lose if he goes through with it.
I’ve said before that I thought Xander’s speech to Anya in Into the Woods
rang false. In my eyes, Xander didn’t behave as if he loved Anya
“powerfully, painfully”. Xander rarely defended her, he often criticized her,
there was always an air of patronizing about his sarcasm towards her. I
collected instances of these in my posts on Into the Woods and Doublemeat
Palace. That treatment, we now see, turns out to be consistent with, though
not nearly as obnoxious as, the way Xander’s father behaves towards his
mother; it’s part of Xander’s fear revealed here in Hell’s Bells.
Xander’s vision also included physical abuse, though he has never been
physically abusive towards Anya, nor do I think he ever would be. We
didn’t see that with his father, but it doesn’t take much to imagine that
physical abuse also was part of the Harris household. It’s not surprising,
then, that Xander would fear it even if I don’t think it’s likely. The potential
for physical abuse does fit with the season theme, given Xander’s
metaphorical role and Buffy’s relationship with Spike.
Xander made the decision to cancel the wedding just like he made the
decision to announce it – without letting Anya have any real say. As Tara
told Willow in TR, “But you don't get to decide what is better for us, Will.
We're in a relationship, we are supposed to decide together.” It’s worse in
Xander’s case, because he told Anya just last episode that he very much
wanted to be married to her:
ANYA: So our wedding... (Xander nodding) ...is not our marriage. (smiles)
XANDER: Separate things. One fills me with a dread akin to public
speaking engagements.
ANYA: And that would be the wedding.
XANDER: Which will be over soon.
ANYA: But our marriage...
XANDER: That lasts forever.
And a year ago he actually promised Anya to give her warning if he
decided to leave:
ANYA: If you ever decide to go, I want a warning. You know, big flashing
red lights, and-and-and one of those clocks that counts down like a bomb in
a movie? And there's a whole bunch of, of colored wires, and I'm not sure
which is the right one to cut, but I guess the green one, and then at the last
second "No! The red one!" and then click, it stops with three-tenths of a
second left, but then you don't leave. (pause) Like that, okay? XANDER:
Check. Big bomb clock. (Triangle)
In light of all this, one way to see Xander’s speech in ItW is that it did for
him exactly what I think his speech to Buffy did for her (see my post on that
episode): he talked himself into thinking something he didn't completely
feel. He rushed into proposing to Anya before considering what marriage
meant. He tried to force himself to go through with the wedding even
though he didn't want to. I think the fact that he and Anya were not a couple
in Tabula Rasa tends to confirm this view.
Xander’s relationship with Anya has also raised issues regarding Xander’s
judgmental reactions to Angel (and even Spike, though to a lesser extent).
Anya is in a similar situation as Angel was when Buffy met him. Angelus
was a vicious, violent demon who committed unspeakable crimes until he
got his soul. Anyanka’s career as a vengeance demon was arguably worse if
for no other reason than that it was 4 times as long. Both became human by
chance and their own “mistakes” in the choice of victim. Unlike Angel,
Anya showed occasional nostalgia for her former life (Doppelgangland,
Pangs, her continued relationship with Halfrek and D’Hoffryn). Xander’s
criticism of Angel looks pretty hypocritical in this light.
The demon’s “poetic justice” revenge drives this point home, but it would
be a mistake for us to see Xander’s reaction as motivated solely by doubts
about Anya. They aren’t, though the demon leads Anya to think that.
Xander’s doubts are mostly about himself – he thought his family was his
destiny instead of his origin. He hasn't realized what Spike said to Dawn in
Crush, "It doesn't matter much how you start out." It’s not surprising that
Xander thinks this way – it’s exactly what he thought about Angel.
Metaphorically, we might see this as expressing Buffy’s concern that her
Slayer power will eventually corrupt her human side; when Xander walks
out of the wedding for fear of what he might become, that’s a form of
Buffy’s refusal to accept her adulthood.
By leaving Xander demonstrated that he isn’t ready for adulthood either. As
manwitch put it 10 years ago, “You don't avoid becoming your father by
running and hiding from the situation. You avoid becoming your father by
being in the same situation and being different.”
In comments, State of Siege offered a much more favorable take on
Xander’s relationship with Anya. It’s worth reading as a contrast to mine.
I'd put it this way: Xander wants someone he can put on a pedestal. He
wants (his idealized) Buffy. Anya's flaws make it impossible for Xander to
put her on a pedestal. In order for the relationship to work, he needs to learn
to stop doing that (and to stop expressing his disappointment when the
woman fails to live up to his ideal). Anya is therefore a test of Xander's
maturity.
Xander told Anya that didn’t leave because of her, but he certainly does
have doubts about Anya. Those doubts were the focal point of OMWF:
“Am I marrying a demon?”Anya may not be a demon, but she’s no fairy
princess either. She never has made much effort to realize her humanity; the
closest she came was when she finally got her wedding vows right. But not
until she confronted the demon she created has she had the opportunity to
come face to face with her past wrongdoing. If remorse is an essential
condition for redemption, then Anya hasn’t shown that yet. The ending
scene suggests that D’Hoffryn has offered her her powers back. In that case
we’ll find out if Anya’s commitment to humanity is real or if it’s still a
work in progress (Xander’s words in The Prom).
On a purely structural note, I have substantial criticisms of Hell’s Bells. In
particular, it’s hard to explain the absence of Willow, Buffy, Tara, and Dawn
from the scene in which Xander tells Anya he’s leaving. All four were
standing there next to him just a moment before, but they are completely
absent thereafter. That’s a real flaw in the plotting and it’s distracting. So is
the absence of Giles without any mention of him.
Trivia notes: (1) Willow wanted to wear a tuxedo and be “Marlene Dietrich-
y”, after the 1930s film star. (2) Uncle Rory wanted an Irish coffee: coffee
and whiskey. (3) Mr. Harris said that Krelvin came from a long line of
“geeks”. The joke is that the word “geek” originated in the circus – they
were the “freaks” in circus side-shows. (4) The “Bison Lodge” is a takeoff
of Moose Lodges. (5) Uncle Rory is a taxidermist, which we learned in The
Dark Age. (6) Clem mentioned the Commedia dell’arte, for which see the
link. (7) Xander asked Buffy if she wanted to “get lucky”, which is an
American idiom meaning to have sex. (8) Buffy responded with “into the
breach with you”, which plays off a line from Henry V (“once more unto
the breach”) and tells Xander to brave the crowd. (9) Dawn referred to
Spike’s date as a “Manic Panicked freak”. The reference is to a New York-
based chain specializing in hair dye and related products. (10) Dawn
described Spike as “macking” with his date, a slang term meaning “making
out with”. (11) Mr. Harris said that marriage saved him from a dose of the
“clap”, a slang term meaning venereal disease. (12) Joss wrote the
Buffy/Spike scene. (13) Spike tells Buffy she “glows”, a reminder of
William in Fool For Love when he wanted a synonym for “glowing” and
ended up with “effulgent”. (14) Willow reminded Xander of their last
experience with formal wear, which was when they first kissed in
Homecoming. (15) Anya’s reference to herself as a “sex poodle” was a joke
about Jane Espenson, who called herself that. (16) Mr. Harris asked the
bartender for a “double Jack”, meaning a double shot of Jack Daniels
whiskey.
 Normal Again
Normal Again is another one of the reasons I think S6, at its best, is
brilliant. It’s a Top Ten episode for me, one of at least 4 this season (along
with OMWF, Smashed, and Dead Things). I think of it as Buffy’s last
temptation before her incarnation as an adult who accepts her
responsibilities. And yeah, I’m using that vocabulary intentionally.
The asylum looked pretty horrific, so we need to consider why Buffy would
find it “tempting”. It wasn’t the asylum itself, it was the promise held out of
a “normal” life with her mother and father. Basically, she was being offered
the chance to return to her childhood, and to escape from the problems of
adulthood which she can’t seem to solve.
The key scene takes place in the basement, i.e., Buffy’s metaphorical
subconscious. The demon was chained down there, naturally enough; it’s
where we all keep our demons. Xander, Willow and Dawn aren’t usually
there, so Buffy had to force them in order to repress/destroy them as the
doctor urged. Why were Tara and Spike not captured and dragged to the
basement? My view is that W/X/D were insisting that she stay in their
world. Tara refused to judge her, and Spike said it didn't matter which
choice she made, as long as she made one. AsylumBuffy didn't need to kill
them off to break her ties to SunnydaleBuffy. Therefore they weren't in the
basement.
There’s another factor as well, in my view. Buffy’s friends have caused her
untold grief this season. Willow and Xander pulled her out of heaven;
Xander summoned a demon which nearly killed her; Willow violated her
mind; Willow nearly killed Dawn; Dawn shoplifts and is needy despite
Buffy’s own troubles. Through it all, Buffy has forgiven them. She hid the
nature of her return, she apologized to Willow for not noticing that Willow
was “drowning”, she never even mentioned Willow’s “mind wipe”, an
event so serious that Tara up and left Willow because of it. All this is bound
to create resentments in Buffy’s subconscious, and I think we can see her
loosing the demon on her friends as a reflection of that resentment.
Andrew summoned this demon. I’ve said before that I think Life Serial
established a template for the season as a whole. In that episode, Andrew
summoned the demons who attacked her at the construction site. The
construction workers said that the whole incident was all in her
imagination: “I don't know what you're talking about. All I know is you
were losin' it or something. … You're trippin', sweetie.” Buffy then protests
to Xander, “I didn't imagine this, Xander.” Here, the demon’s poison works
by creating an imaginary world for Buffy, one where, in Spike’s words,
“we're all little figments of Buffy's funny-farm delusion.”
Spike’s behavior was, as usual, controversial. Some viewers saw him as
giving Buffy the “tough love” advice she needed. Others thought he
manipulated her by giving her an ultimatum which caused her, at least for a
while, to become willing to sacrifice her friends.
I personally see his comments mostly as “tough love”, but I think they can
be interpreted either way. If we see them as causing her to sacrifice her
friends, then we need to understand why she would feel that way in the
story line (I mentioned the metaphor above). In my view, it’s fear of
exposure, especially to Xander. It’s Buffy's fear of Xander's disapproval that
causes her to hide aspects of her behavior, that makes her want to appear
more "normal". That desire to be normal was driving her fantasy of the
asylum.
I’ve seen two criticisms of Normal Again. One is that Buffy’s statement to
Willow about her previous stay in a clinic was a retcon. It’s a close call, but
I don’t think so. There’s nothing in the show which says directly that she
wasn’t. While it’s a little hard to square a stay in an asylum with some of
the dialogue in previous episodes (particularly the teaser to Bad Eggs), I
think Joyce’s well-established ability to repress things, emphasized at the
end of that very episode, allows us to accept it. Assuming Buffy was in an
asylum, that would go far to explain her consistent unwillingness to reveal
things about her life, particularly her secrecy about her role as Slayer, and
her relationships with the vampires Angel and Spike.
It would also explain her close relationship with Willow and Xander. She
said that she was released from the “clinic” when she stopped talking about
the things she saw. That’s a harsh lesson – that people who love you will
punish you if you don’t conform, but will take you back if you do. But here
were Willow and Xander who accepted the truth of vampires and didn’t
reject her. The story of the clinic helps explain Buffy’s fierce loyalty to her
friends.
Some viewers didn’t like the final scene in the asylum with the camera pan
out the door. In their view, as I understand it, this cheapened the whole
show by suggesting that the entire show was a lie, that it had all taken place
inside Buffy’s head. Here’s what Joss had to say about that:
“If [the viewers] decide that the entire thing is all playing out in some crazy
person’s head, well the joke of the thing to us was it is, and that crazy
person is me. It was kind of the ultimate postmodern look at the concept of
a writer writing a show, which is not the sort of thing we usually do on the
show. The show had merit in itself because it did raise the question, "How
can you live in this world and be sane?" But at the same time the idea
amused me very much and we played on it a little bit, "How come her little
sister is taller than her?" "What was Adam’s plan?" We played on the crazy
things we came up with time and time again, to make this fantasy show
work and called them into question the way any normal person would. But
ultimately the entire series takes place in the mind of a lunatic locked up
somewhere in Los Angeles, if that’s what the viewer wants. Personally, I
think it really happened.”
[Link]
ex=1185076800&en=7c66de4a5f0e124b&ei=5070&pagewanted=2
(spoilers at link)
I interpret the scene differently. To me, the important fact is that Buffy
hasn’t yet taken the antidote. As I interpret it, the camera is Buffy looking
back on the asylum as she rejects it in her mind.
In a larger sense, though, I’d say it doesn’t matter which Verse is the “true”
one. What matters is Buffy’s choice. That’s really the essence of the show
for me. As I saw it, the reason she poured out the antidote initially was that
she hadn't yet made the choice to stay in the adult world. She was still being
tempted by the false security – a form of childhood – offered by the
hallucination. It's the same choice she has faced, in varying degrees, since
Bargaining: between childhood and accepting the responsibilities of
adulthood.

The lure of the safety and comfort offered by her vision offered her an out
from the various metaphorical and story line reasons to hate her life, to be
angry with her friends, and to fear their disapproval. She would no longer
have to exist in a world where the hardest thing to do is to live in it.

In the end, she chose the cruel world of adulthood rather than the safe one
of childhood. I believe that she made that existential choice when faced
with the loss of Willow. Willow is Buffy’s metaphorical spirit. If Willow
died, Buffy’s life in the AsylumVerse would have been spiritually dead.
That’s no better than where she is now, maybe worse.
The most significant point of all, I’ll repeat, is that she made the choice
before she took the antidote. There may not be “objectively correct”
answers to the various moral challenges Buffy faces – Buffy still hasn’t
solved her season dilemma of what she needs to do to actually be an adult --
but it’s critically important that we choose. Making choices is how we
construct our own lives. Hm, “constructing our own lives”? That sounds
familiar; where have I heard it before? Oh yeah, it was the class discussion
in Life Serial.
Trivia notes: (1) Credited writer Diego Gutierrez was an assistant to Joss.
Most people suspect Joss of contributing a lot to this episode, since
Gutierrez never got writing credit on any other episode despite the
brilliance of this one. (2) Jonathan says he’s going “Jack Torrance” in the
basement, referring to the Jack Nicholson character in The Shining. In fact
it’s Buffy who actually does. (3) Jonathan asked Andrew, “Did you even
read Legion of Doom?” (4) Xander called Spike “Willy Wannabite”, which
is probably a play on Willy Wonka. (5) Warren described Buffy as “tripping
like a Ken Russell film festival.” (6) Warren called Jonathan “Spanky”,
presumably referring to the character from the series Our Gang. (7) This
dialogue between Andrew and Warren sets up the next episode:
“WARREN: Ah, now, there's the vault. ANDREW: I still say we're gonna
need eight other guys to pull this off. WARREN: I never should have let
you see that movie.” The movie he meant was Ocean’s Eleven. (8) The
photo of a young Buffy with her mother and father came from the episode
The Weight Of The World. (9) Spike used the phrase “funny farm”, which is
slang for an insane asylum. (10) In her delusion, the doctor told Buffy that
she had a “momentary awakening last summer” from which her friends
“pulled you back in”. He’s referring to the time she was dead. (11) Willow
asked Buffy, “No more cuckoo’s nest”, referring to the movie One Flew
Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. “Cuckoo’s nest” is also a slang term for an insane
asylum. (12) Willow referred to the demon as “tranked out”, meaning
tranquilized. (13) Xander entered the house calling “Friends? Romans?”,
quoting the famous opening of Mark Antony’s funeral speech in Julius
Caesar. (14) The scene where Buffy chokes Xander comes from The
Shining. (15) Cheers resounded throughout the nation when Buffy gagged
Dawn.
 Entropy
Another outstanding episode, Entropy is part of a very good run from NA
through Villains. The Spike/Anya scenes are just terrific; JM and EC first
demonstrated their chemistry in WTWTA and they steal the show in
Entropy. Their story is important in their own right, of course, but also in
this episode because of the effect their actions have on Buffy and Xander
(both as a character and as Buffy’s heart).
Spike’s claim that he doesn’t hurt Buffy involves a bit of special pleading,
IMO. Since Life Serial he’s been telling her she belongs in the dark; in
Smashed and subsequent episodes he told her she came back wrong and he
hit her repeatedly. None of that is likely to have done her much good. Still,
there is a sense in which he’s right, which makes the fact that Buffy was
genuinely hurt by his tryst with Anya all the more meaningful. Spike’s
tenderness towards Anya also tends to validate his feelings about Buffy and
to reinforce the schizophrenic nature of his personality at this point in time.
As was hinted at the end of Hell’s Bells, Anya’s humanity (metaphorically,
her adulthood) was fragile enough that it couldn’t withstand the crushing
emotional blow of Xander leaving her at the altar. I know a lot of people
didn’t like the ending of Hell’s Bells, but I think the fact that she returned to
vengeance reinvigorates Anya as a character, extending her journey rather
than leaving her as a one-note character. Plus, there’s a wonderful payoff in
S7. Even if I had disliked the ending of Hell’s Bells, I’d have put that aside
given the way it played out.
I’ve suggested previously that Xander’s regular belittling of Anya was
wrong, and we now see the cumulative impact it had on her: “ANYA:
When, really, I ... (tearfully) can't sleep at night, thinking it ... has to be my
fault, somehow...” That’s the secret fear which is driving her – that it was
her fault after all, that she wasn’t good enough. In substantial part, that
comes from Xander.
That’s not to defend her attempt to wreak vengeance on Xander. Her
planned wishes were pretty horrific – “I wish you’d never been born.” That
was Cordy’s wish for Buffy in The Wish; imagine how Prophecy Girl might
have changed if Anya’s wish here had come true. Her punishments were so
out of proportion to even the pain she suffered that they reveal some very
deep seated “issues”. At bottom, though, I saw her behavior as seeking
validation for her pain. She didn’t really get that from the SG females, but
she did with Spike. And when she did, she hushed his wish.
And then there’s Xander. Xander’s had some pretty great moments over the
years (Prophecy Girl, The Freshman), but this must be rock bottom. As
indefensible as his behavior was in Hell’s Bells, I think it’s worse here. He
can’t even apologize properly, he doesn’t seem to understand how he
wronged Anya, and his self-righteous pose as the betrayed lover is as
offensive as it is false. In essence, he inflicted the maximum possible pain
on her, and then convinced himself that this was for her own good. This was
the Xander of his nightmare in HB.
Metaphorically, though, I see Xander’s reaction to Anya as mirroring
Buffy’s reaction to Spike. She’s angry with him as a way of deflecting her
anger at herself. That’s Xander when he heads out with the ax.
Taking out his anger on Spike isn’t likely to do Xander any good in any
event. Even if you take the position that Spike is unconditionally and
eternally evil, restrained only by a chip, he’s defenseless against Xander’s
assault. Xander’s desire for revenge rested on the assumption that he and
Anya were still a couple, and that he had some ownership rights in her
behavior. His anger was as unjustified as his reaction, and vengeance is
never justified on this show. We could say, as Xander himself once did (The
Freshman), that anger leads to hate, hate leads to the dark side.
Was Spike right or wrong to blurt out Buffy’s secret? I think that in order to
judge Spike's action we need to know 2 things:

1. Whether he had a right to disclose it.

2. His reason for doing so.

Some viewers defended Spike for not "telling" earlier. I can't see that as
praiseworthy. His relationship was with Buffy. Disclosing it, like all
decisions in a relationship, has to be mutual. Spike was certainly right that
Buffy's concealment of it was insulting to him, but his remedy was to break
it off, not to tell.
I can see 3 motivations he might have had: to justify himself; to hurt
Xander; to defend Anya. It's pretty hard for me to see either of the first 2
reasons as praiseworthy. He hardly needs to justify himself to Xander; that's
spitting in the ocean. Hurting Xander, while certainly understandable given
the provocation, isn’t a good reason. While I suspect his motivations
included all of the above, my view is that he said it to protect Anya. In other
words, he was telling Xander that he had no basis to attack Anya for
something Buffy had also done.
This brings us back to point number one. Revealing her relationship with
Spike was what Buffy herself should have done in order to protect Anya. If
this was Spike’s reason, and if Buffy herself should have made the
disclosure, then I think Spike was right to say it.
The intensity of Xander’s reaction to learning that Buffy has been sleeping
with Spike shouldn’t come as a surprise. Buffy dared Spike to tell in the
teaser, but I saw that as just what anyone would tell a blackmailer: go ahead
and publish. That doesn’t mean she really wanted it to happen. She knew
Xander.
I see two components to Xander’s reaction: (1) A sense of his own
inadequacy, something he truly didn’t need at this point. His reaction is very
similar to that of Willow in Innocence, when she caught him kissing
Cordelia: “It just means that you'd rather be with someone you hate than be
with me.” (2) Disappointment. Xander always tends to put Buffy on a
pedestal, then to become disappointed and judgmental when she fails to live
up to his expectations. It’s his least attractive quality in my personal view.
Entropy finishes on a surprisingly upbeat note, after all the angst of HB, NA,
and the first ¾ of the episode. Tara’s willingness to skip the hard parts
generated a lot of debate amidst the joy of her return. Part of the issue
involves the magic/drugs metaphor. If you see Willow’s problem as “drug
use”, then the fact that she’s been “clean” for several months might justify
Tara’s decision. This is particularly true because the support of a loved one
can be crucial for a recovering “addict”.
If, on the other hand, you see Willow’s problem as an abuse of power and
the violation of Tara’s (and Buffy’s) integrity, then giving up magic is at
best symbolic. Willow hasn’t ever apologized to either of them. At least
with Buffy she’s helped out (Doublemeat Palace, Normal Again), but all
she’s done with Tara is go out for coffee. Many viewers found that
unsatisfying:
Ian (AtPO; slightly edited) “To me, the drug-like nature of Magic has
always seemed mis- represented by the show. Magic was addictive to
Willow because Willow was on a power trip. Willow was addicted to
*power.* Magic was just Willow's tool. Willow may have used magic
improperly, but it was always Willow's responsibility.

For these reasons, I'm also unsatisfied with how their reconciliation was
handled. Willow stopped using Magic. Good. However, has Willow ever
voiced that the problem lay in her intent and behavior? Not really. Willow
and the SG, with the exception of Tara, have treated this as a case of "bad
magic." However, Tara left precisely because she understood she was being
mistreated.

I have no problem with the two of them getting back together. In fact, I
welcome it. However, I was aggravated that Tara came back without even a
simple *statement* from Willow saying, ‘I'm sorry. Magic didn't abuse you,
I did.’"
For all that happens in this episode, I think the most important words are
spoken by Tara when she walks into Willow’s room at the end: “Things fall
apart. They fall apart so hard. You can't ever ... (sighs) put them back the
way they were.” That’s a pretty good lay definition of entropy, in the sense
of the irreversibility of many processes. It’s the response to Xander’s
statement to Anya that “I wish we could just go back to the way things were
before.” That’s no longer possible; Tara’s words apply even more to him
than they do to Willow: “There's just so much to work through. Trust has to
be built again, on both sides ... You have to learn if ... if we're even the same
people we were, if you can fit in each other's lives.”
More important than even this, though, is that Tara seems pretty clearly to
quote William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming”. The relevant passage
reads,
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.”
You should have chills running up your spine about now.
Trivia notes: (1) Warren called Jonathan “Short Round” after the character
in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. (2) Anya’s reference to Xander’s
“beady eyes” should recall her two mentions of that in OMWF. (3) Dawn
asked Buffy if they were the “International House of something”, referring
to International House of Pancakes. (4) Buffy and Dawn were walking
down the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. (5) Halfrek mentioned
“Take Back the Night”, for which see the link. (6) The scene where the light
from the candle reflects through the disk onto the map is an homage to
Raiders of the Lost Ark. (7) We previously saw the camera in the skull in
the Magic Shop in Life Serial. (8) Note that Buffy is now using the weapons
chest Xander gave her in OAFA. (9) Xander accused Anya of having sex
with Spike “Because he was there. Like Mt. Everest.” The reference is to
British mountaineer George Mallory, who was asked why he wanted to
climb Mt. Everest and responded “Because it’s there.” (10) I didn’t mention
Buffy’s conversation with Dawn in the kitchen about Dawn being exposed
to danger, but it’s a critical point in the season arc:
DAWN: (smiling) No, you're not, it's not that, it's just ... what if, instead of
you hanging out with me? Maybe I could hang out with you.
Buffy stares blankly, not getting it.
DAWN: Why don't I come patrolling with you tonight?
BUFFY: Oh. And then? Maybe we can invite over some strangers and ask
them to feed you candy.
DAWN: Well, you guys went out patrolling every night when you were my
age.
BUFFY: True ... but technically, you're one-and-a-half.
Dawn gives her patented adolescent exasperated look.
BUFFY: See, I thought a little levity might ... but okay, also no.
DAWN: I just ... I just think I could help.
BUFFY: I'm sure you could. But it's a little more dangerous than I had in
mind.
DAWN: But-
BUFFY: Dawn, I work very hard to keep you away from that stuff. Okay, I
don't want you around dangerous things that can kill you.
DAWN: Which would be a perfectly reasonable argument, if my sister was
chosen to protect the world from tax audits? But, see, my sister is you, and
... dangerous things that want to kill me seem to find me.
BUFFY: But you don't need to go looking for them.
 Seeing Red
The episode Seeing Red was a flash point in the popular culture of BtVS, so
I need to provide some background before I get to the episode itself. One
notable feature of the series, which I mentioned briefly in my Introduction,
is how it became embedded in culture. The show debuted in March 1997,
just as the internet was beginning to come into widespread use. By Season 6
there were so many Buffy sites I’m sure nobody could keep track of them
all. They had become the water cooler around which the fans met to debate
each episode. The writers were aware of fan reaction to each episode
because they read some of the sites as well and occasionally even posted at
The Bronze.
As I said in my post on Bargaining, Season 6 was easily the most
controversial season of the show. It wasn’t just that some (many?) viewers
didn’t like it; that was true for S4 and S7 as well. No, it was the issues
raised and the way they were handled which generated the passionate
internet debates at the time. In rough order, my personal impression was
that the controversial aspects ranked as follows: T1. Spike (was he evil,
good, or in-between?) and the magic/drugs metaphor; 3. Buffy’s season-
long depression and relationship with Spike; BIG GAP 4. The overall
quality of the season and whether the characters had developed organically;
and 5. The endings of Hell’s Bells and Normal Again.
All of that controversy pales in comparison with Seeing Red. SR was by far,
indisputably, without any shadow of a doubt the most controversial episode
in the show’s history. It possibly was more controversial than ALL the
show’s history. It was perhaps the most controversial episode of any TV
show ever. If you weren’t on line at the time, it’s hard to convey the depth
and passion of the arguments. When SR aired, it was as if the internet had
exploded. Buffy boards were getting maybe 10 times the usual traffic and
the arguments were screaming. You’d have to compare political
controversies like race or abortion in order to get a similar reaction.
So what was the fuss all about? Bathroom and bedroom, of course. Let’s
take Spike first, because SR threw oil on the fire of the Spike debates which
were already intense. Spuffies were infuriated that Spike would attempt to
rape Buffy. They said this was Out of Character, an issue I’m not going to
address, but I think there was a more fundamental concern. Many Spuffies
knew that rape – even attempted rape – occupies a special place in crimes
where women are concerned. It’s one of the few unforgivable offenses, like
child molestation. As one commenter put it at AtPO, “They have given us
an extremely interesting and likeable character and had him do not an
unlikable thing, but an unforgivable thing.”
Most viewers understood that Spike’s actions would change the character
and his relationship with Buffy irrevocably. Indeed, I know some viewers
who had been Spuffies (or sympathetic) who switched on a dime to seething
hatred of Spike, a hatred they never lost. Spike was in human face during
the attack and that seemed to encourage this reaction. Joss very
intentionally put Angelus in vamp face when Angelus murdered Jenny
Calendar for exactly this reason, and it served as an important visual clue
about whether it was the demon or the man who was committing the crime.
While I personally was able to put this aside for the later story, a lot of
viewers weren’t, and I think this had a big impact on later episodes.
Many of those who remained Spike fans blamed Marti Noxon for this scene
– she didn’t write the episode, but the scene was her idea – and accused her
of misanthropy and numerous other faults. I think this is very unfair, even
though I do have criticisms of the scene. The fact is, all the writers went
along with her idea, including Joss. Blaming her alone, even assuming
blame is justified, makes no sense.
Then there was Tara. When she first appeared on the show, some viewers
were very critical of her. They didn’t like the fact that Willow was gay, they
wanted Oz back. They even criticized Amber Benson as “fat”.
Over time, I think most viewers came to like Tara a lot. In particular,
segments of the gay community were absolutely thrilled that a gay
relationship was being portrayed so sympathetically over such a long period
of time. Indeed, it was the only gay relationship on network TV for many
years, and the show was the cutting edge for the acceptance of gays on
television. The writers were creative in using metaphor to show gay sex
(Who Are You) at a time when the WB wouldn’t even allow a kiss. They
pushed the envelope in S6 with scenes such as that in OMWF.
In order to describe the uproar which followed Tara’s murder, I need to
explain some details about Buffy fandom at the time. There was, and for
that matter still is, a posting board called The Kitten, The Witches and the
Bad Wardrobe dedicated to Willow and Tara. Popularly known as the Kitten
Board, the name was a play on Willow’s book report in Restless on The
Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe (see the essay on Restless). The posters
there were enthusiastic fans of the show and thrilled that a gay couple was,
for the first time ever on American TV, shown having a long-term,
successful relationship.
Despite its limited focus, the Kitten Board was widely read. That’s not just
because fans of the relationship hung out there, but also because one of the
posters there, Robert Black (like Riley in Something Blue, not a lesbian),
had the best spoiler sources on the net. Those who wanted to be spoiled (not
me) and to debate the show before episodes even aired read the Kitten
Board. Black knew what was coming in Seeing Red, of course, and he made
sure that the whole Kitten Board knew too. The spoilers on this event were
so widespread (not all of them coming from Black) that they even became
known to people like me who were spoiler-phobic, with the personally
annoying result that the episode didn’t have its intended impact on me.
Anyway, Black and the other Kitten Board posters were absolutely
infuriated that Joss would kill Tara. They were angry because her death
destroyed the one gay couple on TV, but also because they felt that having
her killed in the bedroom after a day of sexual romping reinforced a cliché
that gay couples would be punished for being gay and having gay sex.
(There’s a book called The Celluloid Closet which details this practice of
movies and TV and the Kitten Board has a FAQ explaining their position
here.) For an example of the reaction, see the essay by Todd Ramlow at
PopMatters: [Link]
slayer2/ I should add that I have very strong disagreements with many of
his points, but I’m linking to it as an example of the depth of reaction
Seeing Red generated. For important counterpoints see Andrew Gilstrap at
[Link] [Major
Spoilers for the rest of S6 at this link]
Thus, while many internet posters were screaming at each other about Spike
and Marti, the Kitten Board was screaming at the other writers and at Joss,
with everyone else eventually dragged in. You can read more about it here
(warning: Major Spoilers for the rest of S6 at the link):
[Link] and in the Alissa
Wilts essay in Buffy Goes Dark.
I can’t say much more because that would involve really significant
spoilers, but suffice to say that the ramifications of both of these
controversies would remain for the rest of S6 and all of S7.
With all this as background, let me get to the details of Seeing Red. The fact
that I was spoiled for Tara’s death meant that Seeing Red never had the
dramatic emotional impact on me that was intended. Perhaps for that
reason, or maybe the furious debates afterward, I’ve never been able to
consider it a top quality episode, though it’s the turning point of the season.
I want to emphasize that I don’t think it’s a bad episode, it’s just not the
great one it perhaps could have been. I’ll try to cover at least the basics of
the two major scenes plus some of the others.
Seeing Red reveals the ultimate goal of the Trio (“everything we ever
wanted”, as Warren promised Jonathan in Entropy): manliness. Theirs was a
false, immature form of manliness, of course, emphasized by the phallic
stakes on their ATVs in the teaser to Entropy and by the rather anvilicious
“orbs” and their effect on Warren here in Seeing Red: “WARREN: What's
the matter baby? You never fight a real man before?” All season long
they’ve been trying to prove their own self-worth by attacking Buffy,
tearing her down. Now their efforts are shown for what they really are:
brutal and creepily sexist. Buffy emasculated Warren, figuratively and
emotionally, when she smashed his “orbs”, and that’s his most sensitive
issue (see Katrina).
Seeing Red also reveals the reason why Andrew ended up siding with
Warren, rather than his putative best friend, Jonathan. This was developed
subtly, starting with this dialogue in Life Serial:
Warren holds out his hand to Andrew, who recoils.
ANDREW: With each other?
WARREN: Well, you know what homophobia really means about you,
don't you?
Then, in Entropy, Andrew let slip his true feelings while they were
watching Spike have sex with Anya:
ANDREW: (riveted) He is so cool. (glances at the others, self-consciously)
And, I mean, the girl is hot too.
And here in SR we find out that Warren, unsurprisingly, exploited Andrew’s
nascent feelings:
ANDREW: (crying) How could he do this to me? He promised we'd be
together, but ... he was just using me. He never really loved- (catching
himself) ...hanging out with us.
All along there’s been a ménage a Trio.
The Trio weren’t the only ones attacking Buffy in Seeing Red. Even today
when I re-watch the episode, I still get annoyed with Xander’s statements in
his first conversation with Buffy. As so often, he’s judgmental that Buffy
failed to live up to his expectations: “All those times I told Spike to get lost
... that he didn't have a chance with a girl like you.” And now, even now, he
doesn’t want to know how hard it was for her to be pulled out of heaven.
His criticisms of Buffy are not even remotely plausible. It simply was false
for him to say that Buffy “used to” keep him involved in her personal life.
In fact, the opposite was true – Buffy excluded him precisely because his
reaction to Angel was so harsh (e.g., Passion, Becoming 1, Dead Man’s
Party, Revelations), because he violated her confidence by telling Riley
about Angel in The Yoko Factor (h/t State of Siege), and because Xander’s
Lie in Becoming 2 meant that she could never trust him on that score again.
We see her lack of trust vindicated when he berates her with the same holier
than thou attitude towards Spike that he always showed with Angel. Xander
had no involvement whatsoever in her brief relationship with Parker, at
least not until afterwards. She never once talked to him about Riley before
Into the Woods.
What was really at issue here was not that Buffy had closed him off
regarding Spike, though that was true in part, but that Xander felt like
Willow did in Innocence: “It just means that you'd rather be with someone
you hate than be with me.” That’s the theme which would have made a
better scene – it would have been true to both characters and would have
then allowed him to follow that up with the “you shut me out” accusation.
Spike’s attack on Buffy was the hardest in many ways, though one could
argue that she took more of a physical beating from Warren and more of an
emotional one from Xander. Hardest on her and hardest to watch. There’s a
lot to consider with that scene, so I’m going to break it down in several
different ways.
Having Buffy be “injured” in the fight with the vampire immediately before
the scene was IMO not well-considered. For one thing, the injury wasn’t all
that plausible – a nearly identical scene occurred in Doomed and Buffy was
fine afterwards.
The reason for the “injury” was that the standard fact in real life rape cases
is that the man is stronger. The problem in the narrative within the show is
that Buffy is stronger than Spike; in fact, the resolution of the scene
depends on that very fact. Her “injury” beforehand obscures this point in an
effort to make the scene work with the strength issue reversed from what
we see in real life. I think this comes across as a contrivance and that it
confused the viewers about a very serious social issue. Actor James
Marsters had very perceptive comments on this aspect (very slight edit):
Al Norton: I ran a whole bunch of Buffy polls on our website and
Facebook page and the one things the readers wanted me to ask you about,
other than your favorite episode, was Seeing Red, the episode where Spike
tries to force himself on Buffy. There's been some distance now between
you and the episode; do you think it worked and did you understand the
story they were trying to tell?

James Marsters: I do understand why they did it but I still think it was a
mistake. The truth is the writers on Buffy were being incredibly brave. Joss
was asking each of them to come up with their most painful day, their most
humiliating day, the day that they made the biggest fools of themselves or
the day they hurt someone else the most, and then put a patina of fangs and
blood over that. Basically that's why I think the series is so delightful,
because of the bravery of the writers on that score.

One of the writers, a female writer [Marti Noxon], had a situation in her life
where she and her boyfriend were breaking up and she decided if she just
made love to him one more time, that they wouldn't break up. She ended up
trying to force herself on him and decided to write about that. The thing is,
if you flip it and make it a man forcing himself on a woman, I believe it
becomes a whole different thing.
Even though Buffy is super strong, even though she kicks him through a
wall at the end of it, how it plays to the audience changes when you change
the sex that way. It worked out and everything but I'm not really sure it
expressed what the author was intending and on that score it was not
successful. I think it was a big risk for everybody but I think if she could
have found a female character to express that with it would have gotten
closer to what she was trying to say, and I'm not really sure that we got
there with that episode.
[Link]
James-Marsters-(Buffy-the-Vampire-Slayer,-Angel).htm
IMO, it would have been much more plausible to place Buffy’s first
conversation with Xander immediately before her confrontation with Spike.
That would have transitioned nicely from a discussion about Spike in which
Buffy was emotionally distraught. While there’s little previous evidence in
the show that being physically battered affects her fighting, there’s a great
deal which shows that her emotional state does.
Now I need to discuss Spike’s mindset in the bathroom. There’s a lot of
room for interpretation about that, and the writers clearly intended the
ambiguity. Again, I’m not sure this was a good dramatic choice. Let’s walk
through it.
He began by trying to apologize for having sex with Anya. No problem
there, of course. But he was clearly tormented by Dawn’s accusation that he
broke his own code – “I don’t hurt you” – and that led him to try to recover
what he thought he had. In doing so, he didn’t account for Tara’s words at
the end of Entropy – things can’t go back to the way they were, and trust
needs time to develop.
This is how writer Steven DeKnight explained Spike’s mental state in what
followed:
“C: Why did you choose to use attempted rape as a means of bringing Spike
and Buffy to this point in the relationship?

SDK: Ah. We had talked a lot about Spike trying to do good but ultimately
he doesn't have a soul and it's a constant struggle. His love for Buffy and
what she was giving him back, even though it was often abusive, really kind
of kept him on that path. But once she absolutely cut him off... In the
previous week's episode you really see him start to turn
there, when he tells her to get out.

C: Right, he has a little bit more self respect at that point.

SDK: Yeah, and you know, there's a lot of self-loathing too. I mean, on the
one hand, he hates himself for what he did to Buffy by sleeping with Anya,
and on the other hand he hates himself for feeling anything for her.

C: Well that's the thing that's gone through all of this, that he doesn't
understand why he's feeling this way and he hates that he feels this way.

SDK: Right. So we were talking about how to really show this and push it
in that direction, and it was Marti in the room who said, because we were
talking about Spike going to Buffy to talk to her about this, and she said--

C: Right, cause it starts very tenderly. It starts as a very nice scene.

SDK: --and she said "you know he should go to talk to her, and it just gets
out of hand. He starts to try, to start up the relationship, to say 'I know you
felt it; I know you could feel it again' and he just won't stop."

C: Okay, so did this seem like a natural progression for Spike to you guys?

SDK: Yes.

C; To try and hurt her physically, to attempt...

SDK: Well you know to Spike, and this is not to lessen what he tried to do,
which was wrong. In the moment, all he was thinking about is 'she loves
me, and if she just lets herself feel this again, she'll feel it again.'”
As I interpret this, Spike’s attempt to force things stemmed from the
message he got up through and including Dead Things: “But you like what I
do to you?” He believed that if Buffy would just let herself experience
“what I do to you” one more time, their “relationship” would be restored.
Joss put it this way: “Although Spike could feel love, it was the possessive
and selfish kind of love that most people feel. The concept of real altruism
didn’t exist for him. And although he did love Buffy and was moved by her
emotionally, ultimately his desire to possess her led him to try and rape her
because he couldn’t make the connection —- the difference between their
dominance games and actual rape.” [Spoilers at link:
[Link]
pagewanted=all ]
Compounding the problem was that Spike interpreted Buffy’s reluctance
about the relationship as implicitly telling him that “no means yes”, an
interpretation for which there’s support in previous episodes:
“BUFFY: (sighs) Spike, I mean it. Come on.
SPIKE: I hear you're serious. So am I. I want you ... you want me...
Cut to a closer shot as Buffy has her back up against the tree and Spike is
right in her face.
SPIKE: ...I can't go inside, so ... maybe the time is right ... for you to come
outside.” (AYW)
The problem with the nuance – however true to life it may be in some cases
– is that the uncertainty leaves room for doubt about what he did and who
was to blame. That contrasts very strongly with the gritty, hyper-realism of
the filming of the scene. The contrast caused some viewers, who focused on
the filming, to hate Spike, while others sympathized with Spike and even
blamed Buffy, because they found his conflicted state “understandable”.
Adding to the latter view is the fact that Buffy stopped Xander from going
after Spike. I’m not sure I have a good explanation for why Buffy stopped
Xander. Here’s one from Yoda at AtPO:
“So in this bathroom scene I see Buffy as a sad & confused woman who
cares for someone she feels she shouldn’t mostly because she feels that she
can’t trust him.

Her defenses are down both emotionally & physically. Spike is someone
she has come to care about and to some degree trust.

So when he betrays that trust by forcing himself on her she reacts as a

woman not a Slayer. Her actions are emotional not logical. The tears and
pleas are not so much that she is afraid of him physically but rather she is
begging & pleading because she so desperately wants to be able to trust
him.

I think she wants to believe that he has changed and can love her the way
she wants to be loved, but also knows that as long as he doesn't have a
reliable moral compass, he's a bad risk. And I think that is what's killing
her. And that is why she pushes him away, in part.

I also think she is afraid that if she does fall in love with Spike, that she will
lose herself to her darkness. That the darkness will be all that is left of her,
because it is such a significant part of her. And I think this scares her to
death.

A long time ago Angelus told Spike that the only way to kill Buffy is to
love her. He recognized that Buffy’s Achilles heel is her love. If she loves
you she will let you close enough to hurt her. And as Spike said in Dead
Things "You only hurt the ones you love".

I think by Buffy allowing that scene to play out as far as it did it shows that
Buffy has let Spike into her heart whether she admits it to herself or not. He
couldn't have hurt her so badly otherwise.”
After the episode aired, there was a lot of screaming discussion about
whether Spike’s actions “really” amounted to attempted rape. From a
strictly legal point of view, there is room for doubt. I’m not going to repeat
the arguments because they’re tedious and not terribly enlightening for non-
lawyers. More important for me now is a point I’ve made before, namely
that it doesn’t matter how an action would be treated in real life, what
matters is how it’s treated within the show. Within the show it was
attempted rape, even if that seems to contradict the intended nuance. That
may affect our judgment of the writing, but it doesn’t change the nature of
the scene within the plot.
I’ll let shadowkat criticize the writing:
“Buffy and Spike engaged in a violent sexual relationship, often starting
with Buffy saying no - only to eventually give in and attack him sexually as
she does in Smashed,
Tabula Rasa (kissing scene), Gone. The pushme -pullme relationship was
what was painful to watch. She says no but means yes…. Characterwise? It
made sense. Buffy appeared to be doing what I’ve seen many people do,
excusing her actions by making them someone else's fault.

"Why do I let Spike do these things to me? Why do I let Spike hurt me?"
The audience, or at least a portion of it, was beginning to root for Spike to
slap the living hell out of Buffy. "Tell me you love me. Tell me you want
me." Bam!

This was a risky move on the part of the writers - which they probably
hoped worked because Spike was an amoral vampire, the villain….
Unfortunately watching Buffy beat up Spike, push Spike, pull Spike,
manipulate Spike while Spike obviously loved her beyond reason was not
making Spike inherently evil to the viewer - it was making Buffy seem that
way to some, not all the viewers. I've rewatched the episodes - you can
literally watch them three ways. I can see it from the view that Spike is
seducing her and is obsessive and ruthless and in love all at the same time.
And yes I like the fact you can see it both ways - very intriguing. But and
this is a huge But, if you are going to end this with an attempted rape - you
better damn well make the character who’s the intended victim a little more
sympathetic, otherwise half your audience is going to be rooting for the
wrong character. And that is what happened and that is what continues to
disturb me on a weird horrible level.”
For me, the most interesting issue within the accepted mythology of the
show was Spike’s own reaction to the attempted rape. There were two
components of that. First was the look of horror on his face after Buffy
kicked him off. He was so shocked that he left his treasured duster, the very
symbol of his identity as a Big Bad, on the stairs for Xander to find. Think
about that for a minute -- a vampire understands that he has done wrong
and is upset by it.
The second was this dialogue with Clem:
SPIKE: (shakily) What have I done?
Beat. Spike frowns, looks bemused.
SPIKE: Why *didn't* I do it?
Think about this in the context of vampires. They are, by definition, without
conscience: “ANGEL: When you become a vampire the demon takes your
body, but it doesn't get your soul. That's gone! No conscience, no remorse...
It's an easy way to live.” (Angel) And yet Spike seems to express remorse,
or at least puzzlement, about his attack. That shouldn’t happen with a
vampire. It didn’t even happen with Faith after she tried to rape/kill Xander
in Consequences. Something has made Spike different, whether it’s the chip
or the human nature which informs the vampire he became.
Keep this in mind, because we’re nearing the denouement of Spike’s
“Clockwork Orange” journey. As shadowkat put it, “I think the chip is
irrelevant now. Spike has changed. He just doesn't know it yet. This episode
and that scene had to happen in order for him to find out. In Btvs - a
character has to hit rock bottom before he can learn what he's made of and
truly change. Spike just did.”
I’ve deliberately saved the saddest event for last, just as it occurred in the
episode. In my view, we’re supposed to see Tara as the price of Buffy’s
resurrection. Two factors lead me to conclude that Tara’s death was
Willow’s price. What I’m about to say about the first one requires mild
thematic spoilers for the AtS episode, The Price. This aired the week before
Seeing Red. The entire episode revolves around thaumogenesis and the
“cosmic price” (Cordy’s phrase) for dark magic. For me, that was a signal
of what was to come, and the obvious price for Willow to pay was Tara. (As
a side note, I really strongly didn’t appreciate the use of an AtS episode to
spoil me for Buffy.)
The other factor comes from the events of S6 themselves. In After Life
Spike said that there was “always” a price for magic. As I’ve pointed out,
the first three episodes of every season set the themes, and After Life was
the third episode of S6. Now, as I suggested in my post on that episode,
Spike’s statement wasn’t true in general, but it still could be the case that
something as serious as a resurrection spell might demand a price:
XANDER: We made a demon? Bad us.
WILLOW: Thaumogenesis is when doing a spell actually creates a being.
In this case it was like, a, a side-effect, I guess. Like a price.
DAWN: What?
WILLOW: Think of it like, the world doesn't like you getting something for
free, and we asked for this huge gift. Buffy. A-and so the world said, 'fine,
but if you have that, you have to take this too.' And it made the demon.
The kicker is that the demon in After Life was not the price after all. As
Anya warned them, “Well, technically, that's not a price. That's a gift with
purchase.” Tara’s fate was sealed when Willow killed the fawn, and the
price remained to be paid. Vino de madre.
Finally, there’s the “lesbian cliché” debate surrounding Tara’s death. I
wasn’t aware of the stereotype when the show aired, so this didn’t bother
me at first watching. Once I understood the point, I thought then and still do
that the writers should have been more careful about the way they set up
Tara’s death; they could have done more to avoid the stereotype. That said,
I don’t think the writers intended to convey that Tara was punished for
being gay. There was moral significance in Tara’s life; her death was simply
tragedy.
Trivia notes: (1) The title is a pun. In English idiom, “to see red” means to
get furiously angry, which is true of Xander, of Warren, and of Willow. Tara
“sees Red” in the sense of Willow’s nickname, the, uh, orbs are red, and at
the very end Willow’s eyes turn red to connect the color to the idiom. (2)
Tara told Willow that Buffy told her that she was sleeping with Spike. Buffy
didn’t actually use those words in their conversation at the end of Dead
Things, but it was pretty clear that she was. (3) Willow offered to “Sherlock
around”, referring to Sherlock Holmes. (4) The figurine Buffy poked while
searching the Trio’s lair was that of Vampirella. (5) Anya mentioned “lies
flying around like little monkeys”, referring to the winged monkeys from
The Wizard of Oz. (5) Andrew called the demon ‘Puf’N’Stuff’, for which
see the link. (6) Andrew mentioned Siegfried & Roy, the magicians and
entertainers. (7) Andrew called Jonathan “skin job”, which is reference to
the movie Blade Runner. (8) Xander referred to himself as “Chicken of the
Sea”, which is the brand name for canned tuna, but also has a pun on the
word “chicken” as meaning a coward. (9) Spike’s attitude towards love in
his conversation with Buffy was the same as he’s had since Lover’s Walk.
(10) I think it’s plausible to see the scene between Warren and Katrina in
the bar in Dead Things as prefiguring Buffy’s conversation with Spike
here. (11) Jonathan referred to Warren as “Charles Atlas”, who was famous
for advertising a bodybuilding regimen to turn weak men into strong. (12)
This sentence from Andrew contains a string of Star Trek references: “He's
Picard, you're Deanna Troi. Get used to the feeling, Betazoid.” (13) Warren
called Xander “Shemp”, referring to Shemp Howard, an occasional member
of The Three Stooges. (14) Xander called Warren “Mighty Mouse”,
referring to the cartoon character. (15) Clem wanted to watch Knight Rider
on TV, which was a 1980s show. (16) Clem’s line “love’s a funny thing” is
what Spike said when he left Buffy and Angel in Lover’s Walk. (17) The
park which the Trio robbed was called “Wild River Adventure”, after the
Wild Rivers franchise in the US. (18) James Marsters said later that the
attempted rape scene was very difficult for him and that he’d never do
another.
 Villains
“Rage – Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles…”
I think Villains is an excellent episode, but it presents us with some difficult
ethical issues. I’ll hold off on those for a bit and start with my metaphorical
reading of the episode because I think it’s crucial to Buffy’s journey in S6.
The whole point of Seeing Red was to send Willow into the murderous rage
we see here in Villains. But the show isn’t about Willow, it’s about Buffy, so
I’m inclined to read the story as metaphor (surprise!). Willow’s rage at
Warren – a murderer, yes, but also an attempted rapist – can be seen
metaphorically as the outward expression of Buffy’s repressed rage at
Warren, but also at Spike.
Willow’s rage also reflects her own storyline, of course. It’s not just Tara’s
murder. Magic allows Willow to express the anger she feels at having to
bear a lifetime of unjustified pain (“the softer side of Sears”) and the
inability to put a stop to it. Again, though, we might see this as an allegory
of Buffy’s own struggle to be the Slayer and the pain she has felt all season
at being pulled back from heaven.
In my reading, there’s another aspect to the metaphor and the explosion of
rage by Buffy’s metaphorical spirit serves as an essential step in Buffy’s
own progress. I’ll complete the thought in my discussion of the finale.
On another metaphorical point, Xander says that he’s had the blood of his
friends on his hands. That’s an odd way to put it; the phrase usually implies
some culpability. Is he reconsidering his participation in resurrecting Buffy
because he now sees the price?
Now to the ethical issues. The first involves Buffy’s decision to let Dawn
stay with Spike. It’s hard to imagine that any sentient woman would entrust
her kid sister with someone who just attempted to rape her. We might say
that Buffy wasn’t trusting Spike, she was trusting the chip. But that can’t be
the explanation. A purely evil Spike could simply arrange for someone else
to harm Dawn, just as he tried to do to Buffy and the SG with Adam in S4.
Buffy knows that he won’t do that, which means that she knows that Spike
can restrain himself. This complication is fascinating in its interplay with
the soul canon and Spike’s “Clockwork Orange” journey, but it adds to my
doubts about the artistic choices in Seeing Red.
I mentioned Spike, but I’m not going to discuss his actions here. The
dialogue is still ambiguous about what he’s asking from the Cave Demon,
but we’ll know soon enough and I’ll talk about it then.
Since Wrecked, the show has used the magic/drugs metaphor to represent
Willow’s struggle for self-control. Here, in the beautiful, brilliant image in
the Magic Box, we see her “overdose” by taking in the contents of the dark
magic books. She then uses that power to seek out and kill Warren. Put
aside the issue of whether Warren “deserved” his fate; I’ll get to that below.
The second ethical issue is this: does the fact that she was “under the
influence” (at least metaphorically) excuse her conduct in killing Warren?
I’ve seen many people argue that it does. Buffy herself suggests that the
power itself is exercising agency rather than Willow: “And now she's
messing with forces that want to hurt her. All of us.” The story line,
however, doesn’t support Buffy’s attempt to defend her friend. Willow left
Tara’s body cold and alone in the house before she absorbed the dark
magics. The first thing Willow did after absorbing them was heal Buffy. If
she were under the thrall of dark forces, that’s hardly something they would
command her to do. No, that was still Willow, exercising moral agency.
Even at the end we saw flashes of Willow:
“WILLOW: The pain will be unbearable, but you won't be able to move.
Bullet usually travels faster than this, of course. But the dying? It'll seem
like it takes forever.
She pauses, as if affected by her own words, looking at the little wound on
Warren's chest. Warren just grunts and squeezes his eyes shut in pain.
WILLOW: Something, isn't it? (pensively) One tiny piece of metal destroys
everything. (Warren groaning loudly) It ripped her insides out ... took her
light away. From me. From the world.
Now she looks Warren in the eye again, re-focusing.”
In any event, from the standpoint of the law Buffy’ “the magic made her do
it” excuse is wrong and must be wrong. The legal system doesn’t recognize
any such “under the influence” defense in the circumstances we see here.
Let’s analogize it to a real world situation. Suppose you go out and get high
on PCP in order to generate the courage to murder someone, and then use
your drugged state as a defense. The law can’t accept this defense – you
intended to use the drug to aid you in the crime, just as Willow here
intended the magic to help her kill Warren. Her intent to kill came before
the “drug”, and that’s key to the issue of murder. Thus, the magic/drugs
metaphor has yet another dubious consequence – blurring Willow’s guilt –
even though it should not.
Now, did Warren “deserve” to die (putting aside for the moment the nature
of his death)? Xander and Dawn express the view of many that he deserves
death. Buffy disagrees, and she states what has been her code all along
(since at least Gingerbread): “Being a Slayer doesn't give me a license to
kill. Warren's human. … [T]he human world has its own rules for dealing
with people like him.” By going after Warren, Willow is violating not just
the legal rules which apply to all of us in the real world – we don’t allow
vengeance by private parties – but the code Buffy lives by in her world.
I think it’s important to understand the reason behind Buffy’s code. It’s not
arbitrary at all. She has always made a distinction between the souled and
the unsouled. The difference is critical: the former can be redeemed. Buffy’s
“license to kill” can only work if those she slays are irredeemable. Horrible
as Warren was, Willow acted the part of a vengeance demon when she
tracked him down. Buffy didn’t want to “let Willow destroy herself” by
killing Warren, but she got there too late to accomplish her goal.
“Bored now” is probably the most well-known phrase from the entire
series. It’s hard to convey the chill I got when I heard Willow say those
words. What followed gets my vote as the most shocking scene ever shown
on network television. I’ll let DEN describe his reaction: “The fact that
Warren has no chance at all in his confrontation with Willow is even more
disturbing. In most "vengeance stories" the moral ambiguities are blurred
by making the avenger fight against heavy odds, or by creating a showdown
with at least the structure of a fair fight. But Dark Willow uses her power to
torture Warren in a fashion our culture reserves for the worst villains. …
And for what? On the other side or in the next incarnation, will not Tara
shrink from what Willow has become? It has been well said: "if you seek
revenge, first dig two graves."
“Alas, poor Willow. I knew her dear viewer: a woman of infinite jest, of
most excellent fancy…. and now, how abhorred in my imagination she is!
My gorge rises at it.”
Trivia notes: (1) Willow invoked Osiris to bring Tara back to life. That was
the god she invoked to resurrect Buffy in Bargaining. (2) The fact that Tara
died “by natural order” was a distinction made in Bargaining between
Joyce’s death and Buffy’s. (3) Jonathan sarcastically referred to Andrew as
“Dragnet” after the TV show of that name. (4) Jonathan didn’t want to
become a “butt monkey”, a slang term meaning someone who is dominated
by everyone around them. (5) Andrew said Sunnydale was “like
Mayberry”, a phrase used by Mr. Trick in Faith, Hope & Trick, and
referring to the TV sitcom The Andy Griffith Show. (6) Andrew and
Jonathan mentioned 3 movies starring Mathew Broderick: War Games,
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and The Producers. (7) The scene of Willow
sucking the magic out of the books was pre-figured in Smashed when she
used magic to take information out of her computer. (Drew Greenberg,
Smashed commentary) (8) Some viewers thought that Buffy flat lined in the
hospital. In fact, that was just the disruption to the equipment caused by
Willow’s magic, similar to the way the lights blew out in the Magic Box
when she walked in. Buffy came close to dying, no doubt, but this wasn’t a
third death. (9) Warren said he came “bearing dead presidents”, a slang
phrase for bills of various denominations. (10) Warren called Rack
“Nostradamus”, a prophet. (11) Xander suggested that Willow had gotten
“the makeover of the damned”, referring to the movie Queen of the
Damned. (12) Xander also called Willow “Puppet Master”, referring to the
film of that title. (13) Xander described Willow as “off the wagon”, a slang
phrase meaning that Willow has started “drinking” again. (14) Clem offered
Dawn some “Country Time”, a brand name of lemonade. (15) Willow said
that Buffy was Warren’s “Big O”, a slang phrase meaning he got off on
trying to kill her. (16) “Bored now” was said by VampWillow in The Wish
and Doppelgangland. (17) Willow’s story here takes its inspiration from the
Dark Phoenix story in X-Men comics. (18) The fact that Amber Benson and
Adam Busch were a couple for years (see trivia notes to IWMTLY) is
notably ironic.
 Two To Go
Let’s say this right upfront: Giles’s entry into the Magic Box at the end of
Two to Go is one of the great moments of the series. Maybe not quite as
good as Buffy’s “Me.” in Becoming 2, but still damn fine.
Alas, the rest of this episode is pretty much a train wreck. The problems
include the return with a vengeance [heh] of the magic/drugs theme,
complete with hit-us-over-the-head terminology; the low quality of the
special effects; and some fairly pedestrian dialogue. But the real problem is
much more substantial than any of these and cuts right at the heart of not
just this episode, but the whole end of the season.
In Villains, Buffy tries to save Willow before she gets to Warren. Why?
Because “BUFFY: Willow, if you do this [kill Warren], you let Warren
destroy you too. … [to Xander and Dawn] There are limits to what we can
do. There should be. Willow doesn't want to believe that. … Warren's
going to get what he deserves. I promise . But I will *not* let Willow
destroy herself [by killing Warren].”
But at the end of Villains, Willow kills Warren anyway, and does so in a
horrifying way. So now that Buffy is faced with the fact that Willow did the
very thing which Buffy said would “destroy” her, what does Buffy say in
TTG: “XANDER: Warren was a cold-blooded killer of women just
warming up. You ask me, that bastard had it coming to him. BUFFY:
Maybe. Andrew and Jonathan don't. … whatever she's gonna do, she starts
with those two. (indicating Andrew and Jonathan) They're the line she
cannot cross. … I'm not protecting you, Jonathan. None of us are. We're
doing this for Willow. The only reason it happens to be your lucky day? Is
because Willow kills you, she crosses a line, I lose a friend.”
Somehow, the line Willow couldn’t cross went from Warren to
Jonathan/Andrew without a beat. It’s an ethical copout. Making things
worse is that there are several bits of dialogue suggesting that it’s not
“really” Willow, that the magic is “making” her do these things. For
example, Buffy says in Villains that Willow is “messing with forces that
want to hurt her. All of us.” All of these lines tend to obscure Willow’s
ethical responsibility for having killed Warren. To me, that diminishes the
force of the entire sequence of events. After all, if Warren “had it coming”,
or if it was the magicks, not Willow, which tortured and killed him, then
there’s no reason to hold Willow responsible for what “she” did and no
reason to worry about her “crossing a line”. Villains manages to keep this
distinction pretty clear, but it all collapses in TTG.
The central scenes involve the confrontation between Buffy and Willow. I
see that as metaphor, but I don’t want to discuss the metaphor now because
that would spoil Grave. Similarly, Spike’s goal remains ambiguous but will
be clear by the end of Grave. I’ll hold off discussion until then. In the
meantime I’ll offer a more light-hearted take on one scene.
Some viewers felt that the scene of Willow breaking into the jail was too
unrealistic, too public, within the accepted mythology of the show. It’s not a
particularly good scene, but calling it “unrealistic” because she would have
been arrested led me to make this response:
People v. Rosenberg:
(The judge turns to defense counsel: "Your witness."):

DC: Officer, where were you standing when you saw this damage to the
police station?

Officer: Outside, on the sidewalk.

DC: What was the nature of the damage?

Officer: Well, bricks and stones were torn out of the front of the building
until there was a large hole. Also, some of the bricks fell on the squad cars
on the street and damaged them.

DC: Officer, did you get a good look at the defendant?

Officer: Yes.

DC: And you can see her in court today, right?

Officer: Yes.
DC: How tall is she?

Officer: About 5'5"

DC: And how much does she weigh?

Officer: Maybe 115.

DC: How tall are you?

Officer: 6'1"

DC: How much do you weigh?

Officer: 210.

DC: Officer, you have to stay in shape for your job, don't you?

Officer: Yes.

DC: Do you lift weights for that?

Officer: Yes.

DC: Could you tear bricks and stones out of the wall of the police station
with your bare hands?

Officer: No way.

DC: Do you believe this woman could?

Officer: No.

DC: Did the defendant have any tool that you saw?

Officer: No.
DC: How, then, did she remove the bricks?

Officer: I don't know. They just came flying out.

DC: Let me get this straight. The defendant was just standing there on the
sidewalk and the bricks came out.

Officer (defensively): Right.

DC: She never touched the police station, not with her hands, not with a
tool, not at all?

Officer (standing his ground): No.

DC: But the bricks came out without her touching them?

Officer (very defensive): That's what I saw.

DC (sarcastically): So the defendant used some psychic power, then?

Officer (angry): I don't know.

DC: If the defendant never touched the wall, how do you know she was the
one who used these (sarcastic again) psychic powers?

Officer (unsure): She was standing there.

DC: Well, you were standing there too, weren't you?

Officer: Yes.

DC: How do we know you didn't do it? Did you use your psychic powers to
damage the police station?

(Laughter)
Officer (resigned): No.

DC: Did you use your (sarcastic) psychic power to stop her?

Officer: I don't have psychic power.

DC: But she does?

Officer: Yes.

DC: No more questions.

Trivia notes: (1) The title follows from Willow’s last words at the end of
Villains: “One down.” (2) Andrew’s “Laugh it up, fuzzball” to Jonathan is a
quote from Star Wars. (3) When Andrew says that being in prison is “like
his [Warren’s] test”, it’s a very similar reaction to that of April in IWMTLY:
she suggested that Warren had given her a “girlfriend test”. (4) Andrew’s
description of Willow as “Dark Phoenix” makes the story line source
explicit (see trivia notes to Villains). (5) Jonathan said that Willow wore
“floods”, referring to pants which are too short. (6) The scene of Willow on
the truck was taken from the movie Vampires. (7) Spike’s “Here we are
now. Entertain us.” is presumably quoting the Nirvana song “Smells Like
Teen Spirit”. (8) Dawn told Clem that Rack’s place moves, which we
learned in Wrecked. (9) Willow told Rack that she “just wanted to take a
little tour.” That’s what he told her in Wrecked. (10) Anya asked what
would happen if Willow “filleted their souls”, a pun on filet of sole. (11)
Willow’s reference to herself as “side man” goes back at least to Fear, Itself,
where she tells Buffy “I’m not your sidekick”. (12) Andrew described
Willow as “Sabrina”, referring to Sabrina the Teen-Age Witch. (13) When
Willow tells Buffy that being a slayer is “about the power”, that hearkens
back to Checkpoint and forward to all of S7.
 Grave
Grave is the only finale which was not written by Joss and the only one to
end on a cliffhanger. For these reasons and others, as I mentioned in my
post on Bargaining, I’ve come to think of seasons 6 and 7 as an extended
two-year arc which comes to completion only with Chosen. That makes
Grave less a conclusion than a transition. If you look at the seasons this way
– roughly, IMO, as the two seasons which deal with Buffy as an adult
subsequent to the five seasons she spent becoming an adult – then it makes
sense both that Grave ended with issues unresolved and that it would seem
less like the other finales. Joss: “I've said this before, that I think when
people look at the seventh season, as a story, they'll understand season six
better.”
I’ll talk first about the major unresolved issue. The short version is that the
last three episodes were deliberately ambiguous about whether Spike
wanted his soul back or the chip out, to the point that James Marsters was
instructed to play it as wanting the chip out. So many viewers were
confused – *raises hand* – that Joss issued a statement afterward
confirming that Spike did, in fact, go to the demon with the intent of having
his soul restored. In an interview, Jane Espenson said, “But it was that
moment, in the bathroom, when Spike looked at the demon in him, that's
what made him want to go get a soul…. We did mislead on you all, led you
to believe it was the chip. We knew all the time. If all he wanted to do was
hurt Buffy, he could have hurt Buffy [so he didn’t need the chip out]."
In general, the fans were not amused by this trickery. While I won’t go into
the issue in detail, the phrases "Make me what I was" and "former self"
present major problems if he intended to become a souled vampire. Most
thought it unfair, and I know many who absolutely refused to believe that
Spike wanted his soul until Joss said it.
There’s a difficult issue raised by the decision to stick with the soul canon
rather than to reform Spike as a vampire. The problem is that they
implicitly reformed him in order to insist that they were following the soul
canon. It’s hard to explain why a vampire would come to want his soul
back. That should be, to coin a word, inconceivable. When we first met
Spike in School Hard, he told Angel that demons don’t change: “Angel:
Things change. Spike: Not us! Not demons!” By the end of Seeing Red, he
had an epiphany: “CLEM: Hey. Come on now, Mr. Negative. You never
know what's just around the corner. Things change. SPIKE: Yeah, they do.
… If you make them.” The whole series is predicated on the idea that
vampires don’t change. Spike did.
One possibility is that Spike changed in some fundamental way since he
acquired the chip in The Initiative. Maybe the behavior modification
changed him. Or maybe it post-dated the chip: he fell in love with Buffy 3
episodes earlier, (h/t Aeryl) in Out Of My Mind. I don’t think there’s a right
answer here, but my own view is that it was contact with Buffy which did it
(see below on the religious imagery in this episode).
In my post on Crush, I pointed out that writer David Fury got the message
of The Hunchback of Notre Dame all wrong. He had Tara say that
Quasimodo’s love for Esmerelda was selfish, such that he could never end
up with her. He meant her statement as a prefiguring of Spike and Buffy. In
fact, the whole point of Hunchback was that Quasimodo’s love redeemed
him. Here in Grave, David Fury wrote the scene in which Spike’s love for
Buffy has put him on the road to redemption. The trials constituted Spike’s
rite of passage and the soul signifies Spike’s willingness to change himself.
I’ll discuss Spike’s journey, including its relationship to A Clockwork
Orange, in my posts on S7. For now, consider the purpose of Spike’s chip
in that novel. Consider, too, my post Amends, where I discussed Angel’s
culpability for the deeds of Angelus. Spike’s dark night of the soul raises
the same issues. And it’s not by accident that the relevant episode is
Amends.

Grave does share one characteristic of the other finales: Buffy has the
epiphany – quite literally – which solves her season-long challenge. As
prefigured in Life Serial, it was a puzzle that resisted solving, but she
eventually got there. Buffy told Giles here in Grave that “It was like ...
when I clawed my way out of that grave, I left something behind. Part of
me.” That part of her was Dawn. In my post on Bargaining I said this:
“As applied in its original form -- to impending death -- bargaining
‘involves the hope that the individual can somehow postpone or delay
death. Usually, the negotiation for an extended life is made with a higher
power in exchange for a reformed lifestyle. Psychologically, the individual
is saying, “I understand I will die, but if I could just have more time...”’
It’s worth asking whether someone in these episodes promised to be better –
to reform her life – as part of a bargain, and what that might mean
metaphorically:
DAWN: You told me I had to be strong ... and I've tried. (tearful) But it's
been so hard without you.
Buffy still has eyes closed, frowning.
DAWN: I'm sorry. I promise I'll do better, I will! (still tearful) If you're with
me. Stay with me ... please. I need you to live.

In my view, we need to interpret this via the metaphor. Dawn isn’t the Key
anymore, but she still has a metaphorical role as Buffy’s inner child. Buffy’s
inner child wants her slayer half – the adult half – to pay more attention to
her, and promises to be better in return. Keep that metaphor in mind as we
go through S6.”
Buffy thought she needed to repress her humanity, her inner child, in order
to be an adult. All season long Buffy ignored Dawn, pushed her aside,
insisted on protecting her – “sheltering” would be more accurate – in her
effort to adopt adult behavior. We also see this reflected in Willow’s attacks
on Dawn in TTG – Buffy’s metaphorical spirit lashing out. Dawn’s whiny
reaction to being ignored led most viewers to take Buffy’s side, but
metaphorically Buffy was wrong: “BUFFY: No. Giles, you were right about
everything. It is time I was an adult. … I guess ... I wasn't ready before.”
Here in Grave, Buffy realizes that she doesn’t need to suppress her human,
younger self (Dawn, in the metaphor) in order to be an adult, but to accept
that aspect of her as an essential part of her adult life. When Willow took
the power from Giles, she exulted in feeling “connected to everything”. But
that connection was false, and it led Willow to try to destroy the world.
Buffy found the true connection in her inner humanity: “I don’t want to
protect you from the world, I want to show it to you.”
Buffy climbs out of the tomb, just as she had to do in Bargaining 2,
metaphorically ending her depression by bringing her seasonal journey full
circle. She wants to show Dawn the world, the exact opposite of her
inadequate solution in Older And Far Away, where she stayed inside at the
end. Staying inside with Dawn represented one step forward (willingness to
recognize and include Dawn) and one step back/sideways because "staying
in" continued to shelter her.
One reason S6 got so much criticism, I think, was that viewers didn’t expect
Buffy’s depression to last all season. Joss: “We really went to a dark, dark
place. … I also understand that it got too depressing for too long, but I don't
think all of my instincts are perfect.” In fairness, Joss had promised that her
return from the dead would be hard, but most of us didn’t expect it to be
that hard. And we can’t say we weren’t warned: the season theme was, as
always, given in the opening episodes. Depression and acceptance are, of
course, the two stages of grief after bargaining.
Metaphorically, Buffy reaches acceptance after Andrew and Jonathan, who
represent the lure of immaturity, flee the scene and immediately after her
metaphorical heart and spirit achieve catharsis and reconciliation. In my
reading, it’s Willow’s rage at Tara’s murder which leads to the catharsis. I
mentioned in my essay on After Life that Buffy didn’t get catharsis there;
she had to wait until now.
The catharsis isn’t just Willow’s, though it’s obviously that too. Willow’s
rage is also Buffy’s rage – rage against the petty sexism represented by the
Trio, rage at herself for what she thinks she is and what she thinks she’s
done, demonstrated in her confrontation with her metaphorical spirit in
TTG: “WILLOW: The [world] where you lie to your friends when you're
not trying to kill them? And you screw a vampire just to feel? And insane
asylums are the comfy alternative?” Similarly, Willow’s confrontation with
Giles in Grave is an extended attack on the rational part of Buffy, the part
that for years now has insisted that she grow up.
That explosion of emotion metaphorically breaks the blunted affect
characteristic of Buffy’s depression. Her heart accepts her spirit with all its
flaws and puts aside its own self-hatred – in the story, Xander’s, but in
metaphor Buffy’s: “Well, last season [S6] was very much about Buffy
doubting herself and the concept of power, sort of hating herself….” (Joss)
We saw that self-hatred, a common symptom of depression, repeatedly
emphasized in Two to Go as well as here in Grave:
XANDER: (calls after her) Okay, then, I'll just ... catch up. She's only my
best friend, you know. No big deal, just...
He trails off in frustration. He has walked up to the car and now he slams
his fist down on its lid angrily. Then winces in pain.
XANDER: ...glad I could help. (TTG)

ANYA: You know, none of this would be happening if it weren't for you.
XANDER: You think I don't know that? You think I'm the hero of this
piece? (upset) I saw the gun. Before Warren raised it, I ... I saw it, and I
couldn't move. He shot two of my friends ... before I could even.... You
want me to know how useless I am? That it's my fault? Thanks. Already got
the memo. (TTG)
DAWN: Where are we going?
XANDER: I have no idea.
DAWN: What?
XANDER: I don't know, okay? I can't even run away well. And that's
something I'm usually good at.
DAWN: Maybe we should we go back and help.
XANDER: Yeah, 'cause I've been such a big help already. Standing around
like a monkey while Buffy gets shot. Tara's dead ... and Willow ... losing...
DAWN: (annoyed) Well, feeling sorry for yourself isn't helping either,
Xander, okay? (Grave)
The ending scenes complete the parallel between Buffy and Willow which
I’ve mentioned in previous posts: both need to access their humanity in
order to solve their problem. Buffy does this by accepting Dawn in Dawn’s
metaphorical role, Willow through the agency of the magic Giles “dosed”
her with and through Xander as Buffy’s metaphorical heart:
ANYA: Oh. (getting it) You dosed her.
GILES: Yes.
ANYA: You knew she'd going to take your powers all along.
GILES: The gift I was given by the coven was the true essence of magic.
Willow's magic came from a ... place of rage and power.
ANYA: And vengeance. Don't forget vengeance.
GILES: Oh. How could I? In any case, the magic she took from me tapped
into ... the spark of humanity she had left. Helped her to feel again. Gave
Xander the opportunity to ... reach her.
I’m not a particularly big fan of the hilltop scene with Xander and Willow. I
see the show through a very Buffy-centric lens, so I don’t get as much
emotional resonance from Xander’s actions. It didn’t help that I was angry
with Xander already in the episode for telling Dawn about the attempted
rape. Xander had no right to tell Dawn about it. That works in metaphor –
the heart breaking a hard truth to the human, child part of Buffy’s self. But
it can’t work at all in real life even if, as farmgirl62 pointed out in
comments, “she was throwing Spike in Xander's face in an attempt to get
him to go back into the fight. Xander bites back by throwing Spike under
the bus as a bad individual for Dawn to idolize.” It would be unforgivable
(h/t farmgirl62) incredibly obnoxious for someone to tell anyone such a
personal fact. To disclose it to family is a flat out betrayal of friendship,
especially after Buffy stopped him from telling Dawn in Villains.
In fairness, here’s a counterpoint to my view of the hilltop scene from
Solitude1056:
“The first time I watched the episode, I thought: geezuz, doesn't Giles
realize where Willow is heading, with all her protestations that she can't
take it, must end it, must stop all the pain? Why is he encouraging her with
the phrase "you can stop it," spoken yet again, and even included (I think)
the nail-in-the-coffin phrase of you can end this. It seemed logical that she'd
think in global terms, seeing as how she was feeling in global terms. How
the hell could he push her like that? But on second watching, I realized,
Giles was playing a dangerous game, betting on the fact that he knew the
players well. Hence his pushing - because sometimes, you've got to really
hit bottom in grieving before you can claw yourself up again - and hence
him sending the message with Anya, betting on Xander being there to hear
it as well. Dawn's pleading did nothing, Buffy's fighting got nowhere,
Anya's separateness backfired, and it was down to Giles as the deliverer of
humanity-magic, and Xander's love. Giles couldn't save the day, and didn't -
he just created the door and could only hope Xander would step through it.
In second viewing, I can see how touch-and- go it was, and strangely, as a
result the whole thing affected me much more than it had the first time
around.”
Putting aside my personal views, my critical evaluation is that (1) Buffy’s
speech to Dawn – “I want to show you the world” – fits the theme, but,
along with too much other dialogue in the episode, particularly the
magic/drugs methaphor (heh), is clunky; (2) Buffy’s joie de vivre seems a
bit out of place. Tara is dead. Anya is a vengeance demon again. Willow
killed a human being, tried to kill others, threatened Dawn, beat Buffy
senseless, and tried to end the world; and (3) there’s an awful lot of
forgiveness necessary in the story line for what Willow did.
Still, the hilltop scene is affecting and Willow’s breakdown very classically
cathartic:
“Priam wept freely…as Achilles wept himself
now for his father, now for Patroclus once again,
and their sobbing rose and fell throughout the house.
Then, when brilliant Achilles had had his fill of tears…
he spoke out winging words, flying straight to the heart…
Enough of endless tears,
the pain that breaks the spirit.
Grief for your son will do no good at all.
You will never bring him back to life….”

When Buffy climbs out of the tomb after being dead, first literally in
Bargaining and then emotionally and spiritually here, she is truly born
again. The music – Sarah McLachlan’s “Prayer of St. Francis” –
emphasizes this theme:
Lord make me an instrument of your peace
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon...
Where there is doubt, faith...
Where there is despair, hope
Where there is darkness, light
And where there is sadness, joy...
O divine master grant that I may...
...not so much seek to be consoled as to console...
...to be understood as to understand...
...to be loved as to love...
For it is in giving that we receive
And it's in pardoning that we are pardoned
And it's in dying that we are born...
...to eternal life...
Amen.

Recall also that at the end of Entropy Tara quoted a line from Yeats’s poem
“The Second Coming”, consistent with Buffy being born again. I think this
resurrection imagery is quite deliberate and that the consequences will be
important in S7. The flash cuts to Spike receiving his soul as the song plays
make it apparent that we’re to see this journey as implicating Spike also.
In the scene just after the teaser, Buffy tells Giles that she doesn’t know
why she was brought back, and Giles has no answer for her:
BUFFY: (quietly) I guess ... I wasn't ready before. It took a long time for
that feeling to go away ... the feeling that I wasn't really here. It was like ...
when I clawed my way out of that grave, I left something behind. Part of
me. I just... (pauses, looks Giles in the eye) I don't understand ... why I'm
back.
GILES: You have a calling.
BUFFY: But it was my time, Giles. Someone would have taken my place.
(Giles grimacing) So why?
Giles looks away, pensive, not answering.
Note that this is the question Angel asked Giles in Amends. Giles had no
answer for him either. As with Spike, the reference to Amends is no
accident.
As I see this, it means that Buffy doesn’t yet recognize the Ultimate Boon
of the Hero’s Journey: “The ultimate boon is the achievement of the goal of
the quest. It is what the person went on the journey to get. All the previous
steps serve to prepare and purify the person for this step, since in many
myths the boon is something transcendent like the elixir of life itself, or a
plant that supplies immortality, or the holy grail.” That Boon is the subject
of S7.
Trivia notes: (1) I rather doubt Buffy told Giles about Spike’s attempted
rape when she was bringing him up to date in the teaser. That might have
put a serious damper on their laughter. (2) Willow reminds Giles that he
called her a “rank, arrogant amateur” in Flooded. (3) Giles said that Willow
killed “a human being” (singular). The DVD commentary strongly implies
that Rack was not human. (4) Willow uses flying knives against Giles just
as she did against Glory in Tough Love. (5) Willow refers to Giles as Jeeves,
the character from P.G. Wodehouse novels. (6) Willow describes Andrew
and Jonathan as “dead men walking” after the movie of that title. (7)
Willow sent off the fireball with the words “fly, my pretty, fly”, from the
movie The Wizard of Oz. (8) When Xander called Willow “black-eyed girl”,
that was probably a play on the Van Morrison song “Brown-Eyed Girl”. (9)
The hilltop scene reminds me of the climax of A Wrinkle in Time, in which
Meg’s love saves Charles Wallace, though I don’t know if that was used as
the exemplar or not. (10) Joss wrote Xander’s “yellow crayon” dialogue.
(11) During the summer, Joss announced that the theme for S7 would be
“back to the beginning”.
 SEASON SEVEN
Lessons
“It’s about power.” Those words open Season 7 and close Lessons, and so it
is about power – Season 7, I mean. Not in the sense we understood it in
Checkpoint (where we hear Buffy say these very words to Quentin Travers),
nor in the sense that something similar was said in TTG and in Grave, but in
a very different way entirely. The whole point of S7 is to explore what the
show means by “power”.
Buffy tells Dawn in the teaser that “the stake is not the power”. That’s easy
to see. But there’s an important aspect of the lesson Buffy gives Dawn
which contains a clue to what Buffy will realize about power in the finale.
We next see Willow talking to Giles in England, and Willow tells us that
“it’s all connected”. She said something very similar in Grave: “It's like I,
I'm connected to everything.” Again, though, it’s clear that we’re to
interpret this in a fundamentally different way. There, her sense of being
connected came from a dark power, like Jesse after he’d been vamped in
The Harvest: “I feel good, Xander! I feel strong! I'm connected, man, to
everything!” Here, the fact that everything is connected gives Willow a
form of power, in this case to bring forth a flower. I think this scene is
important for the season as well.
Lessons opens Season 7 much like Buffy v. Dracula opened S5. By this I
mean that the key moment in BvD came in the final scene, which
introduced Dawn. The final scene of Lessons should be just as challenging
and lead to similar questions: who or what was/were that in the room with
Spike?
More questions: Joss said before that season that the theme would be “back
to the beginning”, but what is “the true beginning” we’re going back to
according to the Master? What is it about power that’s so important? Who
was that girl in the teaser and what’s her connection, if any, to anything
else? I’ll give one clue about the unidentified girl: Joss: “this is absolutely
the primal scene for me, because it's everything that I made 'Buffy' to get
rid of. Was the girl who couldn’t get through it.”
Setting up the season isn’t the only purpose of Lessons, of course. There’s a
new high school in town, which Dawn is starting just as we saw Buffy start
in WttH, and it’s terrifying to the kids. But Buffy’s an adult now so it
“seems smaller”. The “manifest spirits” – I think they represent Buffy’s
fears that she won’t be able to protect Dawn in high school – turn out to
pose little real challenge. She can confidently tell Dawn, Kit, and Carlos
that “You guys are gonna be OK. School is intense, but you'll do all right as
long as you're careful.”
There is, by the way, a huge clue to the identity of the season’s Big Bad in
Spike’s conversation with Buffy. He told Buffy that her “ghosts” were
“manifest spirits raised by a talisman”. His wording here references a
previous episode, and I’ll make the connection explicit when we get to
Never Leave Me.
Spike’s story in S7 follows the metaphor of a pretty well-laid-out path for
recovery from addiction. Here in Lessons, we see Spike in what we might
call the DTs, alone by himself in the basement and acting delusional. Keep
this in mind and I’ll note the steps as we go through the season.
In Buffy v. Dracula we heard Dracula tell Buffy that her power was rooted
in darkness. Here we see that the same is true of Willow. She may want to
have the magic “just taken from her”, but as Giles tells her, “You're
connected to a great power, whether you feel it or not. … This isn't a hobby
or an addiction. It's inside you now, this magic. You’re responsible for it.”
This is the final nail in the coffin of the magic/drugs metaphor; the best part
about this is that we eliminate the distraction and get to see how Willow
responds to the challenge that Buffy faces every day.
Lessons also contains perhaps my personal favorite line in the entire series:
“In the end, we all are who we are, no matter how much we may appear to
have changed.” Note, by the way, that the camera then jump cuts to Xander,
dressed, unusually, in a suit. Giles spoke the line to Willow, but the jump
cut tells us that it also applies to Xander.
I think Lessons is one of the best season openers.
Trivia notes: There are many more references to previous seasons in S7, so
lots of trivia: (1) Like every season opener beginning with When She Was
Bad, Lessons opens in a graveyard. (2) Buffy did indeed miss the heart her
first time, as we were shown in Becoming 1. (3) The scenes in England
were shot at ASH’s home there. (4) When Giles tells Willow the magic is
inside her, this also hearkens back to Becoming 1, where he told her
“channeling... such potent magicks through yourself, it could open a door
that you may not be able to close.” (5) Dawn called Xander “Double-0
Xander”, a reference to James Bond. (6) Xander mentioned that the last two
principals of Sunnydale High were eaten: Principal Flutie in The Pack and
Principal Snyder in Graduation Day 2. (7) Buffy’s warnings to Dawn about
high school included references to The Pack, Go Fish, and Out of Mind,
Out of Sight. (8) The new principal introduced himself as Robin Wood.
Robin Wood is the name of a famous horror film analyst with a strong
feminist bent. (9) As Dawn went into the school without Buffy, she said “to
serve man is a cookbook”. To Serve Man was a Twilight Zone episode based
on the short story of the same title by Damon Knight. (10) The song in the
coffee house is “So High” by Strange Radio. (11) Hallie said the song was
“happy, shiny crap”. That’s a reference to the song “Shiny Happy People”
by R.E.M. (12) The reference to Mrs. Czolgosz in the conversation between
Anya and Hallie is an obscure joke on Jane Espenson growing out of her
reference to the McKinley assassination in Superstar. Leon Czolgosz was
McKinley’s assassin. (13) Anya made someone’s boyfriend French,
although she wished him to be a frog, because the English historically
called the French “frogs”. (14) Buffy called the spirits “resentful dead
guys”, a play on the Grateful Dead. (15) Principal Wood used the phrase
“curiouser and curiouser”, which is from Alice in Wonderland. (16) It’s a
truly awful pun when Warren says that he’s “more than flesh”. (17) Adam
called Spike “Number 17”, a reference back to the Initiative (and to The
Prisoner), which called Spike “Hostile 17”. (18) Because the show had
been evicted from Torrance (see trivia notes on Graduation Day), they
found a new location for the high school in Northridge, CA.
 Beneath You
The closing scene of Beneath You is, IMHO, the best dramatic scene in the
entire series (Joss wrote it). When S6 first aired, I had a lot of criticisms of
Spike’s storyline from Seeing Red through Grave. I gave them all up when I
saw this scene. It’s so transcendently beautiful that the set-up is worth it.
Joss said later that one thing he wanted to explore in S7 was the extent of
forgiveness – what evil can be done yet still be forgivable. The ending of
BY is a key moment for this exploration, but there will be many others
throughout the season.
The title resonates not only with the theme of this episode and of the
season, but with Fool For Love, where both Cecily and Buffy told Spike
“you’re beneath me”. In his soliloquy Spike says that he sought a spark.
Sparks glow; they are, one might say, effulgent.
Spike’s behavior follows the recovering alcoholic trope I mentioned in the
post on Lessons. He begins the episode still in the DTs, saying repeatedly
that “it’s not the time” and that he’s “not ready”. We see him later, however,
come into the world with bravado, claiming he’s “changed” (note the
change in clothing; it is, as he later admits, a costume) and therefore can
handle "it" all on his own. As we’ll see later, there’s a reason for this
behavior, but I won’t go into it now in order to avoid spoilers.
It turns out that Spike can’t “handle it”, and he tries to hide his new
condition. Stabbing Ronnie was so traumatic, both emotionally and because
of the chip (yes, it did fire), that he can’t hold the pretense. He loses his
emotional control and confesses to Buffy in the church scene that she’s
inspired him to “quit”.
We can see Ronnie as a metaphor for Spike – as a demon, he pursues one
woman single-mindedly, but when the spell is reversed he ends up human --
naked, vulnerable and wounded like Spike in the church. For once in his
life, Spike is not wearing any costume. It’s that stripping off of layers which
allows him to confess to Buffy that he got his soul. This is an essential step
in his progress – he understood his fatal flaw and confessed his
commitment to change.
Spike got his soul for Buffy and, I think we can say, because of Buffy. Does
this mean he’s now her responsibility? I’ll let Rufus and Rahael take two
sides of this:
Rufus: “Whatever Spike is now, whatever he is to become, I feel that Buffy
has the power to shape [him]....will she choose to forgive, or will she reject
the newly souled vampire? The choice is hers, and remember a certain
guide in Intervention told her....."love give forgive"....to do anything else
would be wrong.”
Rahael: “We cannot look to other people to save us. When we start trying
to save ourselves, that's the key. That's what gives us responsibility and
respect for ourselves. That's how we save ourselves. Others can give us
motivations - but they cannot be held responsible for what we do - if they
were, our 'salvation' is meaningless.”
I see it as a little bit of both. Buffy, having died and returned, is Spike’s
route to salvation. To put it in Christian terms, his justification comes
through Buffy. But unless you’re a strict Calvinist, that doesn’t mean
Spike’s own conduct is irrelevant. As I interpret Joss’s view, seen in
previous experience with Angel, Spike might lean on Buffy – he clearly
wants her forgiveness but knows he has no right to ask for it – but
eventually he has to take responsibility for himself. No, he can’t rest. Not
yet.
We’ve also seen this pattern with Spike himself. He came to Buffy (“in
friendship… well, seething hatred”) and begged for help in Pangs. Against
all reason, she extended it to him. That eventually paid off in Intervention.
The question for S7 is what responsibility Buffy will feel for the situation
now.
I also saw the worm as representing Buffy's fears about Spike -- that he
would stalk her and attack her. Spike instead attacked the demon (thereby
protecting Buffy), and revealed that the demon was just a man inside it all.
Same lesson Buffy learned about Spike himself a few moments later.
Spike’s soliloquy has pretty obvious sexual references, but can also refer to
Buffy’s death in The Gift: “And you make me weak, thinking of you,
holding myself, and spilling useless buckets of… salt over your... ending.”
The soliloquy also reaffirms that Spike sought his soul voluntarily.
Anya’s situation parallels that of Spike in some ways, as confirmed when
they both “demon up” in the fight at the Bronze. There’s also a contrast:
Spike got his soul for Buffy; Anya returned to vengeance because of
Xander. Both Buffy and Xander took actions in the past which led to this
point, and Xander was very wrong when he told Nancy that Anya was
“ruining his life” when it was he who ruined hers. But Xander’s right when
he tells Anya “sooner or later, Anya, that excuse just stops working.” Yes,
the actions of others contribute to our current situation, but that doesn’t
relieve us of responsibility from this point forward.
Anya has backed herself into a real corner. OTOH, as Hallie told her in
Lessons, she has to worry about D’Hoffryn. If she fails to deliver the
vengeance she’s supposed to mete out, then she will personally experience
the fact that “it’s a bad time to be a good guy”. Hence her bravado in the
confrontation at the Bronze.
But D’Hoffryn isn’t her only problem. If she continues as a vengeance
demon she’s on a collision course with Buffy, as we see from the way Buffy
put the sword on the table in the Bronze. That’s Buffy’s way of saying she
means business.
It’s pretty clear that Anya herself is conflicted about her demon persona
because she reverses the spell. She’s confused about what she is, but she’s
reaching the point where she’s going to have to take a side.
Trivia notes: (1) The teaser was expressly an homage to Run Lola Run. (2)
Buffy mentioned Dawn kissing a vampire, which she did in All The Way.
(3) The worm monster derives from the movie Tremors, or perhaps Dune if
you’re older. (4) Nancy’s boyfriend was Ronnie, a joke on the names of
President Reagan and his wife. (5) Note also the additional joke in the name
of the “[Nancy and] Sluggoth” demon. There was also a character in the
comic strip named Spike. He was a bully who beat up Sluggo. (h/t Allie) (6)
There’s perhaps a third pun too. Spike looks much like Sid Vicious, whose
girlfriend was Nancy Spungen. If you see the worm as a metaphor for
Spike, then this pun follows naturally. (7) Anya’s grant of Nancy’s wish
was a pun. Nancy asked to make her boyfriend a worm. Anya made him the
“same phylum” in accordance with her usual “bait and switch”. (8) Spike
asked Buffy if she was “up for another round on the balcony”, referring to
their sex there in Dead Things. (9) Spike asked Buffy if she was “off to the
batpoles”. Buffy then rescues Nancy in a scene very reminiscent of Batman.
(10) One of critic Robin Wood’s (see trivia note 8 to Lessons) essays on
horror films is called “What Lies Beneath?”, which he wrote in 2001, and
the theme of which is Freud’s theory of repression and the return of the
repressed, with particular reference to the movie Day of the Dead. Hm.
 Same Time, Same Place
When I first saw Same Time, Same Place, I thought the Gnarl demon was
too heavy-handed. In thinking about it since, I realized it works both
metaphorically and in the context of the plot. As metaphor, Gnarl represents
Buffy’s fears about Willow.
As plot, I think we should see Gnarl as born of Willow’s guilt about how
her friends perceive her:
GNARL (O.S.)
Your friends left you here. (singing) No one comes to save you. (talking)
They wanted me to have you. Did they leave you as a gifty for me? Are you
a tasty little gifty? … Or did they just throw you away?
Gnarl then punishes Willow as her sense of guilt leads her to feel that she
should be punished. The entire situation, then, was something she herself
created, just as she created their mutual inability to see each other.
Gnarl used the word “gifty” when referring to Willow, three times in fact.
From Robert Burns’ poem To A Louse: "O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie
us/to see oursels as others see us!" And what does Willow say in her
conversation with Buffy at the end? “Heck, I did a little [think it might have
been her]”. Her own witchy power, combined with her sense of guilt,
allowed her to see herself as others saw her.
The demon makes a lot of sense from this perspective. And it’s creepy as
Hell, for my money the second creepiest on the show after the Gentlemen
in.
As for the inability to see each other, it’s very much in character for Willow
to try to hide, which is what her spell accomplished. That was one of the
major themes in her dream in Restless:
TARA: They will find out, you know. About you.
***
BUFFY: (to Willow) Your costume is perfect. (Whispers) Nobody's gonna
know the truth. You know, about you.
WILLOW: (bemused) Costume?
BUFFY: (pouting) You're already in character! Oh, I shoulda done that!
***
TARA: (offscreen) Everyone's starting to wonder about you. The real you.
If they find out, they'll punish you, I ... I can't help you with that.
***
BUFFY: (straightens up) Play is long over. (Stares at Willow) Why are you
still in costume?
WILLOW: Okay, still having to explain wherein this is just my outfit.
(Gesturing to her clothes)
BUFFY: Willow, everybody already knows. Take it off.
WILLOW: No. No. (Looks around nervously) I need it.
(Buffy rolls her eyes.)
BUFFY: Oh, for god's sake, just take it off.
(Spins Willow around and rips her clothes off.)
BUFFY: That's better. It's much more realistic.
Three episodes into S7 and as always the themes for the season have been
established and major developments prefigured. STSP is very important for
that purpose, as it sets the stage for one major plot development later in S7
and for Buffy’s actions in the finale. It’s a very good episode IMO, but I’ll
have to discuss some of the features later in the season just as I did with
Real Me in S5.
Obviously, too, unfinished business from S6 needs to be addressed, and
those past issues have now been raised for Spike, Anya and Willow. Raised,
but hardly finished. We did see a step forward for Willow, but Spike is back
in the DTs. Anya seems to be making tentative moves back to humanity
when she admits to Willow that the “vengeance isn’t as fulfilling”. Buffy’s
quietly helping Anya by turning to her for help just as if she were human.
The ending scene is lovely, and Buffy has developed formidable reservoirs
of forgiveness since IOHEFY, reflected by the fact that her metaphorical
heart has already forgiven Willow. If you doubt this, compare Faith and
Willow. Faith is still in jail, having turned herself in. Putting aside the
practical question of whether someone as powerful as Willow could be
punished by others, Willow got to spend 3 months in England having Giles
go all Dumbledore on her.
We could say that the purpose of punishment is limited to making sure that
the perpetrator no longer poses a danger to society. Even if that were true –
and it’s doubtful this would garner universal agreement – Willow’s case
isn’t certain: “DAWN: She didn't finish? She didn't finish being not evil?”
No, punishment is imposed to reinforce the moral lesson. We don’t lecture
children and expect them to understand the Kantian rules. We ground them,
for example, because that drives home the explanation which accompanies
it. The question for an adult is whether they’ve internalized the punishment.
That Willow has done so seems to be the point of this episode.
Another difference is that Willow has done quite a lot of good in her time
with Buffy. Faith doesn’t have that “credit”. Still, this comes perilously
close to adopting Faith’s argument in Consequences that she shouldn’t be
responsible for Allan Finch’s death:
“Faith: (steps closer) Buffy, I'm not gonna *see* anything. I missed the
mark last night and I'm sorry about the guy. I really am! But it happens!
Anyway, how many people do you think we've saved by now, thousands?
And didn't you stop the world from ending? Because in my book, that puts
you and me in the plus column.
Buffy: We help people! It doesn't mean we can do whatever we want.”
Perhaps a better argument is that Willow is needed in order to meet the
challenges of S7. That’s what Giles told her in Beneath You: “You will be
needed.” She is, after all, Buffy’s metaphorical spirit. Keeping her locked in
a dungeon would mean preventing Buffy from accessing all her power. It
might even put Willow back on the wrong side. By taking Willow in, Buffy
can help Willow forge her own recovery instead of blocking it. If this is
true, you might then ask what the proper treatment of Faith might entail.
Whether Buffy is the proper one to forgive Willow is an interesting
question. If you apply the “Hero’s Journey” rubric to Buffy – and there are
good arguments for doing so – then she’s reached the stage of a Christ
figure. Her forgiveness of Willow is both appropriate and a necessary step
on Willow’s own path to justification.
Trivia note: (1) Xander’s description of Spike as “chock full of sanity”
plays on the name of the coffee company “Chock Full O’ Nuts”. (2) Anya
and Willow reconnect in a scene reminiscent of when they first met in
Doppelgangland. That reference is hardly accidental, because that’s the
source of VampWillow’s “bored now” which Willow repeated just before
she flayed Warren. (3) The “find the demon” spell was the first spell Tara
and Willow tried (in Goodbye Iowa; it failed because Tara sabotaged it),
and Willow’s spells with Tara did eventually get very sexy. (4) Anya’s
statement that “teleporting isn’t a right, it’s a privilege” plays off the
expression usually used in the US to refer to driving. (5) Dawn’s “it’s
smellementary” plays off the Sherlock Holmes expression “it’s
elementary”. (6) The facts that Willow didn’t realize her own spell until the
end, and that it had unintended consequences, should remind you of her
“my will be done” spell in Something Blue. (7) Many viewers thought that
Spike’s behavior in STSP, and Buffy’s behavior towards him, were odd in
light of the ending of Beneath You. What apparently happened was that the
ending scene of BY was re-shot after STSP was filmed. The changed
ending, in turn, made Spike’s behavior here and Buffy’s reaction to him
seem discordant.
 Help
In my view, Help plays the same functional role for S7 that Inca Mummy
Girl played in S2. Ampata was a Chosen girl who sucked the life out of
others for her own selfish purposes. That’s exactly what Buffy saw herself
as having done with Angel, as her emotional reaction in IOHEFY showed:
“Buffy: No. James destroyed the one person he loved the most in a moment
of blind passion. And that's not something you forgive. No matter why he
did what he did. And no matter if he knows now that it was wrong and
selfish and stupid, it is just something he's gonna have to live with.”
Buffy gave in to her selfish desire when she slept with Angel and that
sucked the (metaphorical) life out of him. She therefore saw herself as
worse than even Ampata; she failed a “chosen one” test.
Similarly, the events of Help create in Buffy’s mind a standard which she
doesn’t know how to meet. This begins very subtly in the teaser. The
dialogue there implicitly raises the issue Joyce first noted in Gingerbread,
namely that Buffy can’t really put a dent in the vampire population:
XANDER
33 minutes. Since when do we go through all this trouble for one lousy
vampire. Excuse me, one lousy potential vampire.
BUFFY
Vampire by vampire. It's the only way I know how.
If you think about Buffy’s calling in the context of Joyce’s challenge, then
Buffy’s response to Xander leads directly to her rhetorical questions at the
end of the episode: “So what then? What do you do when you know that?
When you know that maybe you can't help?” The connection with the teaser
is that if Buffy can’t defeat all the vampires and demons, then there will
inevitably be those, such as Cassie, whom she can’t save. Note that this
builds on the accusations of the manifest spirits in Lessons, each of which
berated Buffy for failing to save them. It also builds on the girls who’ve
mysteriously died, one of whom Buffy saw in her dream in Beneath You.
The questions she asked will haunt Buffy all season just as Ampata’s
behavior haunted her in S2.
The problem posed by Help is inherent in the role of the Slayer (another
“back to the beginning” theme). If you’ll recall, Buffy eventually answered
Joyce’s challenge in Graduation Day with an act of rebellion which
incorporated the entire Sunnydale High student body to defeat the Mayor.
Because Help ended as it did, many viewers see it as bleak, even
despairing. At best it seems to suggest that you can’t stop trying even when
failure is inevitable. I suggest that both of these interpretations are wrong.
In the context of the season as a whole, this is a key moment -- it defines
Buffy’s problem for the season arc just as Glory’s introduction in episode 4
of S5 defined Buffy’s problem that year, Flooded introduced the Trio, and
Fear, Itself showed Buffy and the Scoobies separated by their fears but
united at the end. (Are we seeing a pattern here?) Much of the season will
explore possible solutions. Help isn’t intended to make you give up, or to
slog on in existential despair, it’s intended to make you think about the
problem a little harder. And Cassie’s last words are, indeed, prophetic.
The opening of Help (up through the scene of Willow at Tara’s grave) is,
IMO, terrific. Xander’s hammer analogy describes the adult dilemma
perfectly. The episode remains very good while Buffy is talking to the
students, but IMO the rest is problematic. When Buffy goes to see Cassie’s
father, she’s doing what she thinks is the correct, adult thing to do, but she’s
painfully, embarrassingly wrong and the scene grates on us (well, me) for
that reason. (This I might justify on the ground that it may foreshadow
another plot point later on.) The demon-raising boys are a metanarration on
Reptile Boy (continuing the “back to the beginning” theme), the idea being
that events which seemed important to a high schooler look downright lame
when viewed from the perspective of an adult. The problem is, most people
saw Reptile Boy itself as lame; lame on lame is not a pretty combination.
Dawn’s over the top “friendship” with Cassie, while it works
metaphorically to show Buffy’s human side determination to save Cassie,
isn’t all that plausible as a story and MT’s acting in the final scene is off to
me.
One final point. Some fans criticized Buffy for being so determined to save
Cassie and so worried about Willow, while leaving Spike in the basement
all by himself. One way to explain this is to note the thematic connection
between Buffy’s inability to save Cassie and the fact that Spike’s demons –
whatever their source – are invisible and she can’t fight them. Getting Spike
to help her save Cassie might well have been the best thing she could have
done for him because it enabled him to “protect the girl” instead of
wallowing in his guilt.
Trivia notes: (1) Xander mentioned the jingle “I like Ike”, which was the
slogan for President Eisenhower’s presidential campaigns. (2) Putting
stones on a grave as Willow did is a Jewish tradition. You can find several
different explanations on the internet, which is good evidence that the true
origins of the tradition, and what it represents, are unknown. (3) Buffy
mentioned “occupying Algeria” in connection with the French Foreign
Legion because Algeria was once a French colony before it broke away in a
civil war. (4) Cassandra was the name of a Trojan princess who could
foretell the future but was fated never to be believed. Like Cassie,
Cassandra knew her own fate but was powerless to avoid it. (5) The book
Cassie is reading in the library, Slaughterhouse Five, involves a character
who knows when he’ll die and publicly predicts it. (6) Though it doesn’t
exist anymore, there actually was a website with the address
[Link], where you could read Cassie’s poems. (7) Willow
mentioned that she used to post Dougie Howser fanfic. Neil Patrick Harris,
who played Dougie Howser in the TV show of that name, later starred in
How I Met Your Mother with Alyson Hannigan, and in Joss Whedon’s
internet hit Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. (8) The actual name of the rock
group Buffy got wrong was Blue Oyster Cult, whose biggest hit was “Don’t
Fear the Reaper”.
 Selfless
Season 7 has its critics, but I’ve never seen anyone who dislikes Selfless
(this being the internet, I’m sure someone will now prove me wrong). It’s in
my top 25, and it’s one of many reasons I personally rate S7 so highly. I
think it’s a perfect example of what Joss meant when he said that we would
understand S6 much better when we saw S7 – Anya’s story here couldn’t be
told without the background of Hell’s Bells and succeeding episodes.
Although Spike’s very brief scene seems unrelated to the main story line, I
think it’s very much on point. I’ve always seen Anya as a parallel to Spike.
Both were long-time cold-blooded killers. Both would have preferred to
remain that way. Anya lost her amulet, Spike gained a chip. These events
resulted in forced socialization that originated in attraction to one member
of the SG. Both struggled with the adaptation to humanity after so many
years as a demon.
Spike and Anya are now both struggling with their consciences. Spike’s
dialogue with the first Buffy is, as I see it, an internal dialogue in which
he’s imagining that she would understand if he went to her for help, though
he knows that he has no right to ask. The Buffy he “sees” in that dialogue
represents something internal to him, the nature and purpose of which I’ll
explain later:
SPIKE
I'm in trouble, Buffy.
BUFFY
I can help you.
SPIKE
I could never ask. Not after...
BUFFY
It's different. You're different.
SPIKE
I could never ask.
The harsher-sounding Buffy, dressed in black, then comes in to tell him to
take steps to help himself. That tough love advice comes from the real
Buffy, as we see from the fact that she’s wearing black for the remainder of
the episode. Similarly, as I’ll discuss below, Anya takes steps to help herself
only after Buffy’s intervention.
Anya’s story actually begins in the opening scene, though she’s not in it.
Dawn’s advice to Willow in the teaser describes someone who has no self:
DAWN
My advice to you is do exactly what everyone else does all the time.
WILLOW
Got it.
DAWN
Do what everyone else does, wear what everyone else wears, say what
everyone else says.
WILLOW
OK.
DAWN
People may say something to you you don't understand. Just don't be afraid
to keep your mouth shut and pretend like you know what they're saying.
When Buffy and Xander return to the house and learn that it was Anyanka
who summoned the demon, Buffy tells him that she’s been thinking about
the problem of Anya since the summer. We can be sure that she also
considered her duty with respect to Willow in STSP. It’s pretty clear Willow
understood that too, in light of their conversation at the end of STSP:
BUFFY
I have a confession to make. I thought it might be you. With the flaying.
WILLOW
I know.
BUFFY
I wanna be the kind of person that wouldn't think that. Xander never
thought it.
WILLOW
He did, a little. Heck, I did a little. Xander has the luxury of not saying it,
but you're the slayer. You have to say stuff like that.
This, I think, helps explain Willow’s sympathy for Anya throughout the
episode.
Buffy’s sense of responsibility for the dead frat boys must be all the greater
because she let Anya’s behavior drop after Anya reversed the spell on
Ronnie in BY. We should remember the lessons of Innocence and Passion;
Buffy does.
When Buffy mentioned Xander’s lie in Becoming, I literally jumped up off
the couch and shouted at the TV. Finally! This was a hotly debated topic on
the internet for years but it seemed the writers would never bring it up
again. Not only did Drew Goddard use it at exactly the right moment (93
episodes and 4.5 years later!), but he made it clear that Buffy viewed
Xander’s previous betrayal and his current hypocrisy as stemming from
precisely the fact that he had cheered her on to kill the man she loved.
Think back to the sword fight in Becoming 2. Angelus told Buffy that she
had “no weapons…no friends… no hope.” It wasn’t that her friends were
not physically present. It was that if those whom she called friends were
willing to cheer her on to kill the love of her life, then they weren’t really
friends at all.
I had never seen anyone articulate this aspect before, despite reading
hundreds of comments on this topic. Among other things, this cast a whole
new light on Buffy’s decision to leave Sunnydale at the end of S2 and her
reaction to her friends at the start of S3. It also speaks volumes about
Buffy’s character that she never said these words until Xander forced her.
Buffy’s use of the phrase “I am the law” should bring to mind Faith’s very
similar statement in Consequences: “You know in your gut we don't need
the law. We *are* the law.”
There’s a crucial difference between the two, notwithstanding the similarity
in the words used. In context, Faith said it in order to avoid responsibility.
Buffy said it as a way of accepting her responsibility in the course of her
duty. It’s the burden each Slayer has faced from the beginning (word used
advisedly):
BUFFY
It is always different! It's always complicated. And at some point, someone
has to draw the line, and that is always going to be me. You get down on me
for cutting myself off, but in the end the slayer is always cut off. There's no
mystical guidebook. No all-knowing council. Human rules don't apply.
There's only me. I am the law.
This is another key point of the season, tied in with the seasonal themes, the
problem Buffy posed at the end of Help, and the solution Buffy will adopt to
her seasonal problem.
Although Xander told Anya that Buffy was not coming as part of an
“intervention”, I think that’s exactly what it was. Buffy gave Xander a head
start, and she looked to Willow for an alternative.
When she arrived at the frat house, her actions can be seen as shock therapy,
perhaps. I believe Buffy knew that something drastic had to be done to get
Anya to change (compare the real Buffy’s “tough love” advice to Spike
earlier). I interpret Buffy’s action in the fight as letting it go on as long as
possible so that Anya would understand the reality of it. Then she told Anya
she was sorry and stabbed her. That moment was, thematically, the death of
Anyanka. Note that Anya had been in demon face before the sword, but was
in human face after. (Drew Godard, DVD commentary.)
Buffy surely remembered the experience in OAFA when a sword through
the chest failed to kill Hallie, an incident Anya expressly mentions
afterwards. IMO, Buffy suspected that Anya was attempting suicide by cop
as a cry for help and pushed it just far enough to force her to change (with
some help from Xander and Willow). Anya wanted to die – she lay
unmoving on the floor as Buffy raised the sword over her (Drew Godard,
DVD commentary).
I personally had underestimated D’Hoffryn and thought of him as less
threatening than he was revealed to be in this episode. I guess the pimp can
seem sympathetic until one of his “girls” tries to leave, and the dialogue
here certainly supports that characterization of D’Hoffryn. He converted
Anya’s attempt at selflessness into a horrifying punishment – killing her
only friend in the story, killing her vengeance demon side in metaphor –
leaving Anya to find her true self on her own.
Trivia notes: (1) Selfless was Drew Goddard’s first ever script. (2) Joss
provided the dead frat boys story and wrote the X/A scene at the end. (3)
Aud – which gets pronounced “odd” by Anya so we can get the joke – was
an actual Norse name of an early settler in Iceland and the wife of Olaf
(really). (4) Spike remembered that Dru saw stars even indoors, which she
did in Innocence. (5) Spike’s line “scream Montresor all you like” refers to
Edgar Allen Poe’s story The Cask of Amontillado. Montresor walled up
Fortunato in the basement in order to kill him, and Fortunato screamed
Montresor’s name to no effect. (6) There was a revolution in Russia in
1905, but it failed. (7) Halfrek referred to the “Winter Mansion” in
connection with that revolution, presumably meaning the Winter Palace.
That palace featured in the 1917 Revolution, but not in 1905. (8) Anya’s
claim that workers would overthrow absolutism and lead the proletariat to
revolution succinctly summarizes the stated goals of the Communists. (9)
Buffy says that Anya chose to become a vengeance demon twice. It was
actually three times, though Buffy had no way to know that – Anya
demanded her powers back at the beginning of Doppelgangland. (10)
Willow got the talisman to summon D’Hoffryn in Something Blue. (11) In
Anya’s flashback, Xander said that he just wanted a happy ending, which is
what he said when everyone discovered that he summoned Sweet in
OMWF. (12) Anya’s mention of coconuts also refers back to OMWF. (13)
Marti Noxon and David Fury sing the mustard song in the background of
the flashback. (14) Joss wrote Anya’s song in the flashback. (15) Anya
Christina Emmanuella Jenkins was the name Anya gave the Council in
Checkpoint. (16) Anya’s phrase “I’ll never tell” refers back to the song she
and Xander sang in OMWF. (17) All of Kali Rocha’s scenes for the season
were shot on 1 day, which shows how far in advance episodes were plotted.
(18) Just to complete the point I made in my essays on The Wish and
Doppelgangland, I’ll mention here the issue of Anyanka’s pendant. One
potential weakness in my interpretation of The Wish as a daydream is the
existence of her pendant as a real item. While there’s plenty of evidence in
those S3 episodes that Anyanka needs her pendant as her power source,
there’s evidence to the contrary in the episodes from Entropy through
Selfless. In those episodes no amulet or pendant is ever mentioned, nor is
she ever shown relying on one, even when she’s acting as a vengeance
demon. More significantly, the whole ending of Selfless makes no sense if
there had been one. Nobody would have needed D’Hoffryn to reverse the
deaths of the frat boys and to expel Anyanka from the Order – they could
have just smashed her pendant as Giles did in The Wish. Thematically, of
course, Anya had to ask – to wish, actually – rather than have her pendant
smashed involuntarily.
 Him
The question you should be asking about Him is “who’s the ‘him’”? There’s
an obvious “him” in Him: R.J. But the entire teaser focuses on Spike. It
begins with Spike moving into Xander’s apartment, and then shifts to Dawn
and Buffy discussing Spike. The teaser always sets up the episode. Thus, I
think we need to see the title as referring to Spike as well. There are several
clues to this effect throughout the episode:
The focus on R.J.’s coat (the magical effect of the coat might also suggest,
perhaps, some meta-commentary on Spike fans); like William, R.J. was a
poet before he became cool (note the look on Spike’s face when Lance
mentions poetry); Dawn tells Buffy that she “knows R.J.’s soul” after Buffy
has twice emphasized Spike’s soul to Dawn; and Anya tells Willow “I
looked into him and saw his soul”, just as she did to Spike in Beneath You.
Given these clues, we should see the story of R.J. and the jacket as an
allegory of Spike. Not just Spike and his duster, which we haven’t seen
since Seeing Red, but in the more general terms of an entire persona. The
point of the magic jacket was that it made the wearer cooler, more
attractive, more dominant than he actually was. That’s why we saw Lance –
poor Lance went from star jock on campus to pretty much where Xander
was in S4, complete with pizza delivery shirt. We all understood that this is
what would likely happen to R.J. once they burned the jacket.
Now let’s translate this into Spike. He’s putting his past behind him; that’s
both the story of getting his soul and the metaphor played by the soul in the
series. Just as we saw with Lance and anticipate for R.J. using the metaphor
of the letterman’s jacket, putting his past behind him means that Spike will
now reveal his true underlying self. Spike is no longer the same “person”
that he was.
Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying that Spike will necessarily be like
Lance. That’s one possibility, of course, since the human William wasn’t
much. But just as Angel was neither Liam nor Angelus, it’s possible that
Spike will be somewhere in the middle also. Later episodes will show us
where he’s headed.
There’s probably another message as well: that Buffy’s no longer
obsessively attracted to Spike as she was last year. She couldn’t be – that
Spike no longer exists. Whatever Buffy thinks or feels about Spike will be
based on his new persona, not his old one.
The dialogue is careful to emphasize that Buffy’s feelings toward Spike are
unclear. In her conversation with Dawn, she’s unable to articulate just why
she’s helping Spike, but she knows it’s the right thing to do:
DAWN
Last night, you said you weren't helping Spike out of pity. What is it?
BUFFY
It's a good question. (sips her drink through a straw)
DAWN
Is sitting there drinking soda some kind of a Zen non-answer?
BUFFY
(puts sunglasses on top of her head) No, I just... I don't know what I'm
feeling. I think I can't stand him, but sometimes...
DAWN
You love him?
BUFFY
No. I—I feel for him.
DAWN
Feel what, exactly?
BUFFY
(shakes her head) Dawn...
DAWN
No, I'm—I'm just trying to understand. I mean, none of it makes sense. First
you say Spike disgusts you, but secretly you two are doing it like bunnies.
And then Spike says he'd die for you, but he tries to rape you.
BUFFY
(sighs) For the record, Spike knew how wrong it was. That's why he went
away.
DAWN
But to get a soul? Like that would make him a better man? Xander had a
soul when he stood Anya up at the altar. And now he says he still wants
her? I just don't think it's the school basement that's making people crazy.
BUFFY
(sighs) I should really get back. You comin' with?

Buffy’s actions speak at least as loud as her words – she now has Spike
sharing an apartment with her metaphorical heart, albeit with her heart
expressing some well-founded, uh, reservations.
Buffy’s forgiveness policy also extends to Anya. Anya, like Spike, doesn’t
want to admit that she needs help and doesn’t want to accept it, but Buffy
helps anyway:
ANYA
… Now please go away. (takes ice and dish towel into the other room, picks
up a knocked-over chair) Look, I don't need anyone's help. Or, OK, clearly I
do, (sits in chair) but I don't want to need anyone's help, so stop helping.
(starts making an ice pack with the ice and towel)
BUFFY
I get it. After last week, you feel you need to be all renegade and broody.
Taking yourself out of the loop—
ANYA
I need to figure out who I am. (puts ice pack on her leg)
BUFFY
Another, something bad is happening. I don't want my friends out there
alone right now, OK?
I think there are two important ideas to take away from this. One is that the
Xander/Anya relationship, in which the two are obviously conflicted,
continues to parallel that of Buffy and Spike. The other is that this
uncertainty is, in both cases, important to the seasonal arc, particularly on
the question of what it means to have a soul.
Him is bookended by 2 great but relatively dark episodes, and it’s much
lighter in tone. There’s lots of humor and some pointed commentary on all
the female characters. Anya calls R.J. her best friend, which is how she
once described Xander (Hell’s Bells). Willow claims that R.J. is devoted to
her, just as Tara was (“I am, you know. Yours.” – Who Are You). Dawn was
ready to sacrifice herself, like Buffy was for Angel in Graduation Day 2
and for Dawn in The Gift. Note that Buffy never said she loved R.J., just
that he loved her. She was certainly ready for the sex, though.
The reference to so many previous episodes – and there are arguably even
more than I’ve mentioned – probably represents continuing commentary on
the way the problems one faces before becoming an adult are so much
easier to solve once we reach adulthood, similar to what we saw in Help.
It’s pretty clever when Spike turns the angels to face away from him while
Xander’s talking to Lance. Keep in mind that Spike’s path is that of a
recovering alcoholic, and he sees himself as not yet worthy. He’s now out of
his self-imposed prison, no longer suffering from the DTs, and trying to live
in the world. We’ll see more of his journey in the next two episodes.
Trivia notes: (1) Xander called Spike “Nimrod”, which is an American
slang term meaning a stupid person. (2) The romantic music which begins
to play when Dawn falls off the bleachers while transfixed by R.J. is,
naturally, the theme from the movie A *Summer* Place. I guess I’m dating
myself, but I died laughing when it began to play. (3) Buffy’s old
cheerleader clothes were from Witch. (4) Xander mentioned Dawn’s former
crush on him, which we saw in Real Me. (5) Dawn’s “no one expects the
Spanish Inquisition” comes from the Monty Python routine. (6) Buffy’s
reference to Anna Nicole Smith in criticizing Dawn’s behavior at the
Bronze may be dated by now, so see the link. (7) Buffy called R.J. “Mr.
Wizard”, which was the title of a TV show from the ‘50s and ‘60s, later
revived in the ‘80s (h/t Aeryl). It was a science show for kids. (8) Buffy’s
denial that she’s under a spell recalls her similar denial in Something Blue.
(9) Xander’s flashback reminiscence was to Bewitched, Bothered &
Bewildered. (10) The split screen sequence of the 4 women is an homage to
the TV show Charlie’s Angels. (11) Buffy’s bazooka/rocket launcher is
possibly the one used to destroy the Judge in Innocence. (12) Willow began
to call on Hecate, the same goddess Amy supplicated for Xander’s love
spell in BB&B.
 Conversations With Dead People
Conversations With Dead People, the second great episode of S7 – third if
you include Beneath You – marks the true beginning (heh) of the season
storyline, as Buffy tell us in the opening words: “Here we go.” The season’s
Big Bad isn’t officially identified yet, though viewers with a good memory
could be pretty sure by now. I’ll hold off until we get confirmation in Never
Leave Me.
I’ll begin with a sad farewell to Jonathan, who was a fan favorite
notwithstanding his tendency to fantasy and bad decisions. His final words
showed real maturity. After all the trauma of Earshot and Superstarand the
Trio, he grew up. So, of course, Joss killed him.
As shadowkat pointed out just after Conversations aired, each of the 3
principals got what she perhaps most wished for, and it turned into a
nightmare. Dawn got to talk to Joyce, who told her that Buffy would be
against her. Willow got to talk to Tara, whose conduit told her to kill
herself. Buffy got to voice her anxieties, only to have them reinforced and a
new one added regarding Spike.
One thing comes through loud and clear in Buffy’s conversation with Webs,
namely her sense of being isolated, alone. Loneliness is the theme of the
episode, just as it is of Angie Hart’s song which opens and closes it. Each
vignette, including that of Andrew, Jonathan, and Warren, showed an
individual who thought s/he was making a connection (in Andrew’s case
with Warren, in Jonathan’s case with Andrew), but each was in fact alone.
Buffy tells Webs that she commits, but that’s debatable. Yes, she certainly
committed to Angel, but her failure to commit was why Riley left and she
certainly didn’t commit in any meaningful sense to Spike in S6 (she does
seem committed to encouraging his new-found soul here in S7, but that’s
different). It shouldn’t be surprising if she finds committing difficult – she
had to kill Angel, she nearly had to kill Willow and Anya, and she may now
have to kill Spike. Her role as Slayer makes it tough to commit to anyone,
which reinforces the isolation she confesses to Webs.
Of course, she makes no connection with Webs either. He’s just a way for
Buffy to talk to herself, another conversation with a dead person be it noted:
“Whisper in a dead man’s ear/doesn’t make it real.” This isolation goes all
the way back to the beginning of the slayer line: “First Slayer: No ...
friends! Just the kill… We ... are ... alone!” It could hardly be otherwise
when she’s the Slayer:
HOLDEN
So, all that time, you were a slayer?
BUFFY
The.
HOLDEN
"The", like as in "the only one"?
BUFFY
Pretty much.
HOLDEN
Oh. So, when you said not connected, that was kind of a telling statement,
wasn't it—?
Giles told Willow in Lessons that “it’s all connected”. Webs feels his own
connection to a “powerful all-consuming evil” (and see trivia note 9). The
bad guys are connected. How can Buffy achieve her own connection, not to
evil but to other people, in light of the dilemma she expressed in Selfless:
“You get down on me for cutting myself off, but in the end the slayer is
always cut off.”? That’s Buffy’s dilemma for the season. In the words of
director Nick Marck, “this episode is the set up for the season finale.”
(DVD commentary)
Everyone was unsure who or what Dawn saw. Jane Espenson had to
confirm Dawn’s vision, and I’ll discuss that in two more episodes. Joyce’s
words to Dawn will be controversial later, so I’ll be discussing them later as
well. For now, they’re intended to put a rift between Dawn and Buffy,
consistent with the theme of Buffy’s isolation we saw in her conversation
with Webs.
For Willow’s conversation, I want to copy here a discussion I had with
local-max in comments to Older And Far Away (slight edit to avoid mild
spoiler):
Local-max: “I don’t think Tara is 100% wrong. I think Willow is so used to
being powerless, and has grown accustomed over the years to both being
smarter than her peers and to rules being essentially meaningless (she has to
break out of “I can’t make the first move or I’ll be a slut” and “I can’t walk
off campus when I’m not a senior!”, after all), that her judgment is fairly
terrible; she can’t distinguish good uses of power from bad ones. I think
Tara’s attitude is that Willow simply can’t be trusted with power, because
she abuses it automatically, and if only Willow stops using power, well,
everything will be better. That attitude is wrongheaded, though, because
Willow needs to learn how to use power effectively, not just to give up on
it. But I don’t think Tara’s position is psychologically incredible: I think
that it makes a lot of sense for her, and for someone of her background, to
have a knee-jerk feeling that Willow is just one of those people who can’t
be trusted with power, and who can only be trusted otherwise.

I think that you can argue that season seven continues Tara’s role as skeptic
of Willow’s power, a role Willow has to grow beyond needing/wanting.
“Cassie”, representing “Tara,” also functions as a dark mirror for Tara.
While Giles tells Willow that giving up magic is harmful to her and that she
should use her power for herself and others, “Tara” tells Willow that she
can’t be trusted to do even a single spell, because her power itself is so
deeply corrupting that she will eventually kill all her friends. And the ne
plus ultra of that is, of course, that she should kill herself. What is killing
herself but the ultimate way of cutting herself off from her power. The thing
is, Tara—the real Tara—may have an element of being anti-power, where
Willow is concerned, in a way that I actually do think is wrongheaded. But
she would never take it to the extreme of wanting Willow to kill herself.”
My response: “I'm not convinced that Tara's qualms about Willow's abuse
of magic lead inexorably to the conclusion "no more magic". That's
certainly one possible conclusion, and Willow's "mind wipe" behavior
supports it. But there are less drastic reactions too, and Tara seems uniquely
well-placed to do some teaching on the proper use of magic. Jumping to the
most extreme solution in direct opposition to her original admiration of
Willow's power, seems a bit discordant to me. Not "out of character",
because I think your explanation is certainly a plausible read, but "off".
Obviously, that's a very subjective reaction.”
Willow certainly distrusts her magic, and perhaps she (at least in retrospect)
got the same sense from Tara that local-max had. Willow certainly told
Giles that she distrusted magic in Lessons and Beneath You. Her “mutual
‘no-see-ems’” spell in STSP can hardly have increased her confidence.
Then, in Selfless, the old Willow came back for a minute when she threw
the spider demon out the window, and D’Hoffryn called her on it. Her
conversation here with “Cassie” was clearly designed to implant further
doubts in her regarding her own ability.
What saved Willow was not magic, but her love for Tara. She has no doubts
on that score – Tara would never be a party to any effort to get Willow to
kill herself. So while the Big Bad can play on Willow’s insecurities, there
are parts of humanity it clearly doesn’t understand.
Self-confidence is a key issue for everyone in S7, particularly Buffy. In
addition, Willow is Buffy’s spirit, so any lack of self-confidence in Willow
will reflect Buffy’s own internal doubts, just as Buffy’s doubts will be made
manifest in Willow’s insecurities. But love is a key theme too.
Lots of interesting discussion points in CWDP. Spike (see below) and
Andrew both killed someone. Should they be treated differently? Different
from Willow? Anya? Stay tuned – these will be major debates for the
season.
Actually, there was a great deal of debate after this episode over whether
Spike actually killed the girl. Some thought it was the Big Bad. Others
thought it a trick of some kind because, well, “he has a soul now”. He also
has a chip, which we saw working in Beneath You and Help, but which
obviously didn’t fire when he bit the woman here.
Webs played expertly on Buffy’s fears regarding both herself and Spike; the
two fears are connected, even if Buffy isn’t, as we’ll see. Consider Buffy’s
dilemma if Webs told her the truth. She just made a big issue to Xander
about the fact that she killed Angel. For her to have to stake Spike, when
she admits to having indeterminate feelings about him, would be another
level of pain. At the same time, she steeled herself to kill Anyanka, even if
in the last resort, notwithstanding Xander’s accusation of a double standard.
Actually pursuing a double standard would cause all kinds of problems,
especially increasing her isolation from others.
Trivia notes: (1) AFAIK, the time stamp at the beginning has no meaning
except as the air date and time, though it could also set the beginning of the
final arc towards Chosen. (2) Angie Hart, whose song opens and closes the
episode, is a friend of Joss and performed on the show in two previous
episodes. Joss co-wrote the song with her. (3) Joss also wrote the Buffy
scenes, while Marti Noxon wrote the Willow scenes, Jane Espenson wrote
Dawn’s scenes, and Drew Godard wrote the Trio. (4) This is the only
episode in which Xander does not appear. (5) The original plan was for Tara
to appear in the scenes opposite Willow. Amber Benson refused the role
because of the fallout from Seeing Red; she didn’t want Tara to appear evil.
(6) Cassie told Willow, “Remember that time on the bridge when you sang
to each other?” This was a clue that Cassie wasn’t actually in
communication with Tara: Tara sang on the bridge in OMWF, but Willow
didn’t. (7) It’s a little hard to catch, but Dawn was talking on the phone to
Kit, from Lessons. It’s a subtle way of reminding viewers that events
continue to happen offscreen. (8) Webs wrote an essay on Vaclav Havel, a
playwright and former president of Czechoslovakia. (9) Webs tells Buffy
that being a vampire feels “Like I'm connected to a powerful all-consuming
evil that's gonna suck the world into a fiery oblivion.” Compare what Jesse
said in The Harvest: “I feel good, Xander! I feel strong! I'm connected,
man, to everything!” (10) The joke about Scott Hope coming out is that Fab
Filippo, who played Scott Hope, later played a gay character on the TV
show Queer As Folk. (11) Buffy said she didn’t need therapy from “the evil
dead”, referring to the movie of that title. (12) In the flash cuts behind
Dawn, Joyce’s body is in the same position on the couch as when Buffy
found her. (13) Andrew called Jonathan “McFly”, referring to the main
character in Back to the Future. (14) Jonathan used the Spanish word
“cuesta” to mean “quest”. It actually means “hill” or “slope”. (15) Warren
called Jonathan “Short Round”, after the character in Indiana Jones and the
Temple of Doom. (16) Cassie reminded Willow that she was “strong like an
Amazon”. That was the phrase Willow and Tara used in The Body. (17) The
pronunciation of “nemeses” refers to Warren’s dialogue in Gone. (18)
Buffy’s use of the phrase “insane troll logic” refers to Triangle. (19) It may
be a stretch, but I read Webs’ phrase asking Buffy if she was ready for “our
little death match” as a Shakespearean reference to orgasm. (20) Cassie
mentioned the Indigo Girls, who are a lesbian band. (21) Conversations
won the 2003 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form.
 Sleeper
Sleeper connects Spike’s “addiction recovery” story and the Big Bad (still
unidentified). I now need to explain how Spike’s story since S4 intersects
with the themes of S7.
I’ve commented several times before on the “Clockwork Orange” theme
that the show has been using with Spike since S4. In my first post, on The
Initiative, I mentioned that the writers were using the American version of
the novel. The difference between the American version, which Kubrick
used for his movie, and the English version is that Anthony Burgess’s
original novel had 21 chapters (representing the age of adulthood) and the
American version ends with chapter 20.
Chapter 20 ends with Alex’s conditioning reversed after he was
deprogrammed, and with him looking forward to resuming his violent
ways. That’s a very pessimistic outcome, of course, and what we’ve seen of
Spike in S7 so far is a thematic recasting of Chapter 20. Remember that in
Alex’s case the conditioning had to be removed, while in Spike’s case the
chip/soul are still present and some form of conditioning has overridden
them in order to get him to kill again.
Sleeper finishes Chapter 20, but then it goes further to show Spike rejecting
his instruction to feed off Buffy. This rejection sets up Chapter 21 of the
novel, in which Alex has grown tired of the violence and settles down to
raise a family. In short, Burgess saw Alex as ultimately on a path to
redemption without the conditioning, and that’s roughly where Spike is at
the end of Sleeper.
The story line achieves this result by means of the metaphor of a very well-
laid-out path for recovery from addiction, a theme that can also be read into
A Clockwork Orange pretty easily as an alternative to Burgess’s growing up
theme (and vice versa). Here’s how it’s played out so far, summarized from
what I’ve mentioned in previous posts: in Lessons we saw Spike in the DTs,
alone by himself in the basement, which continues into the beginning of
Beneath You. He then comes into the world with bravado (BY), claiming
he’s “changed” and therefore can handle "it" all on his own. He can't; as he
said in his ravings in the teaser there, “not hardly ready”. He therefore tries
to hide his new condition, but he can’t hold the pretense and confesses to
Buffy in the church scene that she inspired him to “quit”.
Because of the influence of the still-unidentified evil, he relapses into the
DTs (STSP) and starts “drinking” secretly again, eventually going on a
binge (CWDP and earlier, though we don't see it until the final scene of
CWDP). In Sleeper we see the evil something appear to him mostly in his
own form, indicating that his own weakness is the source of the problem.
The fact that the evil is Spike’s own weakness tells us an important fact
about the Big Bad.
We get clues to the addiction theme, and to the fact that Spike is being
controlled, early in the episode. When Buffy confronts Spike in his
bedroom, he insists that she’s “trumped up some charge about me being
back on the juice.” We need to know that something has controlled Spike,
as opposed to him resuming his killing ways. That’s why we got the scene
where Spike hit Xander in order to leave the apartment. His chip fired,
meaning that it still works and that something is overriding it. The scenes of
“Buffy” encouraging his binge and his own behaviorial changes also
support the presence of external control.
Later at The Bronze (a place no alcoholic should go), the Aimee Mann song
“This is How it Goes” reinforces the addiction theme in its chorus: “It’s all
about drugs, it’s all about shame/and whatever they want, don’t tell ‘em
your name”. The title of her other song, “Pavlov’s Bell”, highlights the
conditioning used to deprogram Spike and to get him to kill again, Pavlov
being famous for his experiments in conditioning dogs to react to a bell.
The chorus of “Pavlov’s Bell” ties together the drug use and the
conditioning: “I'm all about denial --/But can't denial let me believe? … If
you're what I need,/Then only you can save me/So come on baby -- give me
the fix….”
In both cases, the chorus of the song is played over key moments with
Spike in the Bronze to give us powerful clues to the themes of the episode.
With “This Is How It Goes”, the song fades out briefly, only to come back
strongly on the chorus as Spike searches the Bronze for the girl he killed in
CWDP. With “Pavlov’s Bell”, the chorus provides the background for
Spike’s fight with the vamp on the upper level – “nobody knows that’s how
I nearly fell, craving for love and ringing Pavlov’s Bell” – at which point he
realizes that he’s been killing again.
Spike now takes a major step for someone struggling with recovery and
admits his problem to Buffy, bringing her to the house. The vampires rising
up from the basement represent Buffy’s fears of Spike’s dark side. Since it’s
not Spike’s basement, that means he’s not entirely responsible for them.
Buffy defeats the vamps only after she sees Spike resist attacking her and
change. Note, too, how the scene should bring to mind the events of Seeing
Red. Here’s the dialogue:
“Buffy fights the vampires, who have taken tools from the basement to fight
her with. Spike-2 is talking to Spike.
SPIKE-2
You know what I want you to do.
Buffy continues to fight the vampires, but they manage to get a hold on her,
one on each arm, holding her up for Spike.
SPIKE-2
They're waiting for you. Take her, taste her, make her weak.
Spike stands, and walks toward Buffy menacingly.
BUFFY
Spike, no!”
In Seeing Red Buffy had to kick Spike away when he ignored her cries of
“no”. This time, after he takes communion from her blood, his soul allows
his love for Buffy to stop himself from repeating his sin:
“SPIKE
(in human face) I remember.
Spike's horrified. His face is one of complete shock and disbelief that he
could have actually done those things. He recoils from Buffy, staggering
back to the far end of the room.”
The way I see it, the chip allowed Spike the time and space for love to
redeem him, i.e., for his soul to take over. Karen suggested in a comment to
Smashed that “Quoting C.S. Lewis, who describes pretending and 'acting
good' as real steps in moral development: ‘When you are not feeling
particularly friendly, but you know you ought to be, the best thing you can
do, very often, is to put on a friendly manner and behave as if you were a
nicer person than you actually are... Very often the only way to get a quality
in reality is to start behaving as if you had it already.’ Spike thinks he's
better than he really is. In Tabula Rasa, he thinks he's a hero, a good guy, a
vampire with a soul. He needs to act the part before he becomes the real
thing.”
That’s not all he needs to do, though. The key moment comes when Spike
asks Buffy to help him. This is the biggest hurdle for a recovering addict –
seeking help. Before this episode, Spike was unwilling to ask for help: “I
could never ask”, he tells the false “Buffy” in Selfless. He was unwilling to
seek help from anyone, least of all from Buffy, the woman he’d wronged.
Now he’s “hit bottom” and he faces up to his failure, aided, perhaps, by the
fact that his latest wrongs aren’t “really” him anymore. His guilt makes him
ready to give up, but he seizes the last chance and asks Buffy for help.
Buffy recognizes that Spike was under the control of something else:
“There's something playing with us. All of us. … You didn't see him down
there. He really didn't know what he'd done. It wasn't in his control.” For
that reason, and because she’s Buffy, she agrees to help him.
In my view, Sleeper is a terrific episode and a remarkable payoff to a theme
which began 3 seasons previously.
Trivia notes: (1) Xander wanted to analyze the facts in a “CSI-like manner”,
referring to the TV show Crime Scene Investigation. (2) Xander made the
same request for an “objective” analysis about Angel in the episode Angel.
In both cases his prejudice seems pretty clear. Of course, given the events of
S2, Xander does have some cause for his attitude. Just don’t mention Anya.
(3) Xander described Spike as “cool as Cool Whip”, referring to the brand
name whipped cream. (4) The song which we hear Spike humming in the
teaser and which triggers Spike’s change, first with the harmonica on the
Promenade and later sung in the basement by his evil twin, is the old folk
song “Early One Morning”. The lyrics sing of a maiden betrayed by her
suitor. (5) The Promenade, where we see Spike and Buffy walking, is an
outdoor shopping area in Santa Monica. (6) Spike’s evil twin uses a line
from “Early One Morning” when he asks Spike “how could you use a poor
maiden so?”. (7) When Spike tells Buffy “it's still all about you” I take that
as a reference to the internet debates regarding whether the show is “all
about Buffy”. (8) The bouncer called Spike a “Billy Idol wannabe”, for
which see the link. (9) The bouncer also said Spike was a “real player”,
which is a slang expression for someone very promiscuous.
 Never Leave Me
Never Leave Me – the title quotes the words of Spike’s trigger song, “Early
One Morning” – reveals the identity of the Big Bad while tying together
more tightly the threads of the Spike and Andrew story lines with each
other and with the seasonal arc.
NLM gives us lots of information as well as themes. The identity of the Big
Bad allows us to recognize the robed figures as the Harbingers (at least it
does if we remember Amends). We also now learn at least in part why the
robed figures are killing off the girls. We can also look back on the end of
Lessons and ask ourselves again the meaning of what the phantoms told
Spike. In particular, we now know it was the First, not Buffy, who used the
phrase “it’s about power”, so we can recognize going forward that our
understanding of that phrase, and its meaning for the season, might change.
We also know that the First can’t be touched, leaving open the question of
how Buffy can fight it. That, in turn, is a clue to the First’s metaphorical
role, which I’ll discuss later.
Spike’s “recovering addict” metaphor gets reinforced in this episode with
blatant references to withdrawal. The parallel between Spike and Andrew is
pretty clear, even down to Andrew’s black coat and boots. Andrew isn’t
recovering yet – he’s still buying blood and listening to The First. He wants
to be bad, but he isn’t very good at it. Neither one wants to kill again, but
they’re susceptible in different ways. The danger presented by Andrew is
relatively straightforward, but Spike’s potential as a “Manchurian
Candidate” (or the movie Telefon if you prefer) adds to the complexity.
Xander tells Andrew that Anya removed his heart and replaced it with
darkness. I see this as a reference to Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of
Darkness, which was the basis for the movie Apocalypse Now. That movie,
remember, formed part of Xander’s dream in Restless. Of course, Xander is
being typically childish here in blaming Anya for what was really his own
fault. Contrast this with the forthright way Buffy accepts some of the blame
for her relationship with Spike in S6 (see below). Andrew’s inability to take
responsibility for his own actions – indeed, even to separate fantasy from
reality – is what makes him potentially dangerous.
Both Andrew and Spike pose moral challenges for Buffy, which Anya
articulates in the teaser: “Shouldn't we stab him through the chest? Isn't that
what we do when these things happen?” At least since Innocence, Buffy has
faced the problem of deciding whom to hold responsible. In NLM Buffy
clearly distinguishes between Anya – who, she said in Selfless, “chose to
become a demon” – and Spike, whose attempt to accept responsibility she
rejected:
BUFFY Was that you who killed those people in the cellar? Was that you
who waited for those girls?
SPIKE There's no one else.
BUFFY That's not true.
If you think back to the post on Amends, this is the same view Buffy took of
Angel in that episode. For her, the soul is primary. If you are capable of
exercising free will, then you can’t be held responsible if, for some
involuntary reason, you are deprived of that free will. The consequence is
that neither is responsible for the actions of their vampire selves, not Angel
for Jenny’s murder and not Spike for the attempted rape or the recent
murders. Mind you, this is Buffy’s view; as we’ll see, it isn’t necessarily the
view of other characters.
Buffy knows much less about Andrew at this stage, not even that he killed
Jonathan, so she’s keeping him from doing harm.
In my view Buffy has been consistent about this issue and I’ll defend her
decisions past and future alike, but the issue will arise again over the course
of the season and there’ll be plenty of room for argument about who
belongs on which side of the line.
Spike’s dialogue with Buffy about the consequences of his soul was taken
amiss by some viewers at the time. There were two areas of controversy.
One was whether Spike was blaming Buffy for their relationship in S6. The
other was whether he overstated his prior evil behavior, with implications of
rape and torture. I’ll give a brief sample of each debate (all quotes from
AtPO).
The argument that Spike was blaming Buffy went like this:
Malandanza: “We still see Spike blaming Buffy for all his problems. Nice
to know some things never change. Apparently free will applies only when
he does good (albeit for selfish reasons) and when he does evil, it is
someone else's fault. Buffy used him. She mistreated him. He tried to
change for her. It's all about Buffy. So, really, when you think about it,
Spike's sufferings are all Buffy's fault.”
Spike’s phrasing is ambiguous, and could certainly be seen as criticizing
Buffy (she herself took it that way at first). That would be a bit much under
the circumstances, but I interpret him as talking only about himself. Here’s
the dialogue:
SPIKE … There was a price. There were trials, torture, pain and suffering...
of sorts.
BUFFY Of sorts?
SPIKE Well, it's all relative, isn't it?
BUFFY Meaning?
SPIKE Meaning I have come to redefine the words pain and suffering since
I fell in love with you.
BUFFY (sighs) How can you say that?
It’s possible to interpret this as saying that Buffy directly caused his
suffering. While she did mistreat him in S6, the way I read it is that the
presence of the soul – which he got for her – has caused a self-loathing for
his previous deeds. IOW, the soul has given him a new understanding of
what pain and suffering are about, something he now recognizes because
Buffy was the one who inspired him to get his soul:
SPIKE I'm feeling honest with myself. You used me.
BUFFY Yes.
SPIKE You told me that, of course. I never understood it though. Not until
now. You hated yourself, and you took it out on me.
BUFFY You figured that out just now?
SPIKE Soul's not all about moonbeams and pennywhistles, luv. It's about
self-loathing. I get it.
The extent of Spike’s previous evil was much more controversial:
KdS: “I think that if ME intended not to downplay Spike's evil [previously]
they did a very bad job. I think there was plenty of evidence for people to
consider Spike's past as being about relatively innocent battle killing and
not sadistic torture - there's the speed of most of his kills in early S2, the
oft-quoted "Not one for the pre-show" line in WML2, and the whole
argument between him and Angelus in FFL. Also note that his worst threats
against Willow in Lover's Walk were in a context where they could be
explained by him wanting her to do something for him and not by
motiveless cruelty.”
Ponygirl: “There was simply no way to have Spike as a regular,
sympathetic (at least grant him a semi-sympathetic) character if his past
crimes had been graphically depicted. It would have made Scooby
interactions with him that much more implausible, and given unwanted
weight to his every scene. Since we now have a clear line between Spike of
seasons past and current Spike - that being the soul-- it is no longer
necessary to hold back on his past crimes.”
Slain: “Spike has rarely had the opportunity to be Spike. In a handful of
episodes in Season 2 he's dangerous, but after that he becomes disabled,
then lovelorn, then chipped, then souled. Spike has rarely had the
opportunity to be himself, to do what he's truly capable of; he's always been
in the power of others (Dru, Angel, The Initiative, Buffy, The First).

So in this way, Spike's lines are a retcon, a way of reminding us that what
Spike has to atone for is not just what we've seen him do by far, but
everything that happened before he ever came to Sunnydale. The question
is of course, Should we have been told about Spike before, should we have
always looked at him and thought of him as a rapist and a sadist (rather than
simply a masochist)? I don't think so. I think, up until Season 6, that kind of
real evil wasn't part of BtVS. We've had glimpses of it, but until recently
[the writers] haven't gone that far for fear of compromising the lightness of
the show.”
There’s another possibility too, namely that Spike’s overstating things
deliberately in order to convince Buffy to kill him. Spike might have
wanted to die for lots of reasons, including all his wrongs done as a
vampire. However, I think what bothers him the most is that the First got
him to kill again after he got his soul. He insisted to Buffy in Sleeper that it
was “not the chip! Not the chip, dammit” which kept him from killing.
Learning that the soul didn’t save him made him feel helpless, made him
feel that he might commit a whole new series of horrors (as, in fact, he just
did).
Buffy’s reaction can be read as interpreting his description of his past
wrongs as part and parcel of his plea for her to kill him: “It's not your fault.
You're not the one doing this…. Was that you who killed those people in the
cellar? Was that you who waited for those girls?” She’s rejecting his
culpability and is too smart to give him an easy way out. Instead she tells
him that she believes in him, putting the onus back on him to prove her
right. When she tells him that, it’s one possible fulfillment of Cassie’s
prophecy to Spike in Help (“Someday she’ll tell you”). The look on his face
in response shows that this is the incentive he needs to continue the fight.
The destruction of the WC was a shock to everyone. It’s been a symbol of
patriarchal authority since S3, so is it good, bad, or neutral that it’s gone?
Principal Wood’s status is deliberately ambiguous at this point, so I’ll leave
it that way.
Trivia notes: (1) When Andrew tells Warren that he’s like Patrick Swayze,
the reference is to the movie Ghost. (2) Warren told Andrew that Andrew
was his “iron fist”, a reference to the comic book character of that name. (3)
Andrew’s “that’ll do pig” is a quote from the movie Babe. (4) The butcher
called Andrew “Neo”, a reference to The Matrix. (5) Andrew’s butcher shop
order resembles the condom-buying scene from The Summer of ’42. (6)
Andrew told Xander that he was “barking up the wrong asparagus”. That’s
a garbled version of the American expression “barking up the wrong tree”,
which means looking in the wrong place. (7) Spike’s “saw a man about a
girl” plays off the expression “saw a man about a horse”. It’s a way of
refusing to say what you spoke to someone about. (8) Spike remembered
that Buffy told him she was using him. That came at the end of As You
Were. (9) Anya mentioned a horse named Trigger. That was the name of
Roy Rogers’s horse. (10) Xander was “in the army” in the episode
Halloween. (11) We last saw the First and its harbingers in Amends. (12)
Quentin Travers’ reassuring words to Lydia are a quote from William
Ernest Henley’s poem “Invictus”. That poem was chosen by Timothy
McVeigh as his final statement before his execution for blowing up the
Alfred P. Murrah Building much as the Watchers’ Council building was
destroyed (with some pretty bad special effects). (13) When First/Spike tells
Spike that “You're the one who had to … learn something about himself”,
the reference is to The Master’s words to Spike in Lessons. (14) In an
online discussion after the episode aired, Drew Goddard suggested that they
had to use leather straps for the crucifixion scene rather than nails because
of network censorship. Given that it was intended as a crucifixion, you
should recall Spike’s crucifixion pose in Restless.
 Bring on the Night
As should be obvious by now, the writers depended on the viewers having
an obsessive memory for the details of previous episodes. By S7 there are
numerous references to earlier seasons in each episode, and the whole plot
line of S7 depends on everyone remembering the events of Amends. Bring
on the Night contains a number of scenes which follow from Amends, and if
you haven’t re-watched Amends in some time it’s probably helpful to do
that now.
In Amends the First tried to get Angel kill himself (among other things).
Here we see it work on both Willow and Spike, in addition to using the
Ubervamp against Buffy. I’ll talk first about Willow and Spike, because
what happens with them reminds us of what happened to Angel and thus
what the First is. With that in mind, I’ll turn to the main plot of Buffy and
the Potentials.
When the First takes over Willow’s spell, her fear afterwards – “It's still in
me. I feel it!” – can be read both as metaphor and as consequence. Willow
still fears the potential evil inside her and that fear prevents her from using
her full abilities.
In storyline terms, Spike’s torture in BotN seems odd. Why not just dust
him? As I see it, the physical torture is designed to weaken his mental
resistance so that the seductions of the First can take hold again.
Metaphorically, Spike’s torment, like Willow’s fear from her spell,
represents his punishment of himself for his recent “binge”. The
punishment is mental as well as physical. The First tells Spike how awful
he is, how worthless, just as Jenny’s ghost told Angel in Amends. That’s
what the First is – it’s your own fears, insecurities, isolation, and existential
despair telling you that you will fail, that you’re worthless, that you should
murder your best friend, that Annabelle should run away, that you can’t win
the game.
It’s Buffy’s faith in Spike – the belief that he is not alone – which gives him
the strength to overcome the torments of the First (storyline) and his own
recriminations (metaphor):
DRUSILLA/FIRST
Do you know why you're alive?
SPIKE
(weakly) Never figured you for existential thought, luv. I mean, you hated
Paris.
DRUSILLA/FIRST
You're alive for one reason, and one reason only. Because I wish it. Do you
know why I wish it? (holds her hands to her heart) Because I'm not done
with you.
SPIKE
(scoffs) Give it up. (Drusilla/First rolls her eyes and turns away) Whatever
you are, whatever you get away with, I'm out. You can't pull this puppet's
strings anymore.
DRUSILLA/FIRST
(snaps back to face Spike) And what makes you think you have a choice?
What makes you think you will ever be any good at all in this world?
SPIKE
She does. Because she believes in me.
Spike can believe in himself because Buffy believes in him. “I mean, the
whole show in a way, the whole show ping pongs between the darkest night
of the soul and this whole yearning for belief.” Marti Noxon
I doubt Spike’s mention of existentialism is accidental.
I think Juliet Landau did a great job. She had to play someone else playing
Drusilla. That meant she had to be similar to Drusilla without actually being
her (Spike: “You’re not Drusilla.”). That’s hard to do and she did it very
well.
While Willow and Spike are important for showing us how the First works,
they are secondary to the plot of this episode. BotN introduces us to the first
Potentials, or “slayers in training” as they’re sometimes called. Their
presence explains the young women we saw murdered in Lessons, Beneath
You, and Sleeper. We’ll see more Potentials as we go along. The Potentials
were widely unpopular as a group and often individually unpopular as well.
I personally don’t have any problem with them per se, though individuals
among them will sometimes annoy me.
Regardless of your own reaction, the important point to remember is that
the Potentials play a crucial metaphorical role in the season. We’ll be told
that metaphor two episodes hence, so I’ll hold off discussing it until then.
For now I’ll just say that what they’re crucial for is the solution to the
problem pointed out to Buffy by “Joyce” (it’s really the First; Jane
Espenson had to assure everyone because viewers were so confused – see
trivia note 2) in her second appearance:
JOYCE
Buffy, evil isn't coming, it's already here. Evil is always here. Don't you
know? It's everywhere.
BUFFY
And I have to stop it.
JOYCE
How are you gonna do that?
BUFFY
I-I don't know yet, but—
JOYCE
Buffy, no matter what your friends expect of you, evil is a part of us. All of
us. It's natural. And no one can stop that. No one can stop nature, not even
—
Note that this is essentially the same problem the real Joyce pointed out to
Buffy in Gingerbread. There’s a very good reason for all these S3
references, which I’ll explain in the finale.
Right now, all we know is that the Potentials are in danger. The First
intends to terminate the Slayer line:
GILES
…We always feared that this day would come, when there'd be an attack
against not just an individual slayer, but against the whole line….
BUFFY
The First. That's what it wants.
GILES
Yes, to erase all the slayers in training and their watchers along with their
methods.
BUFFY
And then Faith, and then me. And with all the potentials gone and no way
of making another, it's the end. No more slayer. Ever.
Buffy describes the slayer line as running through the Potentials, then Faith,
then her. That’s wrong in light of Joss’s official explanation after S5 that the
Slayer line now runs through Faith, and it bothers a lot of viewers. I don’t
really see it as much of a problem, just a case of Buffy being wrong. As we
saw in CWDP, Buffy’s own life has been dramatically affected by her role
as “the” Slayer, so it’s understandable that she’d see it that way. Her view is
consistent with the season theme, but I’ll leave it there to avoid spoilers.
The scene where she escapes the Ubervamp in the first encounter nicely
recapitulates the scene in which she and Xander escaped the vamps in The
Harvest. It’s another “back to the beginning” reference, but I also see it as a
“starting over” theme. She faced the challenge once when she was young,
now she faces a similar but more difficult challenge as an adult. We’re
supposed to compare and contrast how she deals with the new challenge.
Giles is the one who sets her that challenge. Since Giles’ role in S7 gets a
lot of criticism, I might as well say up front that I think the writers perfectly
capture a parent whose daughter has grown up but who still wants to
pressure her to act like the parent thinks she should. Giles, it’s clear,
remains Ripper at heart, willing to do what he believes is necessary
regardless of moral concerns, as we see from him stealing the Council’s
books because “there wasn't time for-for bureaucracy or debate”.
Giles is seriously frightened by the destruction of an institution which has
dominated his life, and we can see that fright in his words to Buffy: “If the
slayer line is eliminated, then the hellmouth has no guardian. The balance is
destroyed. I'm afraid it falls to you, Buffy. Sorry. I mean, we'll do what we
can, but you're the only one who has the strength to protect these girls—and
the world—against what's coming.”
What Giles says is perfectly logical (Giles = mind), even inevitable, given
what he knows, indeed, what we all know. Faith aside because she’s in
prison, the situation is now as it was in Welcome to the Hellmouth when
Giles explained to Buffy why she had to accept her duty as the Slayer in
essentially the same words: “Because you are the Slayer. Into each
generation a Slayer is born, one girl in all the world, a Chosen One….”
Every single episode in S1 repeated this point in the introduction: “In every
generation there is a Chosen One. She alone will stand against the
vampires, the demons and the forces of darkness. She is the Slayer.”

Buffy’s role as the Slayer means that she must necessarily end up in charge.
I’ve discussed that consequence previously, most notably in connection
with Xander’s Lie in Becoming, and it’s directly related to the season 7
themes. Think of it this way: Because she’s the Slayer, only she can be the
General. That’s been true since I pointed it out in my post on Becoming,
since Jane Espenson said it on the DVD commentary to Earshot, and since
Buffy reiterated it in Selfless: “in the end the Slayer is always cut off.
There's no mystical guidebook. No all-knowing council. Human rules don't
apply. There's only me. I am the law.”
So what Giles says may seem harsh, and Xander calls him on it, but it’s
logically inescapable.
Thus, it’s in response to Giles’s statement that Buffy delivers her speech at
the end. That speech, and the events which follow in the next episode, form
the first turning point in the season and you need to be thinking about its
consequences from this point on. Buffy’s asserting her role as General in a
dramatic and forceful way. But of course Generals are isolated and we
know that Buffy feels isolated; in fact, being the General is precisely what
causes her sense of isolation. This is Buffy’s dilemma, and it’s directly tied
to both of the other concerns she’s expressed in previous episodes, namely
that she’s isolated and that she can’t save them all.
Given the First’s all out war on the Council and Buffy’s call to war in turn, I
thought it would be interesting to quote DEN on the similarity to old war
movies:
“The "war" metaphor is shaping s7 to the point where BOTN resembles
those old WWI movies like "Wings" and "Dawn Patrol." Willow is the
veteran with too many combat hours, muttering "sorry I let you down, old
boy" as her shaking hands try to hold a scotch and soda. Xander is the
cockney gunner, keeping his sense of humor as things unravel. Anya is the
squadron American, the volunteer from far away, never quite understanding
the people she fights alongside. In Giles we have the wise and experienced
adjudant, prohibited by age and wounds from climbing into a cockpit. The
SiTs are the green lieutenants, doomed to early and horrible deaths--
certainly doomed if, like Annabella, they panic and break formation. And
there's Buffy, coming on like Errol Flynn or Richard Barthelmess. ‘Chaps, I
know it's hell up there. Von Richthofen's flying circus is tearing us to
pieces. We're outnumbered and outgunned. But the lads in the trenches are
counting on us, and the squadron will do its duty to the last man!’"
No matter how many times I watch Buffy’s speech, I get chills. Not just the
words but SMG’s delivery, both just suck you in. If you really love the
speech, though, ask yourself just how Buffy’s going to “kill” an incorporeal
being, particularly in light of “Joyce’s” obviously true statements.
Trivia notes: (1) The chronology of this episode is impossible to square
with the date stamp at the beginning of CWDP. (2) Yes, we saw “Joyce”
touch things, even though the First shouldn’t be able to. That’s because
Buffy is dreaming of her. As in all dreams, the ordinary rules don’t apply.
(3) Xander mentioned the mummy hand while repairing the windows,
which was from Life Serial. (4) Xander’s description of Andrew as
“Sleeping Ugly” is, of course, a reference to Sleeping Beauty. (5) Dawn
suggested that Andrew was in a “fugue state”, which is “a rare psychiatric
disorder characterized by reversible amnesia for personal identity, including
the memories, personality and other identifying characteristics of
individuality.” (6) Dawn mentioned that “kids of today like Jackass”, which
was a movie. Of sorts. (7) The scene of Spike held under water was
originally supposed to be Holy Water, but the Standards & Practices folks (a
euphemism for censors) nixed that. As a result, the scene doesn’t make any
sense because vampires don’t breathe and so holding them underwater is
pointless. (8) Kennedy apologized for “the British invasion” in Buffy’s
kitchen, which refers to the numerous British music groups which followed
The Beatles to America. (9) The Turok-han name was an obvious homage
to Lord of the Rings. (10) Camden Toy, who played Gnarl and one of the
Gentlemen, plays the Ubervamp. (11) Principal Wood mentioned the
movies of Rob Schneider, for whom see the link. Describing his movies as
“evil” is a joke. (12) Principal Wood told Buffy that “I'm only saying that
once you see true evil, it can have some serious afterburn, and then you
can't unsee what you saw. Ever.” “Afterburn” is a term from psychotherapy
which means "the period of time before a past event is assimilated". Note
that his words apply to Buffy seeing the First. (13) Xander’s suggestion to
trap the Ubervamp in the pantry is a reference to the movie Signs by M.
Night Shyamalan. (14) Andrew’s “spider sense” is a reference to
Spiderman. (15) For Andrew’s mention of various “super-villain[s] like Dr.
Doom or Apocalypse or-or The Riddler”, see the links. (16) To get really
obvious, the scene with Buffy and the Ubervamp in the factory is an
homage to The Terminator.
 Showtime
Showtime is episode 11. In seasons 3 and 5, episode 11 showed us the basic
problem Buffy will face in the finale, but with a wrong or incomplete
solution (seasons 2 and 6 did that in episode 14). That’s what Showtime
does. I won’t give any details because of spoilers, but I can say that the
wrong solution here is directly related to every single one of the themes
we’ve seen in S7.
The statements of Beljoxa’s Eye (see trivia note 4) are intended to be
cryptic. Lots of viewers were confused by them and even got angry that
later episodes seemed to ignore them. As I read S7, though, the statements
were entirely consistent with the seasonal themes and contain an important
clue. I’ll have to explain all this in the finale. If you think carefully about
some of the questions the Potentials ask themselves in the basement, you’ll
get some clues.
What I can do now is to draw your attention to Giles’s use of the word
“balance” when he laid all the responsibility on Buffy in BotN: “If the
slayer line is eliminated, then the hellmouth has no guardian. The balance is
destroyed.” What he’s saying is that the First intends to change the world in
a fundamental way. That’s what the First itself told Willow in CWDP: “Fact
is, the whole good-versus-evil, balancing the scales thing—I'm over it. I'm
done with the mortal coil. But believe me, I'm going for a big finish.” And
that’s what Beljoxa’s Eye is telling Giles and Anya here:
GILES
If The First has been around for all time, then why hasn't it attempted
something like this before? Why now?
BELJOXA'S EYE
The opportunity has only recently presented itself.
GILES
Opportunity?
BELJOXA'S EYE
The mystical forces surrounding the Chosen line have become irrevocably
altered, become unstable, vulnerable.
ANYA
Something The First did?
BELJOXA'S EYE
The First Evil did not cause the disruption, only seized upon it to extinguish
the lives of the Chosen forever.
Beljoxa’s Eye also repeated what “Joyce” told Buffy in BotN: “It cannot be
fought, it cannot be killed. The First Evil has been and always will be. Since
before the universe was born, long after there is nothing else, it will go on.”
Remember from S3 that Joss is an absurdist (see my post on Amends). In
absurdist philosophy, as in existentialism, the world has certain fundamental
characteristics that can’t be changed (see my posts on Gingerbread and
Graduation Day). Absurdism opposes revolution because it attempts to
change these fundamental characteristics, but endorses rebellion because it
does not (Id.). The First is trying for fundamental change and it sees the
opportunity to make that change. The question is whether Buffy can defeat
that change with an act of rebellion rather than revolution. It’s worth
considering which one she’s attempting now.
Some people felt that Buffy had no real strategy in confronting the
Ubervamp. I disagree. I think that the Ubervamp was under orders not to
kill Buffy and that Buffy knew this. From BotN:

BUFFY The First - that's what it wants.

GILES Yes. To erase all the Slayers-in-training and their Watchers, along
with their methods...
BUFFY And then Faith. Then me.

IOW, Buffy believed that she was last in line, that the Ubervamp wasn’t
supposed to kill her. Now, we know this isn’t quite right – Faith is actually
last in line – but it doesn’t make any difference for this episode. Buffy still
has to go last of all those in Sunnydale and only after all the other
Potentials, even those outside Sunnydale, are gone. She made her plan to
fight with this knowledge in mind. It gave her a real advantage, and made
her strategy pretty sensible.
Consistent with the comparison I made in the post on BotN to the events of
The Harvest, dusting the Ubervamp here compares with dusting Luke in
that episode. In both cases Buffy faced a foe who had defeated her
previously and appeared too strong. In both cases the scene was quasi-
public and took place on a stage. In The Harvest Buffy had to convince
herself (and maybe the nascent SG) that she could protect the world. Here
her goal was to show the Potentials that she could protect them. She did
that; you can see it in the look on Kennedy’s face at the end of the fight.
But in focusing on her heroic defeat of the Ubervamp we may lose sight of
an important, if implicit, message her actions also sent. It’s one that got
delivered in The Harvest too, and it’s been with us since the beginning. The
battleground she constructed deliberately highlighted the fact that she was
facing the Ubervamp by herself. She and Willow and Xander expressly
discouraged anyone else from helping:
DAWN
Buffy, you can't take that thing on yourself.
KENNEDY
I'll stay.
BUFFY
No! …
BUFFY
Willow, Xander, take everyone to a safe location. Get 'em out of here. Now!
Everyone but Buffy and Dawn follows Willow.
XANDER
(touches Dawn's arm) Have to go, Dawnie.
***
Kennedy aims her crossbow at the Turok-Han, but Willow waves her off.
WILLOW
Just watch. It's showtime.
***
RONA
It's killing her.
MOLLY
We have to do something.
WILLOW
Wait!
Note that discouraging others from helping is exactly what she did with
Xander in The Harvest, an episode expressly referenced here and in BotN:
Xander: So, what's the plan? We saddle up, right?
Buffy: There's no 'we', okay? I'm the Slayer, and you're not.
While Xander disobeyed orders and went with her in The Harvest, here in
Showtime her friends, the Potentials, Dawn -- they were all just bystanders
to a performance, not participants. This is Buffy’s show and she’s showing
off. Hence the title.
What this did was to emphasize that Buffy has the power and they – “they”
being everyone else, even Willow, whose barrier failed – don’t. The job of
the others was to play a supporting role, to applaud the hero at the end.
Buffy may be protecting them, but they aren’t in any meaningful way a part
of the victory.
After she defeated the Ubervamp, Buffy announced “here endeth the
lesson”. That same phrase has been used twice before on the show, once by
the Master in Never Kill A Boy On The First Date and once by Spike in
Fool for Love. In my view, the repetition of this phrase was deliberate and
should be a big honking clue about the way we’re supposed to interpret the
events of this episode.
As the group leaves Thunderdome, the First/Eve glares down at them. It’s
not just angry that Buffy killed the Ubervamp, it understands what we see
next: that Buffy will rescue Spike. Spike’s faith in Buffy has been rewarded
and nothing could now shake that faith.
The final scene begs comparison to that in Intervention. There, Buffy kissed
Spike to show her appreciation for what he’d done. But at that stage,
unsouled Spike still belonged in his crypt so she left him there. This time
she takes him with her. It’s a wonderful moment. Buffy told Webs that she
felt “not so much” connected, but Spike feels it:
I think that [Joss] does feel like it's sort of a meaningless void, and what
matters is the struggle to find the good. And the relationships you build
with people while you struggle. And in some ways you'll never find it, but
the quest and the questors, and the people that you find, who are not
necessarily your family, are the only thing that lends the journey
meaning. I think that is his major theme. Marti Noxon
What makes Buffy especially dangerous to the First is that she doesn’t
merely defeat evil, she redeems it.
Trivia notes: (1) Back to the beginning: “Welcome to the hellmouth.”
Buffy’s greeting to Rona is, of course, the title of the very first episode. If
you recall Buffy’s attitude in that episode, that will help, I think, in
understanding the psychology of Potentials like Rona. (2) Andrew is
“Episode 1 bored”, referring to The Phantom Menace. (3) Xander’s
description of the Ubervamp as “the vampire time forgot” plays on the title
of the movie The Land That Time Forgot. (4) Beljoxa seems to be a
portmanteau word which means “good (bel) joke (joxa)” (think Joxer
[Joker] from Xena). (5) Willow mentioned bringing a newbie “in from the
cold”. That’s a reference to the novel (or movie) The Spy Who Came In
From The Cold. (6) Andrew realized Buffy had a “license to kill”. That’s
the title of a James Bond movie starring Timothy Dalton and produced by
the Broccolis. Andrew said in Life Serial that he liked Dalton as Bond. (7)
Andrew wanted to play the Kevin Bacon game, for which see the link. (8)
Andrew’s references to the Justice League and the Imperium are to comic
books. (9) Dawn asked how many Ubervamps were at the Geneva
Convention, referring to the international conventions which define the
laws of war. (10) Andrew’s plea for “deflector shields” is a Star Wars
reference. So is Xander’s description of the Ubervamp as “snaggletooth”.
(11) When Buffy tells the Ubervamp that she’s the thing that monsters have
nightmares about, that’s a near quote of what she told the Ugly Man in
Nightmares. (12) The “Thunderdome” scene is taken from the movie Mad
Max Beyond Thunderdome, as is Andrew’s quote from that movie, “Two
men enter. One man leaves.”
 Potential
Potential is a very important episode, though not really a favorite of mine. I
suggested in my post on BotN that you should be asking yourself the
question, what is a Potential, metaphorically? Andrew, of all people, tells us
the answer here: “It's like—well, it's almost like this metaphor for
womanhood, isn't it? The sort of flowering that happens when a girl realizes
that she's part of a fertile heritage stretching back to Eve…”
So the Potentials are women, but they’re typical women before they’re
empowered – think Buffy at Hemery High as we saw her in Becoming I.
They show us all the faults of women, not as such, but in a condition of
powerlessness. I see the Potentials as representing the less attractive aspects
of womanhood precisely because they lack power. You’re supposed to find
them pretty flawed – remember that Buffy described herself in Helpless, the
obvious predecessor to Potential, this way: “Before I was the Slayer, I
was... Well, I, I don't wanna say shallow, but... Let's say a certain person,
who will remain nameless, we'll just call her Spordelia, looked like a
classical philosopher next to me. Angel, if I'm not the Slayer, what do I do?
What do I have to offer?”
Powerlessness creates incentives to behave in a child-like manner. There’s
no point in behaving as an adult if you can’t, or aren’t allowed to, do much
of anything. But there’s also the continuing metaphor of Slayer/adulthood
that we’ve watched with Buffy for 7 years. The Potentials are potential
adults, but they aren’t there yet.
This leads naturally to wondering whether Buffy is preparing them for
adulthood, and if she is, whether she’s going about it in the right way.
There’s no doubt that she’s using some traditional methods, but she
modifies them. For example, did Buffy re-enact the Cruciamentum with the
Potentials? Not in my view. I see several important differences: there were
4 potentials, not Buffy all alone; they had weapons, whereas in the intended
Cruciamentum Buffy would have had none; the vampire was ordinary, not
Kralik; and she and Spike were just outside, presumably ready to intervene
if necessary.
I’ll let you decide if her changes were good or bad; I think they’re good.
Her speech to the Potentials, though, struck a number of viewers the wrong
way, even if more in tone than in substance:
“BUFFY: You're all gonna die. But you knew that already. (paces in front
of them) 'Cause that's the cool reward for being human. Big dessert at the
end of the meal. Don't kid yourselves, you guys. This whole thing is all
about death. (stands still) You think you're different 'cause you might be the
next slayer? Death is what a slayer breathes, what a slayer dreams about
when she sleeps. Death is what a slayer lives. My death could make you the
next slayer. (walks back to retrieve her axe from the target) Oh, goody. Rapt
attention. I love that so much. …
So when I kicked its ass, the whole Firsty circus decided to back off for a
while. Good news? Means we probably don't have to worry about it pulling
Spike's strings for a while. (stands still) Here's the half-empty. Time away
means time to regroup. And part of that regrouping is coming back stronger
than ever. The odds are against us. Time is against us. And some of us will
die in this battle. Decide now that it's not going to be you. (walks closer to
the girls) I know you're all tired, far away from home, anxious. But you're
all special. Most people in this world have no idea why they're here or what
they want to do. You do. You have a mission, a reason for being here.
You're not here by chance. You're here because you are the chosen ones.”
Beginning with this speech, Buffy’s response to the challenge posed by the
First became increasingly controversial. To be honest, I didn’t notice
anything about this episode. I saw the show through such a Buffy-centric
lens that I almost reflexively defended whatever she said or did. I thought
Buffy was generally encouraging in the teaser and I had no problem with
the “Cruciamentum”. However, lots of viewers began criticizing her actions
and the debate got increasingly heated as S7 went along. Since this is early
and the discussion pretty restrained still, I’ll give you a flavor of it:
Cjl: “Field Marshall von Buffy keeps trying to put everything in absolutes
(good/evil, demon/human, etc., etc.), but she's reacting to the extremity of
the battle with the First Evil, and losing sight of the ambiguities she learned
over the first six seasons. I think this is exactly what the First Evil wants.”
Peggin: “I don't think this is about Buffy losing sight of those things. IMO,
she's teaching the Potential's exactly what they need to know in order to
stay alive. She doesn't want to put the Potentials' lives in danger by having
them start out with the idea that, "Gee, this vampire might turn out to be a
good guy -- maybe I shouldn't stake him." Buffy knows of exactly one
vampire in the history of the world who has ever switched sides voluntarily.
Making this an issue for the Potentials, making a point of the fact that it's
even a remote possibility that any given vampire could turn out to be a good
guy, is only going to get them killed, and fast.

Look at it this way -- if you were in charge of Army boot camp, and you
had personal experience of seeing exactly one enemy soldier wave a white
flag and ask to join your side, would you bring that up to the new recruits
you were just training? When they go into battle, do you want them
hesitating before they pull the trigger, just in case the other guy might not
really be the enemy and wants to join your team?...
I've seen quite a few comments to the effect that Buffy is on some kind of
power trip, and it's obviously just going completely over my head. I don't
see her going all power trippy. I see her letting a whole bunch of strangers
live in her house. I see her teaching others to use their own power in order
to keep themselves alive and in order to fight evil. How does any of this
point towards Buffy treating power as an end in itself?”
Cjl: “She's obsessed with "winning" the game she's playing with the First
Evil when she might be better off not playing. … As the season has
progressed, she's gradually pushed aside the real reasons why she's fighting
… and adopted an increasingly ruthless, win-at-all-costs policy.”
FinnMacCool: “It may be true that she can't beat the First Evil (I repeat:
may be true, that still isn't a certainity), and it may be true that the best she
can do is simply contain the First, but she shouldn't TRY just for
containment. She should try with all of her might to destroy the First Evil
forever, even if it is impossible to achieve anything more than balance, as
you say. Because balance isn't caused by trying to control the unbalanced
force. Balance is caused by two equal forces opposing each other. So, while
Buffy might end up keeping the balance only, it will be a result of her
attempts to destroy the First.”
Cjl: “We've all grown rather disturbed over the past few weeks [he means
starting with BotN] at the increasing disconnect between the Buffy we've all
known and loved for six years, and the hardened, take-no-prisoners slayer
who's trying to whip her troops into shape like a veteran military
commander.

I think we're more concerned with the possibility that Buffy has lost sight of
why she's fighting, about her increasing isolation from her friends and her
sister, about her losing track of the ambiguities she's learned over the course
of the series. She isn't approaching the problem of the First Evil from a
"how do I protect the ones I love" perspective; she's approaching it from a
"how do I kick this thing back to Hell" perspective. She seems more
interested in beating the First Evil with the application of Raw Power; and
with that attitude comes the danger of becoming the demon you're
fighting.”
Finn MacCool: “As for Buffy being less personal and more like a military
leader recently, I have a couple points for you to consider: first, she's
usually been in commander mode only when around the proto-Slayers, and
to them she really is more of a commander and not nearly close enough to
be a friend; and second, her actions towards Clem and Spike reveal that she
isn't really hardened emotionally or being unambigous, rather she's acting
that way because being the tough but still emotionally vulnerable Buffy we
all know would disenhearten the scared and confused proto-Slayers and not
inspire much confidence in her as a leader. Buffy only became commander
girl after the potentials came under her care and one of them was killed
because she didn't believe Buffy could protect them. At the moment, Buffy
can't afford to show the more human side of herself because that would only
lead to further loss of morale among the proto-Slayers, and possibly more
deaths as a result.”
OnM: “Pay less attention to what Buffy overtly says, and more to what
Buffy covertly does, and you will see that her behavior towards the protos
really is not as formally militaristic and role-playing rigid as it might first
appear. Yes, she initially gets their attention by throwing a battle axe at a
target, and then gives a very Patton-esque speech to the 'troops'. But, she
also makes a significant effort to appeal to the latent passion stirring within
the souls of her students, trying to get across to them the nature of what it
means to be a Slayer, to have a destiny or a calling. She states, seemingly
coldly, that "some of us will die" in the battle to come, but immediately
follows that remark with "decide right now it isn't going to be you". Tough
love, yes, but it is love. There really isn't the luxury of time for anything
else right now, and once again the weight is on Buffy's shoulders. If the
protos manage to survive the coming apocalyptic battle, there will be time
enough to start teaching them the discriminating nuances and subtleties of
existence in a grey world when demons can be forces for good and humans
can become the most horrific of enemies.”

This debate would become a central feature for much of the rest of S7.
Keep it in mind as we go through the next 7 episodes.
Moving on to other, and equally important, issues, the title of this episode
seemingly refers to Dawn as a Potential. That was, in a way, a shout out to
fans who’d speculated on her having some special power since the end of
S5, based at least partly on the “same blood” thing (which Anya, in another
nod to the audience, “doesn’t get”).
Dawn turned out not to be a Potential, of course. We could see that even
before she realized it and told Amanda. The superimposed fight scenes with
Buffy in the crypt and Dawn in the classroom are nicely paralleled with
dialogue and flash cuts to let everyone see that Dawn does pretty much
everything wrong until the Bringers inadvertently rescue her. Here, for
example, is what Buffy says:
“Know how to stay calm, centered. Every move is important, every blow's
got to be part of your plan 'cause you make that one mistake, and it's over.
You're not the slayer.”
As she’s speaking these words, here’s what we see of Dawn:
“Dawn runs to the front of the classroom where she grabs the flagpole with
the California state flag on it. She struggles to break the flagpole in half on
the edge of a lab desk, but finally does splinter it. She leaves the part that
the flag is on and starts swinging the jagged wooden pole at the vampire a
few times, then loses her balance and falls to the floor. The vampire
pounces on her.”
The scene then cuts back to Buffy, and we hear her say, “You're not a
potential. You're dead.” Dawn would be dead if the Bringers hadn’t chosen
that moment to enter the room.
But while Dawn isn’t a Potential, she does represent, metaphorically,
Buffy’s potential, as we’ve seen since S5. The title has a double meaning
and it’s important for the season.
Don’t get me wrong: Dawn does something noteworthy in the episode even
if she’s not a Potential. It wasn’t noteworthy because she has hidden
powers, but because when faced with the fact that Amanda was the real
target, Dawn relinquished her claim of her own free will. She stepped aside
when she needed to for the sake of the cause. More than that, she went back
to doing her job without any complaint. That was a very adult thing to do.
Xander’s praise of Dawn gets a lot of love in fandom, but I have some
issues with it. For one thing, the whole context is odd. He’s contrasting
himself and Dawn as “powerless” compared to Buffy, Willow, Anya, and
Oz. He says, “Working with the slayer. Seeing my friends get more and
more powerful. A witch. A demon. Hell, I could fit Oz in my shaving kit,
but come a full moon, he had a wolfy mojo not to be messed with.
Powerful. All of them.”
But in all these cases the power is far from an unmitigated good. Take Oz,
for example. The werewolf is a metaphor for unrestrained id. It didn’t
benefit Oz, it caused him to lose the woman he loved and to leave
Sunnydale. Anya may have been powerful, but only when she was evil.
And while Buffy and Willow both are able to accomplish good with their
power, both face serious consequences as a result of it.
Given the context, this, for example, is just wrong: “How much harder it is
for the rest of us…. They'll never know how tough it is, Dawnie, to be the
one who isn't chosen. To live so near to the spotlight and never step in it.”
Nor does Xander understand that being “chosen” isn’t necessarily
something good; he’s forgotten how often Buffy has resisted the idea that
she was chosen. And if I were quibbling, I’d add that none of Oz, Willow,
or Anya was “chosen”, so they do know what it’s like not to be “chosen”.
Quibble aside, it’s the words “harder” and “how tough it is” that really
grate. Sorry, but Xander’s life isn’t tougher than Buffy’s – and that’s who
he’s really talking about – any more than mine is tougher than Martin
Luther King’s. It’s a shame, really, because Xander doesn’t have to
overstate the case in order to make his point.
Since my evaluation of his speech might seem harsh and even graceless, I’ll
add some dialogue from people who disagreed with me at AtPO. Note that
some of their points are ones I agree with and made above:
Solitude1056: “I don't think Xander was patting himself on the back so
much as letting Dawn know that he's in the same boat of seeming
ordinaryness, but that he's figured out that being ordinary, and trying
anyway, may be the most extraordinary act of all. I never thought, for even
a second, that he was reassuring himself or trying to convince himself. I
don't think he needs to convince himself that he contributes - TtG/Grave
showed him once and for all that it's possible to save the world despite
being 'powerless'. What I do think he was doing, though, was applauding
Dawn. He was doing what any parent would do for a child they're proud of,
especially in a case where the child has given up something or acted
otherwise nobly. It's the old speech about "I know that deep down you wish
you'd done ____ rather than ____. I know it was hard to make that sacrifice,
and I'm proud of you."
Shambleau: “Xander spent the summer telling the Summers girls his story
of saving Willow and the world "with my WORDS" ad nauseum, so I see
that as support for Sophist's belief that there's a component of tooting his
own horn in that speech. It may be slightly unseemly, yes. It's also human
and understandable. He's flawed even when he does something wonderful,
but that doesn't diminish him in my eyes. I want to strangle the big lug
sometimes and then he'll do something so full of heart I feel like bowing
down before him. Here you can read a little of both aspects of his nature
into the speech he gave Dawn, if you're so inclined. It doesn't affect my
reaction, though. The speech still has me dosing myself with allergy
medicine, for those watery eyes, you know.”
Random: “I admit that I cringed just slightly at the undercurrent of
backpatting initially, but I realized that we were listening to Xander here....

What he was offering Dawn was the Wisdom of the Zeppo(tm). He was
telling her, plain and simple, that the courage (which he never claimed for
himself, mind you) to cast off your disappointment at being ordinary, not-
Chosen, and nevertheless give everything to the support of the cause was an
extraordinary one. He was saying, and legitimately to some extent (as I
said, I shared your doubts), that following the path of the Chosen ones
without being Chosen yourself was harder than when you know you're
special, Chosen. He "saw" Dawn -- he saw, a person capable of stepping
aside for the sake of the war, a person who does what they can, when they
can, and even when she tasted greatness, she understood that the greatness
was in service of humanity, not her own ego...so she stepped aside. Xander
doesn't envy Buffy or the potentials for their lives, or their lives to come.
He merely notes that choosing to play on the field when everyone around
you is larger, tougher, better at the game, requires a fortitude and courage
that the naturally brilliant athletes (to carry the metaphor) will never quite
understand. To know you're the least capable player on the team and still go
out and give it your all...there's a peculiar honor in that form of courage.

Eh, I'm soft on the doof, I know. Buffy has the toughest life of them all (and
she's my favorite anyway) but Xander and Dawn have it harder than her in
that one regard: they must deal with the fact that they will always be
second-string...and still forge on.”
Just to clarify my position after I got some criticism in comments, I think
that Dawn did a very good thing and that Xander was also doing a good
thing in praising her for that. I just wish Xander could have praised Dawn
without implicitly patting himself on the back and dissing Buffy while
doing so. I’d say more, but I have to go kick a puppy now.
Dawn’s return praise of Xander is also dubious on the merits. As both
D’Hoffryn (“And the young man, he sees with the eyeballs of love.”) and
Anya (“Xander, you've always seen what you wanted to.”) mentioned in
Selfless, “seeing” isn’t really one of Xander’s strengths. In fact, much of the
time he’s clueless (e.g., in STSP when Buffy suggests using Spike to track
Gnarl). Nevertheless, it’s a nice thing for Dawn to say.
One final point. Andrew’s use of the snake skin may seem like just part of
his weirdness, but you have to wonder if Willow didn’t see it as a reference
to Warren. Andrew says later that he hates his free will, but if he’d
compared himself to Willow rather than Spike he’d have had a better case.
Trivia notes: (1) Buffy called the Ubervamp “the Chaka Khan”, for which
see the link. (2) Buffy mentioned snausages, which are a commercial dog
treat. (3) Keeping up with Andrew’s geek references is really hard. For
those in these 2 sentences, see the links: “I'm like Vegeta on Dragonball Z. I
used to be a pure Saiyan, and now I fight for the side of Goku.” (4) Dawn
mentioned the “glamazon” in her gym class. A “glamazon” is a tall,
beautiful, athletic (h/t Bruce) woman, with the implication of belligerence.
(5) Andrew wanted to know when they were going to replace the
microwave. The microwave was destroyed in CWDP. Just one of those little
touches that I love; the writers knew they could count on their fans to
remember that. (6) When Clem shows the Potentials what he can do as a
demon, that’s a reference to the movie Beetlejuice. (7) Amanda’s
description of Buffy as a “high functioning schizophrenic” is probably
another inside joke for the fans, this time a reference to the events of
Normal Again.
 The Killer in Me
The Killer In Me is, I think, a very good episode which could have been a
great one and just misses. The basic concept is excellent and IMO Alyson
Hannigan and Adam Busch both do great jobs. Part of my disappointment is
that some of the Spike scenes are played almost as slapstick. Part of it is my
annoyance at the lame joke about touching Giles, which bothered me a lot
the first time around but which I ignore on re-watch. I, uh, won’t touch the
Giles story and instead will focus on the important ones, Spike and Willow.
Some people had a problem with the fact that the Initiative lab still existed,
contrary to what the government official instructed, somewhat
contradictorily, be done at the end of Primeval: “The Initiative itself will be
filled in with concrete. Burn it down, gentlemen. Burn it down, and salt the
Earth.” My view is that the failure to follow through is all too typical of
government and not a retcon. In any case, it makes for a nice metaphor of
Buffy and Spike stumbling around in the dark to find a solution to Spike’s
chip/soul nature.
Buffy’s decision about the chip would seem to be easy after her “I believe
in you” speech. It’s hard to show that belief by denying someone free will.
Still, Buffy’s a protector too and the chip may be necessary if Spike gets
triggered again. One thing is clear: Spike can’t make any real progress on
his journey as long as the chip is there. The chip was Spike’s internal
panopticon. His soul is his authentic self. Removing the chip is essential to
him accepting moral authority for his own actions, something he hasn’t yet
done as we see from the teaser:
BUFFY
OK. But you've been fine. In close contact with the girls.
SPIKE
(looks at Buffy) With you by my side, yeah. You won't let me hurt one of
them.
He fears the killer inside him, just as Willow does, and, for that matter,
Andrew does.
If Buffy does decide to remove it, that puts Spike to a real test. For the past
3 years Buffy has to some extent protected him even when she probably
shouldn’t have, because he was defenseless against everyone but her, and
defenseless against her for much of the time. That won’t be true if the chip
comes out, so the uncertainty about the continued presence of his “trigger”
creates a risk for Spike as well as for those around Buffy and even Buffy
herself – not of being attacked by Spike, but of having to stake someone she
obviously cares for. The existence of the risk posed by the trigger means
that Spike has one more step to take before he completes the journey which
began in The Initiative.
In comments, local-max pointed out that we don’t see Riley, but this
episode closes out his arc in a much better way than As You Were. The
military leaves it up to Buffy to decide because Riley respects her choices.
Kennedy noticed that Willow always turned off the Moulin Rouge DVD
after chapter 32. Chapter 32 ends with Christian and Satine singing their
love, i.e., before Satine dies and Christian – who never moves on – writes of
his “love that will live forever”. Similarly, Willow has stopped herself at the
moment Tara died. The point of the episode is that Willow, unlike Christian,
does need to move on.
Willow has two sources of guilt, namely killing Warren and letting Tara go.
Both are triggered (word used advisedly) when she first kisses Kennedy.
She was confused by Kennedy at first, then reluctant. To her surprise, I
think, the evening at the Bronze actually went well. The kiss was awkward,
but clearly Willow liked it and began to respond. Being Willow, though, her
self-control never really lets go and her guilt took over. That’s the point at
which she punishes herself (as we eventually learn). Willow should be able
to move on from Tara, but fears that if she does that might mean that Tara’s
really gone, that she’s living while Tara is dead:
Willow: No, she was never gone. She was with me. We should have been
forever, and I— (cries) I let her be dead. She's really dead. (breaks down
into tears) And I killed her.
The metaphor of turning into Warren and (nearly) re-enacting Tara’s murder
perfectly expresses both forms of her guilt. Amy serves as Willow’s dark
side. If you read them carefully, Amy’s first words to Willow tell us exactly
what Willow is going through:
AMY: It took me a long time to really see myself. But I did. Because you
know that's the crazy thing about hitting rock bottom, you get to relive all
the crappy things you did.
The spell makes Willow “really see herself” as her guilty conscience sees
her: as Warren. She “relives the crappy things she did” as Warren. Amy’s
wording also fits Willow because Warren came to kill Buffy because she
had exposed his weakness, and now Willow nearly kills Kennedy for
exposing hers.
Amy pretends to try to help Willow, but the words of the spell Amy recites
are ambiguous: “Give back the form the soul requires. See that the balance
is set right.” The first sentence could call for Willow’s restoration, but in the
context of Willow’s guilt and internal desire to be punished, it could also
reinforce Warren’s presence. I see it as the latter – Amy used the spell to
amplify the effect of her hex. We can also see this metaphorically as
Willow’s dark side reinforcing her punishment.
The second sentence would have meant one thing to Willow, but something
much different to Warren. Willow's first Warren-like behavior came
immediately after Amy performed her spell in the presence of the coven.
Before then, all we saw was Willow's personality in Warren's body. Amy's
second spell contributed to the emergence of Warren and set “him” on a
path to “set things right” from his warped perspective.
Amy, speaking both as character and as metaphor, then gives us further
insight into Willow’s internal guilt when she tells Kennedy “It’s about
power. Willow always had all the power, long before she even knew what to
do with it. Just came so easy for her. The rest of us—we had to work twice
as hard to be half as good. But no one cares about how hard you work. They
just care about cute, sweet Willow. They don't know how weak she is. She
gave in to evil—stuff worse than I can even imagine— She almost
destroyed the world! And yet everyone keeps on loving her?”
Willow, of course, is Buffy’s metaphorical spirit, so if what Amy says is
true of Willow – and it is to some degree, or at least true of how Willow
sees herself – then the same holds true for Buffy. If you hear Amy’s words
as Willow speaking of herself, then except for the part about destroying the
world, it’s substantially similar to how Buffy described herself to Webs in
CWDP: “I have all this power. I didn't ask for it. I don't deserve it. It's like...
I wanted to be punished. I wanted to hurt like I thought I deserved.”
It’s important, though, to keep in mind that the whole point of S7 is to
question the idea of “power”. What Amy’s talking about is one form of
power, but it’s not the only one. The question is whether Willow, and
therefore Buffy, will find a different way to exercise power.
Willow, by the way, was right about the spell in the first place:
WILLOW/WARREN*
Maybe, but I probably brought it on myself.
BUFFY
What makes you think that?
WILLOW/WARREN*
Well, it wouldn't be the first time. I have a history with my witchy
subconscious making things go kerfloopey. Remember the wacky "I can't
see you, you can't see me" spell?
That’s exactly what Amy’s spell did, as she explained to Kennedy later:
“AMY: The hex I cast lets the victim's subconscious pick the form of their
punishment. It's always better than anything I can come up with.”
In my reading, Amy deliberately let slip the fact that she had “put a hex on
her”. The ending of the episode essentially requires that Amy send Kennedy
into Buffy's backyard (of course, the plan must have been that Willow
would actually kill Kennedy). Amy couldn't have known in advance what
the trigger was for Willow to feel the need for penance, because she set the
spell up to let Willow's subconscious choose the punishment. Nor, for the
same reason, could she have known in advance what form the punishment
would take. Once she saw that Willow had turned into Warren, the first
piece of the puzzle was in place. Amy then needed information about the
trigger in order to take full advantage of Willow/Warren, and could only get
it from Kennedy. My assumption is, therefore, that she let the secret slip on
purpose to discover if Kennedy was the one who should be sent to serve as
the intended victim.
This episode seems to have marked the beginning of the dislike for
Kennedy that’s so widespread on the internet. Her aggressive flirtation with
Willow doesn’t bother me, any more than Tara’s original extreme passivity
did. Both were just ways for the writers to address Willow’s situation at the
respective times in a reasonable way. Joss:
“Kennedy is … a bit of a brat. What I wanted was an anti-Tara. I wanted
somebody who was as different from Tara as possible. Tara was very
reticent, and she was somebody that Willow caused to blossom. What I
wanted was somebody who was further on down in dealing with her
sexuality than Willow ever was. Somebody who was totally confident, who
was totally not earthy-crunchy, who was a completely different person.
What I wanted to explore was the concept of Willow moving on. We did
that with the first kiss, that turned her into Warren. … the things that
Willow has to deal with emotionally, her fear of her power and stuff, and
Kennedy's kind of involvement in that. That's what Kennedy was for.”
In the current situation, Willow was not so much rejecting Kennedy’s
previous flirtations, she was letting her guilt prevent her from moving on,
from living. Plus, I like that Kennedy could be depicted as openly sexual
and gay, and the fact that Kennedy cares nothing for the magic means that
Willow can be sure Kennedy’s attracted to her alone (compare Willow’s
fear at the end of Wrecked that Tara only loved her because she was
superpowered).
Kennedy also gets real credit from me because, despite the danger, the
second kiss was purely compassionate, not sexual like the first one
presumably was. It’s that expression of compassion which brings Willow
back, and it demonstrated that she understood that Willow needed someone
to recognize her emotions. The kiss symbolically seals Willow’s decision
to forgive herself and move on. And if you think about it, so does the tea –
it’s sexual when Buffy jokes about it, comforting when Kennedy offers it at
the end. I mentioned in my post on Beneath You that Joss said he wanted to
explore forgiveness in S7, and TKiM is another example of that.
Trivia notes: (1) I loved Buffy’s description of her experience in
Intervention when telling the Potentials about the Vision Quest. (2) As is
always the case on the show, the song at the Bronze fits the scene. The
words we hear as we pan over to Willow and Kennedy are “So I can be
happy again….” (3) The better word for “lesbidar” is, of course, “gaydar”.
(4) As Spike suggests, nobody can use the phrase “who you gonna call”
because that line was used in the movie Ghostbusters. (5) Kennedy says she
likes “skate punk, Robert Parker mysteries”, for which see the links. (6) All
the scenes with Willow and Warren were shot twice, once with each actor.
(7) Andrew mentioned “dancing schnauzers”, referring to a breed of dog.
(6) Willow threatened to tell everyone about Xander’s “Aquaman
Underoos”, referring to the comic book character and Xander’s underwear.
(7) Andrew is waiting for the new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a
comic book series. (8) Andrew spoke on the phone to Robson, who was the
watcher we saw attacked by the Bringers in Sleeper. (9) Willow mentioned
the Wiccan’s “bake sale phase”. That was the discussion the first time we
saw them in Hush. (10) Andrew wanted to play the game “Ghost”, for
which see the link. The name of the game probably references the First and
their concerns about Giles. (11) Andrew suggested the license plate game as
an alternative. (12) Amy first appeared 132 episodes ago, and now we see
that she’s pretty much turned into her mother. It’s pretty remarkable when
you think about how they’ve managed to use characters like her and
Jonathan even stretching back to S1. (13) Willow’s first two sentences and
her posture with the gun as she entered Buffy’s back yard were the same as
Warren’s in Seeing Red.
Seeing Red
This being a Valentine’s Day episode (it aired on February 11), we can be
sure that Buffy’s having a true First Date. What we can’t be quite so sure of
is the identity of her date. It looks on the surface as if it’s Robin Wood, but
I’d argue it was Spike. Since Xander is Buffy’s metaphorical heart, the fact
that Xander is attracted to demons (Teacher’s Pet, Inca Mummy Girl, Anya,
Something Blue, First Date) is letting us know by allegory that Buffy is
attracted to Spike, not Wood. Similarly, Xander’s on-off behavior with
Anya mirrors that of Buffy with Spike, particularly with Anya and Spike
now comparable as “recovering” former demons.
Buffy has serious abandonment issues (metaphorically shown through
Dawn in Older And Far Away: “People keep ... people have a tendency to
go away ... and, I miss them.”). Her father left the family, Angel left town,
Riley went off to Central America. Even Giles left her in Tabula Rasa.
Spike’s the only one who asks if he should leave rather than telling her or,
worse, just doing it. Buffy can’t say yes, even if she’s not entirely sure why.
Why does everybody in the house think she’s still in love with Spike?
Wood’s attraction to Buffy has some faint Oedipal overtones. The fact that
he seems to be attracted to Buffy because his mother was a Slayer is a bit
off. If you accept this, Spike could stand for the father blocking the son's
fantasized union with the mother. I wouldn’t insist on it, but I think it’s
there.
Nor is Wood the only one with “mommy issues”. Here’s shadowkat posting
the day after First Date aired:
“Do you remember our little spec about Spike's mom, leslie? The sick
mother? In Fool For Love, Spike tells Dru what? "Mother's expecting me."
And in Forever - it is Spike who helps Dawn resurrect Joyce, but insists on
doing it the right way. And oh yes, which adult figure does Spike bond
with? …Spike bonds with Joyce. Spike is chipped by the evil mom, Prof
Walsh.

Methinks the mother issue with Wood and Spike is going to be a lot more
multilayered than we know. Spike has some Mommy issues - Wood is our
way of getting to and exploring them.”
Less speculatively, Wood was not able to save his real mother from Spike;
killing Spike is his opportunity to save Buffy and make up for the fact that
he was unable to save his mother. It’s obvious that Wood hasn’t forgotten
his vengeance quest. In this case, he has the added incentive of removing a
romantic rival – he definitely noticed that Buffy went first to Spike after the
fight, not to Xander. Wood had a first date too. A date with the First, that is.
In a certain sense, this season involves a battle for souls. So far, Buffy’s
winning with Spike, with Anya, and with Andrew. At the end of First Date,
the First opens up a new front with Wood. It plays on Wood’s hunger for
vengeance and exploits his jealousy. The First is perfectly happy if it can
corrupt Wood even if that means becoming unable to use Spike in some
way (similar to the way it shifted gears with Angel in Amends). Very soon,
if not now, Wood’s going to have to ask himself just why it is he’s fighting
demons.
Giles’s attitude towards Spike is more subtle. It’s the classic case of the
father who never liked his daughter’s romantic choices, reinforced in this
case by the obvious danger Spike poses. Needless to say, though, I think
Buffy is right about Spike’s chip and that Giles is wrong:
BUFFY
Nothing's changed, Giles. Spike had a chip before, remember? When the
First had him kill and sire all those people.
GILES
We have no idea if his chip was working then. A new chip might restrain
him should the First attempt to activate him again.
BUFFY
Spike has a soul now. That's what's gonna stop him from hurting people.
GILES
Buffy...
BUFFY
He can be a good man, Giles. I feel it. But he's never gonna get there if we
don't give him the chance…. You think I'm losing sight of the big picture,
but I'm not. When Spike had that chip, it was like having him in a muzzle. It
was wrong. You can't beat evil by doing evil. I know that.
Giles, I think, finds himself out of place and not sure what to do. Like any
parent, his role has changed now that his child is an adult, and he’s
fumbling for a new one. As I read him, he lacks confidence in Buffy’s adult
decision-making because of the chaos of S6. He recognizes that she has
feelings about Spike, whom he’s despised for years, and this reinforces his
lack of confidence in her.
At the same time, he stepped away last year in order to let her succeed or
fail on her own. That leaves him in an awkward position now. He can’t
consult his books; there aren’t any, so he can’t use them to hand out wise
advice. As a result, he’s frustrated and critical rather than helpful, and his
attitude towards both Spike’s chip and the “date” reflect this. In the
meantime, he’s reverted to the Giles we saw early on, the Giles of
NKABOTFD:
“Giles: All right, I-I'll just jump in my time machine, go back to the twelfth
century and ask the vampires to postpone their ancient prophecy for a few
days while you take in dinner and a show.
Buffy: Okay, at this point you're abusing sarcasm.
Giles: Buffy, this is no ordinary vampire. But we have to stop him before he
reaches the Master.
Buffy: But... Cute guy! Teenager! Post-pubescent fantasies!
Giles: Those will just have to be put on hold! The dark forces are aligning
against us, and we have a chance to beat them back. Tonight we go into
battle!”
and of Reptile Boy
“Giles: Just because the paranormal is more normal and less... para of late
is no excuse for tardiness or letting your guard down.
Buffy: I haven't let my guard down.
Giles: Oh, really? You yawned your way through weapons training last
week, you, you, you, you skipped hand-to-hand entirely…
Giles: When you live on top of a... a mystical convergence it's only a
matter of time before a fresh hell breaks loose. Now is the time that you
should train more strictly, you should hunt and patrol more keenly, you
should hone your skills day and night.”
Now he’s even harsher in tone, with the clear implication that his alone is
the adult path:
GILES
Children, enough. … Enough! Have you learned nothing from tonight's
assorted chaos? There isn't time for fun and games and quips about
orientation. (holds up flashcards) These—these aren't a joke. (flips through
the flashcards) This—this happens. Girls are going to die. We may die. It's
time to get serious. (walks out of the room)
Giles’s flashcards haven’t improved since Hush.
As I suggested in my post on Bring on the Night, he’s pushing Buffy very
hard to adopt a seemingly more grown-up approach that appears to be very
harsh. Buffy remains very susceptible to following Giles’s admonitions,
especially in light of her experience on her own in S6. We’re about to see
the result, notwithstanding Willow’s advice to “move on from this imposed
super-self-reliance. Let somebody get close.”
Trivia notes: (1) The opening flashback of Giles and the axe was to Sleeper.
(2) One of the tombstones in the graveyard scene has the name “Snyder” on
it. AFAIK, it doesn’t mean anything. (3) Buffy and Dawn saw Principal
Wood in the basement carrying a shovel in Bring on the Night. (4) Buffy
mentioned a reality show about a millionaire, meaning the show Joe
Millionaire. (5) Andrew’s “get thee behind me” admonition to
Jonathan/First is from Matthew 4:10. (6) His “Jonathan slash The First”
acknowledged the internet fans who’d been using that identifier. (7) The
pizza stain Anya couldn’t get out of Buffy’s blouse was put there by Dawn
in CWDP (“she’ll think it’s blood”). Another small detail the writers knew
the fans would remember. (8) Xander thought it would be karmic if Lissa
stood him up, referring to the fact that he left Anya at the altar. (9) Giles’s
phrase “circling the wagons” is an American idiom referring to the scenes
in Western movies in which pioneers bring their wagons into a circle when
attacked. (10) Giles’s prediction that “something’s eating Xander’s head” is
another back to the beginning reference, this time to Teacher’s Pet. (11)
Another reference to CWDP can be seen in the fact that Buffy left her cell
phone at home. In CWDP she didn’t hear it ringing. Either way, she’s not
connected. (12) Xander envisioned the actor Scott Bakula, who played
Captain Jonathan Archer on Star Trek: Enterprise. (13) For those who
watch Angel the Series, the German word for “wood” is…. Holtz (spoilers
at link, of course).
 Get it Done
Buffy formally and dramatically took on the role of General in BotN, but
she has always seen herself more as a protector than as a commander, even
if she does assert authority in some cases (most recently Selfless). We saw
her protector role in Showtime. Here in Get it Done, she’s much more
playing the role of General; she’s having Kennedy train her “soldiers” in the
back yard; she’s recruiting Wood; she’s demanding that Willow and Spike
go back to being warriors.
Part of Buffy’s problem is that the roles of General and Protector are
inconsistent. Generals send soldiers off to fight, knowing that some will die.
“They're not all gonna make it. Some will die…”, as she tells Wood.
Protectors? Well, they protect people. Her conversation with Wood at the
house demonstrates that Cassie’s death in Help continues to exact an
emotional toll on her because of this dual role: she continued her sentence
to Wood with “… and nothing I can do will stop that.” This isn’t new;
we’ve seen the Protector side of Buffy from the beginning. She went to face
the Master in Prophecy Girl to save Willow. In Consequences she was the
one who cared about Allan Finch:
Faith: People need us to survive. In the balance, nobody's gonna cry over
some random bystander who got caught in the crossfire.
Buffy: (sadly) I am.
The Protector side is under increasing stress and we see the consequences in
GiD. Buffy blames herself for not preventing Chloe’s suicide, believing that
she should have interpreted her dream as a cry for help from Chloe. This
anger at herself for her perceived failure, in turn, drives her reaction to
Chloe’s death and her harsh (if true) outbursts which follow. That’s also a
side of Buffy we’ve seen before:
When She Was Bad
Willow: What do we do?
Buffy: (exhales) I go to the Bronze and save the day. (starts to go)
Xander: I don't like this.
Giles: Nor I!
Buffy: (turns back) Yeah? Well, you guys aren't going.
Willow: What do you mean?
Buffy: I can't do it anymore. I can't look after the three of you guys while
I'm fighting.
The Yoko Factor
BUFFY: (raising her voice) No! No, you said you wanted to go. So let's go!
All of us. We'll walk into that cave with you two attacking me and the
funny drunk drooling on my shoe! Hey! Hey, maybe that's the secret way of
killing Adam?!

XANDER: Buffy . . .

BUFFY: (hurt and angry) Is that it? Is that how you can help? (a beat)
You're not answering me! How can you possibly help?

BUFFY: (somberly) So . . . I guess I'm starting to understand why there's no

ancient prophecy about a Chosen One . . and her friends.
The Gift
Buffy: "Remember: The ritual starts, we all die; and I'll kill anyone who
comes near Dawn."
In short, the conflict between both sides of her Slayer role is whipsawing
her behavior. She can’t resolve her season dilemma until she can resolve
this conflict.
What makes Buffy’s situation more difficult is that, as always in the show,
there’s something to be said on both sides. We, the audience, know that
Buffy is struggling with the inconsistencies of her twin roles and that she
isn’t as harsh as she appears in this episode, even if other characters don’t.
We’ve seen her with Spike at the end of Showtime. We understood her
dream in the teaser as reflecting her concerns about the Potentials’ safety.
We watched her cry as she buried Chloe. But that’s not the side she’s
displaying to anyone else; as usual, Buffy’s holding back her deepest
feelings from everyone else. As a consequence she appears harsh and
demanding to them.
One question is whether her boot camp methods are likely to be effective.
This was hotly debated among fans. Here are representative defenses of her
behavior by Cactus Watcher and Malandanza at AtPO:
Cactus Watcher: “The girls aren't there for a quilting bee. Something is
trying to kill every last one of them. Buffy is trying to keep them alive,
however she can. It was important for the survivors to understand that
Chloe didn't die because Kennedy yelled at her, and made her do pushups.
Chloe died because she gave in to what they all must struggle with, the fear
of the First. Buffy has been trying to tell them all along that some of them
weren't going to survive, but if they stick together some will survive and the
world will be saved. Chloe chose to 'go it alone.' She gave in to despair. Not
only did she let the others down by removing what strength she had from
the group, the manner of her death could very well have shattered the
morale of the group. It could have left them all thinking too much about
how hard it was to do what they were facing, and too little about how
necessary it was. Buffy was right to say Chloe was an idiot. She has learned
that being a leader sometimes means saying things the blunt, harsh way, so
that everyone understands you mean business. Buffy has grown up.”
Malandanza: “I think the speech was needed, brutal as it was. The
Potentials were utterly demoralized by Chloe's death, filled with exactly the
kind of doubts the First can exploit. Why is Andrew alive and Chloe dead?
Because Andrew's faith in Buffy is stronger than his fear of the First. The
Potentials, at the start of Buffy's "everybody sucks but me" speech, would
have followed Chloe's path -- now they will fight.

My problem with the speech was less about the things Buffy said and more
about her friend's reactions. Is Buffy the general? Then why so much
insubordination? Kennedy, Spike and Xander all openly defied her in front
of the troops. Xander claimed that they were just waiting for orders, subtly
shifting the blame for the current malaise to Buffy, but even in this season
we've seen him obey only the orders he agreed with. Think of Selfless:
General Buffy heads off to slay Anyanka. Corporal Harris runs ahead to
warn the enemy. Second Lieutenant Rosenberg calls up enemy General
D'Hoffyrn, explains what's happening, and asks if, as a personal favor to
her, he would intervene. The Scoobies can't have it both ways -- either they
are also responsible for the decision making or they should follow Buffy
(questioning her when alone, perhaps, but not in front of a group of scared
girls).

I don't think Buffy was being too harsh -- she was trying to save the lives of
these girls in spite of themselves. I wouldn't have minded seeing Buffy grab
Kennedy, drag her outside and have her dig the next grave, for the potential
who dies because she helped destroy morale at a crucial point because she
thought Willow wasn't getting enough credit. Then maybe busting her back
to private for insubordination and sticking her on KP duty with Andrew.”

For a very well-expressed contrary view, see the comments by farmgirl62 at

[Link]
What’s driving the harshness from the “General” side? Several things, I
think. One is what I’ll call institutional. The role of a commanding officer –
though she’s really more like a drill sergeant here – seemingly requires
making harsh demands on one’s subordinates (see Malandanza’s argument).
Giles’s words at the end of First Date, which I emphasized in my post on
that episode, probably have had an effect too. Adding to the burden is that
the First/Chloe uses Buffy’s self-recrimination to goad her towards the path
of greater power.
The First, it becomes increasingly clear, is the Iago of S7. And as we
learned in Earshot,
“TEACHER Jealousy clearly is the tool that Iago uses to undo Othello. But
what's his motivation? What reason does Iago give for destroying his
superior officer? …
BUFFY Well, he, um, he sort of admits himself that his motive are...
spurious! He, um, he does things because he, he enjoys them. It's like he's
not, he's not really a person. He's uh, the dark half of Othello himself.”
I’ve said all along that for me the show is All. About. Buffy. so that makes
the First the dark half of Buffy. But the same metaphor applies pretty easily
to all the characters, as we’ve seen with Spike, Andrew, and Wood. After
Showtime aired, manwitch and Rahael posted thoughts about the First
which I can repeat here:
Manwitch: “The First Evil on BtVS seems to represent separation. It is
separate from others, untouchable. It manifests itself as those separated
from us by death.

The First Evil's mode of attack appears to be separation. It is attempting to

separate the Slayers from their line (preslayers), from their support (the
council, watchers), to separate Buffy and her friends from each other
through lies that destroy their trust in each other and confidence in
themselves.”
Rahael: “And most especially because it plays delightfully with the idea
that 'it's all connected'. Separation and connection, two ideas that coexist in
a kind of creative tension.”

While all of Buffy’s behavior in GiD was controversial, what generated

perhaps the most debate was Buffy’s demand that Spike and Willow access
their dangerous powers (my emphasis):
BUFFY
Anyone want to say a few words about Chloe? Let me. Chloe was an idiot.
Chloe was stupid. She was weak. And anyone in a rush to be the next dead
body I bury, it's easy. Just...think of Chloe, and do what she did. And I'll
find room for you next to her and Annabelle. I'm the slayer. The one with
the power. And the First has me using that power to dig our graves. (throws
down the shovel angrily) I've been carrying you—all of you—too far, too
long. Ride's over.
KENNEDY
You're out of line!
WILLOW
No, she's not.
KENNEDY
(to Willow) You're gonna let her talk to you like that? Willow, she's not
even the most powerful one in this room. With you here, she's not close.
BUFFY
You're new here, and you're wrong. Because I use the power that I have.
The rest of you are just waiting for me.
XANDER
Well, yeah, but only because you kinda told us to. You're our leader, Buffy,
as in "follow the."
BUFFY
Well, from now on, I'm your leader as in "do what I say." …
WILLOW
Come on, Buffy. You know everyone here's doing everything they can.
BUFFY
The First isn't impressed. It already knows us. It knows what we can do, and
it's laughing. You want to surprise the enemy? Surprise yourselves. Force
yourself to do what can't be done, or else we are not an army—we're just a
bunch of girls waiting to be picked off and buried. (Spike stands and walks
toward the door) Where are you going?
SPIKE
Out. Since I'm neither a girl, nor waiting. All this speechifying doesn't
really apply to me, does it? (walks away)
BUFFY
Fine. Take a cell phone. That way, if I need someone to get weepy or
whaled on, I can call you.
Not exactly the St. Crispin’s Day Speech, to quote The Gift.
Some argued that she was, in effect, telling both Spike and Willow to
regress to an evil state. I don’t see it this way. As I see it, both were
pretending that the power which had led them astray was no longer a part of
them. This was self-deception.
Both Willow and Spike, especially Spike, spent the first half of the season
thinking they were “new”. Spike dressed conspicuously differently, as if he
could put on his new persona with his new clothes. But neither Willow nor
Spike is new. They already have power. Buffy didn’t ask them to gain more
power. She didn't ask Willow to go drain another Rack, she didn't ask Spike
to become an UberVamp. What she did was demand that they use the power
they already have.
What they need to do is to confront the fact that the power, dark though it
may be, is part of them. Giles told Willow this in Lessons: “This isn't a
hobby or an addiction. It's inside you now, this magic. You're responsible
for it.” Similarly, Spike’s demon didn’t leave him when got his soul back;
he’s like Angel now, with the soul able to control the demon.
Buffy needs them to face the same reality she faces – that the power is part
of her, but she controls it and uses it in the struggle against evil. She
controls that power in order to use it for good. She demanded that Willow
and Spike do the same. Both have been gripping the hammer near the head
– lots of control, no power. She needs them to find the balance Xander
explained in Help. She herself is struggling with that balance, as we see
from the harsh tone of her demand.
That doesn’t mean that we’re supposed to approve of what any of them do,
certainly not unreservedly. Spike, in my view, does do what Buffy wanted.
Some suggest that Spike’s retrieval of the coat was a form of triumphalism,
a display of his trophy gained by murder like Cain’s display of werewolf
teeth in Phases. If that were the case, then clearly it would be wrong. I’m
disinclined to see it this way because Spike gave up wearing the coat in
Seeing Red and this is the first time he’s put it on. If he were making a
trophy display, he could have done that at any time.
As I see it, the sole reason Spike went back for the coat was so that he could
do what Buffy demanded of him. In my view the coat serves as Spike’s
reminder of what he once was. It’s a step on the road to the acceptance of
his true self that I described above. That doesn’t make it any less painful for
Wood, as we see from Wood’s reaction to learning where Spike got the coat.
And it emphasizes the ambiguities inherent in the exercise of power.
Willow’s case is different. For one thing, she commands the “mighty
forces” in much the same tones as Buffy used in her speech. Willow most
certainly does NOT use her own power as Buffy tells her to do, she instead
steals power from Kennedy and Anya. We see this as wrong – her eyes and
hair turn black in the circle, Willow herself apologizes to Kennedy later on.
Turning to the metaphor, we understand that Willow – Buffy’s metaphorical
spirit – reinforces the theme of the episode in the course of her spell:
Buffy’s harsh words and actions, in their own way, suck the power out of
others. Anya hangs a lantern on this point when she describes Buffy’s
speech as her “everyone sucks but me speech”.
Kennedy’s reaction to Willow’s violation mirrors everyone’s reaction to
Buffy’s exercise of her power earlier in the episode. Willow’s (and Buffy’s)
excuse of necessity simply makes the moral dilemma more difficult and the
real solution of Chosen harder to see. Willow described her power as if
there were no alternative: “I'm really sorry. It's just, you were the most
powerful person nearby, and—well, that's—that's how it works. That's how
I work.” Willow’s phrasing begs the question whether she can find a
different way of exercising power. Because her actions parallel Buffy’s, the
same holds true for her.
Buffy didn’t enter the portal in search of more power. She went in search of
knowledge. But when the Shadowmen did “offer” her extra power, was she
right to reject them after she berated Willow and Spike for not using their
power? Here’s one argument that she was:
“Didn't she just ask, no, not ask, DEMAND that her friends make similar
sacrifices? Didn't she declare herself the infallible leader of all of them?
Didn't she tell them that she would do anything, anything at all to beat the
first? WELL THEN WHAT GIVES?

Leaders must lead by example. If Buffy is truly the leader, the most
powerful among them, then she has no right to ask others to make sacrifices
that she herself is unwilling to make. That, to me is pure moral arrogance.
Or, does she truly believe that her humanity is worth more than the others.

Dawn did her job; she read the incantation to open the portal;
Spike did his job; he tracked down and killed the exchange demon, at the
cost of a new, powerful enemy;
Anya did her job; she came up with the portal re-summoning ceremony;
Willow did her job; she opened the portal to get Buffy back, at a personal
cost to her;
And, when the floor is repaired, Xander will have done his job.
-Everybody did their jobs here-

However it was the slayer's job to bring back the strength from the source
of the slayer, the strength they all need to beat the First; without that there
was no point to this little exercise. Buffy did not do her job here because
she didn't like the cost to her. The very same cost she demanded of her
friends.

This is unacceptable in a Slayer, improper in a leader, and unworthy in a

friend.”

I disagree with this pretty strongly. I have no doubt that we were meant to
see her rejection of additional demonic power as the right choice. The
metaphorical attempted rape was barely metaphor. No larger purpose could
justify this. Any imaginable obligation ended when they chained her to the
rock.

Moreover, I doubt that the supercharging would have been effective. I don't
see the FE as being defeated by Buffy having SuperSlayer strength. Note
the First Slayer’s words: “It’s not enough.” That’s Delphic – what’s not
enough? Maybe that refers to the amount of power, but maybe not.
This ties in directly to the claim that Buffy asked Spike and Willow to risk
their own humanity while refusing to risk hers. I made the point above that
Willow and Spike already have the power within them and that Buffy hasn’t
asked them to get more. Now let me address the point about “believing her
humanity is worth more than theirs”.
The way I see it is this: the exercise of special powers by any of the three
(Buffy, Willow, Spike) runs along a continuum. Using Willow as an
example, we might say that the continuum runs from locater spells to
teleportation to raising the dead to attempting to destroy the world.

Now, if any exercise of power along this continuum puts their humanity at
risk, then Buffy certainly did ask Willow and Spike to take that risk. By the
same token, however, Buffy cannot be accused of hypocrisy because she
exercises her power every day and, by the same logic, must therefore put
her own humanity at risk.

I don't believe that the mere exercise of power alone puts their humanity at
risk. It's the abuse or excess of that power which does so. Buffy pushes
herself as far as she can, but made the decision that the "extra" “offered” by
the Shadowmen went too far.

What she told Spike and Willow was, in essence, "Hey, you guys are
limiting yourselves to the tinkerbell end of the spectrum. I need you to go
further because I know you can. I believe in your ability to control it and I
myself am taking that same risk." Buffy did not tell them to "risk their
humanity". She told them to use the power they had while remaining in
control. Again, Buffy herself does this. Given the circumstances, it's fair to
demand no less of Spike and Willow (and, on a different scale, Giles,
Xander and Wood). None of this is to justify the harsh way Buffy made her
demands.
Now let’s turn to the actual evil of the Shadowmen. One obvious point is
that they metaphorically (or perhaps actually) raped the First Slayer by
forcing power upon her – note the up and down movement of their (ahem)
staffs – but it goes well beyond that. The existence of that power then
became the reason for making her The Slayer, which condemned her to a
life fighting demons that was inevitably solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and
short. It’s a harsh judgment on patriarchy: men control women through
sexual violence.
But there’s more than this, even. The natural consequence of this assault on
the Slayer is that she remains under the control of a patriarchal system,
never having been given any say in the matter to begin with and without
any real ability to contest it. Compare Buffy’s rejection of the additional
power offered her by the Shadowmen to her speech asserting her power to
the Watcher’s Council in Checkpoint. It is about power both times, but in
very different ways.
There seems to be a fairly clear metaphor also about the way “the system”
co-opts leaders in order to undermine the potential for disturbances by those
now having lower status. The Shadowmen offer Buffy more power as a
bribe, in effect. This is a standard feature of the Hero’s Journey – there’s
temptation for the hero to divert from her journey for her own
aggrandizement (think Satan on the mountaintop with Jesus).The
Shadowmen try to get Buffy to believe that this will allow her to prevail,
but she knows that the stake is not the power. Note that Buffy didn’t reject
power per se, she just “didn't like the loophole.” Nicely vague about what
that might mean, but her instincts are good.
Dracula warned Buffy that her power was “rooted in darkness”. GiD shows
us how true that is. I should note, though, that the episode doesn’t directly
say (nor did Dracula) that her power itself is evil, nor that having the power
somehow makes Buffy evil. It only says that her power was forced on her in
an evil way. Vampires aren’t evil because they have superhuman power,
they’re evil because they don’t have a soul to control the exercise of those
powers. Buffy’s power may have been “rooted in evil”, but Buffy uses it
properly and on behalf of Good based upon her personal character.
Leave the Slayer aside for the moment, though. What’s the consequence of
all this for other women who aren’t Slayers (e.g., the Potentials)? That’s the
question which will be answered in Chosen.
Oh – since I made a point of criticizing the special effects when the WC
blew up, I should note here the great special effects with the shadow
casters.
Trivia notes: (1) Anya told Spike she liked her sex on top of the table,
referring to Entropy. (2) I can’t say for certain, but I like to think the bag
Wood gives Buffy is the same bag Buffy gets the face paint from in her
dream in Restless. (3) Andrew's concern that "they'll see the Big Board" is a
reference to the movie Dr. Strangelove. h/t local-max (4) Any viewers who
still liked Kennedy after TKIM mostly changed their minds after her “push
ups, maggot” command to Chloe. Apparently there weren’t very many fans
of Full Metal Jacket – the source of the quote – in the Buffy audience. (5)
Willow’s “bring it on” while they’re watching the Potentials refers to the
movie of that title. (6) Spike used the phrase “beat him off”, which is
American slang for masturbation. (7) Spike’s statement that he’s unique
“more or less” refers to Angel, of course. (8) Ancient Sumer, where they
spoke the Sumerian language in which the book was supposedly written,
was located roughly in the area which is now Kuwait, and included part of
Iraq as well. (9) Xander’s “ja wohl” in response to Buffy’s demand that they
follow her orders implies that she’s reaching Nazi levels of
authoritarianism. The German phrase acquired that connotation in the US
from American movies about World War II. (10) Kennedy’s “don’t make a
case out of it” probably should have been “don’t make a federal case out of
it”. That’s an American idiom meaning don’t make a big deal out of it. (11)
Kennedy’s suggestion that Willow try “all 32 flavors” is a reference to the
ice cream company Baskin Robbins. (12) The Shadowmen are speaking
Swahili. (13) Kennedy sarcastically suggested chanting Kumbaya, for
which see the link. (14) Willow first attempted a spell in Latin. The words
meant, roughly, “Path of time, I call to you. Path of space, I command you
to open. Open!” (15) Spike did get his coat in New York, as we saw in Fool
For Love. (16) Buffy used the phrase “knocked up” to refer to what the
Shadowmen were trying to do to her. That’s American slang for “become
pregnant”. (17) The ending scene of the massed Turok-hans is an homage to
the Peter Jackson movie version of Lord of the Rings.
 Storyteller
Jane Espenson gives us the third (for me, the fourth) great episode of S7
with her masterpiece Storyteller. It’s one of my very favorite episodes,
mostly based on the way Buffy closes the Turok-han pez dispenser (h/t
Rob).
The most important thing I can say about Storyteller is that it’s shot almost
entirely in Andrew’s POV. In that sense it’s similar to earlier episodes like
The Zeppo (Xander’s POV), Doppelgangland (Willow’s), and A New Man
(Giles’s). Andrew may think he’s telling Buffy’s story, but in fact he’s
telling his own.
Some of the seemingly implausible plot points in this episode disappear
once we realize that it’s shot in Andrew’s POV and that Andrew is the most
unreliable of narrators. For example, the fact that Andrew can somehow
read Tuareg is silly, but remember that this is Andrew telling the story –
he’s a fantasy hero, able to save the day. What this actually means, though,
is that Andrew has abdicated his own role in life. He is “lost in the story”,
as he says in the teaser.
We only leave Andrew’s POV when he and Buffy are alone at the Seal,
when she forces him to shut off the camera. Buffy forced him out of his
own story and made him respond to reality instead. From that point on in
the basement, we see events with Buffy as the storyteller – “I’m making it
up”, she says, knowing that she’s lying to him about the Seal’s need for
blood – rather than events as they are transformed in Andrew’s imagination.
Buffy’s storytelling, like all great art, produces the cathartic moment. She
uses the classic Aristotelian duo of pity and fear to effect Andrew’s
emotional identification with Jonathan and the purging of Andrew’s own
escapist fear. The imagery of the basement scene, with the tears of the
repentant sinner halting the spread of evil, is brilliant. That’s the point at
which Andrew can begin to have his own story to tell.
If the episode were solely about Andrew, it would be beautiful. What takes
it beyond that is what it tells us about Buffy. What I’m about to say in the
following 3 paragraphs is influenced by a post written on livejournal by
beer_good_foamy. You can find it at [Link]
[Link]/[Link] (SPOILERS AT LINK) and I
recommend it. I’m going to give both a shortened version and my own
interpretation, so b-g-f isn’t to blame.
What Storyteller shows us about Andrew is that he’s trapped by the
narrative. He spends all of his time living in a world some geek (namely,
himself) invented. That narrative imprisons him. It takes him away from
reality, such that he can’t ever move forward.
That’s Buffy’s problem too. She’s trapped by the narrative in two ways:
within the show itself she’s limited by the conventions of the Slayer line
and the ways in which the Watchers, including Giles, interpreted the
Slayer’s role. If we take this another step and break the fourth wall, we can
see that Buffy’s trapped by the narrative created by Joss Whedon and
developed by the other geeks writers on the show: “Buffy, Slayer of the
Vampyres”, as Andrew calls it. Her fate is determined by what they decide
she’ll do. Buffy herself has no agency, as they say.
And that’s Buffy’s basic dilemma in S7. She needs to be able to create her
own life, her own self, to put it in existential terms. To an existentialist,
“creating her own life” doesn’t mean living in one’s fantasy world like
Andrew: “Buffy: You make everything into a story so no one's responsible
for anything because they're just following a script.” No, it means acting
within the world as it truly is, it means taking responsibility for one’s own
actions. In order to do that, she needs to be able to break the narrative
structure which limits her development, just as she was finally able to break
Andrew’s imaginary narrative and put him on a path to adulthood and
maybe even redemption.
In her early conversation with Wood, Buffy herself breaks the fourth wall
and implies some magical realism in the show: “There’s this thing that
happens here, in this school, over the hellmouth. Where the way a thing
feels—it kind of starts being that way...for real.” Perhaps this is Jane
Espenson’s meta-commentary on the entire series. In an interview on 5 Sept
2001, Joss said:
“I designed Buffy to be an icon, to be an emotional experience, to be loved
in a way that other shows can't be loved. I wanted her to be a cultural
phenomenon. …
I wanted people to internalize it, and make up fantasies where they were in
the story, to take it home with them, for it to exist beyond the TV show. …”
We – all of us – have put Buffy in a narrative box. As a result, she too is
“lost in the story” at this point. What we’ll see in the finale is her effort to
break those constraints. Precluding Andrew from making her the focus, the
star, of the narrative is an important step.
I get the sense that many viewers are ambivalent about Storyteller because
they don’t care much for Andrew. Lots of them disliked him, almost
everyone would have preferred that Jonathan stick around instead. I don’t
mind him. I think he gets used to deconstruct the show right in the middle
of it, hating his free will and giving us the metaphor for the Potentials.
There’s a perfect example of this here in Storyteller: “The world's gonna
want to know about Buffy. It's a story of ultimate triumph tainted with the
bitterness for what's been lost in the struggle.” Yes, exactly.
Andrew also makes a good contrast to Spike, Willow, and Anya in terms of
their respective journeys on the road to redemption. Here’s a sympathetic
but critical description of Andrew by Random at AtPO after Potential:
“Andrew, morally reprehensible though he may have been most of his life,
never seemed too evil...because, as the Scooby Gang has demonstrated, we
take evil seriously, and if we can't take something seriously, we're not likely
to define it as evil. Andrew's attempts to claim that he's no longer evil are a
pathetic cry for validation...not of his reform and worthiness, but of the
possibility that he might have, if only for a little while, might have been
considered worth taking seriously because he was "evil." I would guess that
he's never even had a real friend. Warren used him. Jonathan was stuck with
him by necessity and circumstance. Neither seemed to like him in any
particular way. He was a body with certain commonalites with certain
people around him. A geek? Sure, let's do some geeky things with him.
Trust him with a heart-to-heart talk? Yeah, right. Give a damn about what
happens to him? Uh, well, sure, I guess, I mean, I hope he doesn't, like, you
know, die ugly or something.

It was Jonathan (late, lamented, *sob*) who gave us the final word on
Andrew: "You are sadness personified." And even Jonathan may not have
grasped the true depth of his insight. Andrew is not pitiable because he's a
geek -- a great many people are, and a large percentage of them are people
worth talking to. Nor is it a simple matter to dismiss him as inept and
ultimately stupid. He's both, of course, but they are symptomatic of a more
essential problem. Andrew is the very definition of a lost soul, one of those
who exist on the periphery of socialization but never able to cross. He and
Xander are exact opposites. The reason I love Xander can be, in many
ways, summed up in his talk with Dawn in "Potential." … Xander may have
been an unpopular outcast, but he had an identity, a sense of self. He may
have had low self-esteem, but at least it was his self-esteem, dammit, and
nobody -- not Cordelia, not the bullies, not Angelus -- was going to break
him. Andrew, with the same credentials, socially, has no grasp of who he is
and, one is tempted to believe, never will because he's too far gone. … He
is the classic, and tragic, character: the pratfalling victim, the loser who
exists only to lose. And that's what's tragic here. Even within the
Buffyverse, that seems to be Andrew's only purpose -- to lose and exist as
an example of everything the Scooby Gang doesn't want to become. So,
yes, I felt sorry for Andrew. Sure he's a murderer. Sure he set flying demon
monkeys on the school play. And sure he could be genuinely sorry for
having killed Jonathan...but nobody cares. He, both in practice and in
theory, doesn't matter. Whatever happens to him in the remainder of the
season, I hope he finds some measure of redemption.”
Two quick concluding thoughts. When Wood tried to dust Spike, was that
his vengeance crusade or the influence of the Hellmouth? A neatly
ambiguous moment.
Xander’s conflicted attitude towards Anya – loving her yet hesitating even
now to tell her that he loves her, and not sure what it means in any case –
should be read metaphorically in my view. Xander is Buffy’s heart (Andrew
reminds us of that earlier in the episode), and Buffy’s feelings towards
Spike are similarly conflicted, as we saw at the end of First Date:
BUFFY That's not why I need you here.
SPIKE Is that right? Why's that then?
BUFFY 'Cause I'm not ready for you to not be here.”
Trivia notes: (1) The opening scene is taken from the PBS series
Masterpiece Theatre. (2) When Anya tells Andrew “birds need to fly”,
that’s a line from the musical Showboat. (3) The Bronsted-Debeye-Huckel
equation, to which Andrew refers in his “supervillain” fantasy scene, really
exists. Google “Pitzer equations” if you’re dying to know. (4) Many
references to previous episodes in Storyteller: the girl fading away (Out of
Mind, Out of Sight); Buffy’s mention of swim team monsters (Go Fish);
Buffy’s mention of killer prom dogs (The Prom); Anya’s belief that sex
with Xander meant they were over (The Harsh Light of Day); the
Cheeseman who appears in Andrew’s dream flashback (Restless). All
remind us that we’re following a story. (5) Wood’s “hell’s a bustin’ out all
over” plays off the line from the musical Carousel. (6) Andrew was correct
that this is the one year anniversary of Hell’s Bells. (7) Andrew’s request for
a Zima is an in-joke. Writer Jane Espenson invented the name. (8) When
Jonathan went to the bathroom, Andrew was singing la cucaracha, for
which see the link. (9) The Tuareg are actual Saharan nomads. (10) Buffy’s
use of the phrase “beautiful downtown hellmouth” comes from the ‘60s TV
show Laugh-In, which used it to describe Burbank, CA.
 Lies My Parents Told Me
"For when was revenge in its exactions ought but an inordinate usurer?"
James Madison.
Immediately after the episode which taught us that the narrative has trapped
Buffy, we learn that some part of that narrative consists of lies. The
brilliantly constructed Lies My Parents Told Me is the fourth/fifth great
episode of S7. Why is it so great? Partly it’s the flashback scenes, building
on what we saw in Fool For Love, to which there are many references.
Partly it’s the major clue about the source of Buffy’s various related
problems. But mostly because it poses, in the sharpest possible way, the
moral dilemmas Buffy faces this season: justice v. vengeance; redemption;
consequentialist v. deontological ethics.
By no means does LMPTM provide definitive solutions to the difficulties it
exposes. What it does is pose them in a way which furthers our
understanding of several major characters in circumstances where
arguments can be made for or against any of them. “Genuine tragedies in
the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts
between two rights.” (G.W.F. Hegel) Because it was so carefully
constructed, there were probably more internet arguments about this
episode than any other besides Seeing Red or maybe the upcoming Empty
Places.
I’ll use this post to analyze the actions of the four main characters, Giles,
Wood, Spike, and Buffy. Though I’ll ultimately criticize Giles and Wood, I
do recognize that their fundamental point was true, namely that Spike was
still a danger. For me, that’s not enough to justify their conspiracy, as I’ll
explain in detail below.
I want to begin, though, with the scene in which the nature of Spike’s
trigger is exposed. That sets up the remainder of the episode, so it’s
important to explore what happened there.
We’ve known since Sleeper that Spike has a “trigger”, that is, something
that the First can use to bring out his demon. He and Buffy were very
careful about Spike’s freedom when they discovered the trigger. Spike kept
himself chained or stayed around Buffy as his figurative “leash”. Since
Buffy rescued him from the First in Showtime, and even more since the chip
was removed in TKiM and the First seemed to be in “reMission”, Spike has
been more “free range”.
Notwithstanding all this, we’ve also known that “it wasn’t time” for Spike
yet, as the First/Jonathan told Andrew in First Date. That strongly implied
the continued existence of the trigger and suggested some residual danger.
In light of this, it’s not clear why Buffy told Wood that “the trigger’s not
active any more”. Perhaps she believed that, which would explain her more
relaxed attitude towards Spike recently.
Now consider what the Prokaryote Stone showed. It confirmed the
continued presence of the trigger and revealed the specific song as “Early
One Morning”. The name of the song is of limited value in itself; it doesn’t
explain why that song had such a powerful effect on Spike, as Giles points
out after the Stone did its work. The net effect was therefore to confirm that
the trigger was still active, as everyone should have suspected, and to add a
minor, albeit useful, detail.
I’ve summarized all this, obvious though it seems, in order to note the
reactions of Giles and Buffy to the results. Buffy unchains Spike, Giles
insists that Spike’s still a danger, implying that he should continue to be
chained until he cooperates in eliminating the trigger. It seems to me that
the importance of these events is that nothing has changed. The situation
remains what it was before the Stone, although Buffy was wrong about the
trigger. But the fact that Buffy unchained Spike wasn’t any different than
what she’d been doing for several weeks beforehand (at least since
Showtime), even if she was wrong about the reason. Buffy trusts Spike
under those conditions, Giles and others don’t. Note that even though Buffy
trusts Spike, she agreed to have Wood watch over him while she was out
with Giles.
What changed was not Spike and not Buffy, it was Robin Wood. It was in
this time that the First tempted him with the chance to obtain vengeance for
his mother’s death. What Wood did was seize the opportunity presented by
the confirmation that Spike still poses a risk.
Now let’s turn to the consequences. I’ll start with Giles because only his
agreement to cooperate with Wood enabled Wood to move from desire to
action.
Many people were upset with Giles’s behavior here, claiming it was out of
character. I disagree for two reasons. First, I think his behavior fits with the
metaphor of the parent who tries to continue to control his adult child. As I
said in my post on First Date, I think the events of S6 caused Giles to doubt
whether Buffy could handle the responsibilities of being an adult (at least as
he sees them). On no subject is this more true than her relationship with
Spike. Not only does Giles detest Spike, but he remembers Jenny Calendar
as well.
Second, in my view, Giles has always taken the view that it was right to
sacrifice the interests of an individual for the greater good, which is how
Wood expressly phrased it to Giles. Giles’s ethics is a form of utilitarianism
– the famous “greatest good for the greatest number”. Utilitarianism is a
consequentialist theory of ethics, meaning that it judges the propriety of
actions by whether they have good consequences regardless of the means
used to achieve those consequences (see my post on Choices for the
meaning of “consequentialist” and the distinction between that and
“deontological”). We saw Giles’s attitude at its most forceful in The Gift, so
it’s no surprise to see it here:
GILES
It takes more than rousing speeches to lead, Buffy. If you're going to be a
general, you need to be able to make difficult decisions regardless of
cost….
GILES
So, you really do understand the difficult decisions you'll have to make?
That any one of us is expendable in this war?
BUFFY
Have you heard my speeches?
GILES
That we cannot allow any threat that would jeopardize our chances at
winning?
BUFFY
Yes, I get it.
GILES
And yet there is Spike….
GILES
Spike's a liability, Buffy. He refuses to see it, and so do you. Angel left here
because he realized how harmful your relationship with him was. Spike, on
the other hand, lacks such self-awareness.
So far, so good. But do you suppose Giles ever stopped to think whether his
argument might apply to Angel or to Wood or to Willow or to Anya as well
as to Spike? I see Spike's trigger as metaphorical. We all have something
inside us that can release our basest instincts --the death of a loved one, a
child, whatever. Willow can lose control under the influence of grief (as
recently as The Killer in Me); Anya upon rejection; Angel in the case of
true happiness. Each of these instances represents a metaphorical way of
exploring the dark side of the human soul, that which can cause us to lash
out at others. Spike's loss of control under the trigger is no different than the
loss of control experienced by the others. No one can ever guarantee that
their own trigger won't be pulled.
One argument against this is the fact that the First potentially could trigger
Spike without him having the ability to control it. This begs the question, to
some extent. By that logic, Angel was just as dangerous pre-Innocence as
Spike is now. Surely Willow is just as dangerous, because her own
subconscious – by definition something outside her conscious control –
could be manipulated by Amy in such a way as to nearly cause her to kill
Kennedy.
The larger point is that Giles’s argument ignores the power of free will, the
power of the soul, as Buffy keeps reminding everyone. What made Angel
“safe” in S3 wasn’t the elimination of his trigger, it was his own recognition
of the fact that he had a trigger and his determination to control it. The same
is true of Willow now. Thus, when Buffy insists that what makes Spike safe
is that “he has a soul now”, this is what she’s getting at.
A second argument against Giles’s argument remains even if we ignore the
soul. If everyone has a trigger, then everyone is a risk, but that doesn’t
mean we should “lean towards the postal” as Xander did in Revelations.
The risk is proportional to the individual's power/ability. The only way to
eliminate the risk is to eliminate also the opportunity for that person to use
that power/ability for good. Surely Willow poses a much more serious
threat than Spike does. She has far greater power, her use of that power is
shaky at best, the First has already shown that it can take control of her
spells (BotN), and Amy has the power to manipulate Willow’s subconscious
(TKiM) just like Willow’s own subconscious can cause her to lose control
(STSP). The same holds true for Anya.
More ironically, it would be easy to justify taking out Wood or Giles
himself under Giles’s theory. Both proved themselves a danger to the
Mission by conspiring behind Buffy’s back in order to eliminate an ally, and
Wood actually acted under the very influence of the First that Giles claimed
to fear from Spike. Both have a “trigger” that the First can use in the form
of Spike. Giles’s argument cuts both much too far and far too close to home.
Buffy rightly accepts the risk because she trusts others. That trust, in turn,
inspires others to trust her, to reach beyond themselves when the need
arises.
Metaphorically, we might see Buffy’s conversation with Giles in the
graveyard as reflecting Buffy’s own internal debate regarding what to do
about Spike. On the one side is her rational self, coldly logical and applying
the standard arguments of crisis. On the other side are her instincts, telling
her that Spike is important and that the whole premise of Giles’s argument
is wrong:
BUFFY
Spike is here because I want him here. We need him. I'm in the fight of my
life….
GILES
You want Spike here even after what he's done to you in the past?
BUFFY
It's different now. He has a soul.
An even bigger problem for Giles is the way he went about it, conspiring
with Wood (whom he hardly knew) and lying to Buffy. I thought the
conspiracy with Wood followed naturally from Giles’s basic attitude, his
oft-expressed dislike of Spike – from Giles’s dream in Restless: “I still think
Buffy should have killed you.” – and his recognition that Buffy would
disagree. After all, Giles never told Buffy that he had killed Ben (a line in
the shooting script contains this adMission but it was cut). But as was true
with Ben, the fact that Giles conceals both his motives and his actions is
itself evidence that he knows that he’s embarked on a dubious course.
Of course, if Buffy’s supposed to be the General, as Giles insists in their
conversation, then it’s hard to explain how her chief lieutenant is conspiring
behind her back. For a sense of just how controversial this got, here are two
sides of the debate on the quality of Buffy’s Generalship:
Malandanza: “I think there was significant good to come out of the
episode -- we got to see more of the evolution of General Buffy. At the start
of the episode, we saw people making choices for her -- Giles and Wood, of
course, but also Willow, who kept her Mission to LA a secret. Hey, why
should the "general" have all the information necessary to make informed
choices? Giles berates Buffy for playing at being general at the same time
he's second guessing her and deliberately subverting her orders. By the end
of the episode, we saw Buffy crack down on the insubordination of her
well-meaning underlings -- she lets both Giles and Wood know that she is
the one making the decisions and, finally, mutiny will be dealt with harshly.
I doubt she'll shut Giles out completely -- he's a useful tool -- but he is no
longer her superior or her equal. He'll be taking orders from Buffy, not the
other way around. Her officers are there to advise her; once she makes a
decision, though, they need to help her carry it out, not act on plans contrary
to her goals. Hopefully, we'll see some of the others put in their places next
ep -- Willow, Xander and Kennedy, particularly.”
Earl Allison: “The problem is, Buffy has shown herself as all too willing to
expend (or at least risk with tremendous stupidity) the lives of EVERYONE
else in the house over Spike.

Why? Spike is muscle, nothing else. Worse, he was unreliable muscle until
the trigger was destroyed. Yet over and over she has bent over backwards to
find reasons to keep him around, to decide he wasn't killing, or that if he
was, it wasn't his fault.

Buffy wanted to unchain Spike even after he had JUST grabbed her by the
throat and flattened Dawn with a thrown cot. There was no reason to
assume the trigger was eliminated -- but Buffy wanted him free, why?
There was no pressing need for him to be unchained, and if he HAD been
triggered again, who other than Wood or Buffy could subdue him? Buffy
willingly risked everyone else -- and I still want to know, for WHAT? There
was no benefit, no immediate payoff, and it's not like leaving him restrained
HURTS anything. I can't understand what motivates Buffy, so I can't accept
her as a leader -- I wouldn't trust her with a pet rock right now.

Given what I've seen to date, I'd follow Giles long before I'd follow Buffy,
who HAS shown an enormous preference towards Spike regardless of risk
to others.

With Giles, I can accept that sacrifices would come from being for the
greater good -- for Buffy, I have to be honest, I have NO idea what her
motivations are, and the idea that she is General and therefore her word is
law -- not nearly good enough….

If ANYONE is to be put in their place, IMHO, it needs to be Buffy. These

people supported her for years, and THIS is how she repays them, by
favoring the until-recently unstable and potentially dangerous vampire over
ALL of them?

Were I in the group, I would either be leaving, or looking to relieve her of

command. Buffy does not, and has not, inspired any leadership at all that I
can see this season.”
I, by the way, disagree with both of them. But the arguments you see here
are about to play out in an important way two episodes hence. I’ll explain
why I think they’re both wrong in that post.
One more point about Buffy’s interaction with Giles. I don’t think it’s a
spoiler to say that this is the last episode in which Buffy stakes a regular
vampire (leaving Ubervamps aside for now). Vampires serve multiple
purposes on the show, and one is that they represent the obstacles on
Buffy’s path to adulthood (see the Introduction). As she closes the door in
Giles’s face, she tells him, “I think you’ve taught me all I need to know”.
She no longer needs to slay vampires now that she’s fully accepted adult
responsibilities herself.
Now let’s consider Wood. Wood sells Giles on the plan based upon the
danger Spike poses. The way he puts it is that Spike is a danger to Buffy:
“Now he's gonna prove to be our undoing in this fight, Buffy's undoing, and
she will never—never see it coming.” It’s interesting that he makes this
particular argument, since it’s somewhat at odds with Giles’s argument that
Spike poses a danger to others (presumably the Potentials).
Taking Wood’s argument at face value, and putting aside Wood’s veracity
for a moment, he doesn’t know, nor does Giles, that Buffy has been in
danger from Spike ever since Smashed, but he has never tried to kill her.
Nor do they know the details of Spike’s remarkable journey to get his soul,
or that, trigger or not, Spike had enough self-control to back away from
biting Buffy in Sleeper, that Spike asked Buffy to kill him in that episode,
that Spike was tortured by the First but didn’t change sides, or that Spike
offered to leave town in First Date.
It’s hard to tell if Giles truly believes this justification, but we don’t have to.
Maybe Wood believes it when he says it, but it’s pretty clear in the event
that vengeance is his real goal (with perhaps some jealousy mixed in). In
my view, there are 2 key points regarding Wood’s “avenging son” attitude:
the timing of the vengeance and the justification for it.

I see no possible counter argument to the timing claim. There is an

apocalypse coming; the one in charge (that would be Buffy) believes Spike
is essential to defeating it. There is no reason I know of why Wood couldn't
wait until afterward to exact vengeance if that were justified. And his
attempt here is inexcusable on multiple grounds: he deceived Buffy; he
acted after the First influenced him to kill Spike, yet ironically claimed to
worry that the First will influence Spike; he used the First’s own tactic to
access Spike’s demon; he ignored the fact that Spike has saved his life more
than once, including earlier in this episode. Wood not only wasn’t fighting
the First, he was acting on behalf of the First – he gave in to the evil voice
inside him telling him to seek revenge.

Whether Wood is “justified” depends in part on what credence you give to

the presence of a soul. Buffy gives a lot; Xander and possibly others are less
certain. I see it Buffy's way -- souled Spike is essentially different from the
vampire he was before. In my view, Wood is no different than Holtz
(spoilers at link) if he fails to recognize this. However, for the sake of
analyzing Wood’s moral choices, I’ll assume that SouledSpike bears
responsibility for the murders of VampSpike and is still dangerous because
of the trigger.
Probably the most fundamental principle of our legal system is expressed in
an old maxim: "No man may be a judge in his own case." This maxim not
only establishes the most basic principle of due process, it also serves as the
foundation for the Lockean political philosophy which supports the entire
American system. Here’s James Madison explaining the point in Federalist
10: “No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, because his interest
would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his
integrity.”

There are both historical and psychological reasons why we adopt this
principle. Historically, primitive legal systems operated under a vengeance
principle. This was widely seen as a failure, leading to cycles of blood. It
was precisely to get away from vengeance cycles that the legal system
adopted the maxim I quoted. The avenger takes it upon himself to judge his
own case and enforce that judgment. This undercuts the foundation of
justice as we recognize it.
I personally doubt that vengeance is ever justified. I can see reasons for
punishment. I can't justify vengeance -- it's an endless cycle of hatred and
violence. That’s the point of the quote from James Madison which heads
this post.
That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t do it myself in some case. I might well react
like Giles in Passion or Willow in Tough Love, given the right
circumstances:
SPIKE: You - so you're saying that a ... powerful and mightily pissed-off
witch ... was plannin' on going and spillin' herself a few pints of god blood
until you, what, "explained"?
BUFFY: You think she'd ... no. I told Willow it would be like suicide.
SPIKE: I'd do it.
SPIKE: (looks down at the ground) Right person. Person I loved. (looks at
Buffy) I'd do it.
So I fully understand the motivation. What I’m saying is that from a
societal point of view, vengeance is unacceptable. That’s also been the view
of the show since at least Innocence: “It is not justice we serve, it is
vengeance.” That’s the contrast, all right.

Now let me address some specific defenses of Wood which I’ve taken from
the internet. The first is the claim that Wood had no one to go to for justice.
This is wrong – the Slayer is available, and Wood knows it. Now, Wood
may not like Buffy’s judgment, but that doesn’t allow him to seek
vengeance on his own.

Another argument I’ve seen is that Wood’s silence would be construed as a

form of complicity. If Wood acts as though Spike is just another guy, then
Spike, Buffy, and everyone else may very well assume that he doesn't really
care. This suffers from the logical fallacy of excluding the middle. There
are lots of options between silence and killing Spike.

A third argument focuses on Spike’s own character. If he were truly is sorry

for his deeds, he should desire forgiveness for the sake of his victims. That
would show true repentance. I agree with this in general. But for me the key
point is this: how is Spike to know that he needs to demonstrate contrition
for this particular wrong, more than any other, unless Wood speaks up? And
how will he ever get the chance if Wood stakes him without warning while
Spike is protecting Buffy? By the time Wood told Spike, he was preparing
to kill him.
In a larger sense, Wood’s real target was The Mission. That’s what took his
mother away as much as Spike. If his mother was truly dedicated to that
Mission, then Wood betrayed his mother when he betrayed, even perverted,
her Mission, as Buffy told him at the end. We can debate whether the
Mission really is what matters, and I will as we move towards the finale.
(We might do well to remember the words from the beginning of
Apocalypse Now: "I needed a Mission. And for my sins they gave me one."
That’s a HINT.) My only point here is the narrow one that Wood failed to
respect his mother’s own dedication to the cause, indeed, that he may not
even understand what that cause is.
Now let’s consider Spike. Until the very end, Spike did nothing
controversial; he was the victim. LMPTM marks the end of the beginning of
Spike’s journey since Grave, the final step in his “recovering alcoholic”
progression during S7. Once Buffy rescued him in Showtime, Spike had to
accept that he had moral authority over himself. That couldn't happen until
he got the chip removed (The Killer in Me). At that point he needed to face
the monster within and gain control over it (Get it Done, and LMPTM).
Only now can he begin to reconstruct his life on his own, without Buffy
standing at his side every minute. In that sense, Wood succeeded in killing
the monster within Spike.
That doesn’t mean Spike should be seen as redeemed; far from it. As I’ve
said before (Amends), redemption is a process, not an event. How far does
he have to go? Well, let’s start with his cruel comments to Wood at the end
of the episode, which were very controversial at the time. Here’s the
dialogue, fighting omitted:
SPIKE I wasn't talking to you. I don't give a piss about your mum. She was
a slayer. I was a vampire. That's the way the game is played….
ROBIN You took my childhood. You took her away. She was all I had. She
was my world.
SPIKE I know slayers. No matter how many people they've got around
them, they fight alone. Life of the chosen one. The rest of us be damned.
Your mother was no different.
ROBIN No, she loved me.
SPIKE But not enough to quit, though, was it? Not enough to walk away...
for you. I'll tell you a story about a mother and son. See, like you, I loved
my mother. So much so I turned her into a vampire... so we could be
together forever. She said some nasty bits to me after I did that. Been
weighing on me for quite some time. But you helped me figure something
out. You see, unlike you, I had a mother who loved me back. When I sired
her, I set loose a demon, and it tore into me, but it was the demon talking,
not her. I realize that now. My mother loved me with all her heart. I was her
world.
In one of the less plausible arguments I saw at the time, a few viewers took
Spike’s comment as a statement being made by the writers themselves
about the worth of Nikki Wood as a mother. They then extrapolated that to
claiming that the show itself was dismissive of working mothers generally,
or as a sign that Spike lacked remorse for his previous actions. To be polite,
both of these conclusions require a radical interpretation of the text.
Take the issue of mothers first. The most significant problem is that the
argument about the worth of mothers completely misreads the point of S7
and of LMPTM in particular, for reasons I’ll have to discuss later. I’ll just
say that in an episode with this title, we shouldn’t accept at face value
everything the two parents say.
There’s another fundamental problem with this argument as well, one I
discussed in my posts on Lover’s Walk and The Wish. It confuses the voice
of a character with the voice of the author. It’s implausible, to say the least,
that the writers were intentionally insulting mothers. We all have them;
loving one’s mother is as close to a universal as there is. Nor would such an
insult be likely given the context of Spike’s realization that his mother did
love him. I think Spike is telling Wood, through his own experience, that he
had placed the wrong interpretation on his mother’s feelings and had now
realized his mistake, something Wood should do too.
Even if we set that aside, the scene tells us more about Spike’s view of love
than it does about some objective or ex cathedra view of mothers. Spike has
always believed that love is consuming, overwhelming. In Lover’s Walk, he
told Angel and Buffy, “You're *not* friends. You'll never be friends. You'll
be in love till it kills you both. You'll fight, and you'll shag, and you'll hate
each other till it makes you quiver, but you'll never be friends. (points at his
temple) Love isn't brains, children, it's blood... (clasps his chest) blood
screaming inside you to work its will.”
Spike has lived this attitude from the beginning; he’s always been love’s
bitch. It’s why he came to Sunnydale to cure Dru in School Hard. It’s why
he was willing to kill Dru for Buffy in Crush; why he withstood torture in
Intervention; and why he ultimately got his soul in Grave. For Spike, real
love – true love – means the willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake
of the one you love. That’s what he’s done his whole life, first with his
mother and then with Dru and Buffy. His epiphany at the end of LMPTM
confirmed (to him, at least) that his mother had loved him the same way, the
way he believed she had when he was alive, regardless of what she said.
Spike’s comments to Wood tell us not only how Spike sees love, but also
how he sees Slayers. His statements to Wood tell us that he believes that,
for Slayers, “the Mission” is the most important thing in their lives. But that
very fact means they can’t possibly love the way Spike understands love; no
Slayer will ever let love for another interfere with “the Mission”. Spike has
now adjusted himself to that world. Wood seems to accept Spike’s view of
both love and Slayers, but he hasn’t yet adjusted to it, nor for the possibility
that his mother might have loved him completely notwithstanding her
loyalty to the Mission. Spike’s view of Slayers may or may not be true, just
as his view of love may or may not apply to Slayers (or to anyone – see
Buffy’s response to him in Seeing Red). Those are wholly different
questions indeed.
Whether Spike does or should show remorse is somewhat more
complicated. It depends in part on how one views the soul in BtVS. As I see
it, and as I explained vis-à-vis Angel in my post on Amends, the restoration
of Spike’s soul makes him an essentially different person than what he was
when he lacked one. Souled Spike bears no responsibility for the actions of
unsouled Spike. The new Spike doesn’t need to express remorse for
something “he” didn’t do. Buffy also takes this view, as she tells Wood “…
you're looking for revenge on a man that doesn't exist anymore.”
Closely connected to the question of remorse is the issue of Spike’s coat,
which first came up in Get it Done. Some have pointed to the fact that
Spike took Nikki’s coat back from Wood as evidence of Spike’s lack of
remorse or, worse yet, as a sign that the show was validating his murder of
Nikki by showing his lack of regret. This interpretation strikes me as wildly
implausible for many of the same reasons noted above.
As I said when discussing this issue in my post on GiD, I saw the coat more
as Spike’s reminder to himself of what he had once been. He spent the first
part of the season trying to believe that the demon was no longer a part of
him, that he could simply return to being William (see, for example, his
attire in Beneath You). This not only wasn’t true, it was inhibiting his
personal growth. When Buffy called him on it in Get it Done, he retrieved
the coat as a reminder to himself that he wasn’t “just” William, but that part
of him was Spike too. Spike didn’t affirm Nikki’s death, he tied a
metaphorical string around his finger so that he’d never forget his own
character.
Finally, Spike bit Wood, but pulled away without killing him even as “Early
One Morning” played. That was necessary to show, beyond any doubt, that
Spike himself is now in control, not the demon inside him and not the First.
It was the lesson Wood needed to learn if his concerns about Spike’s trigger
were anything more than rationalizations, and, more importantly, to remove
Wood’s own trigger – contrary to Wood’s belief, Spike is not simply a
demon any more.
Last but hardly least we get to Buffy. What are we to make of her
conversation with Giles in the cemetery and of her words to Wood when
she finds him lying prostrate, failed in his vengeance plan? In part I think
the episode serves as a metaphor for Buffy’s fears of how she will be
perceived by Dawn – i.e., her human self – if she devotes everything to “the
Mission”. She can’t resolve this yet, so we should consider the story on its
face for the time being.
The image we get of Nikki Wood, and Buffy’s actions since at least Bring
On The Night, demonstrate that there’s a core of truth in Spike’s description
of the Slayer to Wood. The Slayer is chosen (an object), not choosing (a
subject) to fight a Mission. As the Bodyguard told Ampata in Inca Mummy
Girl, “You are the Chosen One. You must die. You have no choice.” Nikki,
like Buffy – like every Slayer – was forced to play a game she couldn’t win
and couldn’t tie. Every slayer takes on the responsibility for the world,
sacrificing her own humanity and the ties of friendship and family, in
substantial part because she has no choice. We’ve seen Buffy’s life made
better by her humanity, her friends, her love, but those all involve her
human side. When it comes to her slayer side, in the final analysis (and
that’s what we’re getting in S7) she remains alone: “You get down on me
for cutting myself off, but in the end the slayer is always cut off. There's no
mystical guidebook. No all-knowing council. Human rules don't apply.
There's only me.” (Selfless)
The impact of this on Buffy, over time, is devastating, just as it must have
been for Nikki and every other Slayer. We can see this in Buffy’s response
to Giles when he tests her resolve in the graveyard:
GILES …Would you let this vampire live if it meant saving the world?...
BUFFY … Giles, we had this conversation when I told you that I wouldn't
sacrifice Dawn to stop Glory from destroying the world. [deontological
ethics: do the right thing even if the world ends]
GILES Ah, yes, but things are different, aren't they? After what you've
been through, faced with the same choice now, (paces) you'd let her die.
BUFFY If I had to...to save the world. Yes. …
GILES … So, you really do understand the difficult decisions you'll have
to make? That anyone of us is expendable in this war? … That we cannot
allow any threat that would jeopardize our chances at winning?
BUFFY Yes, I get it.”
Now, does Buffy really mean it in her heart of hearts, or is she just telling
Giles what he wants to hear? Some of both, I think. She expressed those
concerns to him at the beginning:
BUFFY
Have you seen me with those girls? I mean, the way I've treated my friends
and my family and... Andrew.
Giles’s response, which I quoted in my discussion of his actions, was to
drive Buffy to become even harder. In addition, Buffy’s sense of isolation is
causing her to articulate Giles’s view. There’s also more justification for
that view this time. Dawn is no longer a helpless, innocent target. She’s a
fully committed participant in the fight against evil. Dying in that struggle
would mean something entirely different than what it meant in The Gift.
And yet there’s a conflict between what Buffy says to Giles now and what
she told him in First Date: “you can’t beat evil by doing evil”. There’s also
what she does when she realizes the real world consequence of what Giles
has said: Buffy races off to save Spike. I think she instinctively knows that
the battle against the First is at least partly a battle for souls. Losing Spike,
after all he’s been through, would be a huge loss on that front.
Her words to Wood at the end may seem harsh, but Wood’s in no position to
complain. He betrayed Buffy – the Buffy who trusted him, worked for him,
went on a date with him, brought him into her home, shared details of her
life (and her friends' lives) with him, patrolled alongside him, and otherwise
made him a part of the team – as she now realizes. She knows that Wood
suborned Giles into his conspiracy. She’s seen how battered Spike is. She
can see the nature of Wood’s “sanctuary”. What she tells him reflects both
sides of her struggle: the compassion of recognizing the pain of his
mother’s death; and the stark choice she offers him as General to give up
his vendetta or to suffer the inevitable consequences (which she surely has
no duty to protect him from).
When she returns to the house we see her stroking Dawn’s hair to show that
she loves Dawn as much as Nikki Wood loved Robin, and shutting the door
in the face of Giles’s arguments. But at the same time Buffy’s statement to
Wood rings true to her current mindset when she unknowingly echoes
Nikki: “The Mission is what matters.” It’s the burden of the Slayer, and
Spike articulated it harshly but accurately in what he said to Wood. Buffy
needs to deal with this conflict by recognizing the lies her “parents”
have told her; that’s what will enable her to escape the story in which
she’s now trapped, and it’s the whole point of Season 7.
Trivia notes: (1) The opening scene gives us a date of 1977, which we
should remember as the year Spike killed his second Slayer as he described
to Buffy in Fool For Love. Drew Goddard wrote the flashback scenes,
David Fury the present day ones. (2) Giles’s concern that computers have
replaced books in the library gives us another back to the beginning
reference, in this case to his debate with Ms. Calendar in I Robot, You Jane.
(3) Buffy complained that Spike’s trigger song wasn’t “catchy” like Pink’s
“Get the Party Started”. (4) Buffy covered her near-insult of Giles by
switching to using the name of the actor Yul Brenner. (5) Coughing up
blood, as William’s mother did, is a typical symptom of tuberculosis. (6)
William asked his mother if he should send for Dr. Gull. Dr. William Gull
was a real Victorian physician. He features prominently in theories about
Jack the Ripper, including a comic series by Alan Moore. It was Moore
whom writer David Fury drew on for Primeval. (7) Though we don’t hear it
in the dialogue, William’s mother’s name is Anne, which is Buffy’s middle
name. In the DVD commentary, writer David Fury says that Carolyn
Lagerfelt was cast for the role because she resembles Sarah Michelle Gellar.
Oh yes, Spike has Oedipal issues; you might think back to Seeing Red and
reinterpret his reaction to the attempted rape in light of his experience with
his mother. (8) Andrew answered a call from Fred, meaning Winifred
Burkle (spoilers at link) from AtS, which is why Andrew thought Fred
“sounded effeminate”. (9) Willow left to go to Los Angeles to help Angel.
See the AtS episode Orpheus. Though I didn’t mention it above in my
discussion of Angel’s “trigger”, I think it’s no coincidence that Orpheus
aired at the same time as LMPTM. (10) When Spike tells Wood, “I’m not
much for self-reflection”, that’s a double joke. It’s true for Spike as an
individual, but it’s also the case that vampires have no reflection. (11)
William tells his mother, “you’re glowing”. That’s another reference to Fool
For Love – “glowing” is the word for which William wanted a synonym
and ended up with “effulgent”.
 Dirty Girls
Dirty Girls re-enacts a standard horror scenario in order to take us back to
the original concept of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It seems like a long time
ago, but in both my Introduction and in my post on Welcome to the
Hellmouth/The Harvest, I quoted Joss on the reason why he created the
show. I’ll quote it again here because I think Dirty Girls brings us back to
the beginning in a crucial way:
“Where did the idea [for BtVS] come from? There’s actually an incredibly
specific answer to that question. It came from watching a horror movie and
seeing the typical ditzy blonde walk into a dark alley and getting killed. I
just thought that I would love to see a scene where the ditzy blonde walks
into a dark alley, a monster attacks her and she kicks its ass.”
Joss didn’t mention it in the passage quoted, but the usual rule of horror
genre is that the blonde girl had sex. That act made her “dirty”. Joss sets up
the basic premise in the teaser to Dirty Girls, which he wrote, by
introducing us to Caleb and his view that all women are dirty:
CALEB
Well, do you ever think that maybe they were chasing you because you're a
whore?
SHANNON
(looks at Caleb, stunned) What?
CALEB
Now, I know what you're thinking. Crazy preacher man spoutin' off at the
mouth about the whore of Babylon or some-such. That ain't me. I'm not
here to lecture you. I mean, what's the point? (presses in his dashboard
cigarette lighter) My words just curdle in your ears. Wouldn't take in a
thing. (Shannon looks around nervously, looks out the window) Head's
filled with so much filth there ain't no room for words of truth. Well, you
know what you are, Shannon? Dirty.
SHANNON
(offended) What? I'm not! What're—
CALEB
Now, now, now. There's no blame here. You were born dirty, born without a
soul. Born with that gaping maw wants to open up, suck out a man's
marrow. Makes me puke to think too hard on it.
Because in his view all women are “dirty”, Caleb feels himself justified in
luring them into traps and killing them.
Caleb is the stereotype of the crazy preacher of horror films. In fact, a good
many viewers saw Caleb as too heavy-handed. While there’s some truth to
that, my own view is that Nathan Fillion was excellent in the role, that
Caleb’s straight out of the horror genre, and that the evil of the patriarchal
subjection of women is part of the season theme (e.g., Get it Done). It’s
appropriate that Caleb take this particular form because he’s also a “daddy”
figure, and let’s face it – Buffy has some “daddy” issues. She had them with
Hank, Angel too, and this season Giles (and Wood also, in some ways).
Buffy fears rejection by those she wants to rely upon most, and Caleb is the
dark side of that. Caleb’s over the top characterization is essential to drive
home the point: that Buffy’s struggle now has and always has had a feminist
element deliberately in order to subvert the horror stereotypes.
We’ve watched Buffy follow Joss’s template so often over the last 7 seasons
that we’ve forgotten what it’s like for her to fail. This time, though, the
standard horror trope plays out. Our hero walks into a blind alley and she
loses. Badly. So why would Joss replay this fundamental point here in S7?
As I see it, it’s because Buffy needs to go back to the beginning and to
reassess her basic principles in order to figure out just what she has been
doing wrong. In my view, this is the most important of the several meanings
Joss had in mind when he said that the theme of S7 would be “back to the
beginning”.
Why does Buffy attack Caleb? Well, he deserves it, of course. But the more
direct motivation is because that’s the natural consequence of what Giles
and Wood have been telling her to do all along. They’re the ones pushing
for her to be the General. This does NOT mean that I think Giles or Wood is
evil. They’re flawed, not evil. They’re pushing Buffy to do what they truly
believe is the right thing, because an alternative is inconceivable; the limits
of the existing paradigm are completely ingrained in them.
Buffy has followed that path ever since BotN. She’s uncertain about it, as
we’ve seen in her private moments, and she voices that concern here to
Wood: “I don't want to lead them into war. It can't be the right thing.”
Wood, however, waves away her doubts and pushes down that path just as
Giles has been doing. Wood fires Counselor Buffy – her compassionate side
– and urges her to “test” the Potentials, the very thing she’s doubting. “The
Mission is what matters.” This is the first time she actually undertook the
role, as opposed to talking about it, and her doubts could hardly have been
more strongly vindicated. That’s why she’s walking the dark streets alone at
the end.
I’m not going to discuss how Buffy can solve her problem for the obvious
reason that doing so would spoil the finale. I’ll just make a couple of points.
First, it’s important to remember that Caleb isn’t the ultimate target. He has
to be defeated before Buffy can deal with the First, just like the Ubervamp
had to be defeated. But Caleb is just a stake in the hand of the First, and the
stake is not the power.
Second, most of the internet debate about this episode involved the quality
of Buffy’s “Generalship” – meaning in this case her tactics, rather than, as
in previous episodes, her harsh treatment of her friends and the Potentials –
in the attack on the vineyard. I’ve gone back and forth about whether I
should summarize those arguments. I’ve decided not to. They’re interesting
in their own way, and I’m on the side which mostly defends Buffy’s tactics,
but I now see the whole debate as orthogonal to the main point. I am going
to discuss that main point in the next episode, so I’ll leave aside the
arguments about whether Buffy is a good or bad tactician. Those debates
posed the wrong questions.
Why is Buffy so uncomfortable with Faith? Well, there was that whole
“tried to kill me and my mother” thing, but that’s not all. Buffy has
subconscious fears about Faith, as shown in metaphor with Faith’s dialogue
with Spike in the basement (metaphorically, the locus of Buffy’s
subconscious). There we see her unrestrained, sexual, dark half in a very
sexual, almost post-coital (note the cigarettes) conversation with the man
for whom Buffy’s feelings are very conflicted. It could be jealousy, it could
be fear, but it’s making Buffy very uneasy. I think there’s another reason
too, but it’s spoilerish so I’ll hold off until the finale.
The horrible wound Caleb inflicts on Xander in Dirty Girls has been
prefigured throughout the season. From STSP, an episode involving “mutual
no-see-‘ems”:
“Buffy and Gnarl are still fighting. Gnarl leaps over Buffy's head and lands
behind her. She turns and stabs his foot with her dagger when he lands,
pinning him to the ground. He screeches and flails, throwing him off guard.
She grabs his head with both hands and plunges her thumbs into his eyes.
XANDER (to Buffy) Ew. Ew. Thumbs? I can't believe you did that.”
In Showtime, Beljoxa’s Eye was both all-seeing and made up of eyes.
From Potential:
“DAWN Maybe that's your power.
XANDER (pauses at the door) What?
DAWN Seeing.”
All season long we’ve seen Xander fixing the windows of Buffy’s house –
the “eyes” of the house, as it were. Andrew even called special attention to
this in Storyteller: “Look at the fine work Xander did on replacing that
window sash.” And, of course, the Bringers are notoriously eyeless, a point
which is reinforced in Dirty Girls when Xander’s instructing the Potentials.
Xander’s wound is all the more emotionally devastating after that
wonderful speech he gave in support of Buffy before the attack. That’s
Xander at his best.
Trivia notes: (1) In addition to the teaser, Joss also wrote about 80% of the
episode (Drew Godard, DVD commentary). There’s probably some
exaggeration in his estimate, because Marti Noxon wrote the Faith/Spike
scene in the basement. If she wrote that, and Joss wrote “80%”, then it’s
hard to see why Drew would be credited at all. (2) Caleb mentioned the
whore of Babylon, for which see the link. (3) Caleb’s phrase “blue eyed
boy” is British slang for the American expression “fair haired boy”. Both
mean “favorites”. (4) For Faith’s story since Who Are You, see the AtS
episodes Five By Five, Sanctuary, Judgment, Salvage, Release, and
Orpheus. (5) Faith told Spike they’d met before, which they did in Who Are
You, although Faith was in Buffy’s body at the time. Spike later quotes what
she said to him at that time. (6) Faith borrows Buffy’s stake when she first
shows up, just as she did in Faith, Hope & Trick. There are also references
throughout Dirty Girls to pretty much every episode in which Faith
appeared. Most of them are in Andrew’s recital. (7) Caleb got the doctrine
of transubstantiation backwards, probably intentionally to emphasize his
evil. He said, “The body and blood of Christ becoming rich, red wine.” In
Catholic doctrine, it’s the wine which becomes Christ’s blood. (8) Caleb’s
phrase “lookin for the Lord in the wrong damn places” plays off the lyrics
of the song “Looking For Love”. (9) Caleb refers to the Bringers as the
“Ray Charles Brigade”, referring to the blind singer. (10) Caleb told the
First/Buffy that he’d “killed all those splits”. That’s a very crude way of
saying he’s killed lots of women. (11) Faith killed a volcanologist in
Graduation Day 1. (12) In their conversation in the basement, Faith
recognized that “the Big C” isn’t an issue for Spike. That’s a slang term for
cancer. (13) Willow warned Buffy that Caleb might kill the girls left behind
while Buffy and Faith were scouting Caleb. That’s almost what happened in
When She Was Bad. (14) Faith’s attitude seems not to have changed much
since Bad Girls: “Drop me in the hornet's nest, what the hell?” (14) The
discussion between Andrew, Amanda, and Xander about Matthew
Broderick and Godzilla refers to the 1998 movie Godzilla. (16) Xander’s
phrase “take the little bus” is American slang. It refers to the small buses
which bring mentally disabled kids to school; it’s a crude way to say
someone is stupid. (17) Spike described the vineyard as “like Falcon Crest”,
for which see the link. (18) Caleb’s description of Faith as “Cain to
[Buffy’s] Abel” refers to the Biblical story in which Cain was a murderer.
(19) Caleb’s admiration for St. Paul probably stems from verses like 1
Timothy 2:11-14 and Ephesians 5:22. (20) Caleb’s words, “for the kingdom,
the power, and the glory are yours now and forever” paraphrases the Lord’s
Prayer. (21) Dirty Girls aired about a month after the Iraq War began. Some
viewers took the show as commenting on the political events, but the
outline for S7 was worked out in the summer of the previous year and had
no relation to the War. (Drew Godard, DVD commentary)
 Empty Places
Et tu Brute?
Empty Places made viewers angry when it aired and I think still does today.
It’s comparable to Dead Man’s Party in its plot, and that generated a similar
reaction. I don’t like DMP (second bottom on my list), but EP works for
me. What’s the difference? Mainly the fact that the abuse of Buffy was SO
one-sided in DMP. It wasn’t just that Xander and Joyce, and Willow to a
lesser extent, were self-righteous, the episode and its successors implied
that they were entirely right. In EP the situation is much more nuanced. We
see the conflicted feelings of the SG, we see Buffy’s side, we know that
there’s something to be said on all sides. While my heart’s with Buffy, just
as it was in DMP, here I can see the point of her critics.
Let me deal with a couple of preliminary points before I get to the big
mutiny. First there was the question of Faith taking the Potentials to the
Bronze. Yes, blowing off steam was probably needed. That still doesn’t
make the Bronze a good choice. Faith put herself at risk of arrest and
everyone at risk of death had Caleb showed up rather than the cops.
Bringing up the raid on the vineyard as a way of defending herself to Buffy
was not only offensive, it was a terrible argument. There’s a huge difference
between a military operation gone wrong and putting everyone in danger in
order to get some R&R.
That said, Faith was very mature and considerate of Buffy earlier when
Dawn insensitively tried to talk about Xander. The fact that Buffy didn’t
want to discuss that topic, though, shows just how far she’s controlling her
human feelings and steeling herself to function as General. It’s another sign
on the road to the mutiny.
In order to discuss the mutiny, I want to review how we got here, even at
the risk of stating the obvious and repeating points I’ve made in previous
posts. Since BotN, the Potentials and the SG have seen Buffy in full
“General” mode. Indeed, to a very substantial extent they’ve insisted that
she take on that role. As I’ve emphasized starting with my post on BotN, the
logic of this is irrefutable. We’ve known since the very first episode of the
series that the Slayer alone can stand against the vampires, the demons, and
the forces of darkness. If the Slayer alone can slay, then the Slayer alone
gets to make the decision to slay. That means the Slayer must necessarily be
in charge.
The unique status of the Slayer has always made Buffy uncomfortable, and
her discomfort has been highlighted throughout all 7 seasons, most recently
in CWDP. The inescapable fact of being the Slayer isolates her from
everyone else. That was her complaint in CWDP, but really it’s been a
factor since the very beginning: “Prepares me for what? For getting kicked
out of school? For losing all of my friends? For having to spend all of my
time fighting for my life and never getting to tell anyone because I might
endanger them?” (Welcome to the Hellmouth)

From the very beginning of the series, Buffy reacted to her situation by
accepting the responsibility which came with her unique status. She
articulated that responsibility in Selfless: "It is always different! It's always
complicated. And at some point, someone has to draw the line, and that is
always going to be me. You get down on me for cutting myself off, but in
the end the slayer is always cut off. There's no mystical guidebook. No all-
knowing council. Human rules don't apply. There's only me. I am the law."

Note that both parts of the dilemma are expressed in this single quote. The
Slayer is isolated, and yet the Slayer must perforce make the decisions
because there’s no one else. I think this pretty well expresses what Buffy
has been doing for a minimum of 3 years before Selfless (at least since
Graduation Day).

However, accepting this responsibility, good though it is, causes an

additional problem. This is the problem raised starkly in Help, but one
which has simmered below the surface all along in episodes such as Phases,
Gingerbread, and Lessons: Buffy simply can’t save everyone. Thus,
accepting the full responsibility which comes from being the Slayer
inevitably puts an incredible burden on her, above and beyond the risk of
death she faces every night.
Seen from the other side, many of the Potentials have relied on Buffy to
protect them. That was the point of Showtime. Eve/First told everyone “I
don’t think Buffy can protect us.” After Buffy defeated the Ubervamp, the
Potentials could be confident that they were safe. That kept them on Buffy’s
side, notwithstanding her harsher moments, until Dirty Girls called that into
doubt. Thus, Buffy feels the burden of protecting the Potentials, causing
stress on her, yet the disaster in Dirty Girls means that the Potentials have
now lost confidence in her ability to protect them. Her plan to return to the
vineyard therefore appears to them as reckless.
The point of the episodes since BotN is to show how these factors conjoin
to isolate Buffy. Get it Done emphasized both parts of her dilemma. She
“failed” to save Chloe, but when her guilt at that “failure” caused her to
react as General she succeeded in angering everyone around her. Empty
Places is the culmination of this cycle. Everything Buffy says to the
mutineers is true, but it doesn’t matter. The emotional impact of the disaster
at the vineyard means that they won’t follow her once more unto the breach.
She’s also now isolated from her friends – and remember the metaphor:
they’re her mind, heart, and spirit – even above and beyond the isolation
that comes from being the Slayer which she noted in Selfless and CWDP.
Part – but only part – of Buffy’s problem is that she has not issued her
commands in an acceptable way. Farmgirl62 pointed this out in her
excellent comments on GiD. Buffy knows this is true. She told Giles this in
LMPTM: “Have you seen me with those girls? I mean, the way I've treated
my friends and my family and... Andrew.” The truth is, though, that even
accounting for this, Buffy’s still on the wrong path.
The true heart of the problem, to put it in existentialist terms, is that the role
of General inherently requires treating other people as objects rather than
subjects. You can put a gloss on this by saying that generals should be very
nice in the way they treat their objects, but at the end of the day the privates
are still objects for the General to order into combat. And yet, the logic of
the situation inescapably demands that there be a General.
Let me state this for emphasis: when Buffy took on the mantle of General in
BotN, she made a mistake. We’re supposed to recognize it as a mistake,
even those like me who reflexively defend her most of the time. While I’m
not going to spoil the finale, I will offer this clue: An essential part of
Buffy’s dilemma is that the role of General is a traditional patriarchal role.
It reinforces the isolation she feels, there being, of course, just one General.
Exchanging a woman (Buffy) for a man (Watcher’s Council) in the role
may seem like progress, but it’s actually not.
Everyone can sense that something is wrong, including Buffy, but nobody
(yet) can see a way out of the logical trap I summarized above. Kicking
Buffy out of her house is how the SG and the Potentials express their sense
that another attack on the vineyard is the wrong plan, but that’s the excuse
for the mutiny, not the reason for it. I’ll argue over the three remaining
episodes that they’re right to be disturbed – Buffy is indeed on the wrong
path – but wrong in the way they went about it and wrong in their solution.
Having acknowledged that Buffy is on the wrong path, and has gone down
that path making mistakes along the way, let me now review the mistakes of
the SG and the Potentials. The biggest problem is that they’re trapped by
the same paradigm which has trapped Buffy, so they decide to let Faith take
command. Wood was the first (heh) to make this suggestion, but Dirty Girls
should have taught us to be skeptical of his advice. He was the one who
pushed Buffy to “test” the Potentials, and that led to the disaster. As
shadowkat put it, “Wood is a metaphor for authority figures who've always
under-estimated Buffy.” His last name may very well serve as a double
entendre to emphasize this point.
I’ve said this before, but I don’t think Wood is evil. I think he’s an asshole
for not recognizing his own responsibility for the attack on the vineyard,
and for attacking Buffy in public, but he’s not nominating Faith because he
wants the First to win. That would be derogatory of Faith in a way that’s
unjustified given how far she’s come. No, he’s nominating Faith because
he’s simply incapable of seeing any alternative. That’s partly on him, but
it’s also inherent in the logical trap that the Slayer power entails on the
Slayers.
It’s easy to see, though, that Wood’s suggestion can’t possibly work. If, as I
suggest, the whole problem is caused by the fact that Buffy was the
General, then making Faith the General obviously won’t solve that problem.
She might be a better general, but she’ll still have to bear the same burden
Buffy has been laboring under. All that will happen is that the burden will
shift from Buffy to Faith; there’s no net progress.
At the time Dirty Girls and Empty Places aired, there was lots of argument
that Buffy had showed herself to be a bad General tactically as well as in
the way she treated her subordinates. Many were enthusiastic at the idea of
Faith taking over. I don’t agree with these arguments, but I think my point
about burden shifting demonstrates that the whole issue is irrelevant to the
themes established in the opening episodes to S7. Good tactics or bad, the
mere fact of being the General leaves the Slayer isolated and unable to
protect everyone.
The next problem with the mutineers is that they don’t actually know what
Buffy’s plan is. Yes, she wants to go back to the vineyard. They don’t,
understandably enough, but they never allowed Buffy to explain how she
would return or what she planned to do. They simply refused to go.
There were lots of bad arguments in the room besides those of Wood; the
Hellmouth must have been really acting up. That’s a joke, but we were
shown Storyteller and the earlier scene here with Giles and Willow for a
reason:
WILLOW
(walking away with Giles) Good idea. My control was fading. What's up
with those cops?
GILES
Oh, same as everyone. The Hellmouth is active again.
Buffy undoubtedly interpreted the mutiny as a sign of the Hellmouth’s
influence, and we can see it that way in metaphor to some extent: we can
interpret the whole scene as the blooming, buzzing confusion of Buffy’s
internal thoughts. I don’t doubt that the Hellmouth influenced everyone’s
reaction, but as was true when it was Spike in The Yoko Factor, “trouble
was stir-uppable”.
In each case, the bad arguments stemmed in part from existing resentments.
I mentioned Wood already, and his resentment is easy to understand after
First Date and LMPTM. Anya has shown all season that she still resents
what happened in Selfless. She made the claim that Buffy was “luckier”
than everyone else: “But you didn't earn it. You didn't work for it. You've
never had anybody come up to you and say you deserve these things more
than anyone else. They were just handed to you. So that doesn't make you
better than us. It makes you luckier than us.”
As we saw in Get it Done, the Slayer power isn’t a matter of “luck”, it
originated in a primal violation. That doesn’t make Buffy a victim – she’s
not – but it does mean that Anya is effectively criticizing Buffy’s personal
moral character. That’s pretty hard to take after what we’ve seen over the
last 7 years, and is pretty rich coming from Anya. Note also that if Anya’s
argument had any merit, it would make no sense to expel Buffy and then
pick Faith as the new leader. Choosing Faith is internally contradictory to
Anya’s position in two ways: first because Faith would be just as “lucky” as
Buffy; and second because Faith’s existence actually refutes Anya’s
assertion that Buffy is “luckier than anyone else”.
That said, Anya’s comments mirror what Buffy told Holden in CWDP: “I
have all this power. I didn't ask for it. I don't deserve it.” So while Anya’s
comments are indefensible in character terms, they do express Buffy’s own
internal insecurities.
Rona’s joy at seeing Buffy gone made her even more widely disliked than
Kennedy, high a bar though that may be. Rona was the one who showed up
in Sunnydale expecting to be protected. She’s lost confidence in Buffy’s
ability to protect her. Her obnoxious comment reflected that the whole issue
is more about being protected and about resentment than it is about
anything else. I do wish, though, that Dawn had slugged her instead of just
telling her to shut up.
One reason that Wood, Anya, and Rona all spoke up is that they have come
face to face with Buffy’s harsher side over the course of the season
(Selfless, GiD, LMPTM, the scene at the Bronze here). We, the viewers,
have had the advantage of also seeing Buffy’s moments of doubt and
compassion: her rescue of Spike in Showtime; her rejection of more power
in GiD; her caress of Dawn in LMPTM; the scene with Andrew in
Storyteller; her tears on seeing the picture of herself with Xander and
Willow earlier in EP. The important thing about all these scenes is that the
other characters have NOT seen these moments when Buffy lets down her
mask. Thus, she has appeared harsher to them than she has to us. This
makes their rebellion more understandable even if it doesn’t improve their
logic.
Unlike DMP, Xander and Willow are not the moving force here. Their
comments are not directly critical of Buffy, they just conspicuously fail to
defend her. That’s a betrayal in its own way, but not nearly as bad as what
we saw in S3. And it’s somewhat understandable after the events at the
hospital. We as viewers can see how broken Buffy is by her guilt over
Xander’s injury, but that probably wouldn’t have been as clear to Willow
and Xander.
I’ve noted before that Giles lacks confidence in Buffy’s decision-making
(meaning, metaphorically, that Buffy lacks confidence in herself), and it
showed in the mutiny. Putting metaphor aside, just 2 episodes ago Giles
was urging her to be the General and saying that everyone was expendable.
Now he’s against her, even as she recites the principles he’s been
advocating all year, because “This is a hell of a lot to ask”. And disclosing
to the entire room her private doubts about trusting others, which she
overstated in her anger at him for sending Spike away, was a gross and
unfair breach of confidence.
The most controversial line was undoubtedly that of Brutus Dawn: “This is
my house too”. This struck most viewers as preposterous. While it’s true
literally, it’s just not right literally. No child believes she has the right to tell
her parent to leave the house. Metaphorically, however, it works perfectly.
Dawn IS Buffy; that is, she’s Buffy’s non-slayer part, what Buffy sees as
her better half. Thus, the scene plays out metaphorically as Buffy’s human,
compassionate part telling her Slayer half to step down and stop
dominating. In this sense, Dawn is indeed a joint occupant of Buffy’s
(metaphorical) house, and fully entitled to exercise her rights.
So there's plenty of fault to share in EP. The way I see it, though, Buffy is
"more" right. Though I’m not going to analyze her statements in detail,
everything she said was factually true. She took a position consistent with
her behavior over the previous seasons, with what her mentors have been
telling her since BotN, and with the existing paradigm of the Slayer. The
mutineers, in contrast, had no real solution. They didn't want to follow
Buffy's advice, but they found themselves trapped in the same situation
except for a different name at the top of the firm resume. To make such a
minor change at the cost of betraying Buffy seems much less defensible to
me.
One last fact to note about the mutiny, and it’s an important one. The
Potentials and the SG may have kicked Buffy out, and they may have done
so for bad reasons, but they haven’t deserted the battlefield. They’re still
prepared to fight, they just don’t know how yet.
So why did they kick her out, instead of just getting up and leaving en
masse? I think that the metaphor is driving the plot here. All of Sunnydale
is now deserted, but Buffy’s house is crowded with her hopes, her dreams,
her thoughts, her confusion, her insecurities. She needs to get away from all
that in order to regroup. In addition, as Allie pointed out in comments, it
would be logistically difficult as well as dangerous for everyone else to
move.
I have to admire Buffy’s attitude on the porch at the end, both forgiving
Faith and giving her the chance to make a difference. In a way, it’s what
Faith told Wood before the meeting: “WOOD: Why didn't you fight back?
FAITH: Other things matter more.” And props to Faith, who’s the only one
to come out of the whole scene looking good.
Trivia notes: (1) Clem asked Buffy if she could “believe this mishegas”.
That’s a Yiddish word meaning “craziness”. (2) Willow and Giles pretended
to be from INTERPOL, the perhaps unfortunately named International
Criminal Police Organization. (3) Xander mentioned his Halloween
costume, meaning his pirate outfit from All The Way. (4) Faith likes to
remind Anya that she had Xander first, which she did in The Zeppo. (5)
Caleb’s mocking words about Buffy’s tears recall Buffy’s nightmare about
her father in Nightmares: “BUFFY: Why are you saying all these things? (a
tear rolls down her cheek) HANK: Because they're true. I think that's the
least we owe one another. She begins to sniff and cry. HANK: You know, I
don't think it's very mature, getting blubbery when I'm just trying to be
honest.” (6) Andrew used the phrase “called dibs”, which is American slang
meaning that he asked for it first. (7) It’s very hard to see on screen, but
what Giles and Dawn see in the photo is an imprint of Caleb’s ring. They
could recognize it because of Shannon’s burn mark in Dirty Girls. (8)
There’s a joke in the location of Spike’s mission. Giles told him to go to
Gilroy (CA), which advertises itself as “The Garlic Capital of the World”.
Having second thoughts about Giles’s motives now? (9) Giles suggested
that Andrew bring his “Pan flute thing” along on the trip with Spike. In
Greek mythology, the god Pan played the flute. (10) This is the last episode
to feature a scene at the Bronze, so the band was Nerf Herder, who wrote
the Buffy theme music. (11) While riding the motorcycle, Andrew wears
the same helmet Dawn wore in Bargaining 2. (12) Spike mentioned the
“onion blossom things” at the Bronze. We learned that he liked those in
Triangle. (13) The inscription on the wall in the monastery is in Latin, but
written in Greek letters. (14) Giles suggests that Buffy is leading them to
find “windmills”. The phrase “tilting at windmills” means to fight a non-
existent foe. While the phrase isn’t precise, he means she’s chasing after
nothing. (15) Buffy’s claim that Faith tried once before to “take everything
she had” refers to the body switch in Who Are You. (16) Rona’s “ding dong,
the witch is dead” comes from The Wizard of Oz.
 Touched
“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
Continuing the point from Empty Places, the chaos of the teaser drives
home the logical necessity that someone has to be in charge. The group was
incapable of even having a discussion, and both Xander and Kennedy
suggested that not everyone should participate (without, of course,
including themselves out, to quote Samuel Goldwyn):
XANDER
You know, I'm thinking that everyone here shouldn't have a say.
KENNEDY
I just wonder if those of us who have been here longer should have more of
a say.
The follow-up group discussion in the basement emphasizes this
conclusion. As was apparent in Empty Places, Buffy had succeeded in
isolating herself from everyone else over the course of the year. That’s what
the role of General entails. The Potentials thought that switching to Faith
would change things. Kennedy states this expressly: “I thought things
would be different now, but you keep shutting me out”. What Kennedy’s
missing is that she can't function as an equal because Faith has power that
she lacks. Given that ineluctable fact, Faith will always be the one who
decides who to slay and who not, just as Buffy was. The logic of the
situation demands a General.
Faith’s reaction to Kennedy in the basement builds on this premise, and
states expressly the logic of the situation which demands Kennedy’s
obedience to Faith’s orders: “Look, you guys, I'm not Buffy. I'm not the one
who's been on your asses all this time, but I'm not one of you any more,
either. I'm your leader, which means I go first, and I make the rules, and the
rest of you follow after me. Is that clear?” My emphasis. Nor does Faith
treat others any better, as witness her curt dismissal of Wood. Thus, one
point of Touched is to make it clear that the problem is not individual to
Buffy, nor to Faith, but to the existing system.
Turning now to Buffy, we see that events all season have been preparing us
for her admission that she is responsible for cutting herself off. Indeed, as
Buffy herself says, she’s done so from the beginning. As an example, go
back 130 episodes to When She Was Bad:
JOYCE: Did she manage to stay out of trouble in L.A.?
HANK: She did, yeah. She was, um... you know, great.
JOYCE: But?
HANK: She was just, I don't know, um... distant. Not brooding or sulking,
just... there was no connection. The more time we spent together, the more I
felt like she was nowhere to be seen.”
Not so much connected, as she says in CWDP.
In Lessons, the manifest spirits told Buffy that she had failed to protect
them. In Help, Buffy was faced with what she should do when she couldn’t
help, and in subsequent episodes she felt that she failed in her duty to
protect the Potentials. Her very understandable reaction was to cut herself
off in order to avoid the pain, as she tells Spike: “That's my problem. I say
the word, some girl dies...every time. … These are girls that I got killed. I
cut myself off from them...all of them. I knew I was gonna lose some of
them and I didn't….”
This reaction became more pronounced after she had to face down Xander
over Anya in Selfless, and after she kept losing Potentials (Annabelle, Eve,
Chloe, Molly) and saw Xander horribly wounded. We could see how distant
she forced herself to become in the hospital scene in Empty Places. In turn,
the loss of lives meant that the Potentials would no longer accept her harsh
commands in a trade-off for safety.
All of this background we now understand as essential to explain why
Buffy seemed so distant to the Potentials and to her friends. Now that Buffy
herself has recognized it, she has the ability to take the next step and find
another answer to the question she posed at the end of Help:
BUFFY
… I failed her.
DAWN
… I guess sometimes you can't help.
BUFFY
So what then? What do you do when you know that? When you know that
maybe you can't help?
Never did I like Spike more than in this episode, first calling out the SG
over their betrayal, then with his inspirational talk to Buffy. Without
spoiling, I can also say that his dialogue with Buffy, like that of Faith and
Wood, provides a major clue to Buffy’s intuitive solution in Chosen.
Two quick points about the paralleled love scenes with Heather Nova’s
“Only Love” playing in the background. Not surprisingly, Joss had to fight
to get Standards & Practices to permit the Willow/Kennedy sex scene. It
was, AFAIK, the first lesbian sex scene ever shown on network TV. Since
you all know that I don’t mind Kennedy but that mine is a distinct minority
view, I’ll let Masq give her verdict on that scene:
“I think we all wish that when a network television program finally decided
to show two women making love the way they always show a man and a
woman making love, that it would Willow and Tara. Because we all felt the
love of Willow and Tara.

But when Joss and co. decided to push that envelope, and when UPN had
the cajones to show it, it was Willow and Kennedy.

And I, for one, thought it was HOT, and I want to applaud Joss, ME, and
UPN for doing it.”
Willow didn’t need anything more than sex to reassure her that her
sexuality was not the source of darkness in her, nor was it the cause of
Tara’s death. Local-max added in comments: “She's always associated her
sexuality with evil, at least subconsciously …" IMHO, rather than being a
mistake, the shifting of the metaphor of magic from lesbian sex to power
generally [not getting into the drug stuff here] actually emphasizes
something real about Willow, which is her deep-rooted fear that being
joyful, acknowledging her desires and love, being empowered (which are
all related), make her a bad person. For Willow, magic represents power
first, and secondly I think it represents the...transgression of social
boundaries -- which is why it's appropriate that it is a gateway to *both* her
non-normative sexuality and her darkness.”
While the sex has meaning for Willow in this sense, the scene where Spike
just holds Buffy pretty clearly establishes an important distinction between
love and sex – only love makes a true connection to others. I see the scenes
as running a spectrum from B/S to W/K to X/A to F/W to Caleb/First. The
three human couples were (mostly) just having sex, Buffy was trusting
Spike. It turns out Buffy was right when she told Giles in Empty Places that
Spike is the one who has her back. She’s connected to at least one person.
And that’s the double meaning of the title. Someone “touched” Buffy. That
enabled her to defeat Caleb by the simple expedient of not letting him touch
her, just as the First can’t be touched. She circumvented it using its own
strength.
Since the consequences of Faith’s turn as General and of Buffy’s discovery
of the cool axe-thingey spill over into the next episode, I’ll discuss those
topics in my next post.
Trivia notes: (1) Giles thought the phrase “power to the people” sounded
like something from the ‘70s. It was actually from the ‘60s. (2) Anya’s
metaphor (?) of Girl Scouts trying to make quota refers to the fact that Girl
Scouts sell cookies door-to-door to raise money. (3) For the Model UN see
the link. (4) Faith said the people from the power company “got the hell out
of Sunnydale”, playing off the expression “got the Hell out of Dodge”. It’s
American slang meaning to get away from a situation. (5) Spike recited the
“I spy with my little eye” line when he first saw Giles as the Fyarl demon in
A New Man. (6) After Giles congratulated Kennedy for her “performance as
a disgruntled minion”, Kennedy said that she was “method”. That refers to
a school of acting, but it’s also a joke. Method actors try to put themselves
in the actual thoughts and emotions of their characters. Kennedy’s response
said, in effect, that she was a disgruntled minion. (7) Anya didn’t think the
Bringers were Rhodes Scholars, for which see the link. (8) Andrew was
thrilled to ride on Spike’s “hog”. That’s a slang term for a large motorcycle,
but not the one Spike has. (9) Faith told Spike that Buffy had him
“whipped”. The full phrase is “pussy-whipped” and it’s American slang for
a man dominated by a woman. (10) Spike’s reference to the comfy chair as
a diabolical torture device is a reference to Monty Python’s Spanish
Inquisition. (11) I’ve seen it suggested that there are echoes of Terry
Gilliam’s The Fisher King in the Buffy/Spike scenes. I can’t confirm that,
but it seems reasonable. (12) Faith asked the Mayor if he was a shrink now.
That’s an in joke. Harry Groener played a psychiatrist in the Roswell
episode Who Died And Made You King?,which aired in April 2002, i.e.,
about a year before Touched. (13) The Mayor previously called Faith
“firecracker” in Graduation Day 1. (14) Faith said a “whole lot of Jack D”
killed the pain. She’s referring to Jack Daniels Whiskey. (15) Heather
Nova’s “Only Love” was the last vocal music on the show. It’s pretty
obviously Joss’s taste in music, and I hear it as a valedictory. (16) Iyari
Limon (Kennedy) didn’t really have a pierced tongue; that was a prop. (17)
Given my previous comments about Wood’s Oedipal issues, the fact that he
and Faith have sex in Buffy’s bed is, well, kind of icky. (18) The First’s
desire to be corporeal in order to feel a neck crack is the same explanation
Moloch gave in I Robot, You Jane. (19) It’s unclear what Caleb means when
he refers to Buffy as the “prodigal Slayer” when she enters the vineyard.
The word “prodigal” is often misunderstood to mean “wandering”, and he
could mean it in that sense because Buffy has left her friends. However, the
word actually means “spendthrift”, so he might be taunting her about her
supposed willingness to risk the lives of her friends in Dirty Girls. (20)
Buffy’s reference to Caleb as a “woman hating jerk” was apparently
originally written as “woman hating prick”. For some reason, Standards &
Practices objected to the latter phrase.
 End of Days
Having reached End of Days, it’s only fitting that we finally discover the
(symbol of the) Ultimate Boon. In my post on Grave I said that S7 would
cover the stage of the Hero’s Journey known as the Ultimate Boon.
Wikipedia describes the Ultimate Boon this way:
“The ultimate boon is the achievement of the goal of the quest. It is what
the person went on the journey to get. All the previous steps serve to
prepare and purify the person for this step, since in many myths the boon is
something transcendent like the elixir of life itself, or a plant that supplies
immortality, or the holy grail.” My emphasis.
Here in End of Days Spike tells us that Buffy’s found it (my emphasis
again): “And you did it. Fulfilled your mission. Found the Holy Grail.” The
quest for the Holy Grail is, symbolically, a quest for the deeper meaning of
life. At different times that might mean Christian salvation or, more
generally, spiritual progress. We might see it in more secular terms as
seeking wisdom or the meaning of life. Success on the quest involves
asking the right questions. Buffy’s conversations with Spike and Faith are
leading her in the right direction, but she has one more step to take.
Since I referred to the Scythe as a symbol, that means that it isn’t itself the
Boon, just as Excalibur wasn’t the kingship, but a symbol of Arthur’s right
to be the true King in one version of that story. There’s a good reason why
this particular symbol takes the form of a Scythe. From the Penguin
Dictionary of Symbols (via Rufus at ATPO): “sickle: Curve weapons
generally relate to lunar symbolism and to fertility. They are the mark of
female nature. The sickle may thus symbolize the harvest-cycle, self-
renewing, and death and the hope of rebirth......... The sickle is also the
attribute of Death and Time, which destroys all things (see also SCYTHE)
…. In this context the sickle is the symbol of decisive resolve, of determined
differentiation on the path of individual or collective evolution. It is the
sign 'of temporal progress and of evolutionary necessity itself', the
sprouting of the primeval seed.”
The actual Boon, and the relationship of the Scythe to the Boon and to the
solution to Buffy’s seasonal challenges, will appear (duh) in Chosen.
Now let’s complete the discussion which began in Dirty Girls and consider
Faith’s performance as General. She got that job as a result of the decision
to evict Buffy in Empty Places. Now that we’ve seen the full consequences
of her actions, we need to understand what Faith did wrong in the context of
the debate over generalship in order to understand the point being made.
In my view, the whole point of the attack on the “arsenal” was to refute the
belief that the problem was that Buffy was a bad General. Regardless of
how you evaluate Buffy’s Generalship, Faith was, if anything, worse: she
risked a good many lives to attack an arsenal, which would be a very low-
value target compared to the Hellmouth or the vineyard; Faith had every
reason to believe the whole setup was a trap, and it was (unlike Buffy); she
did no reconnaissance at all (unlike Buffy), instead spending her time
having sex with a subordinate; she had no idea who or what might be
guarding the weapons; she had no idea what was there; she left the house
and the most defenseless Potentials unguarded by Willow (unlike Buffy);
she had no backup or reserve force (unlike Buffy); and she took the
Potentials to a location with no lights, giving the Bringers a huge advantage
(unlike Buffy).
Nor, for the same reasons, did Faith do a good job of protecting the girls.
That was the other half of her charge from Buffy at the end of EP: “Protect
them, but lead them.”
It’s important to understand that, though it may seem like it, I’m not
criticizing Faith here. I particularly am not criticizing her order sending
Willow, et al. to look after Buffy. While that’s probably a bad tactical
decision, I interpret it as speaking well for Faith’s concerns about Buffy.
Yes, she failed to protect the Potentials. But whether it was this particular
risk or some other one, the Potentials are in danger. There’s probably
nothing Faith or anyone could do which would guarantee their safety.
That’s a lesson the Potentials needed to learn.
Yes, she did a worse job than Buffy at being General, even if she had
express approval from Giles and implicitly from everyone else. I’m simply
stating that the point of this sequence was not to compare Faith with Buffy,
but to rule out the possibility that Buffy’s “poor” Generalship was the real
problem, one which could be solved merely by replacing her with another.
Think of it this way: It’s theoretically possible that one day there’d be a
Slayer who’s another Hannibal or Napoleon. It’s questionable whether this
would be a good thing; great generals aren’t necessarily gifted with Buffy’s
moral sense and intuition, only great generalship. We can hope that
someone, someday, might come along with the whole package. In the
meantime, though, the world is stuck with a system in which the Slayer,
whoever she might be and whatever her faults, must be the leader, with
everyone else bearing the cost.
No, given the context of a season in which the isolation of the Slayer and
the inability to “save them all” are the related problems to be solved, the
very fact of having a General in the first place reinforces those problems
rather than solving them. Faith’s actions remind us of the logical box which
traps Slayers and Potentials alike.
Buffy’s conversations back at the house confirm the point I’ve been making
all along about Generalship:
AMANDA
I think we got punished.
BUFFY
What?
KENNEDY
(nervously) We, uh...we followed her. And it was—
VI
It didn't work out.
BUFFY
You guys, it was a trap. It's not her fault. That could've just as easily
happened to me.

Buffy hammers the point home to Faith:

FAITH
Somebody has to lead. Let's vote for Chao-Ahn. It's harder to lead people
into a deathtrap if you don't speak English.
BUFFY
It wasn't your fault.
FAITH
(looks away) I'm really not looking for forgiveness.
BUFFY
You're not?
FAITH
What do you want me to say? I blew it.
BUFFY
You didn't blow it.
FAITH
Tell that to—
BUFFY
People die. You lead them into battle, they're gonna die. It doesn't matter
how ready you are or how smart you are. War is about death. Needless,
stupid death.

Yes, Faith made mistakes. But that’s not the source of the problem, any
more than Buffy’s mistakes were. Every Slayer – every person – makes
mistakes. There’s no solution to that problem. The problem which is our
focus is the one Buffy identified: leading people into battle. That’s the
problem because it creates the isolation which has been the theme of S7 all
along:
FAITH
So, here's the laugh riot. My whole life I've been a loner….
FAITH
No ties, no buddies, no relationships that lasted longer than...
FAITH
OK. The point. Me, by myself all the time. I'm looking at you, everything
you have, and, I don't know, jealous. Then there I am. Everybody's looking
to me, trusting me to lead them, and I've never felt so alone in my entire
life.
BUFFY
Yeah. (swallows, looks down)
FAITH
And that's you every day, isn't it?
BUFFY
I love my friends. I'm very grateful for them. But that's the price of being a
Slayer.
Buffy can’t solve all the world’s problems, but perhaps there’s a solution to
this one.
I don’t have much to say about the other vignettes which make up the
episode. I think the scenes with Buffy and Xander in the kitchen and of
Anya and Andrew at the hospital are terrific. I do, however, want to
emphasize the importance of catching the ambiguity of the Guardian’s
words:
WOMAN …. This [the Scythe] is a powerful weapon. (hands the Scythe
back to Buffy)
BUFFY Yeah.
WOMAN But you already have weapons.
BUFFY Oh.
WOMAN Use it wisely and perhaps you can beat back the rising dark.
Does she mean that the Scythe is a weapon in addition to the ones Buffy
already has? Or that she already has the necessary weapons and doesn’t
need the Scythe as a weapon? Or both?
Trivia notes: (1) For those who haven’t read it, the Scythe – that’s what
we’re calling it – is featured in Joss’s graphic novel Fray. (2) Willow’s
“scythe matters” joke plays on the advertising campaign for the 1998 movie
version of Godzilla. (3) Buffy’s description of the Scythe as “kills strong
bodies 3 ways” plays off the old advertising slogan for Wonder Bread
(“builds strong bodies 12 ways”). (4) Buffy “King Arthured” the Scythe out
of the stone in reference to the stories of King Arthur pulling the sword
Excalibur out of a stone. (5) Willow mentioned the Children's Crusade, and
there actually was one (see the link). (6) We last saw Miss Kitty Fantastico
in the episode Family. Judging by Dawn’s comment, she came to a tragic
end. (7) Xander mentioned I, Claudius, for which see the link. (8) Note the
contrast between Buffy’s rejection of more power in GiD and Caleb’s
embrace of it here. (9) Spike’s reference to the Scythe as the “Holy Grail”
supports the possible Fisher King vibes I mentioned in trivia note 11 to
Touched. In that movie, finding the “Holy Grail” cures someone of
catatonia and results in reconciliation for everyone. It’s not clear that the
Scythe itself brings Buffy back to her friends, but it’s fair to say that finding
the Scythe did. (10) Spike’s description of the Scythe as the “Holy Hand
Grenade” refers to Monty Python and the Holy Grail. That movie was
directed by Terry Gilliam, who also directed The Fisher King. (11) For
Spike’s comparison of Buffy to Carrot Top, see the link. This is possibly the
best example in the series of my point in the Introduction that comedic
references can become dated very quickly. (12) Spike told Buffy in Fool
For Love that killing the Chinese Slayer was “the best night of my life”.
Now, simply holding Buffy and giving her emotional support is. (13) Anya
did leave town previously, as she tells Andrew, in Graduation Day 1,
though that wasn’t an apocalypse. (14) At Comicon 2003, Joss said that
Buffy sending Dawn away was the fulfillment of FE/Joyce’s statement in
CWDP that “Buffy won’t choose you”. (15) Dawn confused the word
“chloroform” with color forms. (16) Buffy’s note told Dawn that she’d
promised to show Dawn this beautiful world, which was the promise she
made in Grave. (17) Caleb compared his new strength to “like being
reborn”, for which see the link. As is often the case with evil, it’s a twisted
mirror image of what actually happens to the good. It’s Buffy who’s been
truly reborn. (18) For Xander’s joke about “it’s all fun and games until
someone loses an eye”, recall this passage from Dead Man’s Party:
“Cut to an intersection in the alley. Buffy comes around the corner and
looks down the adjoining way. There she sees a man dressed in black,
walking suspiciously, as though looking for something. She begins to
follow silently, but doesn't notice an empty aluminum can on the pavement,
and steps on it. The man reacts instantly to the noise, spins around and
swings at her with a stake. Buffy throws up her arms and cross blocks the
swing, then deftly takes the stake from the man's hands and raises it to
counter attack. He steps back, and the white cross hanging from his neck
swings around, standing out in marked contrast to the rest of his attire.
Buffy sees that it's Xander, and stays her attack. Xander is taken completely
by surprise and just stares back at her.
Buffy: (lowers the stake) Didn't anyone ever warn you about playing with
pointy sticks? (shakes it at him) It's all fun and games until somebody loses
an eye.”
 Chosen
DRUSILLA
… You like our little songs, don't you? You've always liked them, right
from the beginning. And that's where we're going...
THE MASTER
...right back to the beginning. Not the Bang... not the Word... the true
beginning. (Lessons)
Joss: “And the real beginning was girl power. The real beginning is what
does it mean to be a Slayer?”
There’s much to say about Chosen and about S7 as a whole, such that this,
like most of the finale posts, will be a long one. As I did with The Gift, I’ll
start with the conclusion. It’s always easiest to reverse engineer the season
once you know where it’s going. Then, because S7 often gets criticized, I’ll
outline how the season themes played out and the paths of the core
characters.
Season 7, like Season 3, has empowerment of others as the solution to
Buffy’s challenges. Empowerment of others is the Ultimate Boon, the
answer to the question Buffy asked Giles in Grave:
BUFFY: (quietly) I guess ... I wasn't ready before. It took a long time for
that feeling to go away ... the feeling that I wasn't really here. It was like ...
when I clawed my way out of that grave, I left something behind. Part of
me. I just... (pauses, looks Giles in the eye) I don't understand ... why I'm
back.
GILES: You have a calling.
BUFFY: But it was my time, Giles. Someone would have taken my place.
(Giles grimacing) So why?
She knows she's special but doesn't really understand: "Why me?", a
question even more poignant after her death and resurrection. All during S7
she struggled with the sense of isolation. She first tried to overcome it by
withdrawing even more into her "special" cocoon, but that only isolated her
all the more. Only here in Chosen does she meet her challenge, and it’s not
by making herself special, it’s by making everyone her equal.
Let’s fit this theme of empowerment together with the metaphor of the First
Evil. As is always true, the main villain represents in metaphor the
challenge Buffy has to overcome. As I noted in several posts, the First
represents separation or isolation. It’s the voice inside us that tells us we’re
not good enough, that others don’t care for us, that we should go off on our
own. Buffy’s sense of isolation from being the Slayer has been present since
the very first episode of S1, and we were shown it repeatedly in S7. I’ll
quote from Conversations With Dead People because it’s simple and
spelled out bluntly in scenes Joss himself wrote, but I’ll bet I could find 50
similar expressions of the same point throughout the series, beginning in
Welcome To The Hellmouth:
HOLDEN So, all that time, you were a slayer?
BUFFY The.
HOLDEN "The", like as in "the only one"?
BUFFY Pretty much.
HOLDEN Oh. So, when you said not connected, that was kind of a telling
statement, wasn't it - ?***
HOLDEN So, you meet someone, you form a bond...
BUFFY But it never lasts.
HOLDEN Do you mean in all relationships, or just yours?
BUFFY …I think there're people out there who'd make it. I just... target the
impossible ones... with deadly accuracy.
HOLDEN You think you do that on purpose? Maybe you're trying to
protect yourself?
BUFFY Protecting myself? From heartbreak, misery, sexual violence, and
possible death? Not so much.
HOLDEN From committing.***
BUFFY I feel like I'm worse than anyone. Honestly, I'm beneath them. My
friends, my boyfriends. I feel like I'm not worthy of their love. 'Cause even
though they love me, it doesn't mean anything 'cause their opinions don't
matter. They don't know. They haven't been through what I've been through.
They're not the slayer. I am. Sometimes I feel - (sighs) this is awful - I feel
like I'm better than them. Superior.
HOLDEN And so you can't win. And I thought I was diabolical - or, at least
I plan to be. You do have a superiority complex. And you've got an
inferiority complex about it. (laughs) Kudos.
BUFFY It doesn't make any sense.
HOLDEN (sits forward) Oh, it makes every kind of sense. And it all adds
up to you feeling alone.
Joss: “I lived my life feeling alone. That's just the way of it. I always did.
As soon as I was old enough to have a feeling about it, I felt like I was
alone. No matter how much I loved my family - and I actually got along
better with my family than I think most people do - but I just always felt
separate from everybody, and was terribly lonely all the time. I wasn't living
a life that was particularly different from anybody else's, a pariah - it wasn't
like I didn't have friends, but I just... we all of us are alone in our own
minds, and I was very much aware of that from the very beginning of my
life. Loneliness and aloneness - which are different things - are very much, I
would say, of the three main things I focus on in my work.”

I don't see how it could be any clearer that the First Consequence (TM) of
becoming the Slayer is the psychological sense of separation the Slayer
feels from the rest of the world. The First – which made itself known to the
SG in CWDP – is therefore the metaphorical demon which stands between
Buffy and the world at large. Not only does it force Buffy into a position –
General Buffy – in which she becomes even less connected, but we see at
the end that the First itself, in the shape of Buffy, has the goal of "feeling"
the connection to others. Buffy is at war with herself. Note that when the
First appears as Buffy, it always portrays her as arrogant and obsessed with
power. That’s the superiority side talking, and it’s telling.
Buffy only recognizes this internal conflict when the First/Buffy confronts
her in the basement in Chosen. When the First/Buffy overplays its hand by
taunting her with her aloneness, that gives her the solution of ending the
isolation of the Slayer by empowering others.
Sharing power solves all of Buffy’s problems identified in the early
episodes of S7: she no longer has to function as “the law” (Selfless). She
therefore will no longer suffer the sense of isolation and uncertainty she
faced because she was the only one (CWDP). And she no longer has to save
everyone (Help) because not only are others available who might also save
them, but lots of people can now save themselves. Empowerment of others
solves Buffy’s problem not just for S7, but for her whole career as the
Slayer; that makes it a perfect theme for the series finale. Given that, I
should explain how I understand the empowerment spell to work.
I’ll start by asking, whom does she empower in Chosen? In a narrow sense
the Potentials. Let me just explain in a bit more detail how I understood that
process.
As long as Buffy functioned as “the” Slayer, she was necessarily placed in
the role of General. I’ve explained the logic of this in previous posts, so I
won’t belabor it here. The problem began with the Shadowmen. The evil of
the Shadowmen was not that they imbued the First Slayer with power; for
all we know, that power was benign. No, the evil was the lack of choice, the
fact that they forced her. They isolated her from all other women and made
her alone fight the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness.
The tactic of the Shadowmen was to fight demons by concentrating power.
Within that paradigm, it's not that Buffy was wrong about the fact that she
was therefore in charge, it's that she was right. Buffy felt uncomfortable
with her role – that instinct caused her to reject the Shadowmen – but she
was trapped by the paradigm that said power had to be concentrated in
order to be used in opposition. Her answer wasn't wrong, the question was.
“It’s about power” in the sense of who has it, not in the sense of how much
one person has.
As we saw in Showtime, Buffy’s actions as “the” Slayer, as General, made
everyone conscious of their own weakness. Everyone else was subservient
to her. In GiD, Buffy’s harsh attitude was sucking the power out of
everyone else.
This is very realistic. It’s pretty well established that a relationship
involving subservience distorts the character of both master and servant.
This was widely observed under slavery, where the obsequious false cheer
of the slave became a stereotype (see Gone With The Wind). It wasn’t just
the impact on the slave which was harmful, though. Here’s Thomas
Jefferson describing the effect of the process on the masters:
“The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of
the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one
part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and
learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. … The parent storms, the
child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the
circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus
nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by
it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his
manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances….”
Slavery is an extreme, but the same is true even under lesser forms of
oppression, with weaknesses exaggerated (Rona) and strengths hidden or
rejected by the victim (Annabelle and Chloe). We also see cases of bravado
like Kennedy, who, much as Jefferson described the child, acts like she
thinks Buffy would want while training the Potentials in GiD. As I said in
my post on Potential, I see the Potentials as representing the less attractive
aspects of womanhood precisely because they’ve been forced into a
position of subservience.
As we saw in Get it Done, that subservient role was created by a patriarchal
structure, which is important because Buffy adopted a traditional patriarchal
role as General. It was if the only change necessary for women was for a
woman to replace a man in a traditional man’s role. In fact, the Potentials
are at first excited by this (see the look on Kennedy’s face after Buffy
defeats the Ubervamp at the end of Showtime). Eventually they’re
disillusioned because their condition doesn’t change. Buffy actually
perpetuates and even reinforces their subservient role.
Buffy’s speech in BotN was therefore a critical turning point in the season
because in calling for an “army” she took the wrong path. We didn’t realize
it at the time: the speech was emotionally stirring; we knew there was
“only” one Slayer, so it seemed natural for Buffy to take the lead; Giles had
pushed her in that direction with his “it’s up to you” comments; and we
ourselves structure armies this way. But the whole point of the episodes
from BotN through Empty Places is that Buffy is making a mistake. The
ability of one woman alone to fit herself into a patriarchal role is not the
answer.
By taking on the role of General and protector of the Potentials, Buffy
accepted them in their subservient state rather than recognizing that what
they needed was not protection but the ability to protect themselves. It’s like
the old proverb “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man
to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” It’s not an accident that in the
episode titled Potential, Dawn “gives” her power to Amanda even though it
wasn’t really her power to give. That’s the solution Buffy adopts in Chosen.
The choice Buffy offered the Potentials in Chosen was not to be
empowered, but to participate in the fight against evil. They will be Slayers
– that is, someone who joins in the fight – not because they were Chosen,
but because they have Chosen. Those who followed her into the Hellmouth
didn’t do so because they had power – Willow hadn’t done the spell yet –
they did so because they chose to fight. Given the strong similarities
between S3 and S7, it’s worth noting the similar decision at the end of
Choices made by Willow, Buffy’s metaphorical spirit. And given that, it’s
interesting that it’s Willow who provided the opportunity for Anya to
choose her own destiny in Selfless.
That’s the narrow case for the way empowerment plays out in S7. But I see
the theme as much more generally applicable, as I’ll try to explain.
I know that it's common to speak of Buffy as a feminist icon. Joss has
implied this, reviewers cite it in support, authors write books with that as
the theme, it's a commonplace on the net. This means something a little
different to me than it may mean to others.

In one sense, having Buffy as a feminist icon may mean that the message
we get from her and from the show is directed mostly (exclusively?) to
women. That is, that feminism is a way to empower women, to encourage
them to work through the specific problems they face. I think that this
interpretation of the show is very valuable; certainly I felt my own
daughters watched with this perspective and learned from it.

But the show always meant something additional to me. To me, feminism is
a lens, a perspective, through which to view human problems. In my
interpretation, the message Buffy sends is for women, but it’s not just for
women, it's for all of us, male and female alike. As I said in the
Introduction, Buffy may face her problems as a woman, but all of us, no
matter our gender, should identify with her as much as we do male heroes.
As Joss put it, he wanted Buffy to be “a hero, not just a heroine, but a hero.”
For me, the Central Metaphor of the show is that Buffy is us, the viewers,
and we are her. In this larger sense, she has no color, she has no gender, she
has no age; she is a human figure. That’s not to diminish her role as a
woman, it’s to universalize it. In the same way, Martin Luther King faced
his problems as a black man, but the lessons of his struggles aren’t limited
to that; he’s a hero to all of us, black or white. When Buffy empowered the
Potentials, I felt she empowered me. And everyone else too. She didn't
diminish or reject her own power, she made me aware of and enhanced my
own.
At the end of Chosen, Buffy achieved the thing she’s desired since we first
saw her in Welcome to the Hellmouth. She’s “just a girl”. Buffy’s now
“normal” not because she lost her power, but because everyone else has
theirs back. A “normal” life is not an unempowered life, it’s an empowered
life with everyone else empowered too. She is now "normal" only in the
sense that we no longer live through her, but with her.

There’s an inherent tension in the show's Central Metaphor: if only one is

Chosen, can she really stand for me as a separate individual? The answer is
yes, as long as the metaphor holds. But the metaphor is unstable precisely
because it has to focus on a unique individual while simultaneously trying
to symbolize all of us. Chosen resolved this dilemma. “Look around”, Buffy
says. “If you can be a Slayer, you will be a Slayer. Can stand up, will stand
up. You are me after all.”
In my view, Joss did something incredibly daring in S6-7. Having created
the greatest hero in all of American literature in S1-5, he turned around and
asked, in effect, “do we really need heroes, or can we all be heroes?” Joss:
“It was very important to me to say, ‘Ok great that you've worshipped this
one iconic character, but find it in yourself everybody….’”
Before I review the season as a whole, I need to revisit some points I made
in my posts on S3 and explain how the empowerment solution of S7 fits
with Joss’s absurdist philosophy. As a brief review, I argued (Gingerbread,
Graduation Day) that absurdists distinguish between rebellion and
revolution. The former is fine, the latter is not. Revolution is bad because it
attempts to deny the fundamental nature of the world, to make it into
something it’s not. This leads to violence and terror.
At the end of Chosen, Willow tells Buffy “we changed the world”. So they
did. That, however, doesn’t mean Buffy accomplished a revolution. The
reason it didn’t is that the world we saw until Chosen was an artificial
construct. The Shadowmen (Get it Done) isolated the Slayer by imbuing her
alone with power. All other women were held in subservience. For the
Slayer, the fact of her power was a very mixed blessing, as has been
apparent for some time (at least since S3). By using the Scythe to unlock
the power which had been artificially confined for so long, Buffy didn’t
change the fundamental nature of the world, she restored the world to its
natural state, one that the Shadowmen – the founding Patriarchs – had
artificially corrupted. Buffy restored the balance.
Now I can review how the themes of S7 were established and played out in
the individual episodes. Here’s Joss explaining his idea for the season in an
interview in Cinefantastique magazine: “Let's go back to the beginning….
And the real beginning was girl power. The real beginning is what does it
mean to be a slayer? And, not to feel guilty about the power, but having
seen the dark side of it, and finding the light again.”
Lessons set that goal: It’s about power. Note that it wasn’t Buffy who said
that, it was the First in Buffy’s form. The statement was still true, but not in
the way the First meant. To compare the way in which the understanding of
power changed over the final seasons, start with Checkpoint, where Buffy
asserts her individual power against Glory and the WC. Then go to Two To
Go and Grave, where Willow seeks to match her power against Buffy’s,
only to be undone at last by Xander turning the other cheek. Here in S7,
Lessons gave us the First’s implication that the key issue was the amount of
power possessed by one individual; Same Time, Same Place and Potential
signaled the shared power theme; and Get it Done had Buffy understand
that the amount of power wasn’t important.
Also in Lessons, Willow told Giles that “It’s all connected”. As we learned
in subsequent episodes, “it” might be all connected, but Buffy wasn’t.
Connecting to others by empowering them turns out to be what defeats the
First, the metaphor for separation, of selfishness. We saw that prefigured in
Lessons itself with Buffy’s advice to Dawn at the end (my emphasis): “You
guys are gonna be OK. School is intense, but you'll do all right as long as
you're careful. And you might want to think about sticking together.”
Same Time Same Place also gave us the theme of isolation with Willow’s
self-imposed separation from her friends. That’s what Willow’s spell did –
it shifted her out of the same plane as her friends and left her feeling
desolate and alone. Note the similarity of the metaphor with what Buffy
told Spike in Touched: “Being the slayer made me different. But it's my
fault I stayed that way. People are always trying to connect to me, and I just
slip away.”
STSP also introduced the eventual solution Buffy would adopt in Chosen.
At the end of STSP, Buffy joins hands with Willow and offers her power
because Buffy has so much power she’s giving it away. This theme was
reinforced in Potential when Dawn acknowledged Amanda as a holder of
the power.
Beneath You gave us the hint that Buffy’s problem – more generally, the
Slayer’s problem – arises in the subconscious, while Help spelled out the
psychological dilemma Buffy couldn’t solve while she struggled in the
inappropriate role of General. Help also gave us Xander’s hammer analogy
so that we understood the necessary balance in using the power we have.
Selfless and CWDP drove home the theme of the Slayer’s isolation,
reinforcing what we thought we knew from the previous 6 seasons – that
there can be just one Slayer – and setting up the twist in Chosen. The
constant reiteration of Buffy’s status as “the” Slayer left both Buffy and the
viewers with no way to break the logical box which confined Buffy as the
General precisely because she was the only one.
BotN and Showtime show Buffy taking the seemingly logically inevitable
but wrong path of General. I promised in my post on Showtime to explain
what Beljoxa’s Eye meant, and how it fits into the season themes, so I’ll do
that here.
“BELJOXA'S EYE The First Evil did not cause the disruption, only seized
upon it to extinguish the lives of the Chosen forever.
GILES Then what has caused the disruption? What—what is responsible
for letting this happen?
BELJOXA'S EYE The Slayer.”
As Giles elaborated later, the problem arose because Buffy lives. Anya
misunderstood the import of that, blaming herself and the others for
resurrecting Buffy. That was a nice mislead. Now we can see the true
interpretation: Buffy’s resurrection meant there were two slayers; if two,
why not a hundred? Buffy has always been uncomfortable with the idea of
another Slayer; she was very invested in the idea of being the One. That’s
one reason she was so uncomfortable with Faith’s return:
FAITH
There's only supposed to be one. Maybe that's why you and I can never get
along. We're not supposed to exist together.
As it turned out, Faith’s existence was a major clue to Buffy’s solution.
Get it Done took us to the source of the Slayer’s dilemma. By concentrating
power in “one girl in all the world”, the Shadowmen forced every Slayer to
operate within the confines of a patriarchal structure. That, in turn,
guaranteed the isolation that was inherent in that role, which was essential
to preserve patriarchal control.
We learned in Storyteller and Lies My Parents Told Me that Buffy was
trapped in a narrative, and that the narrative consisted of lies told to her, in
fact told to all Slayers, by the Watchers ever since the Shadowmen. The
basic lie was the one which rested at the very heart of the Slayer line: that
there was only one girl in all the world, etc. Buffy had heard that lie before
she ever came to Sunnydale, and Giles repeated it in their second
conversation in Welcome to the Hellmouth. Other lies flowed from that
source, e.g., “The Mission is what matters”. Neither Nikki Wood nor Giles
knew that was a lie, but it was. Neither did Giles know that it was a lie that
the Mission required that Buffy be the General, but it was a lie all the same.
Dirty Girls and Empty Places demonstrated the inherent flaws in the
structure. They also showed us just how difficult it was to overcome the
existing assumptions about the Slayer, to break out of the established
paradigm. The problem was not that Buffy was a bad General, though she
certainly made mistakes, the problem was that Buffy hadn’t been and
wasn’t willing to give up the idea that she was the Chosen One. The line is
unstable because we have more than one Slayer (Faith), but one of them is
refusing to share the role.
To give you some sense of how literally inconceivable it was for Buffy to
share the power, I’ll re-post one of shadowkat’s comments after Empty
Places. Note that she completely got the problem, but even as perceptive as
she is, the hold of “ONE girl in all the world” was so powerful that she
couldn’t see the solution:
“They are playing by the old rules. The paradigm. Set up by the
Shadowmen, The Council. In the Angel episode Inside Out [which aired
between LMPTM and Dirty Girls; no coincidence] - Gunn says something
interesting to Fred about how if they are being manipulated, then it's time to
flip the playing board. Start your own game. That when push comes to
shove? No one knows the final score. You still have a choice.

Buffy and the SG are letting the FE dictate the rules to them. It sets up a big
bad - they go fight the big bad. It opens up the seal, they go off to close the
seal. It kills some of their team, they fight amongst themselves, giving it
greater power. They don't like one slayer? They choose another slayer to
lead them. … I have a hunch Faith is going to inadvertently make the same
mistakes as Buffy. Unless she stops playing by the rules. And since she like
Buffy has somewhat bought into them...I doubt that will happen.

The question therefore is - how do you change the rules? What are the SG
and Buffy and Faith doing wrong?
1. Is it that they are fighting the bads the First sends to them in
combat? Should they just stop fighting?
2. Is it that they are fighting amongst themselves?
3. Is it that they've put the mission above small things like respect,
human comradeship, kindness, friendship, compassion?
4. Is it that they've stopped listening to each other and instead are
talking at each other, projecting their worst fears on each other?
5. How can they flip the board, if they don't even know they are on
it? Or how to flip it?
I don't know.”
The series closed as it began, with Joss completely subverting our
expectations. The opening words in Touched gave us the answer: “Power to
the people.” Giles, naturally, rejected the phrase contemptuously. Only later
in that episode did Buffy’s path to the solution begin when she recognized
her isolation, but the crucial insight doesn’t come until she faces the First in
Chosen. What Beljoxa’s Eye told us, in the usual cryptic manner of oracles,
was that Buffy was so invested in her role as Slayer that she wasn’t ready to
answer the question Faith posed to her in Empty Places: “Can you follow?”
Giving the Scythe to Faith in Chosen symbolically marks that moment.
To put it in the terms of the Hero’s Journey, Buffy used the power of the
Scythe to enlighten the world with what she has learned. The Scythe, as I
said in my post on End of Days, is merely a symbol, in this case of “female
nature”, “the symbol of decisive resolve, of determined differentiation on
the path of individual or collective evolution.” The Scythe represents
feminine power, “girl power” to use Joss’s phrase. Accessing that power
and sharing it with everyone is indeed the Ultimate Boon.
Since some of the criticism of S7 involves the core members of the SG,
which I’ll treat as including Spike, let me talk about them both in story line
terms and in metaphor.
One of the beneficiaries of the Boon was Spike, though not directly. I think
Buffy inspired Spike’s road to recovery, though I don’t think he did it for
her; he says as much in Touched. He did it for himself, which makes his
sacrifice in Chosen all the more meaningful. Of course, Spike has always
hankered after the Grand Gesture, and it’s fitting that he got it. Spike’s
blood opened the Hellmouth in BotN. His soul closes it. Kind of like
Andrew’s tears in Storyteller.
I’ve seen the complaint that it was Spike who actually did the work of
destroying the Hellmouth, not Buffy. This seems to me to miss the point on
two grounds. First, the point of the episode was not to destroy the
Hellmouth – there’s another one in Cleveland anyway – but to empower the
Potentials as Slayers. That was done by Buffy (through Willow). Second,
the criticism ignores the similarity to GD2, where it’s Giles who actually
kills the Mayor; Buffy merely taunted him and led him to the explosives. In
both cases, though, it was Buffy’s idea and her organization which led to
the destruction of the symbolic source of evil.
Spike’s reaction to Buffy’s declaration of love – “No you don’t. But thanks
for sayin’ it.” – is perfectly consistent with his words to Wood at the end of
LMPTM. Because Spike still sees slayers as devoted to “the Mission” above
all else, he can’t believe Buffy loves him in the only way love is meaningful
to him. He loves her that way, but thinks she can’t ever love him. The irony
is that the empowerment of the Potentials leaves open the path for Buffy to
love someone like that.
I think it’s also possible that it was Spike’s way of saying "You can go, you
don't need to stay here with me." Had he not said that, Buffy might have
stayed. Instead, Spike was able to do what he said he wanted in Grave:
Give her what she deserved. In this sense, you could see it as the same lie
Rick tells Ilsa at the end of Casablanca.
Giles’s role this year seems to be widely disliked. As I’ve said several
times, Buffy’s decision to take on the role of General was a big mistake. In
my view, her decision to take this role was a failure of mind, in the sense
that her mind was out of harmony with her heart and spirit. Basically, the
role of General was an extension of Buffy’s understanding of the Slayer’s
role since at least Graduation Day 2. She stated it straight out in Selfless, in
the passage I’ve quoted so many times before: “You get down on me for
cutting myself off, but in the end the slayer is always cut off. There's no
mystical guidebook. No all-knowing council. Human rules don't apply.
There's only me. I am the law.”
If the Slayer is, by default, “the law”, then it only makes logical sense that
she should be the one in charge. As a practical matter, the final call will
always be hers. She may take advice along the way, just as any General
does, but at the end of the day only the Slayer can decide to slay. It’s
inherent in the “fact” of there being just one girl in all the world.
When did Buffy formally adopt this role? In BotN, when she gave the
stirring speech at the end. And when did Giles show up? Yes, in BotN. What
did Giles tell her in that episode? “I'm afraid it falls to you, Buffy. Sorry. I
mean, we'll do what we can, but you're the only one who has the strength to
protect these girls—and the world—against what's coming.” Then he said
similar things during the course of the next several episodes, at least
through Lies My Parents Told Me. I see Giles’s philosophy in that episode
as one of the lies we’re told by our parents. So the metaphor holds: Buffy’s
mistake in S7 is one of mind, and it’s Giles who is, in substantial part, the
origin of that mistake.
Ok, but there’s still Giles the character. I’ve made this point before, but
Giles’s behavior seems to me very true to life. He has a “child” who has
become an adult, but spent the past year making serious mistakes of
judgment. She may seem to be on track now, but she’s faced with a huge
challenge and he’s not confident that she can handle it on her own. The
temptation to step in as a parent is overwhelming, as I can personally attest.
Giles has so much invested in Buffy, and is so concerned because of what
happened in S6, that he pushes too hard. This is why he seems so
unsympathetic in the middle of the season.
If I’m right that the problem in S7 is an overreliance on mind, then it stands
to reason that Buffy’s heart and spirit will feel somewhat left out and
uncertain about their role. I think this describes Willow and Xander pretty
well.
Willow’s case is obvious. As a character, she’s uncertain of her magical
power for the very good reason that in S6 she abused it. Metaphorically, it’s
important in S7 that Willow be unsure of herself, lacking the inner
confidence that her power is for good and that she is worthy of it, because
that’s how Buffy feels, as she told Webs in CWDP.
Willow’s struggle to balance her power – the theme of Xander’s
conversation with her in Help – appears repeatedly throughout the season.
Sometimes she’s too cautious, at other times she goes overboard; that’s why
her use of magic seems inconsistent, at one minute unable to do a locator
spell, in the next bringing Buffy back from the Shadowmen. Buffy struggles
in the same way with her own exercise of power. The parallel between the
two friends is explicit in Get it Done, where Anya describes Buffy’s
“everybody sucks but me speech” and Willow sucks power from Anya and
Kennedy.
I should note that Kennedy plays an important role in Willow’s progress
precisely because she makes it clear that she is attracted to Willow the
person rather than Willow the powerful witch (from whom she actually
recoils after GiD). Willow needs that reassurance that she’s valued for
herself, not for her magic. In my view, Spike plays a similar role for Buffy
in Touched (and see trivia note 11).
By sharing power rather than grabbing it (contrast Chosen with Get it
Done), the spirit is purified. The white, clearly feminine magic which
purifies Willow – more than a little bit orgasmically, it must be said – tells
us metaphorically that Buffy’s spirit is now pure because her spirit reached
out to others and shared with them. In Get it Done Willow had taken power
from Anya and Kennedy. Here she opened the channel of power for others –
a channel the Shadowmen had closed – without taking any for herself. I’ll
stress this because I think it’s important: the Scythe did not give power to
the Potentials. No, as I interpret the spell it unlocked power already there,
power which had been stifled by the decision of the Shadowmen to limit
that power to one girl in all the world. The Scythe was the catalyst for the
spell, nicely connecting with the conversation between Anya and Willow in
GiD about the need for a catalyst.
I said in my post on End of Days that the Scythe was a symbol akin to
Excalibur. It seemed to apply to Buffy in that context, but here we see that
the symbolism reached much further, namely to everyone whose power was
unlocked.
In assessing Xander’s role, we need to consider the status of Buffy’s heart.
She’s doubly conflicted. First she’s conflicted about the seeming
requirements of Generalship. For example, I think there’s reason to doubt
that she really would sacrifice Dawn to save the world, notwithstanding her
statement to Giles, because her kiss of Dawn at the end of LMPTM suggests
she herself has doubts. Second, she’s uncertain about her relationship with
Spike. This is perfectly mirrored by Xander’s on again/off again hesitancy
about Anya. Both Xander and Buffy must decide how to deal with a
recovering demon – I set out my theory of Spike at some length in earlier
posts, and Anya is in the same basic position – and they aren’t sure whether
to commit or not.
As a side note, I’ll suggest that since the two relationships are being
paralleled both in story and in metaphor, your attitude towards one may
affect your view of the other. Thus, if you believe Xander really did love
Anya, it makes most sense to believe that Buffy really did love Spike.
OTOH, if you doubt that Buffy loved Spike, that’s a good reason to doubt
that Xander loved Anya. I should emphasize that I don’t think it’s
absolutely essential to see the two relationships like this, but it’s suggestive.
Since we’re speaking of Anya, some viewers were upset that Anya died.
Given that her role vis-à-vis Xander was intended to parallel that of Buffy
and Spike, it made sense for both Anya and Spike to die (and see trivia note
20). Note that she died doing something truly, nobly Selfless. Joss:
“Andrew learning that the thing that he's sort of reviled for, making up
stories, becomes the thing that he helps Xander with, becomes the thing that
he actually is good at, giving her the epic death that she didn't actually get
to have.”
Back to Xander, it’s only after Buffy has her insight about her isolation in
Touched that she can restore her heart and spirit to their rightful place. She
starts with Xander in the kitchen scene in End of Days, committing her
human half (Dawn) to his care. With her heart now able to influence her
judgment, she then welcomes Giles (“I really do.”) and Willow (“This
woman is more powerful than all of them.”) into her plan. Xander protects
Dawn in the fight, Giles organizes the escape, and Willow unlocks the
Slayer power. The whole Buffy, united in heart, mind, and spirit, fully
deserves her smile at the end.
BtVS began by reversing our expectations: instead of the blonde girl being
the victim, she kicks the demon’s ass. The show stayed true to that theme
even at the end – all these years Buffy and her friends have tried desperately
to keep the Hellmouth closed, but at the end the secret was to open it
themselves.
Rahael (AtPO): “What I was thinking also was that in a meta way,
Sunnydale exists because Buffy is there. Kept all to herself, her power
simply kept her in Sunnydale, imprisoned. Sunnydale (and indeed, the
show, BtVS) exists because she is the one girl in all the world. But when the
power is shared, all through the world, Sunnydale collapses, and the world
lies open for the Scoobies.”
As the show ends, we see Buffy contemplating the possibilities of the open
road. That was deliberate metaphor – she can choose, rather than be chosen,
and the possibilities are limitless. When Dawn asks Buffy “what are we
going to do now?”, she’s talking to all of us. We are Buffy.
Trivia notes: (1) Angel’s “not remotely reliable” source for the information
on the First came from the AtS episode Home. (2) Angel’s description of the
amulet as having cleansing power like “possibly Scrubbing Bubbles” refers
to a commercial cleaning product. (3) Buffy asked Angel if he was “going
to to go all Dawson on me”, referring to the main character of the TV show
Dawson’s Creek. (4) Buffy’s statement that she’s “not done baking”
references FE/Warren in Lessons: “She's a girl. Sugar and spice and
everything...useless unless you're baking.” (5) Xander’s “party in my eye
socket” line plays off a line from The Simpson’s episode Homer at the Bat.
(6) I take Spike’s dream – “I’m drowning in footwear” – as a reference to
the Shanshu prophecy. Spike is barefoot; that is, he’s sans shoes. (7) We
first heard “Into every generation, a slayer is born. One girl in all the world.
She alone will have the strength and skill to …” in Welcome to the
Hellmouth. (8) Buffy’s decision to open the Hellmouth makes her speech in
BOTN prophetic: “I'm standing on the mouth of hell, and it is gonna
swallow me whole. And it'll choke on me. We're not ready? They're not
ready. They think we're gonna wait for the end to come, like we always do.
I'm done waiting. They want an apocalypse? Oh, we'll give 'em one.” (9)
Faith’s claim to Wood that she has “mad skills” is American slang meaning
she’s great at, uh, it. (10) For Trogdor the Burninator, see the link. (11) Joss
said of the scene where Buffy and Spike stand facing each other in the
basement that “to me it's almost the most important shot in the show
because it shows the mystery of their relationship and that's one where I
wanted the audience to fill in the blank. I wanted whatever you want to
have happened to have happened. If people believe that on their last night
together they made love great; if people believe that on their last night
together they talked all night, if people believe they had a fight, great.
Whatever it is, it's up to the viewer; the viewer has earned that.” When I
watched Chosen the first time, I assumed they had sex, and that’s still how I
interpret the scene. (12) Xander’s proposal of miniature golf references
several previous episodes, notably When She Was Bad: “Hey, I got a plan:
how 'bout miniature golf.” (13) Buffy’s shoe craving may reference Spike’s
dream or her own shoe shopping noted by Hank in WSWB. (14) As the core
4 part from each other in the hall, they do so in reverse order of their
introduction to Buffy in WTTH. (15) Giles’s statement – “The earth is
definitely doomed” – echoes his concluding line in The Harvest. (16) Buffy,
Faith, and the Potentials opened the Hellmouth by using Andrew’s knife
from Storyteller. (17) The scene of all the Turok-han, like the one in Get it
Done, is an homage to the Peter Jackson movie version of Lord of the
Rings. (18) Buffy has always won by changing the rules or finding a
creative solution. Her insight to empower the Potentials reminds me of
Captain Kirk’s response to the Kobayashi Maru. (19) Note the pun when
Buffy tells the First to “get out of my face”. In American slang, that means
to get away from me, to stop challenging me. Here it also means “stop
taking my form”. (20) Emma Caulfield asked Joss to kill off Anya. She’d
been having contract disputes with the network and didn’t want to return.
Joss intended someone to die, and this made the decision easy. D’Hoffryn
may have predicted Anya’s death with his final words in Selfless: “ANYA
You should've killed me. D'HOFFRYN Oh, I wouldn't worry about that.
From beneath you, it devours. Be patient. All good things in time.”
Fittingly, Anya’s last word was “bunnies”. (21) Spike’s “school’s out for
bloody summer” comes from the Alice Cooper song “School’s Out”. (22)
When Buffy’s and Spike’s hands burst into flame, I see that as a reference
to the opening lines of “Walk Through the Fire”: “I touch the fire and it
freezes me/I look into it and it’s black./Why can’t I feel?/My skin should
crack and peel./I want the fire back.” (23) Spike triumphed with his soul
glowing. One might say effulgent. (24) Buffy’s “I love you” fulfills Cassie’s
prophecy to Spike in Help (“She’ll tell you”). (25) Since Spike was the one
who created the huge crater, having the “Welcome to Sunnydale” sign fall
over is a neat reference back to School Hard and Lover’s Walk. In both
episodes, he drove into Sunnydale and knocked over the sign with his car.
(26) Giles mentioned the existence of another Hellmouth in Cleveland,
which was first noted in The Wish. (27) The last word we hear Buffy say is
“Spike”. (28) Chosen is the 100th episode since the First Evil was
introduced in Episode 44, Amends. Just as Episode 100, The Gift, completed
Buffy’s journey in the sense of bringing her to adulthood, so Chosen did in
the sense of eliminating the loneliness of that journey.