From The Morgue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Angel controls this narrative.

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

Jenny runs right into his arms.

~

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

Now Buffy can kill him.

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