From The Morgue

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.