From The Morgue

Buffy has, from the very beginning, tried to be about things. The monsters were always a general metaphor for the many ways in which life sucks when you’re a teenager, and Buffy and the Scoobies were a metaphor for how teenagers can rise to challenges beyond the expectations of their teachers, their parents, and themselves. Often the show leaned harder on this, and the monstrous threat would be a specific metaphor for one aspect of teenaged life-suckery; in the world Buffy created, these metaphor monsters could be potent pieces of symbolism.

This episode by Marti Noxon takes that idea of addressing issues to a new level of blunt clarity. We meet Pete and Debbie, who seem happy and normal and friendly. However, we also see them when they are alone, and we learn Pete is jealous and controlling. Debbie is afraid of him. He is verbally, emotionally, and physically abusive, and Debbie covers for him. When Pete calms down from his rages, he blames Debbie for provoking him and begs forgiveness. She does forgive him. She loves him. When his violence is revealed, she tries to protect him. This is their conversation (source):

Debbie: Pete! You’re all right! God, you’re all right.
She throws her arms around him and hugs him close, but he doesn’t hug her back.
Debbie: She almost shot you. Did you see? I stopped her.
She lets go of her hug and looks at him.
Debbie: You have to leave, get out of Sunnydale. She knows.
Pete: How did she know, Debbie? Did you run your big mouth?
Debbie: (frightened) No! She just knew. It seemed like she just knew.
Pete: So you filled in the blanks!
He shoves her to the floor.
Debbie: (screams) NO! (looks up at him) No!
Pete: But what did I expect from a screw-up like you?
Debbie: (Shakes her head) I-I didn’t… Pete…
Pete: You’re nothing but a waste of space.
He moves to grab her.
Debbie: No!

The camera cuts away as Pete kills Debbie.

There are many depictions of partner abuse in popular media. The wife with the black eye is depressingly common. But among that mass of stories, this stands out for its brutality. There’s no escape here, no 3/4 swerve to reverse expectations. There is a monstrous metaphor here: the mood swings that keep love alive in an abusive romance are rendered as literal Jekyll-and-Hyde transformations. This metaphor provides no cover, however, and it is not intended to do so. It’s barely even symbolism at all, only there to provide the story with a genre trapping (and to allow the abusive Pete to go toe-to-toe with a werewolf and a slayer).

And there’s something very powerful in this. Buffy vs. monstrous abusive boyfriend is as pure an expression of the show’s feminist viewpoint as you could get. It feels, though, like dangerous ground for the show. There’s prior form for trouble: when it stops hiding behind metaphor, Buffy‘s storytelling starts to lose its moorings. The significant precursor here is Ted, where Buffy’s new stepdad was a dangerous and controlling man underneath his pleasant facade. Not coincidentally, that was another episode about domestic violence, and while the episode itself was a success, it achieved this by sacrificing consistency with the rest of the series.

This episode, however, manages these risks much more successfully. Partly this is the result of the show’s greater maturity. Buffy the Vampire Slayer has paid its dues and shown in the intensity of season two that it can deal with heavy themes with care and impact. It is hard to imagine such a bluntly violent storyline in earlier seasons. Crucially, the show also manages risk by putting the violent relationship one step away from the regular characters. Pete and Debbie are not friends of any of the group, and so everything that happens here is allowed to be brutal without creating more trauma for the core cast.

This social isolation from Buffy and her friends creates its own narrative problems – this feels in some ways like a Very Special Episode, those stalwarts of 80s TV where shows would address difficult and intense topics inside a single episode. As Vulture points out in its just published secret history of the Very Special Episode, one of the reasons these episodes went out of fashion was the rise of serialised stories; attempting to do justice to some of these important issues inside standard commercial running time rarely ended well. Introducing two brand-new friends and immediately revealing their awful secret feels clumsy and inauthentic in a series that trades on comics-style continuity and ongoing subplots.

However, I feel like this episode gets away with it, for two reasons. Firstly it manages this through the point of connection between Pete and Debbie and the Scoobies: Scott Hope, the lovely normal guy with whom Buffy’s embarking on a very hesitant dating relationship. Pete and Debbie are his best friends. It’s actually very refreshing for any TV show to acknowledge that part of the experience of a new boyfriend or girlfriend is meeting their social circle: the vast majority of TV shows have boyfriends coming and going without any sign that they have other people in their lives at all. We care about these new arrivals because their appearance is organic to the narrative and their friendship with Scott is a mark in their favour, so the introduction works well, and we can forgive the swift revelation of the truth because we believe Buffy and her friends are now skilled at uncovering these sorts of secrets once contact is made.

The second reason for the episode’s success is by locating this narrative within a strong thematic throughline for the episode. It isn’t just about Pete and Debbie, but about masculinity. Faith shoots from the hip in a bout of truthtelling that bites some of Cordelia’s style: “All men are beasts, Buffy… It’s not cynical. I mean, it’s realistic. Every guy from Manimal down to Mr. I-Love-The-English-Patient has beast in him. And I don’t care how sensitive they act. They’re all still just in it for the chase.”

So let’s take a moment to check out the other men in the story.

Scott Hope
He’s still lovely and funny and kind. He’s not particularly memorable in the grand scheme of Buffy, but’s that’s a point in his favour – he isn’t trying to hog any spotlight, he doesn’t screw up in dramatic fashion, he doesn’t dominate. He’s just happy to be spending time with Buffy. It’s lovely to watch, honestly. But by the end of this episode, he is shattered. His two best friends, who he’s known since they were all preschoolers, are dead in a murder-suicide. The abuse plotline is too far from the Scoobies to give any of them trauma, but Scott catches a huge dose of it here. Poor Scott.

Oz
We spend a lot of time with Oz this episode, for a change. He’s still a werewolf and Willow and the Scoobies take turns watching him as he spends wolf nights in lockup. The weight of werewolfiness is obviously wearing him down, and when he believes he might be responsible for a murder, he is sickened. In fact, Oz is pretty much perfect, with Seth Green again showing his dramatic and comedic acting chops are on a level above everyone else on the show as he sells every single beat. (“Uh, you know that thing where you bail in the middle of an upsetting conversation? I have to do that. It’s kinda dramatic, I know, but… sometimes, it’s a necessary guy thing.”
As a side-note, we also get more of Oz as the quiet wise observer, as he’s the one who figures out what’s happening with Pete and Debbie. As a second side-note, shirtless Oz.

Xander
If you’re looking for an episode where the show officially throws up its hands and gives up trying to “fix” Xander, you could do worse than his first scene here, where he promises Willow he won’t fall asleep while watching Oz-wolf, and then promptly settles down for a sleep as soon as she’s out of the room. As it happens the show has some good moves still to make with Xander, but it might yet be too little, too late.

Giles
Giles doesn’t get to do much this episode, but he does have a good conversation with Buffy, showing again their mature relationship, confessing his personal experiences after Jenny’s death to help Buffy reflect on her own grief process. He also calls out Xander for his failures. There is one curious note here, where Buffy asks about Angel returning from torture in a hell dimension, and Giles suggests there are “two types of monster. The first, uh, can be redeemed, or more importantly, wants to be redeemed. The second is void of humanity, cannot respond to reason… or love.” Within the framework of this episode, it’s clear where Pete should sit – void of humanity, with no desire for redemption – but it feels like an off-note, attributing abusive behaviour like Pete’s to some personal deviance or deficiency and denying the possibility of a social/contextual contribution to his violence. Still, a small point, and Giles’ views shouldn’t be taken as the show’s.

Mr Platt
The excellent Mr Platt is Buffy’s counsellor. He is a fun character, provoking Buffy to tell the story of her and Angel with the monstrous flavour stripped way, revealing the metaphor. It’s the show basically showing its cards. He’s a great character and useful for the kinds of exposition the show sometimes has to work hard to shoe-horn in. The kind of stories we’ve seen in this show – heck, in this episode – cry out for this kind of figure. He’d be a great regular character and would reduce the pressure on the characters. So, by the inevitable calculus of Buffy’s commitment to real threat, he has to die. (Sadly, as he’s just the third significant black character to be introduced on this show. Sigh.)

Shirtless Angel
And finally, Angel. He’s back, he’s bestial, he has no shirt. Buffy finds him, and in a very interesting move, keeps his return a secret. This is a shockingly great storytelling decision, a pure expression of the character flaw we saw just last episode, Buffy’s tendency to take things on herself. She wonders if the violence is Angel’s doing, and is relieved when it turns out Pete was responsible – even more so when Angel kills Pete to save her, then collapses before her, revealing he is still himself (and simultaneously resolving the problem of what to do about Pete, saving Buffy from becoming a killer…)

So this broad tour of masculinity does gently support Faith’s point. All of the other male characters are (more or less) uncorrupted, with the partial and notable exception of Xander. And yet the central theme of dangerous masculinity is reinforced because all of these men fret about their own potential for darkness – Angel is struggling to express his humanity, Oz is distraught about what his wolf-side might have done, Giles sees wickedness as a philosophical problem, Xander tries to hide his failings even from himself, and even Mr Platt clearly has no illusions about masculine failings. This gives the episode what it needs to make a particularly tricky episode land. A very special episode, indeed.

Most episodes of Buffy set out to do just one thing. One episode gets Buffy back to Sunnydale, another rebuilds broken bridges with her friends, to take two recent examples. But sometimes the show rolls out an episode that covers off a whole big mess of things inside that broadcast television hour.

Such episodes are usually written by Joss Whedon. This one is written by reliable stalwart of the writing team, David Greenwalt. The title divides the episode into three, so let’s start there.

FAITH
As much as Cordy is the truth-teller, Oz is the audience-speaker, the one who makes observations like those we make at home in our living rooms watching the show. So of course he catches on first: “I’m gonna go out on a limb and say there’s a new Slayer in town.” The whole gang has just followed Buffy out of the Bronze, after seeing a vampire guy (spotted by his out-of-date style in a conscious callback to the first episode) head through the doors with an apparently-vulnerable girl. They all watch, amazed, as she turns the tables on the vampire, borrowing Buffy’s stake to dust him. She knows who Buffy is, thanks her for the assist, and strides past them all without a backwards glance.

As character introductions go, this is pretty special. It is, of course, a note-perfect depiction of Whedon’s initial idea that became the Buffy concept, the vulnerable girl in the alley who turns out to be not so vulnerable. It is also the first time it’s actually been done – the original film script and the actual film that was made and the unreleased pilot episode and the actual first television episode all introduced Buffy Summers in a different way (the latter two by inverting the idea and having the girl be a vampire, not a slayer). However, although it is a pure representation of that initial swerve, it plays very differently to an audience (both in the fiction and in reality) who already know the world contains slight young women who happen to be ultimate badasses.

The details of Faith’s introduction here all communicate plenty. She embodies confidence, passion and instinct, which are all highly charged elements of the Buffy world.

Faith’s sheer confidence (social, physical and especially sexual) is a marked contrast with every one of the Scoobies, and it is clear she has no doubts about her capability in everything she does in this scene – dancing and slaying. Having an audience doesn’t bother her in the least. And though she is clearly on the same side as everyone else, this marks her as a foil for the whole group. The core Scoobies are all basically the awkward ones in their high school world – even Buffy, who ostensibly has a background as a popular girl, was reinvented early on as a natural member of the uncool club. (The expanded Scooby crew, Oz and Cordy, are allowed to be not-awkward, but both of them have explicitly disengaged from that world so they still don’t count as high-status cool kids.) Season two did have its cool kids, of course – the vampires. Here, exactly one season later, we finally get a cool kid on the side of the Scooby gang.

(Note that the show doesn’t go out of its way to emphasise this tension. As noted above, the show goes to commercial on Faith walking past the group without looking back at them, which is how you code a status gap in filmic/theatrical performance. Typically this exact move sets up some action where the characters try to get the attention of this other character – see countless high-school romance stories. However, right after the commercial, everyone’s sitting together and Faith is eagerly telling stories of her adventures. You’re spared any scenes of the Scoobies running after her and asking her to explain, or any other beat that tracks from the low status Faith has just bestowed on Buffy and her friends. The act transition disguises this missing moment, even if you’re watching with no ad break, but its absence creates a feeling of Faith hanging out being slightly too good to be true.)

Faith’s passion is also clearly evident. She doesn’t just know she’s good at dancing and fighting – she loves doing both. This is likewise out of place with every other character. The core cast are all reserved to a fault, and the show draws much of its drama – and humour – from the slow and stumbling way the characters cope with, and overcome, their hesitations. (Again, Cordy and Oz both dodge this – neither is reserved, but they are not passionate either.) She clearly likes her life, and after two seasons of Buffy slowly coming to terms with what it means to be a slayer, it’s a shocking comparison to see someone so happily integrated and comfortable with their fate. The unspoken challenge to Buffy is clear: why is this so hard for you, B? As the episode proceeds, Buffy shows herself to be quite aware of this challenge, and feeling quite threatened by it.

Faith’s reliance on instinct is also right on display. She’s clearly not following any plan by dancing with the vampire for ages before going outside with him. She isn’t being efficient or directed by introducing herself to Buffy while in the middle of a fight. In fact, she didn’t even have a stake on her and had no particular plan to acquire one – luckily Buffy happened to provide. She doesn’t need to think things through, here, she just dives headfirst and trusts that she’ll be able to figure it out as she goes.

Unlike the other two, this trait is not entirely absent from the Scoobies. I’ve suggested before that the core four at the heart of the show each foreground and represent a different attribute of a complete person. Giles is conscience and reason, both aspects of self-awareness and reflection, whereas Willow (despite her nerdiness) is the emotional core of the group – the conflict between head and heart is shown in this very episode when Giles warns Willow about delving carelessly into magic. Xander has had the duty of representing instinct, reliably speaking out of turn, following his gut, and getting in over his head. Faith’s appearance on the scene seems very likely to step on his toes. At the least, it puts a spotlight on some of the growing problems with Xander as a character.

Let’s do a quick review of those, actually. Throughout the last season, the show struggled to figure out exactly what to do with Xander. He was the “normal guy”, the doofus with a good heart, but most of his plot contributions seemed to be about him making stupid mistakes so everything gets worse for everyone. He’s also stuck as a representative of threatened masculinity, so more often than not the dumb stuff he says has a layer of unpleasant gendered foolishness that could make it hard to like him. This very episode has a case in point: Xander calls Buffy a “little slut” for expressing interest in going on a date. He’s just teasing her; the joke he’s making is that she isn’t even remotely being a “little slut”. However, the joke relies on an uncomfortable and misogynistic set of assumptions. (In response to this well-meaning but wrongheaded teasing, Buffy punches Xander a little too hard, or perhaps not remotely hard enough.) Now that Faith’s appeared, also with the instinct trait on display, the weaknesses in Xander’s character stand out more clearly: he’s not only the voice of (thwarted, nice-guy) patriarchy, he is also by design impotent in comparison to Buffy. Just this little scene with Faith underlines how, as a character, Xander’s been set up to fail, and in the world of Buffy where emotional consequences are real, he’s either going to learn and change, or he’s going to get bitter and self-righteous. Keep an eye on him.

Speaking of the word “slut” – Cordy uses it to describe Faith, having spotted her on the dancefloor. It’s another unpleasant beat, almost forgiveable because it comes from Cordelia who spent a season-and-a-half exercising her power by policing other women – that takes a while to get over. It’s a pity none of the other characters are given a rebuke to this, although it’s kinda in character that none of them would chastise Cordelia for this comment – the closest to a paragon present would be Oz, who is characterized above all by his tendency towards silence. (If only we could glimpse what he was thinking…) As it happens, the best rebuke to the comment comes (in delayed form) from Faith herself. Her introduction as a positive character, her mythological importance as a new Slayer, and her continuing role as a major character for this season, all serve to shout down this comment, or perhaps to put it in the context Faith would – as a pathetic attempt to insult her for being command of her sexuality. This show has a female perspective and feminist ideals, and Faith’s arrival immediately shows some weaknesses there.

Not that she’s an instant corrective or a perfect feminist. Faith is pointedly graceless, over-fond of violence, and in the same way her three primary attributes are conveyed immediately, it is also immediately clear how they can flip to become weaknesses: overconfident, overemotional, unthinking. When the episode and reveals that Faith does have weaknesses, in this case a fear of the vampire who killed her watcher, we are set up to wonder if she will listen to Buffy’s appeals to take responsibility and stay. (Not coincidentally, this is a speech she would have been unable to give with sincerity just one episode ago.) Then the vampires short-circuit the question by turning up anyway. Faith’s courage falters, but Buffy’s example gives her the presence of mind to move past her fears and take the monstrous vampire down.

And then we jump to Giles confirming that Faith will stick around, for the time being at least. Buffy is pleased, herself coming to terms with the fact that Faith is also a slayer (easier now it’s clear she has some personal qualities Faith is lacking). The contrasts Faith represents are going to provide plenty of drama, that much is obvious. Faith is a hard contrast with Buffy, the same way Cordelia was intended to be right at the start of season one. Kendra was also a contrast, but not one with much teeth – taking a bunch of awkward kids and showing them someone even nerdier was never going to be a convincing existential challenge. But here, the library nerds suddenly have to deal with someone cool in their circle, and that is definitely going to shake things up. It’s a delicious development, because as much as the dramatic conflicts are clear, the future is wide open – this could go in all kinds of directions. For the first time in Buffy’s history, it really is impossible to predict what is coming next.

HOPE
The introduction of Buffy’s new love interest is accomplished with such economy that it is instantly clear any romance between the two characters is doomed. Buffy is sitting with her friends just outside school when Willow delivers an info-dump worthy of the ones Giles delivers from his dusty tomes: “Ooo, Scott Hope at eleven o’clock. He likes you. He wanted to ask you out last year, but you weren’t ready then. But I think you’re ready now, or at least in the state of pre-readiness to make conversation, or-or to do that thing with your mouth that boys like.” (The double entendre finish is spectacularly forced, but the show gets away with it because Alyson Hannigan.)

Willow’s right that Scott likes Buffy and intends to ask her out; she’s right to be positive about this, because Scott is painstakingly set up throughout this episode as a nice, normal guy; but she’s not quite right about Buffy’s readiness. This is what the Scott Hope portion of the episode is about: Buffy’s personal baggage. We’ve seen in the first episode of the season that Buffy realizes she needs to go home to heal, and that’s where she belongs anyway; in the second episode we saw her reconnect with her friends and her mother. Now it’s time to actually show the impact of that healing, in accordance with the show’s established method of getting past the traumas it inflicts on its characters. Buffy needs to angst a bit, and then the show, and we the audience, will let her get on with the quips and the stakings.

Willow’s misapprehension here is simply because she doesn’t quite appreciate the magnitude of Buffy’s sorrow. She doesn’t know – no-one but Buffy herself knows – that Angel had recovered his soul at the time Buffy had to kill him. She’s underestimating just how messed up that experience was. Another intense dream about Angel, this one unmistakeably driven by her sense of guilt, marks out her unfinished business.

Buffy’s stated motivation is to get her life back so she can “do normal stuff”. This isn’t the same desire that animated Buffy back in season one – her normal has shifted. Patrolling cemeteries and beheading demons is part of her life now, but she also wants the other half, school and friends and time for picnics. Principal Snyder grudgingly readmitting Buffy to Sunnydale High is part of this throughline, and the victory over this petty villain is very entertaining.

So she’s back in high school, hanging with her friends, and has a normal boy to awkward-flirt with – everything is falling into place, except of course that big unresolved unpleasantness that haunts her dreams. And that’s brought to a head by Giles gently probing her for details in order to bind the demon that caused all this mess. Buffy dodges, rather than relive the worst day of her life in excruciating detail, let alone share its full awfulness.

Wait a second. Here’s a question: why does she she dodge? She’s already reliving that worst day over and over again; and does she really think her friends couldn’t handle the truth about Angel’s soul being restored? She’s returned to Sunnydale to heal, and she would heal best by sharing with her friends and receiving their acceptance and love. What’s really holding her back? Is it just dramatic contrivance, to spin an episode out of this plot point and force Buffy to earn her way out of misery? That’s certainly part of it, but is that all? Is there a strong organic reason why Buffy should so vividly keep this secret?

Well, yes, there is, and it comes down to Buffy’s fundamental character. From very early on, Buffy the slayer has been exceptional for surrounding herself with friends. But over and over again she has shown a fierce intent to step away from her team and carry the load and risk herself. This is a fundamental feature of Buffy’s character, or more pointedly it is her fundamental flaw. It could be called a martyr complex, or an ego problem, or any number of other things, but it boils down to the same thing: Buffy will always try and go it alone, and she will succeed often enough that she’ll always underestimate the problems such an approach can create. It is a lesson she will have to learn over and over again, and it will create almost all her major problems from here until the end of the series.

This time, she learns the lesson by witnessing that same instinct, to go it alone, almost get Faith killed. So in a move that shows her developing maturity, Buffy volunteers to Willow and Giles the truth about Angel, that he was cured when she killed him. The moment is played very simply and gently, and to the right audience – the head and the heart. It’s lovely. And then Buffy can go and respond positively to Scott, and to demonstrate closure with Angel by putting down the ring he gave her at the place where she killed him. Time to move on.

(Except, of course, Angel comes back, precisely at the moment Buffy gets over him. Why now? Because this show wants her to suffer. She knew that rule when she came back to town.)

TRICK
Joss Whedon has never been strong on race. Gender – he’s not too bad on gender. There’s no shortage of people giving him fierce critiques for how he addresses gender in his creative works (and, I should say, often making compelling points) but the fact is, he put Buffy on the screen, and she remains a titanic figure in terms of female representation in the media. (Back when Buffy was new we dared to hope the world was changing – but the fact Buffy’s still the titan shows it hasn’t changed as much as it could’ve.) There will always and forever be a convincing case that Joss Whedon pretty much did right by gender.

I don’t know that anyone has tried to say the same about how he addresses race. He’s not a total washout on the subject – Firefly had a few people of colour in its core cast, which is more than a lot of TV manages – but by and large his casting tends towards Whitey McWhitersons everywhere you look. And while Joss Whedon is not the singular deciding power behind any of his works, this show, his first, is the clearest expression of this failing. Sunnydale High is an astonishingly whitebread high school for California. While it’s fairly plausible there aren’t many black students thanks to effective segregation, California’s enormous Hispanic population and significant Asian population are both massively under-represented, even as background extras. After two complete seasons with only Kendra repping people of colour – and that being something of a misfire as well – it’s turned into a known issue.

Enter Mister Trick, a black man in a limo ordering a drink in the drive-thru. “Sunnydale. Town’s got quaint, and the people: he called me sir, don’t you miss that? Admittedly, not a haven for the brothers – strictly the Caucasian persuasion in the ‘dale – but you gotta stand up and salute their death rate.”

This entrance, and Trick himself, hang a lampshade (poorly!) on the show’s racial deficiencies, but litigating that isn’t what I’m most interested in here. The real function of this move is worldbuilding. The “Caucasian persuasion” of Sunnydale is not offered up by the show to excuse its lack of diversity, but rather to signal something about the wider world.

When your show’s title character is at high school, with friends at high school, and one significant older character who works at the high school… Well, that puts some boundaries around your show, and it’s tricky to step outside of them. (Cast your mind back to season one’s terrible effort.) Since then, the show has been carefully building some of the foundations it needs to successfully expand beyond high school. Principal Snyder’s connection to the mysterious Mayor has been a quietly developing subplot for a long time, for example. Sunnydale High is being put into context here: it is just one fragment of something larger.

It’s important to note that this worldbuilding is not intending to logically extend the things we know about the Buffy world into a coherent and consistent wider universe. This show doesn’t give the slightest damn about that: witness any story where the police appear. (Or, even more tellingly, any story where they don’t.) Or look at the Watcher’s Council: in this very episode we learn that Buffy is infamous in Watcher circles, and also that Giles doesn’t get invited to Watcher events. This doesn’t make a lick of sense. Sure, it can be justified if you bend over backwards a ways, but why bother? The show doesn’t care. It’s interested in establishing this wider world solely in order to tell more, and better, stories about Buffy and her friends.

So here, Mr Trick arrives on the scene. He’s a vampire with a gimmick of being tech-savvy and calculatingly self-interested. He is, in other words, an expression of urban power, in sharp contrast to the sheltered small-town suburbs of Sunnydale. And with his arrival we see the vampire metaphor shift again – the cool kids Rebel-Without-A-Cause-ing all over the place have had their moment. For this season, vampires (and those around them) are going to represent technocratic exploitation and the callous misuse of power. The smart young teenagers who are our heroes are going to discover that it isn’t school bullies playing status games who are the real sources of pain in the world – it’s distant suits pursuing their selfish ends, inflicting misery on the small and vulnerable along the way. Not for nothing is Mr Trick’s first victim in town a minimum-wage worker at a fast food joint. So the message of Mr Trick being a black man is the same as the message of him wearing that suit: Sunnydale is a sheltered little haven, and that’s about to change.

Oh, and hey, who else has just arrived in Sunnydale with a big-city attitude? Good thing Faith is on the side of the angels, right?

Other notes:
* The best moment in the episode is actually a very minor one, plotwise. Giles reveals to Willow that there never was a binding spell, and he just wanted Buffy to open up.
* When Faith flirts with Giles, Buffy asks for a show of hands to express everyone’s disgust at the idea. Willow just smiles.
* Oz gives Scott Hope bonus points for using the word “mosey”.
* Joyce: “Probably because you were an only child.” Heh.
* Although Cordelia Chase is almost the epitome of whiteness, Charisma Carpenter is Latina! I had no idea.
* Angel butt.

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.