Category: Buffy

In this episode, Buffy feels isolated from her friends and mother after her return to Sunnydale. Then zombies crash a party and that fixes everything.

Well, eventually. The zombies don’t really get mixed into Buffy’s storyline until the 3/4 mark of the episode, and until then we’re following her through some uninterrupted angst. The show initially has Buffy and her friends greet each other awkwardly but happily, but the relationships swiftly spiral into awkwardness: Joyce is full of smiles and tries too hard to be accommodating, but can’t help seeding every conversation with passive aggressive frustration; Willow is friendly and pleased to see her, but then avoids her while claiming not to be avoiding her; Xander is gleeful at her return, but also can’t help but voice his resentment. All this growing isolation is beautifully depicted, nicely underplayed with awkward silences and off-looks. The message Buffy takes from this is that returning home was a mistake: while she might be ready to return to Sunnydale, Sunnydale doesn’t really want her back. And so she gets ready to leave. Here, finally, the unspoken tensions come to a head as everybody discovers her attempt to leave, and it finally provokes everyone to say what’s on their mind. And then, zombies.

This is a solid metaphor monster episode. Metaphor monsters were initially meant to incarnate the horrors of high school life, but the zombies in this episode represent a much more general phenomenon. This is a sign of the show’s shift in focus, as it owns up to the fact that it was never about high school and teenagers at all, but rather about life in general. (After all, what is drama about teens but a metaphorical representation of proper drama about adults? Cough.)

The show hangs a lampshade on a metaphorical reading for the zombies:

Xander: You know, maybe you don’t want to hear it, Buffy, but taking off like you did was incredibly selfish and stupid.
Buffy: Okay! Okay. I screwed up. I know this. But you have no idea! You have, you have no idea what happened to me or what I was feeling!
Xander: Did you even try talking to anybody?
Buffy: There was nothing that anybody could do. Okay? I just had to deal with this on my own.
Xander: Yeah, and you see how well *that* one worked out. You can’t just bury stuff, Buffy. It’ll come right back up to get you.

Xander is calling out Buffy’s avoidant behaviour, fleeing Sunnydale without telling anyone, but the zombies also represent Joyce and the Scoobies giving Buffy fake smiles and denying that anything’s different or wrong. The conflict that drives this whole episode is about people not saying what they’re feeling, which is clearly presented as toxic: the weight of what is unspoken is far more dangerous than anything that could be said.

This is an amusingly self-serving message, as far as drama goes. On the one hand, fictional drama in general, and television drama in particular, sustains itself on matters unspoken. So many dramatic plots would be resolved swiftly and without much consequence if one character would just tell the other character something. Often the reasons why this talk is withheld are tenuous or absent entirely: they say nothing because the story demands it. (A notable subset: they never mentioned the secret because it hadn’t even been invented until the current episode is written.)

On the other hand, while fiction thrives on revelation and laying bare the resentments and secrets and concerns that sit between two characters, the real world does not always align with this. Real people often withhold their private thoughts. Their relationships may change or end as a result, but they also might continue pretty much as they did before. Telling people things doesn’t always solve problems, and can create many new ones. People aren’t stories, and popular fictions are poorly placed to moralize about secrecy and discretion. (See also: crappy 70s/80s therapy culture telling people to “be honest”.)

Buffy‘s plotting has always been happy to use dramatic contrivance – indeed, the final straw that has Buffy packing her bags is when she just happens to conveniently overhear when her mother finally confides her discomfort to a conveniently-introduced new friend. However, this show has always held itself to a higher standard than most pop culture in the dimension of emotions and emotional consequences, and this episode provides a solid showcase for this. The trouble among the friends is finally expressed with brutal honesty, which gets so unpleasant that Oz interposes himself to stop people really hurting each other emotionally; but the seeds are set for this conflict across the episode through many small awkward interactions, and the clear sense that everyone involved is only figuring out how they feel as they go along. Authentic emotional is even played for farce, setting up the old trope of a teenage party getting bigger than expected by having the core characters feel too awkward to face each other in a small group.

It’s notable that Buffy’s closest friends Willow and Xander carry most of the load here in making Buffy unhappy. Her relationship with her mother is obviously more powerful and more important, but it’s also somewhat expected that there would be issues between them. Willow’s and Xander’s anger at Buffy feels unfair and entirely human, and without the grounding of unconditional parental love the stakes even feel slightly higher. All of which points at the other central figure in Buffy’s life, Giles, who is a counterpoint to all of the above. He, alone, expresses nothing but satisfaction and relief in her return. His quiet relief, alone in his kitchen listening to Buffy and her friends, is enormously affecting. And as a bonus, because Giles doesn’t need to walk a path of forgiveness and acceptance, he is freed up to provide an absolutely hilarious performance in the zombie throughline that sits as a solid B-plot throughout the episode.

The action concludes with the shocking (and never-again-mentioned) death of Joyce’s best friend (shades of Ted, and a reminder that the emotional continuity so prized by this show is rarely applied to secondary characters like Joyce), and a runaround showdown where the gaze of the evil mask is crucial for no metaphorical reason worth discussing. The action itself is used to resolve the character conflict: basically, they all accept their interpersonal issues don’t count for much when zombies and vampires and demons are around and Buffy has a job to do smacking them down. The metaphor works – let the bad blood come out into the open, have the fight, then relax. Curiously, the metaphor positions the disputing friends on the same side, with the dissension between as the enemy that must be controlled – it’s a very interesting way to frame things, and it helps the resumption of friendship among the Scoobies feel both organic and earned even though none of the harsh words exchanged earlier have been addressed in the least.

Other thoughts:
* It’s a shame that when the show finally pulls a story out of Joyce’s gallery as a source of weird stuff, it’s with a Nigerian mask that she calls “primitive”. Perhaps it’s a blessing they mostly forget about the gallery.
* Is the zombie cat a deliberate reference to Pet Semetary?
* Snyder’s threat to keep Buffy out of school is obviously a false jeopardy – the TV show makes it inevitable she’ll be readmitted, so the dramatic question becomes, how (and under what terms) will Snyder be defeated? It is very satisfying to have Giles step in to put Snyder in his place, continuing the movement of his character into the badass role.
* Buffy finds in the basement a photo of Willow, her and Xander… but this framed photo is only a year old, right? What’s it doing in the basement?
* Another appearance of the Cyclops/Wolverine joke from X-Men: Cordelia: How do we know it’s really you and not zombie Giles? / Giles: Cordelia, do stop being tiresome. / Cordelia: It’s him.
* While I’m completely on board with the relationship depicted between Willow and Buffy this episode, the very final sequence, where they trade friendly insults? It just doesn’t feel right to me. Not entirely sure why.

Once there was a girl whose life went bad. Vampire romance turned into vampire horror, until it became just too much for her. So she ran away. She left her home and every friend she had and disappeared into the anonymous big city. She had had enough. She just wanted a simple life. She wanted out. And it worked, for a while. She wasn’t happy, but she was safe.

Then she met Buffy Summers again, and it all went horribly wrong.

The first episode of season three of Buffy the Vampire Slayer has crucial work to do. When we last saw Buffy, she had run away from Sunnydale and the show. Now it’s time to bring her back. But in order to do this, the episode delivers a truly unexpected return. Chantarelle from Lie to Me, a vampire groupie who narrowly escaped slaughter, reappears here. Even in a show that makes a point of treasuring its bit players and revels in comics-style continuity callbacks, this is an astonishing move. She was a minor element in a minor episode, notable only for her clueless optimism. Why on earth would the show build such a crucial plotline around her reappearance?

Like the first episode of season two, this episode is about recovering from the weight of the previous season. Once again, the title character has lost her way and is trying out a different identity, deliberately out of step with audience expectations. Both episodes launch 22-episode seasons in which Buffy must slay some vampires, so for the following 21 episodes to function, they have repair work to do. The Buffy of “When She Was Bad” was troubled and angry, but her recovery to normality was fairly easily achieved. This time the path is not so simple: Buffy had to kill the man she loved, the man who betrayed her and murdered her friend, and whose betrayal was precipitated by her own actions. This is a heavy burden, and true to its founding principles, the show does not stint on the weight. Season two began with Buffy’s return to Sunnydale, but this season she is resolutely away from her friends and family, trying to make a new life. She is alone.

How to bring Buffy back? There are of course countless ways this could be accomplished, but the obvious options are not as suitable as they might first appear. The show could simply contrive a reason to force her back – she forgot something crucial, or she has a message she must deliver,or she discovers a crucial threat to Sunnydale that she decides she can’t ignore. Yet none of these easy answers would address the substance of her departure. Buffy could be made to return and stay, but the emotional reality of her return would be lacking, and in this show, that hurts. Similarly, Buffy’s return could be facilitated by one of the core cast – Cordelia is an obvious candidate, still in her role as truthteller and dispeller of self-delusion, and with a built-in reason to be in Los Angeles as well. But no, even there, the move would be hard to sell. If Buffy comes back because she is persuaded, or because of something temporary, then her true discomfort would remain unaddressed. The troubles ahead would either drive her away again, or destroy the reality of her character.

The truth is, Buffy knows that if she returns to Sunnydale and to the title role of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, then there is more pain ahead of her, more heartbreak, more suffering. She has not passed through a nightmare and come out the other side, but simply glimpsed the horror that awaits her. To be in Sunnydale is to be part of the anguish and certain harm that will be delivered to her life and the lives of all those around her. And so she fled.

The reason she understands is that she senses the rules of the universe around her. She believes she is fated for pain because she is aware that she lives in a reality governed by higher laws. She is a character in fiction, and part of a narrative, and although she is not quite aware of that, she sees enough. The world she lives in is one of realistic pain and realistic threat, but little else stands up to scrutiny. The writers cannot help but make her sense this truth, her above all, because she was created with a self-awareness and insight that is crucial to her whole character, and to maintain the veil from here on would neuter her.

Call it the problem of Anne. Either Buffy’s reflective awareness is stunted, harming her character, or she lives in knowledge and desires only to flee the trap that is this show. How can the show thread the needle?

Buffy is in Los Angeles, living alone, working a thankless job in a diner. The music sting as she does not react to sexual harassment reveals everything we need to know about her: she is hiding from herself. If she stops being Buffy the Vampire Slayer, if she can just be Anne, then she might escape the narrative entirely. She might be forgotten. We, the audience, might let her be. But then Chantarelle, now Lily, appears in her diner with her friend Ricky. Buffy runs from this sign of her past but she meets Lily again later, outside. And then she sees an old man about to be run down, and she cannot help herself: she saves him. Soon after, Lily asks for help: Ricky is missing.

And so we see why Lily is here. Buffy needed a character from her past, one to remind her of the value of her old life, and also to show her that her fate would never leave her alone. It helps the storytelling more if character is tangential enough that Buffy would feel no obligation to them, and innocent enough that she would not be able to feel manipulated. Lily fits all these criteria.

There’s more. Whether Lily was chosen deliberately and strategically for this reason, or it is just creative coincidence, her earlier episode resonates heavily with this one. The great arc of Season 2 began in earnest in Halloween, and Lie to Me immediately followed, encapsulating the whole tragedy of season two in a single episode – someone Buffy loved and trusted turned on her, and his death shook her to the core. Life is hard and complicated, and people die, and it hurts like hell.

Lie to Me was also the episode where the show charted a course back from this kind of trauma: through the love and support of friends. Giles lied to Buffy that everything would be fine; she drew strength not from his lie, but from the fact he cared enough to tell it. The narrative principles of this show inevitably traumatise the characters, but they recover through love. Buffy is hiding from the trauma, but Lily’s appearance proves to her that the trauma will always find her. All that she has accomplished by fleeing is to cut her off from the only remedy to her pain: the love of her friends.

So Buffy makes her choice. She decides not to hide any more. She embraces her identity and her role. She goes to save Lily and avenge Rickie, and finds herself in a slave-ridden hell. She asserts her identity as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (note the invocation of the title of the show, the first time Buffy has ever said it), but then indicates that she is adopting a new strategy. Hiding hasn’t worked. She is going to grab her fate with both hands and take as much control of it as she can. The new direction is signalled in her very next line of dialogue: “Anyone who’s not having fun here, follow me.”

Fun has been conspicuously absent from this story. Buffy has been miserable, and has found only further misery. Enough of that. The show has always believed in true threat and true emotions, but also in joy and laughter. It has always been fun. It has to be fun. Fun is the point. And Buffy’s going to make things fun if it kills her.

Moments later, as Buffy takes control, becomes a leader, and dominates the bad guys, there is an incredible hero shot, the camera coming down on a crane past Buffy on a platform waiting for the bad guys to come at her… And then a huge run-and-punch fight scene that takes the show’s action choreography to a new level. Ending, of course, with the main bad guy finally getting a moment where it looks like he is back in control, holding Lily (of course) at knifepoint. He tells Buffy she has disobeyed, and Buffy’s response? “Yeah, but it was fun.” And then: the bad guy, ranting, grandstanding, steps forward while Lily drifts out of focus behind him.

So Lily uses this as an opportunity and pushes him off the platform to his defeat.

It’s rip-roaring punch-the-air great, and it’s also hilariously meta. It’s hard to read the moment as anything but the show itself intervening again, giving a minor character the chance to unseat a powerful villain via the simple power of blocking. It’s so dumb it’s delightful, and it feels like this is the show *wooing Buffy back*. Yes, there will be pain, you can’t hide from that. But there will also be moments like this.

This is the answer to the problem of Anne. The show is striking a deal with Buffy. She will go back and be herself again, the title character, and she will face the pain. In return, the show will let her be a hero – her kind of hero, the kind of hero who knows too many narrative rules to be safe. The kind of hero who would deliver a coup de grace on a trapped enemy – while comparing herself to Gandhi, no less. A different Buffy. A Buffy who we can believe will go back to Sunnydale, and stay. The show makes with her the same deal it makes with us, the audience: we need to laugh and cheer as well as cry.

The episode ends with Buffy and her mother reunited in a wordless embrace. We’re back. But there’s still some work to do…

Other notes:
* Lily also originated in an episode by Joss Whedon, who is writing this episode – when he cast his mind back for a character to use, she would have been right there.
* Buffy’s working at a place called “Helen’s Kitchen”. The Hel’s Kitchen joke must have been a bridge too far.
* The demon wearing a human mask saying “do you know how long it takes to glue on?” – well I lol’d.
* All of the above completely ignores the parallel storyline in Sunnydale where everyone’s coping with Buffy’s absence. It’s pretty good stuff – the Scoobies trying to slay vampires and not being much good, a subtle demonstration of how intensely Giles is feeling Buffy’s absence, the surprisingly frank discussion between Joyce and Giles about his role in her life, Willow being in charge and thriving at it, it’s all good stuff. But to call out two particular shining lights here:
* Seth Green in the credits! The beautiful moment where Oz throws a stake at a vampire and misses underlines his worth to this show.
* and Cordy just being perfect everywhere, still! There’s a lovely moment where Cordelia and Willow reunite after summer and instantly smile and chat as close friends, which is such an incredible and yet believable contrast to season one. But even better the weird relationship she has with the show’s misfit child of instinct, Xander, where they both talk themselves out of being honest with each other and need to bicker themselves into a life-threatening situation before they can get past their own issues. The problems with Xander continue to grow this season but right now it’s a lovely sequence.
* Now that the core cast have figured out that they’re not really in the real world, the world stops trying so hard to pretend, with amusing results, notably Larry (another recurring bit player) saying “If we can focus, keep discipline, and not have quite as many mysterious deaths, Sunnydale is gonna rule!”
* Although, this episode does feature the extremely rare sight of students in the school library…

In the 90s, reflexive post-modernism moved out of academia and found an unexpected home in popular entertainment, through the overlapping outlets of irony and self-awareness. Nirvana wanted to title their post-breakthrough album “Verse Chorus Verse”, Sprite advertised itself with the slogan “Image is nothing, thirst is everything”, Scream brought horror films back to the multiplex with victims who knew the rules of horror movies. And so on.

The affection for meta was never as dominant as trend pieces would have you believe – trends never are – but it was definitely a part of the zeitgeist, and fledgling network The WB had what the era demanded: wisecracking, weird-talking teens who parsed reality as if it was fictional. Two shows’ worth, in fact, and during 1998 the WB’s critical darling Buffy the Vampire Slayer was used as a platform for its similarly-meta counterpart, break-out teen smash Dawson’s Creek. It’s almost forgotten now, but for that year these two shows were all tangled up with each other.

The WB launched Dawson’s Creek on Tuesday, January 20, 1998, the same night as the heavily promoted Buffy episode in which Angel turned evil, Innocence. The two shows screened as a block, with Buffy as the sillier, goofier lead-in for the more adult Dawson, which courted huge controversy by having its young characters discuss masturbation in the pilot episode.

Dawson immediately became an enormous hit among the coveted teen audience, scorching past Buffy‘s numbers. But by the time Dawson’s short first season and Buffy’s second reached their final episodes (on the same night of course), there was no question that Buffy had become the more grown-up show. Dawson was delivering intense teenage feelings all right, but Buffy was working on another level entirely.

The reputation of Dawson’s Creek has not aged nearly as well as Buffy‘s. It is remembered with great fondness, but with minimal respect. There’s good reason for this: for most of its run, the show was a charming, head-smacking guilty pleasure. But don’t be too quick to write it off. As I’ve argued before, season one was great.

Despite the absence of giant monsters in Dawson and giant foreheads in Buffy, the two shows had much in common. They both featured attractive teenagers uttering highly-stylised dialogue, and used that to sucker-punch the viewer with startling emotional realism. They also both featured a deeply meta approach to their content.

It’s illuminating to compare the ways they played with this aesthetic, particularly how they delivered theme and meaning. Stories have to have meaning, of course, if they’re going to matter to anyone, and the meaning has to sit somewhere. It’s traditional to hide the meaning in subtext, making it implicit in what happens: you get a sense of it by seeing what the characters do, and how they are rewarded or punished, and how they feel about the whole thing.

However, subtext is the exact opposite of self-awareness, and this is the high watermark of an era of self-awareness. Hiding meaning in the subtext doesn’t work cleanly when your characters are constantly exposing and tearing up the subtext. So with all that going on, what happens to the meaning of your story? Where the hell do you put it?

The two shows solve the problem in different ways. Kevin Williamson uses in Dawson the same basic approach he used in Scream. There, the subtext of slasher horror as a contemporary morality play was explicitly called out by the characters; in fact, subverting it became part of the motivation for murder. In Dawson season one, Williamson and his writers have the characters explicitly reference the fact that they are living through a coming-of-age tale, justifying this trick with the device of Dawson’s obsession with films. In both cases, the characters talk about the general meaning of stories like the one they think they’re in, and so end up talking about their story’s actual meaning. In Dawson‘s case, the trick couldn’t sustain itself – the application of a film narrative to an ongoing TV series hints at why – and this structural game was dropped after season one. In fact, the only reason it could last that long was because the characters were never able to solve any of their problems by talking about them. Like figures in a classical tragedy, they were doomed to know their fates but unable to use that knowledge to escape them.

Contrast this with Buffy. The characters talk a lot – endlessly! – and they also seem to know some of the “rules” that govern their reality. But where Dawson and friends seemed to be aware of their position in a dramatic narrative, Buffy and co. have a narrower understanding, where they guess they are inside a story about monster-fighting and use that knowledge against the monsters. They get to be just as self-aware and reflexive as Dawson & company, but because their show is about much more than just fighting monsters, the meaning of the stories can still sit just out of their reach. The Buffy equivalent of Dawson‘s anxious speeches about “what is really going on” are the scenes when metaphor monsters try to tear the Scooby gang to pieces.

During season two, however, Buffy‘s boundaries were starting to fail. The last run of episodes pushed the characters towards a wider awareness, and gave Buffy in particular a clear sense that she wasn’t in a monster-fighting procedural, but in a different kind of narrative that has a larger, more punitive agenda.

Buffy’s insight is the inevitable fate of any show that breaches the boundaries of story and allows itself to be reflexively post-modern: the game is exposed, and the player is revealed. What happens to the show then becomes a reflection of its true nature and the values at its core. Dawson was a show that wanted to push its characters into drama, but never to truly harm them. It depended, ultimately, on keeping them always fundamentally safe so they could love each other. It had a commitment to real emotions, but there was no counterbalance at its core. Such a show can’t do anything but give in to its characters once they become aware of their own narrative position. Dawson’s Creek corrupted into a merry decadence swiftly, losing the rawness and honesty and sexual frankness and awkward edges that so defined its first season.

Buffy had no interest in protecting its characters. Its founding principles were to match real emotions with real threat. These principles created a story engine that wanted the opposite: to break the characters into pieces, slowly, carefully. Committing to real emotions and real threat made Buffy incorruptible despite handing self-awareness to its characters. Those who discovered the truth, like Buffy at the moment she killed Angel, could find no comfort in their status as focal characters in a story. The show’s cruel touch waited above them like a hammer ready to fall. They could only fear the heavens.

This, then, was the challenge facing Buffy the Vampire Slayer as it entered its third season. If the fundamental structure of your show drives the main character to run away from your story – how can you possibly keep the enterprise going and find some joy and laughter along the way? It’s the problem of Jesse again of course, but complicated by the third factor of Buffy‘s and Buffy’s self-awareness. Does it need it’s own name? Maybe. Let’s call it “the problem of Anne”, then. Because that’s where we’re headed next.

Other notes:
* There are, of course, other links between the two shows. Katie Holmes was considered for the role of Buffy Summers. Some sources say she was shortlisted, but I find that hard to credit – Holmes was a developing presence and she radiated awkwardness, like she was always just about to fall over. Even her weird-cute lopsided smile was the opposite of balance. It’s hard to see how her energy could work for the supremely grounded and balanced Buffy.

In any television show, season one is usually spent working out what the show is exactly going to be – taking the ideas you have, trying them out, seeing what sticks and what doesn’t. All going well, you get renewed for season two, and by this time you have it figured out. You know what the show is about, you know how it’s about it, but you haven’t really done much with those ideas yet. In later seasons you’ll have to start looking for new angles and fresh takes to avoid repeating yourself, but here you have an open field. Season two is when you grab hold of the ideas and themes at the heart of your show and you chase them as hard as you can. In the history of television, few shows have exemplified this as well as Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

This is part two of the finale, and it starts with everything in a very bad place. Kendra is dead, Giles is captured, Willow is badly hurt, and Buffy is about to get tangled up with law enforcement. The rules of end-of-season episodes are in play, which is to say, there are no rules. Everything is up for grabs. Buckle in.

Spike knows. Not too long ago, he was gleefully central in a plot to destroy the world using the Judge. Now he comes to Buffy for help – his true motivation is to extract Drusilla from Angel’s influence, of course, but he is also very clear that he doesn’t want the world destroyed. (As he says, “I’m in the world!”) This could be seen as an inconsistency or a change of heart, but I read it as just another sign of how close these characters float to the truth about their reality: that stuff with the Judge was middle-of-season, the world wasn’t ever going to end. But this is end-of-season, and while the world is still probably safe, a lot of things can get torn to pieces at a time like this. Trying to get out with your skin intact is a perfectly sensible strategy.

Buffy knows, too. That’s the point of the cliffhanger from last episode, where she is confronted by a police officer over the dead body of Kendra. There is no surprise in the resolution of the cliffhanger – Buffy gets away and goes on the run. She couldn’t allow herself to be processed by the police, but now she is on the run from them. We know from previous encounters with the police that they don’t belong in Buffy’s world, and their presence is a sign that the narrative rules are breaking down. With that end-of-season looming, they pose a real threat to her for the first time. The episodic nature of her life cannot save her this time.

Back at the end of season one, the show did an impressive job of throwing out as much of its formula as possible – the romantic triangle, Buffy’s attempts to maintain a normal life, her relationship with Giles. Here, even greater change is threatened. She could end the season behind bars. Snyder expels her from the school, so maybe this show doesn’t get to be a high-school drama any more. And maybe Buffy doesn’t keep her home life either, because Joyce finally finds out about her daughter’s extracurricular activities.

After killing a vampire right in front of her mother, Buffy finally confesses that she is the vampire slayer. Joyce tries to keep up but can only muster a litany of objections and sensible suggestions, none of which can work because we’re in Buffy’s narrative, not reality. And Buffy’s reply is to recite the entire premise of the show: “Do you think I chose to be like this? Do you have any idea how lonely it is, how dangerous? I would *love* to be upstairs watching TV or gossiping about boys or… God, even studying! But I have to save the world… again.”

This is a culmination of some of the long-standing threads in Buffy’s development. There have been three significant arcs in her character this season: first, from When She Was Bad to What’s My Line, she came to understand her role as a slayer, building an understanding of what this means, including accepting that she has people close to her who love her and support her despite risk to themselves. Second, from Ted to Innocence, she followed this greater sense of self-confidence to admit, and act on, her love for Angel – which turned out to be a tragic mistake. Third, from Phases onward she sought self-mastery, expressed in her resolve to kill Angelus and to move past her guilt over his fall (achieving the first in Passion and the second in I Only Have Eyes For You). Throughout these final episodes she demonstrates what she has become across the rest of the season, and her decision to walk away from Joyce could only come at the end of all three of these arcs, having earned the attributes of self-awareness, self-confidence, and self-mastery.

Similarly, her showdown with Angel brings all of these together. She begins this battle and pursues it fiercely. When the momentum shifts to Angel, she stops his deathblow by catching his blade between her palms – her mastery moment, signalling that she has achieved a unity of purpose and selfhood. She finally demonstrates what it means to be the Chosen One, the Vampire Slayer. From the moment she catches the blade it is clear she has won the battle, and her triumphant defeat of Angel is inevitable.

Except this show doesn’t care about triumph, except as prelude to pain. And so, as Buffy readies her own killing blow, Angel’s soul is restored. As the gate to hell opens, Buffy understands that she must kill him. Every shade of anguish flickers across her face, and then she drives the sword into her lover’s chest and watches him fall into hell.

I’ve seen this moment called weak by some, because Buffy has no real choice here – she must kill Angel or the world ends, so it ends up feeling like an unfortunate accident of timing without any real dramatic heft (c.f. the end of Romeo & Juliet). I disagree. I think it’s absolutely clear from Sarah Michelle Gellar’s performance that Buffy wants with every fibre of her being to do exactly what Spike did with Drusilla – to take Angel with her and leave, and let the world take its chances. That she doesn’t – that she has the strength and clarity to act as she does – is huge. If catching the blade is the ultimate demonstration that she has become the Slayer over the last two seasons, here is the ultimate demonstration of the cost. The choice Buffy makes here destroys her.

The core principles of this show have been, from the start, real threat and real emotions. The logic of those principles has trapped Buffy. She has chosen to do something too awful to bear, and the show has allowed her – encouraged her – to go through with it. This act will have consequences, terrible ones for her. The problem of Jesse rears its head here in its most extreme form. Buffy is no longer a fit protagonist. She is too damaged, too hurt. Now what?

The show has cultivated a method of rehabilitating traumatised characters over this season: love, specifically the compassionate and accepting love of close friends. This is the end of the season, and we know that Buffy could have three months of off-screen love and support from family and friends before she needs to return to headline another episode. She could return next season and as long as the show acknowledges the depth of her hurt from time to time, she could start out pretty much in her normal mode – quippy, fun, the kind of character you like to hang out with when you turn on the television.

Here is the show’s final swerve, then. In these two episodes the show has woken up, and it has shown that no-one is safe. Buffy knows. On some level, she senses she is a fictional character, stuck in stories that will hurt her and those she loves over and over again. So she does not want to be rehabilitated. She wants out. She exits the show’s milieu entirely, climbing on a bus and departing, rejecting the show that bears her name.

Except we, the audience, know she can’t really escape. The show will drag her back to us, when we’re ready, and she will be made to face what she has done.

Because she is our chosen one.

——

Other notes:
* Don’t worry, by next season the police have forgotten about Buffy. They don’t belong in her world, after all.
* At the time of broadcast, it was widely reported that Angel would be getting his own show, so the dramatic conclusion here was robbed of some of its weight.
* Giles’ torture is terrifying, although it does finally bed in the new version of Giles as the tough-as-nails badass that’s been gently pushed all season. The return of Jenny Calendar is played with maximum cruelty to the audience, a Whedon-show motif.
* Also cruel: Xander confesses his love to Willow, who wakes and asks for Oz. Xander has some odd moments this episode, once again showing he’s representing impulsive action. Most importantly, he lies to Buffy about Willow trying to restore Angel’s soul – it’s a selfish betrayal, and also ultimately meaningless, which just adds to the discomfort here.
* Oz, meanwhile, is still basically redundant. I guess they’ll find more stuff for Seth Green to do next season?
* Whistler is sadly underused here. He just spits out the plot info and saves the Scoobies a library visit. Disappointing after his build-up in the previous episode. I guess if Angel’s getting his own show he might be a recurring character there! That’d make sense, right?
* Giles: “They get inside my head, make me see things I want.” Xander: “Then why would they make you see me?” Giles: (considers) “You’re right. Let’s go.” Whedon used this joke again in the first X-Men film with Cyclops and Wolverine.
* Joyce making small-talk with Spike is priceless. Great comedic chemistry.
* I remember usenet running hot with upset viewers who insisted Buffy did not need to kill Angel – his blood would close the portal, so she needed only to cut his hand again! These people were silly.

We’re at the big finale, and everyone knows it. Not just the audience – the characters, too. They sense something special is going on, the long-promised confrontation is looming and resolution – for better or worse – is just around the corner. The Scooby Gang never actually discover they’re in a TV show, but they sure do wonder about that fourth wall sometimes.

Oz: Uh, I was a little unclear about some of the themes.
Buffy: The theme is Angel’s too much of a coward to take me on face-to-face.

The teenagers are all busy studying for finals, which is the real-world equivalent of a season finale. Willow/Oz and Xander/Cordelia are happy in resolved romantic relationships, enjoying what passes for a state of grace in TV-land. Buffy is chasing hard after Angel, impatient for a confrontation.

Willow: Do you think you’re ready to fight Angel?
Buffy: I wish people would stop asking me that. Yes, I’m ready. I’m also willing and able. Just the one test I might actually pass.

She’s right, and the audience knows it. We’ve been with her on the journey from Innocence to Passion. Buffy has seen enough to overcome her doubts about striking Angel down; the audience has seen enough to accept her transformation. Buffy has become what she needs to be.

However, before the show can allow this final confrontation, it must draw together all loose threads, such as the floppy disk holding the spell that will restore Angel’s soul. It has sat undiscovered below Jenny Calendar’s desk since Passion. (Twin Peaks enthuasiasts collectively wince as they are reminded of the note that lay under Agent Cooper’s bed for a similar length of time.) Buffy and Willow at last discover the disk and the spell, and the confrontation suddenly becomes more complicated: Angel can yet be saved.

This allows the show to return to one of its core dramatic fault-lines: is Buffy’s relationship with Angel a good idea? Xander, who is Buffy’s main confidante right now, maintains his dislike for Angel (implicitly going back to the fate of Jesse in The Harvest). The show has baked this problem in very efficiently – while earlier in the show’s run Xander would have been on shaky ground simply because of Angel’s position in the opening credits, recent events have demonstrated he has a point. It’s an old problem, and this is the perfect time to put it on the table again.

The whole episode is full of moments where the story calls forth elements from the past, for example the return of Kendra, and Buffy moping over the ring Angel gave her in Surprise. Most notably (yes I’m finally getting to it), threaded throughout the episode are a series of scenes showing us key moments from Angel’s history. We see his transformation into a vampire at the fangs of Darla (returning in a brief cameo); his first meeting with Drusilla; the Romani cursing him; his discovery of Buffy. It’s fun seeing these moments dramatized, but that’s all that’s happening here – there’s no revelation, just rote performance of things we already knew. (Well okay, there’s kind of a revelation, namely that Angel was creepily stalking Buffy for much longer than we’d guessed before.) We’re not really learning anything about how Angel became Angel.

The role of these flashbacks, and all of this content from the show’s history, is really to provide momentum and weight to the narrative. We know we’re speeding towards a conclusion, and we are being shown how the threads thus far are coming together in this moment – that the whole narrative of the show has been quietly building to right here, right now.

However, there is something curious at work in all this. I want to zoom in on the moment earlier with Jenny’s lost computer disk. Buffy discovers the disk when she drops a pencil, retrieves it, and then says she has just experienced deja vu. She drops the pencil again, deliberately this time, and when she retrieves it this time she notices the disk. This is an odd little moment, completely unexplained except by tenuous reference to Buffy’s occasional prophetic dreaming. To me, though, it doesn’t feel like the same narratological force is at work. The prophetic dreams affect Buffy and the Buffy narrative in ways that are completely absent here. In fact, a moment’s reflection reveals that the deja vu is entirely redundant from a narrative point of view. The writers could have simply had Buffy notice the disk the first time she dropped her pencil. Why didn’t they do this? Why the elaborate invocation of a sixth sense just to get her to pick up a disk?

Part of the answer, no doubt, comes from the weight of storytelling itself. Stories are usually built from chains of cause and effect, and moments that don’t respect this feel odd and out of balance. The disk was lost as a result of the chaos and violence meted out by Angelus – cause and effect. If the disk is to be rediscovered, the event must arise from an appropriate cause or it should feel unearned and powerless, unacceptable descriptors for a potent weapon intended to divert the clear arc of the narrative.

It would be easy to have the discovery of the disk conform to a cause-effect structure. Perhaos Buffy decides to retrace Angel’s steps in preparation for battling him, looking for signs of weakness or patterns she can exploit. So, when visiting Jenny’s classroom looking for insights, she spots the disk. Or, more simply, the Scoobies are given classroom-cleaning duties by Snyder as punishment for their public displays of affection, and they discover the disk. It isn’t hard to get the disk into Buffy’s hands as a result of previous moments in the story, yet the show chooses a much more elaborate path.

What, in fact, is the cause of Buffy’s discovery of the disk? It isn’t dropping the pencil, which would be too insignificant and random. Assigning cause to the deja vu puts the cause into the realm of the ineffable, and a mysterious intervention in this show is probably enough to satisfy our desire for cause and effect to chain together. Buffy is a character in a supernatural story, therefore a supernatural event is sufficient to tip her towards this discovery. It isn’t elegant, but it is portentous, and so we might let it slide.

But I think there’s more happening here. As noted many times in this blog series, Buffy has fully embraced meta. The characters float close to the surface of the fictional bubble, regularly expressing an intuitive understanding that they are in a world that follows narrative rules. Sometimes it seems like the characters can use that intuition to seize control of the narrative and their place in it.

I think the deja vu is the same thing from the other side: it is the voice of the story itself. The narrative is telling Buffy what it needs her to know.

The episode is not about Buffy becoming what she needs to be, or about Angel becoming what he most feared. What is becoming in this episode is the show Buffy the Vampire Slayer itself. It is becoming the truest expression of its vision, its own proof of concept. From the start the show has committed to two principles, real threat and real emotion. The problem it’s faced has been the problem of Jesse, which is simply the difficulty of keeping your show going if your characters are being traumatised by horrific threats. The show has worked out some good ways to deal with this problem, but they have another one in their pocket right here: the end-of-season break. You can do bad things in the last episode of a season, and let the pieces fall where they may.

So we’re here. The show is ready to give you what you’ve signed up for by watching all these episodes, laughing at all these jokes, caring about these characters. The show doesn’t care if it has to put a thumb on the scales from time to time to get you carrying the biggest weight possible.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer has entered the narrative as a player, and it has no intention of playing fair.

Other notes:
* This episode marks the first appearance of Angel’s utterly convincing Irish accent. Not the last, happily for those citizens of the Emerald Isle who were so delighted to hear the distinctive cadences of their local speech echoed so perfectly here.
* Also: the first appearance of Whistler, a demon who is not a bad-guy demon but something-something-balance. Demons not being inherently bad will become a major feature of the Buffyverse as it develops, so this is a notable development although it passes nearly unnoticed in these two episodes with so much else going on. (Whistler is played by Max Perlich, quintessential “Hey It’s That Guy” of the 90s, best known by me for being a pathetic camera guy in Homicide: Life on the Street and a pathetic snowplow guy in borderline-paedophilic romcom Beautiful Girls. I am always in the tank for Max Perlich.)
* Also: the first depiction of the process of vampire creation. You take blood, then you give blood. Blood in, blood out, as they say. (They don’t say this.) (Well they do but not about vampires.)
* Also: the first sight of Buffy pre-Buffy, including a good look at not-Donald-Sutherland the Watcher.
* Giles gets called in to look at the weird relic by the Washington Institute. There’s a spin-off show waiting to happen.
* Willow’s dabbling with magic becomes official, and she volunteers to do the big restoration spell. She’s come a long way from anxious-nerd-Willow of the very first episodes.
* Kendra is killed. The only positive black character in the show so far is killed. Add in Jenny’s Romani heritage, and it’s not looking good to be a good guy who’s a minority.
* Buffy says she has to go before anyone else gets killed. Kendra immediately launches into a humanizing backstory speech. In a narrative sense, this is the same as painting a big target on yourself.
* Why did they not perform the ritual to restore Angel’s soul in a private home where vampires had not been invited? Because the story made it happen that way.

The third and final space-filler episode between Passion and the finale is a comedy episode with lots of Xander. Buffy has built up its ability to zig and zag through tones and moods but if that sounds less than credible as a diversion in the middle of the worst crisis imaginable, you’re right, it is.

The episode starts with a gruesome image of victims being skinned alive, and reveals a mysterious sea monster clearly inspired by the Gill-man of the Black Lagoon films. The Scooby gang end up investigating the Sunnydale High Swim Team, who are using performance-enhancing drugs that turn them into sea monsters. That’s the premise, but the don’t-do-performance-enhancing-drugs message is so heavyhanded it plays as parody, and it turns out the episode has a few other things on its mind.

Buffy meets swimmer Cameron, who wins her interest with his poetic/philosophical ruminations on the sea. Of course, in a reprise of Reptile Boy, he’s deeply involved in the trouble and not as nice as he appears. This becomes apparent as soon as he gets alone with Buffy in his car, when he turns the encounter sexual, tries to convince her she wants him to, and locks her in with him when she tries to leave. After that when he lays a hand on her she smashes his face into the steering wheel, breaking his nose. That’s unpleasant enough, but the episode’s only getting started: Snyder witnesses this and Buffy finds herself in the high-school courtroom of the principal’s office. Here, Cameron goes directly to blaming Buffy: “I don’t know what happened. I mean, first she leads me on, then she goes schizo on me.” Cameron’s importance to the school’s sporting fortunes is directly invoked, and the swim coach walks Cameron away with a shot at Buffy: “…try to dress more appropriately from now on. This isn’t a dance club.”

This is part of the show’s continuing interest in what has come to be called rape culture, here with a focus on the culture of entitlement and victim-blaming that surrounds high status young men in high school and serves to promote, protect, and excuse sexually predatory behaviour. However, unlike Reptile Boy which based its narrative on similar ground, this episode refuses to mitigate the troubles here with a supernatural flourish. Cameron wasn’t trying to recruit Buffy into a cult or suck on her blood, and the school isn’t protecting him due to a demonic bargain or to fulfill a dark prophecy. It’s all simply literal: a high school boy simply assumes the girl he’s with will accept his sexual advances, blames her for the trouble when she refuses, and is protected by the school.

This is refreshing. Buffy is intended to be powerful enough to violate the scripts about young women, and throughout the show she has thrown down every instance of patriarchal oppression thus far (with the exception, of course, of the still-unfolding danger of Angel). It is salutary to remind viewers (and Buffy herself) that these scripts can envelop a young woman in a whole social structure with a vested interest in her failure. Buffy is strong enough to break Cameron’s nose, but there is nothing her chosen status can do that will stop society around her from turning on her for harming the untouchable golden boy. Without occasional reminders like this, Buffy’s messaging would start to look like a fairy-tale feminism where every threat to gender equality could be neutralized if women just learned some martial arts and pumped themselves with just a smidgen of super-strength. The show is intended to be fundamentally empowering, but it has to stay honest about the limitations of its message as well.

However, this also plays weirdly in the larger narrative of the season. As mentioned, we’re currently carrying the open wound of Angel’s murder of Jenny Calendar, an ongoing reminder of Buffy’s limitations and a potent metaphorical invocation of the insidious power of rape culture. Moving Buffy into a headspace where she can be the focus of this Cameron storyline is not entirely unbelievable, but it does feel deeply unnecessary, especially when the next episode is driven right from the start by Buffy’s furious focus on Angel. Both of the previous interludes manage to sustain some psychological continuity from Passion, but this story can’t manage it.

This plotline, about the institutional sexism protecting these powerful young men, is resolved piecemeal. Swim team star Gage is humbled by Buffy’s saving him from Angel, and asks her to walk him home, symbolically removing their power; the institutional protection is shown to be in service of a deeply corrupt (fishmonster-creating) system, and therefore shown to be illegitimate. However, the episode can’t resist ending the narrative on a particularly sour note, where Buffy is captured by the coach and threatened with being literally raped to death by the fish monsters that were once powerful young men; this fate instead befalls the coach himself. There is no ambiguity or reading-in here, it is made very clear in dialogue: “So, what, you’re just gonna feed me to ’em?” “Oh, they’ve already had their dinner. But boys have other needs.” And later, “Those boys really love their coach.” I’m going to say that again to give it due emphasis: Buffy is threatened with being raped to death. The Coach is raped to death. Buffy reacts with quips, and the show’s zippy pacing carries you through the moment, but by any measure this is a deeply unpleasant and entirely unnecessary denouement.

For all the joy to be had in the episode – series-MVP Cordelia’s incredible speech to the monster she thinks is Xander! – it is hard to get past the deeply unpleasant content threaded throughout, making this episode a hard one to love. I think it’s quite likely the creative team fumbled this episode because they were so focused on what was coming up – it isn’t the first time they’ve done that, after all. And as with that previous instance, they knew that they were about to lay down something very special indeed.

Other notes:
* The ep was written by David Fury and his wife. It’s Fury’s first episode, and he’ll be another important figure for Buffy down the line, but it’s hard to work out what’s up with this story – was it a spec script he was shopping around that got him the writing job? Possibly.
* Sunnydale has a beach! Who knew.
* Jonathan gets bullied, and is unhappy that Buffy intervenes to help him. (Xander’s played this same tune before.) He ends up becoming a legitimate subplot for the first time, a big step up for the recurring bit player. Willow accuses him of summoning a hellbeast, even…
* Speaking of Xander, he gets a big surprise-sexy-body moment where the girls all ogle him. The moment is delightfully undercut by Nick Brendan’s anxious flapping, one of the best uses the show has found for this schtick. Sadly, the Xander moment that sticks with me is his snarling zinger calling Buffy a “swim team perk”.
* Putting over the steroid-abuse narrative regrettably means forcing Snyder to act out of character – the idea of Snyder bending the rules for sports stars doesn’t mesh with anything previously established about him, and the “be a team player” mantra is equally jarring.
* There’s a meta moment where Willow refers to Sunnydale High’s unfeasibly large mortality rate – weirdly, this plays against a moment later on when Buffy tells swimmer A that, hey, you know how swimmer B and C got viciously killed? You might be next! And he’s all meeeh, no biggie.
* Nurse in the water under the grill is a riff on Aliens, right?
* Giles: “Either we’ll find an effective antidote or…” *walks away*

I’ve been pretty useless about mentioning episode writers in these things. Probably the main reason is that the kind of analysis I’m doing – reverse engineering the underlying story structure of whole seasons – works best if you pretend Buffy is an expression of a single harmonious vision rather than the result of a bunch of creative people pushing and pulling on ideas with frenzied showrunner Whedon putting his hands on everything and mostly pulling it all into the lines he wants. But even so, it’s worth shining some light here on Marti Noxon. She will become a crucial figure in the Buffy story, and a fairly controversial one (her twitter bio: “I ruined Buffy and I will RUIN YOU TOO”). She’s written a bunch of episodes this season, starting up with the What’s My Line duo, but they’ve mostly been unpromising assignments – weirdo misfire Bad Eggs, water-carrying setup episode Surprise, and last-minute fill-in Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered. This is another placeholder ep, marking time between Passion and the season finale, but (unlike last week’s offering) it finds some very fruitful space to explore, and I think here’s where Noxon’s voice really cuts through for the first time.

The episode is a ghost story, continuing the process of the show working through the classic monster repertoire for its non-vampire non-demon stories. Given Buffy‘s emphasis on emotional consequence, it might seem odd that they’ve waited this long – after all, what is a ghost but an emotional consequence that can throw things around the room? But ghosts are actually not a straightforward fit for the show because they don’t metaphor easily. A ghost story is stubbornly literal about its emotional content.

The genius of this episode is that it chases that literality right down the rabbit hole. The ghosts in the story are two dead lovers who died in an (apparent) murder-suicide and possess people to repeat the tragedy over and over, unable to find closure. The story works its way to an astonishing conclusion where the ghosts possess Buffy and Angel, forcing them to re-enact a tragic, doomed love affair, a situation that echoes their own tortured story. This is the perfect inverse of the usual metaphor-monster approach but it works just as well. (It also cleverly takes the meta approach that is the show’s hallmark down a level; instead of having the show’s characters making subtle comment on the story they are part of, we have Buffy & Angel’s relationship commenting silently on the ghost’s story.)

It’s a very clever set of moves to make, and yes it does load up the melodrama that will become a Noxon trademark, but she absolutely nails the heart of the story, finding a new way to examine the Buffy/Angel romance and make the characters (and us) feel the pain of its loss. When the ghosts find their peace, and Angel is released from the spell, he simply reels from the experience and flees. It’s a completely convincing moment, and thematically powerful.

The episode also tracks a very important subplot where Giles attributes the haunting to Jenny, until Willow forces him to admit to himself that it couldn’t be her. His grief is palpable throughout, as is the deep compassion shown to him by the other characters, and his acceptance that it isn’t Jenny is a gentle, crucial step in his process of moving on. This also perfectly fits in with the show’s method of resolving the problem of Jesse – Giles has to show the emotional wounds he suffered from Jenny’s awful fate, but through the love of his friends he is guided towards peace.

In fact, the whole episode in a sense echoes this solution to the problem of Jesse. The haunting takes place because the ghosts cannot move past their emotional anguish, and they are only released when they find a way to continue their scene past its usual end point (because undead Angel is not killed by the reenacted murder) and they are able to forgive each other. Love and acceptance are the answer. Buffy spends the whole episode seeing herself in this situation and refusing to forgive herself, and we know she can’t resolve these questions until she does confront Angel face-to-face. Her final scene in the episode makes a marvellous choice of showing she’s been affected profoundly by the experience, but refusing to draw it into some kind of pat lesson:

Buffy: A part of me just doesn’t understand why she would forgive him.
Giles: Does it matter?
Buffy: No. I guess not.

It all comes together as a superb and unexpected way to highlight these themes and this relationship before things come to an awful end. The episode isn’t flawless – the other aspects of the haunting (snakes, wasps, an arm in a locker) feel completely out of place – but its emotional heart is fierce and true. And that feels like Noxon to me.

Other thoughts:
* Great to see Snyder again, and to reiterate his awareness of the supernatural truth, complete with portentous namedrop of “the Mayor”.
* Willow gets some huge moments in this episode, where she for the first time steps into the world of magic. I’d forgotten how directly her movement into magic was attributable to Jenny’s “technopagan” identity.
* The episode’s final reveal is marvellous too – this show has such confidence it can give an episode ending to a bad guy secretly standing up, and it WORKS.

Buffy has been *roaring* along, building momentum and confidence and impact to such a height that last week’s episode slammed into the viewer like a freight train. And to follow that – well, here’s the thing. The writing team have been using a long-form storytelling strategy where you take the 22 episodes of a standard US network TV season, and you treat those like chapters of your story. You put your pieces in place in the first chapters, you tighten the noose and build to a strong midpoint confrontation that foreshadows the rest of the story, then you put your big switch-up reversal to reveal a whole new horrifying challenge. Then you build up that new horror in intensity until it hits a peak of awfulness, and then you ride the inevitability of that right into climax mode.

Up until now, it’s all worked beautifully. Sadly, the plan squeals off the tracks right here. In a 22-chapter story, chapters 18, 19 and 20 can focus on building up to the climax, drawing all the threads together and preparing the ground, but in a serialised TV series, it doesn’t work like that. The show has found itself with three episodes to fill in before it can allow the final conflict to happen. Each episode has to be a unit of storytelling in its own right, not just buildup to the end, and while you can make an episodic story do that build-up work, it’s not easy.

So we have Killed By Death, with the unenviable task of explaining why Buffy has to have a few more adventures when she has every motivation to bring this whole saga with Angel to an end. It stalls for time in the most shameless way possible: Buffy suddenly gets sick. And the point is underlined not just by having Xander say “you’re too sick to fight Angel”, but having Angel turn up himself to demonstrate the same.

So the viewers, like Buffy, are forced to go to the hospital when they’d rather be doing something else.

The show drops Buffy into a spooky situation where there’s a monster stalking sick children. We’re kept off-balance by some ER-style handheld camerawork and a weird flashback sequence to Buffy as a child, where it’s hard to even work out that the child we see is young Buffy. This leads to a tragic backstory revelation: Buffy’s cousin was killed by a monster years ago,

The backstory feels very out-of-place in the greater Buffy mythology. That’s because it jars with the kind of ongoing, iconic comics-continuity narrative this show employs. The revelation that the monster killed her cousin
when they were both children belongs to a different kind of story, a filmic self-contained structure where the protagonist is intimately connected to the horror and overcomes her emotional wounds through the cathartic act of defeating it. It is no accident that we never hear about Celia or Buffy’s extended family ever again.

This is the second time an episode has focused on a threat to children, and like Nightmares, it doesn’t marry up with the thematic interests of the show. (Giles’ line “Well, sometimes small children *do* see something we adults don’t: us. Our true selves, our, our… our hidden faces.” is perhaps the low point of the whole season.)

Overall the episode is just out of alignment with where Buffy is at by now. The proof is in the resolution of the threat. I can just imagine the story conference: “Look, maybe she just punches him so hard he dies and that’s the end,” and everyone shrugs in resignation. They have two more episodes to fill in before they can get to the next part of the real story. D’oh.

Other thoughts:
* SMG continues to show unexpected versatility. Her ravings are genuine and quite moving.
* The showdown in the hospital, Xander vs. Angel, is simply superb. Xander is really working as a character at last.
* But the show’s MVP right now is Cordelia. They have her character down now, and she is extremely useful for storytelling – she drags subtext into text with great efficiency, and that makes it much easier for the show to play its tricks of subvert or outmaneuvering that messaging. She’s instant laughs, instant sexy, instant pathos, instant plot. She rules.
* I LOVE the final scene where Buffy, Xander and Willow are all insensitive teens to Joyce. Charming.

When She Was Bad: “Buffy cannot do this alone. She needs her friends, so her friends are part of her fight, and yes, she won’t always be able to protect them. That’s the deal she makes – the deal we make – with the show.”

Innocence: “Angel in the rain, as he was at the start of the episode. Now you/Buffy are ready. Now you can fight. And you defeat him, but you can’t kill him yet. You let him go, knowing he will kill again. You have no choice, because to kill Angel would be to tumble irrevocably into the problem of Jesse.”

From the first seconds of this episode you know it will be bad. We see Buffy and Xander dancing as friends, their relationship anxieties settled after the shakedown of the previous episode. We see Willow and Cordy chatting as friends, their friendship starting to bloom, also after the previous episode. They seem happy. Then we see that Angel is there watching them.

And then, awfully, we hear Angel’s voice.

We’ve had Buffy lose her position as protagonist before, in The Dark Age, when Giles seized control of the narrative and held on to it for most of the episode. But this, putting us inside Angel’s head from moment one – we know this is a lot worse. Because the rules of television are inexorable. If someone narrates the beginning of an episode, they will narrate the end of it. Angel has us in his power.

He makes us watch Buffy in her bedroom, her safe place. And as we watch her, she checks the window, she settles down to sleep, and there’s a fade transition that suggests we’ve moved to her perspective. She’s the title character, grabbing her rightful control of the narrative. We can breathe out.

But it’s a bait and switch. Angel is in the room. There is no escape.

Angel – Angelus, really – has already threatened to reach outside the bounds of the narrative and harm the viewer. Here he follows through on that threat, kidnapping us, forcing us into his head, controlling the editing and the framing of the episode so we have to listen to his words and see the world through his eyes. He owns this story. He’s been waiting for this.

The credits play, storming Buffy back into the narrative, and the Scoobies have a war council in the library. But Angel has upset the balance: ordinary students come in wanting books. The bubble of narrative expectation has been punctured. Since the beginning we’ve recognized that this show features real threats, but that promise has continually struggled to assert itself against the structures and expectations of weekly action-adventure television. Those structures can’t be relied on, because Jonathan’s in the library.

As if sensing that the structure of their narrative is shifting, Buffy and her friends start pushing back themselves. One of the cardinal rules of vampires is the power of invitation: but if there’s magic in the world, then that rule can be chucked out the window, right? That’s just using one narrative device to take down another.

Buffy tells Joyce that Angel is threatening her, and the metaphor is abruptly altered. Back in Innocence, Angel was the cool boy who sleeps with the girl then mocks her for giving in to him. Now, he’s the ex-boyfriend who won’t let go. The scary one. Like the first metaphor, this one is far too familiar for too many women. Ex-partners who commit violence against the woman who left them – this is such a well of sorrow I can’t bear to even allude to real cases. This is the darkest metaphorical territory we have yet entered through this show. Angel, again, reaching out of the show to hurt us. And inside the show, Angel counters Buffy’s attempt to seize the narrative by telling Joyce they had slept together, forcing Joyce to assume a direct parental role – something she usually doesn’t have space to do. Whatever Buffy and her friends do, he is ready with a way to hurt them right back.

Buffy doesn’t stop trying. She speaks with Jenny. The show wants them to be enemies or to be friends, because that’s how narratives usually work, but Buffy doesn’t submit to this distinction. She doesn’t forgive Jenny, but she gives her permission to be with Giles anyway, ignoring what the structures of television narrative would expect of her. The show is breaking into pieces all around her and she’s trying to make her people as strong and safe as she can.

Jenny. Such a fun character, a rulebreaker from her first appearance as a “technopagan”, a provocateur to counterbalance Giles, a passionate but still cerebral figure who in a way unites the best features of the entire rest of the Scooby gang. And she’s trying to break the rules again here – trying to restore Angel’s soul. She’s a minor character, not even in the opening credits, and there’s no way a standard TV narrative will let her do this. But she cracks it. She breaks the code, translates the ritual, saves it on a floppy disk, all in time for her romantic rendezvous with Giles.

But Angel controls this narrative.

The chase through the school is shot differently to anything we’ve seen before now. We’ve seen other chase sequences in Sunnydale High, but this one just keeps going. It slowly becomes clear, we’re not in a TV show any more – we’re in a movie where women get hunted down and killed.

Jenny runs right into his arms.

~

Angel has held the narrative all episode and used it to thoroughly violate the show, to finally demonstrate what it means to have “real threat”.

Now Buffy can kill him.

Other notes:
* The magic shop is great: “Oh, you’re in the trade!”
* The phone call where Buffy and Willow are told by Giles that Jenny is dead is utterly heartbreaking. Willow’s breakdown is hard to watch. In the whole seven seasons of this show, this moment affected me the most, and it’s a scene I will never forget.
* There’s a common story online saying Jenny was only chosen to be Angel’s victim when Oz became a fan favourite. I can’t find any source for this but it’s on wikipedia and the Buffy wiki among other places. Count me as unconvinced – Oz hasn’t even had a connection with the Scoobies until just a few episodes ago, and I find it hard to believe that lengthy buildup to set up Willow’s boyfriend would be followed by immediately killing him to traumatise Willow. Giles is a much more sensible character to carry this trauma, and Jenny is a character who is much closer-to-home for the Scoobies as a group. So I think this is probably just fan theory, or someone on staff misremembering. I might be wrong of course, but I can’t find anything authoritative on this.

So your writing team have been knocking it out of the park – taking risks, gaining attention, turning all the right heads. The show is surging into the zeitgeist, and the world is starting to notice. Suddenly there’s proof of how well things are going: the star of the show is booked to host Saturday Night Live. Quick, writing team! We need a new episode with no Buffy in it, and we need it now!

This is the episode they come up with, and it’s the biggest proof you’ll get that Buffy was on a roll. They produced not a filler episode, but an important, funny character piece that is remembered fondly as one of the better episodes of the entire series. That just doesn’t happen unless you’re in the zone.

So, following an episode examining the perils of masculinity, we get an episode examining… the perils of masculinity. This time, however, the show turns its attention to a different flavour of Buffy man: Xander Harris, who remains something of an unsolved puzzle.

In typical Western storytelling modes, different characters usually embody different approaches to problems and challenges, and I’ve previously suggested that Xander embodies “instinct”. Following your instincts is an important problem-solving approach for anyone, but especially for teenagers, and so a character with this approach is essential for the Buffy ensemble. Unfortunately, the show is generally down on the efficacy of instinct. It’s a nerdy show where part of the fun is being wrongfooted by the twisty plots. In the narratives deployed on this show, it’s very easy to use ‘instinct’ for comedy beats.

Instinctual responses are also useful to generate conflict when a protagonist needs to take a risk – “instinct” tends to be conservative, associated with “common sense”. Witness the somewhat odd spectacle of Xander being the one who maintains his resistance to Buffy’s relationship with a vampire, while the more cerebral Willow and Giles quickly fall into line. In a show with a vested interest in upending received wisdom, this usually puts Xander in the wrong.

As if that wasn’t enough – in this show, gender is very much under the microscope, and masculinity is often a source of frustration. An “instinct” character who happens to be male will also easily fall into the role of expressing objectionable male instincts and assumptions. This was a role Xander assumed in The Pack, where he became a way for the show to talk about sexual power and its abuse.

So with these three complicating factors more potent than ever as the show enjoys a golden run of quality, it’s interesting for the show to look a little closer at Xander. Of the core characters, his character arc has been the most patchy and uncertain. Willow has clearly blossomed into greater self-confidence and autonomy; Giles has changed his perspective on his responsibilities and his relationship to Buffy; and Buffy herself has come to terms with her duty and assumed the mantle of power. Xander, however, has had a series of small triumphs quickly reversed into humiliations, and while his heroic instincts and indeed his courage have strengthened he continues to fail to apply these in any consistent way. The obvious direction to take Xander is to give him some control over his circumstances, and that means addressing his continual downfall: his relationships with women.

There’s lots going on in this particular kettle of weird fish. Xander’s “girl trouble” arises from his general sense of inadequacy and tendency to overcompensate; his expectations of and assumptions about women; his habit of speaking without thinking; and many, many other happy contributing factors. Xander is a deeply flawed character. However, at this point in the show’s narrative, the writing team are working hard to show him in a redemptive light. He does keep trying to do the right thing – to rise above his limitations. His moments of heroism have never quite been able to eclipse the entitlement and poor judgement that typify his behaviour, but consistently, when he does find a clear and noble path, he commits. He represents, then, another important archetype of all storytelling: the sinner who keeps trying for redemption.

This comes out very clearly in the inciting incident in this episode, where Xander buys Cordelia a locket and tries to be honest with her about what’s happening between them. It’s a brave move, and one he’s uncertain about, but it’s also unquestionably the right thing to do. The audience can’t help but get on side with him here.

Unfortunately, Cordelia dumps him, and Xander immediately does something unspeakably awful, and all of that viewer identification and goodwill gets set on fire.

This is his role. He’s instinct, specifically a male instinct in a female-voiced narrative. He is going to screw up, and those screwups will reproduce the gendered biases at large in our world. To be blunt: Buffy is invested in taking on rape culture, and Xander is the best vector they have for bringing that on-stage.

Xander’s crime is to blackmail the witch Amy to enchant Cordelia so she’ll love him, giving him the power to break up with her and devastate her emotions. It’s a terrible thing to do, and though the show takes care to draw boundary lines around his intentions (specifically, he makes clear he doesn’t intend to use magic to rape her) it doesn’t soft-pedal the ugliness of his actions.

The use of Amy the witch as an instrument is interesting, however. She returns here for the first time since Witch (another instance of the show’s delight in recurring minor characters), and her engagement in Xander’s revenge is a reminder that this show does always speak with a female voice. The spell she casts ends up making all the women characters lust after Xander, but it reads to me as a very female-friendly take on that particular male fantasy. In fact, once you dial out a bit, this episode is revealed as a remarkable showpiece for the many diverse female characters of the Buffy world, and while the episode is unmistakably a spotlight for Xander, it is equally unmistakable that the hero is Cordelia.

Cordelia doesn’t get to lead the story, because the story is all about the weird experiences of Xander Harris. However, the character arc is hers. The story happens because of her crisis of self-belief and consequent bad decision, and it tracks her movement to a place where she can reverse that decision and lay claim to her true identity. Xander doesn’t get that kind of arc. He makes an awful decision and pretty much immediately realises it was an awful decision. For the rest of the story he’s just coping with the mess he’s made, which is very entertaining but doesn’t make him the protagonist.

Cordelia’s return to focus also means it’s time to bring back another recurring player, Harmony Kendall, who reigns supreme on the mean girl throne she claimed back in Out of Sight Out of Mind. Cordelia’s secret hookups with Xander are now common knowledge, and Cordy’s status with the in crowd is in the toilet. That she decides the best way to fix this is by dumping Xander and trying to hold on to her established identity is entirely understandable, even though it’s obviously the wrong option. Cordelia, after all, is the narrative’s truthteller, but here she can’t even bear to tell the truth to herself. She’s found out by the magic spell, which doesn’t affect her because the magic knows the truth even if she doesn’t – she’s in love with Xander. (Note that this is the second time a big magic spell hasn’t affected Cordelia – she evaded the madness of Halloween by shopping upmarket – underlining her association with truth and authenticity.)

The episode concludes with Cordelia choosing Xander, choosing truth, and choosing the Scooby Gang nerd vampire life over whatever she had before. Her final duty in the story is to pass judgement on Xander. The show, as noted above, is set to make Xander screw up a lot of times, and forgiving him will get more and more difficult each time, but he’s not yet too far gone. In Xander’s favour this time – he very quickly figures out what’s going on and doesn’t hesitate in confessing to Giles, whose absolute disgust makes clear the degree of his failure, as does Willow’s refusal to talk to him after. The episode sticks the landing on this, I think – “You came through. There might just be hope for you yet.” says Buffy – but it’s Cordelia’s acceptance of him, flaws and all, her empathy and love, that allows him to carry on.

Other thoughts:
* This episode has some standout gags – barricading the door only to reveal it opens outwards, and Willow’s “Force is okay!” comment is just the first hint of hidden depths…
* Likewise, Spike wondering what rhymes with lungs plays very differently after some later revelations about his origins as William the Bloody.
* The “suddenly, Angel!” instant threat move continues to work brilliantly.
* Oddly, this is the second time in recent weeks that Jenny has attempted a seduction while not in control of herself. She’s past due for a big spotlight episode to give her some dignity at last. Maybe next week?