From The Morgue

SMG gives awesome face-crumple.

The Buffy audience learned before the end of season two that Angel was getting his own spinoff show. This wasn’t just the secret insider info of the superfans, either, but commonplace knowledge discussed in the TV Guide. The audience knew as they watched season three that Angel would be gone by season four. Buffy and Angel can’t end up together, because they are going to be on different television shows, and there’s no fate more final than that.

Has there ever been another romance on TV that went down like this? The Buffy-Angel relationship was central to the show as it reached its greatest heights of public awareness and broke through to become a critical favourite. The show was on the WB, so there had to be yearning and makeouts and two beautiful people hot for each other. It was also a Whedon show, which meant emotional tragedy, so the two lovers were pitted against each other against their will. Everything else in the show – and yes, there was a lot of everything else – revolved around the central fulcrum of Buffy/Angel. The show had not overplayed its hand with these characters either, taking its time to bring them together, making sure there was plenty more to explore between them. And now, with this love story at the peak of its importance to the narrative of the show, and not even close to being exhausted, the decision is made to end it?

Splitting up a show’s central relationship to give one of the characters a spinoff – why would you do that? Even if you had faith that Angel could sustain a new show (and based on what we’d seen thus far, it was hard to see how this would work), how do you make sure you don’t wound Buffy in the process of extracting him? What if you end up with two broken shows and no working ones? And what the heck do you do with Angel in the meantime?

The show’s central romance becomes in season three a kind of slow unraveling, and the viewers can only root for them to find the least painful way to their separate futures. The characters already seemed to have a sense of what was before them, with both Buffy and Angel reluctant to resume their romance early on. This came to a head in Lovers Walk as Spike got under their skin with his claim that they couldn’t stay together without destroying each other. But the chemistry and history between these characters can’t be undone by a single speech, no matter how potent it is; the point needs to be made over and over again before it feels real. And, as ever, emotional reality is key in this show.

This episode’s purpose is to continue the unraveling, to pull a few more threads loose from the Buffy/Angel relationship, but to ensure each movement and change feels authentic. The episode (a Whedon joint) puts a focus on Angel, an important move to ensure the coming separation is mutual and thus sustainable. (Also, a bit of a test run for giving Angel the narrative focus ahead of his solo debut.) Angel is haunted by nightmares of his past sins and visions of his victims. He is being tormented by something called The First, or The First Evil, which no-one else can see, and slowly he is losing control of himself. The First seeks to drive him to kill Buffy, but even in his disoriented state he cannot do it, and resolves to kill himself instead.

What is the First? Giles knows it as an ancient power of evil. By its own account it is “something that you can’t even conceive… Beyond sin, beyond death. I am the thing the darkness fears. You’ll never see me, but I am everywhere. Every being, every thought, every drop of hate.” Angel decides to kill himself instead. “You’re not supposed to die. This isn’t the plan. But it’ll do.” Note that word, “plan”. The First claims that it (in concert with unidentified other powers, it uses the word “we”) brought Angel back from the hell dimension, and wants him to transform back into Angelus. Is this a reasonable goal for the First Evil, to bring Angelus back? And if it is – why is Angel’s suicide an acceptable alternate?

There is no attempt to make this aspect of the plot make any particular sense. Perhaps it is simplest to return to the metafictional lens. This positions the show itself as an entity with motives in the fiction, namely to make Buffy and her friends suffer. For example, Angel returned from the hell dimension precisely at the moment his return would cause the most harm. The First’s motivations suddenly make sense if we understand it as an expression of the show’s own need for antagonism and pressure. The show can freely threaten both Buffy and Angel, knowing that it needs both of them to headline their shows the following season – of all the characters to pick on, these two have absolute plot immunity. It doesn’t therefore worry that either of them will die, because they cannot. What matters is they are both pushed to a point of absolute breakdown, so they can split apart. Angel becoming Angelus and Angel trying to end his own life both work to collapse the Buffy/Angel relationship, so they are both acceptable to the First.

As things transpire, Angel attempts to kill himself by facing the sunrise, and Buffy runs to stop him. The conversation they have is extraordinary. Angel says he is too weak to resist his darkness and it is better for everyone that he die, but Buffy refuses to accept that he should give in. When Angel calls his self-destruction an act of strength, Buffy’s reply gives him pause: “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.” This is as good an expression of the core ethos of the Buffy/Angel cosmology as you’ll find. And to underline the point, it starts to snow.

The snow is something of a controversial moment in Buffy. Whedon suggested it as a potential act of God, but certainly not necessarily the Christian God; a higher power, saving Angel from the sunrise, and giving him a sign of absolution. It was too crazy, too inexplicable, too sickly-sweet, too deus ex machina for many viewers. For me, it feels like the perfect ending. If the First is the show itself expressing its need to harm the characters, the snow is the show’s compassionate love for them. Angel and Buffy walk through the snowfall holding hands, their romance in a strange and breaking place, their world unsteady and uncertain, but the moment abundant with beauty and connection and meaning. Fighting is hard and painful and every day; but sometimes, if you’re lucky, it might just snow.

Other thoughts:
* What would the show be doing if Angel wasn’t spun off? Would the storyline be working out the same way? It is very hard to say. There is always pressure in an ongoing television show to avoid settling into a comfortable pattern, and Whedon has already shown his eagerness in this regard, casually throwing out patterns almost as soon as they get established. A sustained happy-ever-after for Buffy and Angel was never a possibility. At the same time, Angel was an important part of the show and a big drawcard for the audience, and it’s hard to see him getting written out – even if Whedon wanted to, the producers might have balked. The way most shows handle these twin pressures is to end up playing mix-and-match with relationships, giving every combination of established cast a chance to have a romantic connection with each other until the possibilities are exhausted. Thanks to the Angel spinoff show, Buffy manages to (mostly) escape this phenomenon (although Angel itself won’t do quite so well).
* Some cracking scenes in this one. Angel going to Giles for help, and the sudden appearance of Jenny Calendar; Cordelia’s justified coldness; the return of Willy’s demon bar (and Xander as comedy goofball again); Willow’s attempted sexytimes with Oz.
* But also some stuff that doesn’t quite land. The flashbacks never quite work, and the First doesn’t come together as a foe. The whole episode feels unbalanced structurally, which I think is a sign of ambition rather than carelessness but it still doesn’t feel right to me.
* Nice to see Faith again, and to see her joining Joyce and Buffy for Christmas.
* There’s some interesting juice in the idea of Angel’s ultimate weakness being his sexual desire for Buffy, given the association between vampires and rape culture that the show gestures towards on a regular basis.
* Buffy says to Angel: “You have the power to make amends. On your own series.” (slight paraphrase)

The hidden connection between Xander and Willow was revealed last week, with predictably devastating consequences for their respective romantic partners. This episode is dedicated to the fallout. Mostly the focus stays on Cordelia, but the interaction between Oz and Willow is of course the most painful: Oz gives Willow a smackdown that is so clear and gentle and insightful it is almost kind, and therefore it hurts the most.

Willow has always been the audience’s emotional conduit into the fiction, and so we could expect to be wounded there. Our relationship with Cordelia, however, is much more ambiguous. She has been part of the Scooby Gang for a long time but has never been admitted to the inner circle. Although her role as truthseer/truthsayer hasn’t been used much lately, she still maintains the outsider’s position. Her relationship with Xander has consistently been seen as unusual and inexplicable, including by the characters themselves. After an event like this, any realistic emotional reaction would likely see Cordelia distance herself from the gang, and therefore from the show. It is entirely unclear what the show is going to do with her now: the show tacitly acknowledges this by positioning her symbolic destruction of the Scooby gang, by chopping up a photo and burning the others, into the pre-credits climax.

Apart from a perfunctory demon at the cold open and a perfunctory vampire just before the first commercials, the whole first act is monster-free, and mostly devoted to Cordelia. Crucially, we see her bedroom for the first (and only) time, helping us identify with a character who has often been kept at a distance by the show. Then it’s the return of Harmony, who is predictably cruel to Cordelia, but even more so by the handsome popular guy who suggests they might hook up as long as it’s “someplace private”. These scenes do all kinds of work – they of course show Cordelia heartbroken and looking for comfort, but also reinforce our empathy by reminding us that she made a socially-costly choice in choosing Xander, one that refuted something previously core to her identity. Cordelia is not just betrayed, she is also suddenly isolated.

The show takes the time to show us all the ways in which Cordelia is wounded because her heartbreak is to assume fairy-tale power in this episode. She meets a new girl, Anya, and they bond instantly (in a way that rhymes with Cordelia and Buffy’s first, friendly, encounter in the very first episode). However, it turns out Anya is a demon who lures Cordelia into making a vengeful wish – that Buffy had never come to Sunnydale – and then grants it.

This is a form of metaphor monster – “what if your hurt feelings came to life?” It’s interesting to note just how much power the show gives Cordelia’s emotional injury, sufficient to overwrite reality itself. Cordelia finds herself in a dangerous, burned-out Sunnydale, fearful and beset by vampires after the Master successfully rose from his imprisonment. The ruined town is presented vividly, with much of the logic of nightmare, slowly heaping unsettling revelation upon unsettling revelation until we meet Xander and Willow – both vampires in the new reality. Cordelia is narrowly rescued by Giles and his helpers, and learns that this is indeed the world she wished for.

This is (if I remember right) the most dramatic change caused by magic in the whole series, approached only by a similar effect in season four’s Superstar (which, not coincidentally, was also driven by intense personal anguish). It is incredibly effective. The model for this kind of story is Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, in which Scrooge witnesses a dark future that awaits if he does not change his ways. The more recent and more apposite exemplar is It’s A Wonderful Life, in which George Bailey is shown what his town would be like if he’d never been born, and discovers it an awful and dark place. The structure of these tales is clear: the dreamer has a vision of an unpleasant reality, and has a change of heart about the world and their place within it. And so the audience is set up for a breathtaking swerve: Xander the vampire kills Cordelia. Cut to commercial.

Even in a show that delights in subverting audience expectations, this is an exceptional act of rug-pulling, perhaps the most unexpected reversal ever pulled off by the show. It echoes the early twist in Psycho, and not much else: Western storytelling methods have trained us to accept that our primary point-of-view character early on will remain so to the end (and will probably grow as a person along the way). By ditching Cordelia – and at the half-way point, not waiting for the three-quarter – the episode throws out the rulebook and lets us know we are off the beaten narrative track from here on in. Watch out folks, this is bat country.

The rest of the episode continues a brutal tour of the alternative Sunnydale, culminating in a nasty showdown where the returned Buffy and the other remaining good guys engage in a lethal showdown against the Master where pretty much everyone dies before Giles grabs Anya’s magical necklace and smashes it, restoring things to normal. We see Cordelia make her wish, but Anya can no longer grant it; delightedly, Cordelia proceeds to make many more vengeful wishes as the episode ends, having learned no lessons and had no change of heart. The experience was not for her benefit, in the end. It was for ours.

This dark alternative was presented for the audience. It shows us that the show is playing fair, holding to its commitment to real threats. It shows us that this is a story worth telling – that the battles Buffy and friends fight matter to the world. It shows us new aspects of familiar characters (Willow!), and how they have influenced each other (the hardbitten friendless Buffy). And it gives us the visceral thrill of showing how bad things could be if the bad guys won.

Marvel Comics geeks of a certain vintage – approximately the vintage of Joss Whedon, as it happens – will already know where I’m going with this. “The Wish” is a riff on It’s a Wonderful Life, sure, but more than that, it is a very specific take on Marvel’s What If.

The original, classic run of What If was from 1977 to 1984, roughly contemporaneous with the Claremont X-Men run beloved of Whedon and cited by him as a major influence on Buffy. It was the creation of Roy Thomas, a comics superfan turned pro, and displayed his enthusiasm for continuity and winding the many strands of Marvel comics publishing into a single coherent universe. In each issue, a comics tale was reimagined as alternate history: what if things went a different way? Usually this ended with tragic death, often with mass death and destruction, and occasionally the end of the universe itself. Every aspect of the wishverse is right out of the What If? playbook: the triumphant villain, the good-guys-turned-bad, the death and despair.

Within the shared Marvel universe that Roy Thomas loved so much, these imagined alternate histories didn’t matter. They were described as other dimensions or other worlds, but by their nature they couldn’t influence the main reality. They were purely provided as entertainment for the reader, and the effect was to give the experience of depth to this imagined world. A world that can sustain alternate histories is a world that has a history; a world where the fates of characters can change is a world where those fates matter. All stories are imaginary, but this kind of dark counterpart elevates these stories into a special kind of imagined space. Buffy is not just a story – it is a story world.

This claim sits oddly with the show’s gleeful shrugs when it comes to building a believable world outside the main protagonists and their emotional lives. Perhaps it can only be taken seriously as a restatement of the principle of emotional reality: after all, the wish that creates our vision of a different world arises from emotion, and this vision is clearly focused on corruptions of the core relationships amongst our cast.

The events of the previous episode didn’t just send Cordelia careening away from the core cast of this show – they also convincingly argued that Buffy and Angel cannot remain in the same narrative space together without tearing each other apart. If Buffy is a story world, then these emotional trajectories can be followed through: Angel and Cordelia don’t need to stay in Sunnydale, with Buffy. There is a whole wide world out there full of possibilities, and though it might not make much sense in terms of logic, it sure does make sense in terms of passion.

Other thoughts:
* Buffy’s in Cleveland! The idea of Cleveland as another Hellmouth is a minor bit of series lore the show will return to several times, although it never particularly takes it seriously. (Remember, the world doesn’t need to make logical sense!)
* Buffy in the wishverse joins the long tradition of alternate-universe-person with a scar across their face.
* This is a wonderful episode, but there is one note that clunks. The Master – delightfully revived by Mark Metcalfe – reveals his big plan is making an automated blood factory. Once again, technology and the supernatural don’t feel right together on this show, and it doesn’t feel of a piece with the rest of the stuff in the episode or with what we know of the Master. It’s always seemed clear that vampires like hunting, and drinking straight from the source.

Most TV shows have a tone that is fairly easy to understand. Lots of cops-investigating-murders shows run on furrowed brows and gallows humour; most sitcoms have families and friends who love each other despite wacky misadventures. Some shows go for more tonal complexity: Shonda Rhimes makes hugely successful TV that drops near-campy levels of romance all over gut-punching procedural problems; Mitch Hurwitz’s Arrested Development dares you to like the miserable, self-absorbed characters at the heart of the show; Justin Roiland & Dan Harmon’s Rick & Morty makes you both laugh and cry every time a character suffers a messy death.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer encapsulates in its title one of the most challenging tonal mixes of all: horror-comedy. What a misbegotten subgenre, populated with countless misfires that all came about because someone thought “they both involve tension and release – this is gonna be easy!” This is the wrong thought. It is not easy. If you’re not careful, you end up with moments like Pee-Wee Herman’s death scene in one particular horror-comedy film called “Buffy the Vampire Slayer“. Ahem.

It is, of course, not impossible to get right. There was a particularly good batch in the 80s, Fright Night, Ghostbusters, Return of the Living Dead, Evil Dead 2, and a few others, but the list of failures is long. My personal take on why it’s so hard is that most horror effects rely on trapping you inside the fiction, and most comedic effects function by positioning you outside the fiction, and it’s really hard to move back and forth. There’s no reliable route to get around this, and each of the successful films above finds its own solution: they tell a horror story with a dusting of comedy (Fright Night), they tell a comedic story with a dusting of horror (Ghostbusters), they go right through conventional sensibilities and burst out the other side laughing and wielding a chainsaw (Evil Dead 2).

Nonetheless, the Buffy TV show wants to be legitimately scary (it is committed to presenting real threats to its characters) and also legitimately funny. But it doesn’t stop there. If those two contrasting tones weren’t enough of a challenge, the show adds a third: it wants to deliver dramatic, realistic character beats as well. It wants to be a tense horror/delightful comedy/authentic drama. That mixture’s a high degree of difficulty.

Over the last two seasons the show has slowly been getting more skilled at managing these tone differences, and now in season three it is routinely pulling off tonal gymnastics that would have been unthinkable just half-a-season back. This episode is a showcase performance in getting terror, laughter and feels working in harmony.

“Lovers Walk” brings the return of Spike, the scary enemy who had worked so well as a threat in season two. His first appearance in School Hard had given the show a shot of fierce new energy, throwing out the staid vampire threat from season one and replacing it with something that felt much more dangerous and unpredictable. Across the long season Spike was never undermined, and even his period diminished in a wheelchair turned into a reveal of just how canny and dangerous he was. Finally he entered into a very uneasy alliance with Buffy to regain lost ground, then exited the show on his own terms. He remained a scary figure right to the end, even while the show played some delightful deadpan comedy off his cruel wit and that final team-up of convenience.

Spike returns to the show in rather a different state than he left, highlighting the contrast by having him once again crash into the Sunnydale sign on arrival, but this time because he is a pathetic drunken mess as opposed to a fearsome vandal. The show is delightfully clear about how we’re meant to take this: the cut to Spike happens on Cordelia saying “what kind of moron would want to come back here?” Yep – last season’s scary vampire is now comic relief.

And what comic relief he is! Peering drunkenly through the window at Angel, muttering to himself that he’s not afraid even while he slinks away, then tripping over himself and knocking himself out, to being woken by the sunrise setting his hands on fire. Next stomping into a magic shop and ineffectually demanding some kind of lurid curse, oblivious to the magnitude of his decline.

However. Willow enters and leaves the scene, and we swing back to Spike expecting more of the same, but the show pivots right under our feet. Vamp-face on, he cruelly murders the helpful shopkeeper. It is terrifying. And suddenly he’s moving through the narrative with deadly purpose, using Xander to kidnap Willow and then brutally threatening her with a broken bottle.

But this wasn’t just a bait-and-switch, dishing up comedy pathetic Spike before surprising us with his true badass self again. The show continues to use him for laughs: he makes Willow listen to his tale of woe and weeps on her shoulder, prompting her to pat his knee and say “there there”; but then it spins right back to terror, as he homes in on her neck and openly covets her blood. And then both tones at once, as Willow says she might not succeed at what he is asking, and he replies: “Well, if at first you don’t succeed, I’ll kill him [Xander], and you try again.”

The episode continues to pull off this interaction between laughs and horror. The mid-episode climax: Spike turns up at Buffy’s home and finds Joyce, alone and undefended. Of course we’re terrified for her – but the show cuts to reveal Spike sharing his heartbreak with Joyce over hot chocolates. (He asks for the little marshmallows.)

Then Angel appears, correctly identifies that Spike is dangerous- but Joyce knows him only as a threat and refuses to let him in. Spike taunts Angel, pretending to bite Joyce. It’s hilarious and yet we know he’s not kidding – he could turn on Joyce in a moment and kill her without a second thought.

Only when Buffy arrives on the scene does Spike’s deadly threat recede into neutral. The show doesn’t make the slightest effort to maintain tension over Spike’s use of Willow and Xander as collateral, with Buffy guessing very early “he’s probably just got them locked up in the factory.” And yet tension doesn’t disappear. We know by now that the show can pivot fast, and Spike’s threat could be reawakened. But more importantly, we know that Spike is a wild card. He can push the story in all kinds of unexpected directions. He knocks things down and stirs things up, and his presence means nothing is safe.

Which is how we end up with one of the most devastating scenes in the whole run of Buffy: when Oz and Cordelia, who have been so charming and positive and in love with their respective partners, bravely risk their lives to rescue Willow and Xander, only to discover them kissing. This is the show extracting its pound of emotional flesh. There must be pain.

Meanwhile, Spike tears apart the veil that keeps Buffy and Angel from being honest about their feelings for each other with one of the show’s most memorable speeches: “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. Love isn’t brains, children, it’s blood… blood screaming inside you to work its will. I may be love’s bitch, but at least I’m man enough to admit it.”

And still the show isn’t done with the tone switches. Right as Spike rediscovers his true bad self, as he’s starting to seem scary and capable again, he offers the best laugh of the episode: “Oh, sod the spell. Your friends are at the factory.”

There, Cordelia has fallen on some rebar and is horrifically wounded. With Xander, the betrayer, kneeling at her side, she murmurs some final words, then lies still as the camera holds sombre and steady. And we cut to a funeral. And the show immediately shouts “PSYCH!” and has Buffy and Willow talk about how Cordelia’s going to be okay.

These are just the biggest back-and-forth moments this episode; there are plenty more, and several that manage to be hilarious and terrifying at the same moment. This episode makes it look easy, when it really, really isn’t. It’s a sign of how the show has grown, and how good it has become at being what it is. Season two gets the accolades but season three is a clear step up in quality in pretty much every way imaginable.

The show is pulling off these gymnastics and landing beautifully. But how? What is allowing the show to balance comedy and horror so effectively? Not to mention making room for dramatic feels as a third tone! Every tonally complex show has to figure out its own solution to this puzzle. What is Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s?

The answer is right there in front of us, hiding in plain sight. That third tone, the one about realistic characters and emotions? Despite appearances, that doesn’t actually make things more complicated. The third tone allows the first two to work together. How do you make comedy and horror work in harmony? You make them happen to people who feel real.

This episode is the best example so far of the show successfully hitting all three tones, comedy, horror, and personal drama, and switching between them so seamlessly that they are clearly one united whole; each aspect strengthens the rest. It is a significant achievement, something that marks Buffy out as special, that justifies its reputation and importance.

And my instinct, of course, is to cycle right back to where this watching project began: the problem of Jesse, the tension that arose from the show’s core mission to have real threat and real emotions while still being fun to watch. We saw in season two how the show solved the problem of Jesse, but we’ve never really considered why it even tried. What was so important about those principles in the first place? Striving to make a show with real threat (horror) and real emotions (personal drama) that is fun to watch (comedy) – what becomes possible as a result? What makes it worthwhile?

This episode becomes possible. This episode makes it worthwhile. And many more such episodes to come.

Other notes:
* Apparently Buffy nails the SATs? Where does that come from? Huh. The show at least has the grace to lampshade it. Cordy is also academically gifted – the Scoobies are basically the school’s smartest kids. (Except Xander.)
* The precredits climax landing on Spike’s arrival is the second climax that works only if you’ve watched the show before. As the show’s mythology grows, they’ll rely on this more and more.
* The Mayor as big bad doesn’t really work yet. He’s funny and interesting but he doesn’t seem to be up to anything much – he’s very reactive.
* Willow turning to magic straightaway to solve problems – that’s some character that’ll stick.
* The writer for this ep is Dan Vebber, who only wrote one other episode for Buffy. That one’s a cracker too, as we’ll see soon enough.

It’s been a while, but this episode offers one of those three-quarter twists this show does so well. It even lands exactly on the 3/4 cliffhanger. Gwendolyn Post, the officious new watcher who has arrived to supervise Faith, is revealed to actually be a naughty bad one. It’s a great twist because she already gave the show plenty of juice: she’s a logical plot development, a direct challenge to Giles, and a threat to the integrity of the Scoobies while being impossible to easily dismiss. She was even thematically on point, an oblivious adult authority for the teens to cope with and rebel against. The show throws all that out the window to make her a one-and-done villain, so presumably it thinks it’s getting something important in return.

Quick summary: at the beginning of the episode Buffy and Faith are slaying together, focused and happy and literally in sync. Then Mrs Post turns up and immediately assumes the Watcher role for Faith and Buffy, to Giles’s chagrin. She warns the group that a demon called Lagos is hunting a magical glove in Sunnydale. When the group exclude her to have a secret meeting about Angel, she manipulates Faith into finding out more. Shortly thereafter, Giles tells her the location of the glove. She knocks him out and rushes to Angel’s to take the glove, tricking Faith into fighting with Buffy before revealing her villainy and being (inevitably) destroyed. The final scene is Buffy and Faith again, but Buffy’s secrets have changed the relationship. Buffy says “you can trust me” but Faith isn’t interested. They are out of sync, their harmony in pieces.

Buffy’s transgressions against Faith are, by any reasonable standard, minor. They make for a pretty weak lever to split her and Faith, even with that relationship being new. The implication is that Faith’s retreat from Buffy is a response to the whole situation with Gwendolyn Post and Angel and so forth. This points directly at her central character flaw, essentially a fear of vulnerability. It’s smart character work from the show once again, eschewing any simple action/reaction model of behaviour for something messier and more authentically human – note also that, although Faith is shown that Post had been corrupted, she still takes Post’s advice on answering a knock at the door and adopts her description of her room as “Spartan”.

(Faith’s character flaw is also set up as an interesting mirror of Buffy’s: the motivations and methods are very different, but both of them retreat from other people and try to handle everything themselves when the pressure comes on.)

Faith’s retreat from Buffy marks the start of an actual storyline about her, and while it’s obviously a significant development and something that will be central to the season’s arc overall, it wasn’t at all an expected development and it’s very hard to anticipate what will follow – it is a shift that could play out in all kinds of ways. Once again, season three manages to avoid predictability, especially in comparison with the arc in season two which drew great power from its inevitability.

This is obviously a significant development for the show, but in my view it isn’t the most interesting thing going on in this episode. In fact, I don’t even think it’s the most important thing happening here. My nominee for both is how this episode handles Xander.

It’s been clear for a while the show is having issues with the character of Xander Harris. Just a few episodes ago Xander hit a new low, callously abandoning his post to nap when he was supposed to be guarding Oz. This was basically using him for a cheap joke and making him carry the idiot ball so the plot worked out more easily. Both of these are signs the show is struggling to make him work in the ensemble. This isn’t a surprise: a male character representing instinct is always going to struggle to make a good impression in a show with a female perspective, and having his strongest early episode also be the one that makes him an attempted rapist has tainted the character at a deep level.

Two episodes back, the show took a dramatic step to find a way to get some use out of Xander by throwing him into an affair with Willow. It’s a potent, divisive move (the kind of ruthless development that will become something of a trademark – or a cliche – for Whedon’s work) and it infuses every hang-out scene among the Scoobies with some edge-of-the-seat anxiety. Suddenly the audience has every reason to care a great deal about what Xander is doing, because there’s so much at stake – no less than the happiness of Willow, Oz and Cordelia (the three most beloved members of the cast). One thing it doesn’t do is engender any greater sympathy for Xander. I’d expect reactions to this affair are largely driven by where the audience member might sit on their view of Xander – specifically, if they see him as a terminal waste of space, then they’ll hate him for messing up so bad and they might see Willow’s actions as a betrayal of her character by the writers. And by this stage of the show’s history, a lot of people were over Xander. The many years since broadcast have not been kind to the character either.

Xander as he has been portrayed in the previous two seasons has given ample reason for dismay. While he has had several key moments of heroism and good character, his common role in stories from week to week seems to have become “make a thoughtless comment exemplifying male insensitivity and entitlement, and then blunder into a monster and fall down”. The show’s engine runs very easily on those kinds of comments and that kind of blunder, so it’s unsurprising Xander is used in this way over and over again, but it does make it very hard to cheer for him.

Almost in spite of this, Xander has been changing and growing. Xander at the start of season three is different from Xander of season one in many many ways. He is no longer hung up on Buffy, is no longer cruelly oblivious to Willow’s feelings, he is no longer unconvinced of his value as a human being. With the exception of his callous failure to watch Oz recently, he has moved beyond the truely clueless selfishness of his early teenage boy portrayal. These are positive steps, but they don’t seem to be helping: Xander still doesn’t feel right. There’s a simple reason why: the show has made changes in Xander by taking away some of his most egregious negative traits, but they have failed to give him any new aspects to make up for these losses. Xander in season three is in a real sense less of a character than he was in season one, because he has gotten past many of his hangups and now just bumbles along. Until this recent affair with Willow, the show just hasn’t found anything for him to actively do except comment on the action and get into trouble. It’s obvious they don’t have any idea any more what he is for.

In this episode, new writer Doug Petrie delivers a portrayal of Xander that provides the best vision so far of what he can be to the ensemble. (Petrie, like Jane Espenson last week, is another s3 recruit who stays with the show to the end then goes on to greater things.) Under Petrie’s pen, Xander gets plenty of interesting beats.

The episode begins in the Bronze, where Xander is trying to hang out in a group with Willow without encouraging their forbidden attraction; when he accidentally touches her hand, he recoils so much that he makes a gigantic spectacle of himself. He gracefully accepts the humiliation, clearly at peace with his traditional role as clumsy goof.

In the library, he bristles at being ordered around by Giles, but still starts to get stuck into the work, recognizing it’s important. Willow approaches him and rubs her temples to try and relieve her discomfort. He reaches out to do it for her, and she protests weakly, knowing the chemistry between them is dangerous. Xander listens to her, and stops. Whereupon Willow launches herself at him, and they kiss passionately until they are interrupted. Giles tells them of a suspicious location, and Xander volunteers to check it out, partly to get away from temptation with Willow and to (as he puts it to himself) alleviate his guilt.

All of the above is solid, featuring the best parts of Xander – he is trying hard to do the right thing, struggling with his instincts, at peace with the trouble he lands himself in. These are aspects of Xander we’ve seen before, although never quite with this clarity. But from this point on, things get much more interesting, as Xander sees Angel, alive and well – and then sees Buffy and Angel kissing.

Now this is a potent revelation. Xander was, throughout the previous season, the only one who opposed Buffy’s relationship with Angel. Giving the discovery to him is a clear callback to this. However, his response is not to simply blunder in and confront them. Instead, he hurries to Giles, which is unquestionably the best possible thing to do in the situation.

Giles makes the call to stage a kind of intervention with Buffy, and Xander’s first words here are compelling:
Buffy: It’s not what you think.
Xander: Hope not. Because I think you’re harboring a vicious killer.
This is a side of Xander we’ve seen from time to time, most memorably in episode two this season when Xander dressed Buffy down for how her behaviour had affected her friends. There, his anger seemed unfair and unkind, although perfectly understandable and human. Here, it stings because he makes a very good point, and he continues to hammer it home, even naming Jenny Calendar.

Let’s be clear about what the show is doing, here: it is not saying Xander is right. None of the other characters are as upset as he is, even Cordelia, and most of them are taken aback by the cruel way he is making his point. And yet, no-one contradicts him, and everyone else is making watered-down versions of the same complaint. When Buffy challenges Xander, accusing him of being motivated by jealousy, the rebuke just doesn’t work – while not even Xander would reasonably deny there might be jealousy in the mix somewhere, his behaviour clearly comes from a different place. Xander doesn’t even need to defend himself, as he is overtaken by the final word from Giles, who echoes Xander’s words: “Nor shall I remind you that you’ve jeopardized the lives of all that you hold dear by harboring a known murderer. But sadly, I must remind you that Angel tortured me… for hours… for pleasure. You should have told me he was alive. You didn’t. You have no respect for me, or the job I perform.”

This is, quite frankly, an incredible sequence, drawing on two seasons of character and story to find powerful fractures and put them under pressure, and Xander’s right at the heart of it. His flaws are vividly on display but for the first time in a while he’s doing something, pushing hard in a direction, and it works well.

We next see Xander at the Bronze, shooting pool and talking with Faith. This is a startling little sequence, as Xander’s dialogue is in a different register to anything we’ve heard before. He is normally extremely verbose (the default for many Buffyverse characters) but here he’s using clipped sentences with the blunt almost-poetry of a noir character. This matches his behaviour: he goes out of his way to point Faith at Angel, and offers to join her in going to slay him.

When they get to the library to grab some weapons, they discover Giles has been attacked. Faith instantly assumes it’s Angel, but Xander doesn’t. His instincts – so often used to get him in trouble – here give him exactly the right steer. He figures out some reasons why it probably wasn’t Angel responsible, but Faith of course doesn’t listen to him.

Buffy appears, and here Xander does something unexpected, coldly suggesting Angel was responsible for attacking Giles, and telling her Faith has gone to kill him. Buffy is appalled, but Xander is unrepentant. It’s a very interesting move for the character. He then pitches in to fix the problem, and later puts his body on the line to stop the slayers fighting each other.

His final note in the episode is another encounter with Buffy. She asks him if they are cool, and he tells her he trusts her. He doesn’t apologise for “leaning towards the postal”, and Buffy doesn’t ask one, knowing that he did have a point.

This view of Xander is a fascinating step change for the character. The hardened take on the character works surprisingly well, as does the clear indication that he is no longer thoughtlessly following his instincts (which are obviously improving regardless). Here is a Xander Harris who offers something new to the ensemble – a willingness to call it as he sees it, matched with judgments that are starting to show their worth; a fearless ability to challenge the other characters when he thinks they’re out of line, but founded on a commitment to the work; an egoless acceptance of his role as a goof and goat, which also allows him to say and do things the others wouldn’t even consider. This is a Xander who still brings “instinct” to the table, but does so in a way that is effective and distinctive and can drive situations forward in new and productive ways. The show has finally found a way to make Xander work.

If they can only make it stick…

Other thoughts:
* There’s a bit of a bait-and-switch at the top of the episode – it is called “Revelations” and it starts with Willow and Xander being awkward, but their infidelities are not revealed this week.
* Tony Head steals the open – supervising the Slayer duo and then reacting to the arrival of Gwendolyn Post – all without saying a single word. He also gets the best moment in the episode, Giles giving Buffy a private dressing down for keeping Angel secret and reminding her that Angel tortured him. It’s one of the few times in the series where adult/mature authority is given proper moral power, and it hits hard.
* Giles is once again shown to be somewhat forgotten and mistreated by the council, which continues to make zero sense given he is sitting on a powerful Hellmouth and serving as pointman to a Slayer who just came back from the dead. But it makes thematic sense I guess, so we roll with it.
* Sarah Michelle Gellar, whose soap training makes her an ace at communicating what’s going on in Buffy’s head, absolutely sells Buffy’s raw desire for Angel. It’s actually not a common performance beat for a young woman – they are typically the objects of physical desire, not the ones doing the desiring.
* Oz really doesn’t get much to do this ep, but his band play at the Bronze once again. Cordelia is also shaded out almost completely to allow a focus on the core Scoobies. This has become a big ensemble and it’s hard to manage everyone!

Headbang/air drum extra-hard to the theme tune, kids, because Jane Espenson is in the house! Espenson is royalty in the world of geek-culture TV-writing, which is not as much of a niche as it sounds when put like that. Anyway, this is the show where she earned her crown (er, because crowns are totally earned, monarchy is a meritocracy, shut up.) Her fingerprints are all over this ep: it is sharply assembled, full of acute character moments, and funny as hell.

This is one of those episodes where everyone goes a bit weird. In this case, some fundraising chocolate carries a lick of magic that sends all the adults in town hurtling back into teenage revelry, leaving the teenage Scoobies to keep everything together and save the day. The adults-acting-immature gags are fun but the juice of this wacky premise is in the show’s three main adult characters. Joyce, Giles, and Principal Snyder fall under the chocolate spell and cutting loose. The reversal is, of course, established pre-chocolate by reinforcing the status of these characters as the responsible voices of restraint in Buffy’s life. Notably, Buffy is caught out by Giles and Joyce who discover she has been lying to both of them to hide private activities. The two adults team up, parent and parental-equivalent, to deliver a clear message to Buffy that she is being immature. Buffy doesn’t want to listen.

It’s a nice little conflict, because both sides have a point. Joyce and Giles are right to be concerned that Buffy is playing them off against each other, and about her actual whereabouts when she is at large. Yet Buffy hasn’t exactly been going out partying – she is secretly going to help and tend to the recovering Angel. This isn’t a secret she feels she can share with the others in her life. While it is arguable whether or not she is being responsible in doing this, it’s hard to make an accusation of immaturity stick. And yet when she is called on it, Buffy reacts by expressing frustration that she is being over-managed and over-scheduled, saying that she feels treated like a child. This isn’t exactly what Buffy is being asked to address, but it feels very plausible for Buffy to respond to the situation in this way – it feels like a smart character beat, in other words.

Then the adults all change and Buffy (with her friends) has to step up and manage the very people who were just managing her. It’s a blast seeing Giles, Joyce, and Snyder as youth gone wild. (Particularly Giles – Tony Head brings the brutal punk-magician Ripper, discussed several times in season two, to vivid life here but very cleverly makes his defining trait vanity. I’m very curious how he landed on that character note, but it is just perfect.)

If you slow down and think about it, what we see does pose a few questions – pretty much all the adults go out of control, although in the real world teenagers display all manner of different behaviours besides hedonic excess, the Scoobies being a case in point. Perhaps the chocolate forces those who eat it into a party mode – in which case, why wasn’t Xander affected? (Well, because it’s a joke about Xander.) Now, I don’t know that this is something the production team ever thought about, but I think there are good answers to these questions. Namely: the adults we see acting out aren’t actually behaving like teenagers again. Instead, they are acting out a middle-aged perspective of what it was like to be young. They are expressing their own stereotypes, like people pulled out of the audience at a hypnosis dinner show. Teen!Joyce and Teen!Giles and Teen!Snyder aren’t meant to be perfect expressions of their teenage years, instead they represent how they presently imagine their old selves.

So this whole line of action, apart from being hilarious to watch, is also a solid reinforcement of a thematic pillar for the whole series: parents just don’t understand. The show has fought from the start to portray its teenage characters with depth and to allow them emotional continuity, and part of that is showing how they are consistently underestimated by the adults and authority figures in their lives. Snyder doesn’t develop empathy for his errant charges as a result of his teenage experience – quite the opposite, it reinforces his dislike and resentment, because he has only had his stereotypes confirmed.

And yet, the funny teenage versions of Giles, Joyce and Snyder all manage to be revelatory about who these characters are, and what complexities and history lie beneath the surface. The teenage Scoobies will never be able to look at any of these adults the same way again. Despite themselves, the Scoobies are saddled with empathy for their authority figures. It’s a lovely trick for the show to do both these narrative jobs with the same conceit!

Anyway, it’s good stuff, and I don’t have much more to say about it because it’s good stuff. The Mayor and Mr Trick are sacrificing babies to a demon, which is a pretty good way to demonstrate to your audience that the bad guy is a bad guy. Ethan Rayne reappears as an instrument of this plan, and he is once again played for comedy, to wonderful effect. Actually, the show misses a trick here – it cuts to commercial-break on the reveal of Ethan Rayne (the first time the show has used an unexplained continuity reference as a climax), and it fails to cut to commercial-break on Giles with a cigarette. So there you go. The episode is flawed after all.

Other thoughts:
* Willow and Xander footsie is painful to watch.
* But topless Angel tai chi is the most hilarious thing I’ve ever seen.