From The Morgue

The arrival of Spike & Dru has changed up the vampire metaphor at work in the show. Now vampires are the cool kids, the dangerous ones who get into fights and have sex and don’t do their homework. This episode takes this imagery and swerves it hilariously, by introducing a subculture of wannabe vampires. They desperately want to be in with the cool kids, even if they don’t really understand what that means.

The Vampire groupies are played for laughs – there’s a fantastic gag, one of the best in the whole series, when Angel sees a groupie dressed just like he is – but it also allows them some beats of tragedy because the groupies are obviously much more like the nerds and outcasts of the library than the cool kids of vampiredom. Their attraction to the cool kids is understandable, but their sheer cluelessness is almost painful to watch, because we know – we have seen – that Spike and Drusilla and their kind are dangerous to be around.

The groupies, desperately wanting more, mirror the emotion running in the main cast this week: jealousy. One of Buffy’s old friends has turned up, and Angel (and Xander) get jealous, but Buffy saw Angel with Drusilla, so she gets jealous too, and Spike gets jealous when he finds out Dru talked to Angel, and everyone’s pretty messed up with their jealousy.

The show’s principles are in action here – even though this show is full of vampires and silly groupies, it promises to take emotions seriously. All of these jealousies are not random, they are based on the insecurities built into each character. Spike knows Angel and Dru have history, and Buffy knows that Angel has a past gien his enormous age difference. Angel knows Buffy is a young girl with a life of her own that might have no place for him. Etc, etc.

This swirl of jealousy is actually just groundwork for even higher stakes. The insecurities drive the characters to expose themselves and that pushes their relationships to new places. Most notably, Angel asks Buffy if she loves him, and she says the words. That’s a big deal. But the show doesn’t stop there, moving on to use this moment to address the reality of Angel-as-love-interest. Angel confesses the horrific crimes of which he is guilty. It’s a crucial moment for the show – and a clear-eyed look at what exactly Buffy’s romance entails. (The show underlines that Angel is right to bring this up, despite his personal change this past overhangs the present – remember, at the start of the episode Angel saw Drusilla try to kill a child, and he let her go without a fight. The world looks different when you’re a vampire, even a vampire with a soul.)

Which brings us back to the groupies, specifically to Ford, Buffy’s old friend. His beliefs and hopes are also focused in a vampiric direction. Does he understand the horror he’s opening himself up to? The show equivocates on this a bit – Ford is played partly as clueless, and partly as ruthless. A late revelation that he’s terminally ill is meant to justify his embrace of horror, but it doesn’t quite work – it doesn’t really explain anything by itself, just muddies up the picture even more.

Nevertheless, the show ultimately makes clear that Ford doesn’t really appreciate what he’s dealing with, and in so doing it makes us uneasy about Buffy’s entanglement with Angel. In Ford’s fate we see the show’s principles unstintingly applied: the threats are real. There is no forgiveness for Ford, no easy out. He makes bad choices and he is killed. The show’s other principle is for the characters to experience real emotions as a result of this trauma, and this hurts Buffy. The final scene of the episode has Buffy and Giles by Ford’s grave, and we see her carry that weight: “Does it ever get any easier?”

And so we stare directly at the problem of Jesse. (If you’ve been following these posts you’re sick of me mentioning it, but for completeness, it’s this: putting real threat and real emotion into your stories threatens to trap you in misery.) Ford’s death has shaken Buffy. Yes, the loss is different: Jesse was an innocent casualty, whereas Ford betrayed Buffy and brought his death upon himself. But this just makes the loss all the more painful: Ford’s death is awful, but his betrayal is agonizing.

Back when Jesse was killed, the show didn’t know how to engage with the emotional impact that would follow, and so it dodged the issue entirely. Nineteen episodes later, the show has built up the emotional repertoire to embrace a character’s pain, confident that it can find its way back to joy. And in the final exchange of the episode, it demonstrates exactly how it intends to resolve the problem of Jesse. Buffy asks Giles if life will ever get easier:

Giles: What do you want me to say?
Buffy: Lie to me.
Giles: Yes, it’s terribly simple.
Giles: The good guys are always stalwart and true, the bad guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats, and, uh, we always defeat them and save the day. No one ever dies, and everybody lives happily ever after.
Buffy: Liar.

Life is hard and complicated, and people die, and it hurts like hell. Faced with this, Buffy asks Giles to lie to her. And – in a final confirmation that he has abandoned his Watcher remove – he does. And it is unconvincing, and of course it was always meant to be, because the lie is not the point. The point is, he gave Buffy what she needed.
We stave off despair by leaning on each other. It’s love, of course. The pathway from misery back to joy is simply love.

Problem solved.

Other thoughts:
* Unsurprisingly, given this one pretty much gives a thesis statement for the show, this is a Joss Whedon joint. Accordingly, the dialogue is heavy with his Buffy-speak: “You made him do that thing where he’s gone!” – and a sex joke that other writers wouldn’t dare: “Of course I had no idea what it was about.”
* Not to mention that the whole arc of the season is foreshadowed in this episode in Angel’s horrific past and Ford’s painful betrayal.
* The comic-book style storytelling goes full Claremont with some juicy backstory revealed (Buffy’s past life, Angel’s past life) and some continuity threads deliberately dropped now to be picked up later (a book is stolen from the library, Willow invites Angel into her home).
* Wisely, the show never goes back to the vamp groupies, and it mostly forgets about how normal people might react to a world where vampires are real. Doing so would torpedo the metaphorical work it’s trying to do – it’s hard to keep up the idea that monsters are metaphors if they’re forced to interact with normal people as well. (Later on, in the Angel spin-off, the show’s purpose is different, allowing a return to this well.)
* hello Chanterelle, another of Buffy’s recurring bit players – we’ll probably end up talking more about her later.

Here we go. The episodes leading up to this feel like shakedown runs, but here this show goes into high gear. This is where Buffy the show becomes Buffy the classic TV show, launching into a sustained run of excellence, hitting new heights every couple weeks and still climbing, just nailing every aspect of its premise and execution and having a massive influence on the world of TV in the process. Even with one loser in the mix (Bad Eggs), this must count as one of the greatest runs of TV ever produced.

And it starts right in the precredits. It’s a vamp-fighting sequence, bread-and-butter for the opening spot. But this one is an exceptional example. It’s funny. The fight is in a pumpkin patch and it leads to vampires being pelted with pumpkins, a scarecrow getting a stake through the heart, and some silly business with a haywagon and the pumpkin patch sign.

It’s also clever and portentous: there’s another vamp filming this battle on a camcorder, and seeing Buffy through the lens is instantly creepy, making her seem very vulnerable, while also nodding to the meta that this post-modern show loves to reference – the villain, like us, watches Buffy through a screen, and has a position of power over her as a result. (They didn’t forget the comedy here either – the camcorder’s battery is in the process of dying out.)

That’s the show’s offer: we do scary, and we do funny, and we do self-awareness. Like that stuff? Stick around.

There’s one other feature of the opening worth noting: not a single word of dialogue. Buffy says nothing. The vamp says nothing. There’s no ominous voice-over. It’s just action, but the storytelling couldn’t be clearer. There could be no greater sign of the show’s increasing confidence.

But here’s another anyway, just a few minutes later:

Buffy: I was gonna stay in and veg. The one night a year things are supposed to be quiet for me.
Xander: Halloween quiet? Oh, I figured it’d be a big old vamp scare-apalooza.
Buffy: Not according to Giles. He swears that tomorrow night is, like, dead for the undead. They stay in.

The casualness of this exchange – note how this exposition would usually be delivered by a stammering Giles in dramatic tones – hides some genius. For the first time in the series it is suggested the monsters of the night have their own social rules – they aren’t just horrific aberrations of our world, but a whole self-contained counterpoint to it. This puts the creatures of the night in an essentially satirical frame, as despite their otherwordly nature they still embrace mundane habits like taking a night off. The show gestured to this a bit in season one, where the Master would sometimes undercut his own bombast, but this is a bolder act, wrapping the show’s deadly horrors in the logic of comedy – it’s only a step or two away from the Sheepdog & Wolf Looney Tunes where the two enemies exchange small talk and clock in before beginning their vicious struggle.

The “night off on Halloween” has the curious effect of raising the tension instead of lowering it – we’re watching an episode of the show so something exciting has to happen, and it has to originate outside the normal boundaries of the show’s monster logic. It threatens to upset our expectations of what can happen on this show. In the end the danger doesn’t really deliver that kind of conceptual upheaval – the big shake-up is still a few episodes away – but it does remind the viewer not to get comfortable.

Monsters taking the night off on Halloween reinforces the message from School Hard about what kind of bad guys we’re dealing with here. The implication is, unmistakeably, that the vampires think Halloween is beneath them. Once again, the vampires are being set up as the cool kids, the rule-breakers, the ones who grew up too fast. They ‘re natural enemies for the sheltered nerds of the Sunnydale School Library.

And just one more sign of the show’s faith in itself: we’re over fifteen minutes deep before the supernatural threat finally turns up. That time is spent investing in character stories, and we get to explore the episode’s theme in a different way: while the show overall is revelling in its confidence, the characters are suffering from a lack of same. Questions of confidence beset the whole crew, giving us a good opportunity to check in on all our characters as season two gets properly rolling. The nature of the threat – costumes that turn the wearer into whatever they depict – allows this exploration to get charmingly literal.

Buffy’s lack of confidence falls in the usual place – her love life. She is still a bit in awe of Angel, and finds herself wanting next to Cordelia. She has just started dating Angel, her first romantic connection of the series, and it’s natural for her to be anxious about it. She ends up becoming a fainting, weak Ye Olden Times lady like those in Angel’s past.

Xander’s lack of confidence is in his “manliness”, specifically his reputation among other men. This follows on from Inca Mummy Girl where his fundamental heroism was affirmed, complicating the picture by showing that the opinions of others are crucial to his sense of identity, which is a very human failing. It’s also, unfortunately, not an encouraging direction for the character, and Xander comes across as even more foolish than usual. Still, it’s neat to see him transform into a badass military man.

Willow’s lack of confidence is in her sexuality – no-one notices her, and she thinks if she tries to act on her feelings she’d just make a fool of herself. This was hinted at in Inca Mummy Girl, where we were reminded that her attraction to Xander was unrequited and her only other romantic prospect in the series was a computer demon. The viewer is in a privileged position to know that her confidence is due a bump because she’s caught the attention of Oz, but once again Willow herself doesn’t find this out. And just as well – it gives her a chance to improve her confidence on her own terms, rather than because some boy likes her.

At the halfway mark the episode turns into a Willow showcase, because her confidence needs actual work, whereas Buffy and Xander basically need to get over themselves. Willow’s thematically perfect ghost costume ends up trapping her in the sexy outfit she’d chickened out of wearing, and she’s forced to guide everyone through the crisis and solve the mystery (which, pleasingly, she and Giles do in about ten seconds). She nails it, basically, and by the end she’s almost catching up to the viewers in how she sees herself. Finally she’s ready to actually meet Oz.

Giles also gets an arc. It’s weighted a bit differently, but you could describe his reserved personality as lacking in confidence. In the library sequence he is as stuffy and boring as he’s ever been, and Buffy saying Jenny Calendar liked him manages to throw him completely. This demonstration of Giles the stick in the mud is just setting us up for the three-quarter swerve, when we find out Giles was also known as Ripper, and has some kind of dark and dangerous past he’s not divulged before. The Giles we see facing down Ethan Rayne is a rougher, steelier version of the librarian.

So in this episode, all our core characters get some new layers and some reversals of expectations. They all get deeper and stronger and more interesting. This is the magic of season two – your groundwork is done, but your cast and situation is still fresh. Season two is your big chance to make something special – and this enormously fun episode demonstrates this show intends to be very special indeed.

Other thoughts:
* There’s some hilarious attention to continuity when the show remembers that Cordelia still hasn’t discovered Angel is a vampire, and plays it for lovely black comedy. (When Cordy is told Angel’s parents are dead, her first response is “oh good”!)
* And yet the show forgets its own rules about invitations with a random vampire in the Summers house. Like the breathing stuff, this show is much more interested in the consistency of its characters than the consistency of its fictional monster logic.
* Cordelia and Xander get another nice moment. Their characters have great chemistry right now.
* Spike basically just wanders through the episode being cooler than everything else. Until Buffy pummels him of course – and lets him get away. (This confrontation is superhero comic logic, once again.)
* Hmm, could’ve done without the pirate rape threat from Larry. Hi recurring bit player Larry, welcome to the show!

In August 2012, a high school girl in Steubenville, Ohio went out to a party and got drunker than she intended. In the hours that followed, a succession of popular boys took sexual advantage of her, and two raped her. The case went big after it appeared the town was rallying behind the boys instead of their victim. It marked a turning point in global discussion around sexual abuse and consent, particularly in the context of young intoxicated people.

This case, and many others like it before and since, cast a long shadow over this episode of Buffy. The episode was deliberately aiming at a known target: powerful young men luring young women into trusting them, and then feeding them drinks or drugging them, and raping them while they are insensible.

It happens a lot, and it’s been happening for a long time. The focus for some years has been on campus, particularly college fraternities, where this kind of abuse is rife (as researchers were at pains to point out after one story of frat brother abuse turned out to be unreliable).

This is heady stuff for a TV show about cheerleaders fighting vampires. It takes the ostensible structure of the show, monsters as metaphors, and slams it hard against the unavoidable emergent theme of rape culture. Vampires are metaphorical rapists, sure, but episode writer (and show veteran) David Greenwalt takes the idea much further – the metaphor here becomes almost literal, and the intention unmistakeable.

The episode is about a fraternity at Sunnydale’s elite school Crestwood College. (The fraternity is portrayed much like a Skull and Bones-style secret society, but it’s definitely part of the Greek system – this means Greenwalt gets to incriminate both types of boy’s club at once.) The frat boys have an unpleasant habit of luring high school girls into their clubhouse, then drugging them and feeding them to their (phallus-shaped) demon. The demon, in return, delivers wealth and power to their families.

There’s no metaphor at all to the first part of that, the luring and the drugging. The show makes this explicit by having one frat boy correct another who is about to follow through the real world script by raping the unconscious Buffy: “I was just having a little fun.” “Well, she’s not here for your fun, you pervert. She’s here for the pleasure of the one we serve.” The show applies the monster-metaphor as late as possible to make its real-world target crystal clear.

The effect of this is interesting. In the text of the show, literal rape is about pleasure and satisfaction, whereas metaphorical rape is about consolidating social and economic power. Or put another way: being a good business executive is morally equivalent to rape.

This is a politics I can get behind – linking the show’s in-built feminist angle to a left-wing criticism of capitalist power structures. But it is, as stated, heady stuff for this show. Aren’t we meant to be focusing on the horrors of high school? What are all these frat boys doing here?

The episode glosses this link by examining the age difference between Angel and Buffy, and having the frat boys use their age and “maturity” to lure in younger girls. (There’s no particular reason the frat boys target younger women when they have access to a campus full of co-eds.) It’s a pretty weak link, and the two halves of the episode never really illuminate each other. For what it’s worth, the resolution to the age difference conflict is “Buffy doesn’t care about it, and Angel eventually accepts this and gets over his own anxieties about it”, which is about the only way you can play it. Age differences are really about power differences, and if Angel doesn’t fret about that, then the dynamic gets very problematic very fast.

Throughout her relationship with Angel, Buffy never really commits to a perception of Angel as an older man. Instead he’s almost a wish-fulfilment teenage projection of what an older man boyfriend would be like. (Later, when he gets his own show, we see Angel outside the filter of Buffy’s perspective, and he’s kind of goofy and uncool.)

Anyway, with that conflict disposed of, the show is finally able to take the step it’s been teasing since episode one: Buffy and Angel becoming a couple. He asks her out – and she says maybe. In an episode in which we saw so many awful men with so much awful power, this is a nice way to go out – with all the power in Buffy’s hands.

Other thoughts:
* The Buffy/Willow/Xander threesome is portrayed as so close in this episode it almost gets weird – Buffy and Xander together braid Willow’s hair.
* I’m not sure if the costuming here was a deliberate nod to the “what were you wearing?” victim-blaming around rape culture, but Buffy wears two separate outfits where her bra is visible through her top.
* Buffy lying to Giles is a big moment for her. As discussed a couple episodes ago, she doesn’t often do the wrong thing. This is a pretty clear instance of after-school special mistake-making. The show goes out of its way to make sure we buy this act of rebellion, not by really giving Sarah Michelle Gellar a convincing emotional journey to sell (she still almost pulls it off), but by having Willow berate Giles and Angel for not understanding it. Who could resist that?
* As wild frat parties go, this ones looks pretty sedate – close dancing and chill-out music and only one drunk person!
* Jonathan is back and he gets his name!

Not a praying mantis.

So, Xander falls for a woman who is actually a monster, and yes the show is fully aware they already did this story. They’re having a second go the same reason anyone has a second go – they want to get it right this time.

This episode has some character work to do, too. As we’ve seen, the Willow-Xander-Buffy love triangle (really an unrequited-love-chain I guess?) was resolved in the season one finale, and its end was reiterated in the first episode of this season. This raises some questions – what is going on among the trio now, exactly? We saw that Buffy, Willow and Xander have love for each other at the end of When She Was Bad, and we saw them happily dancing together in School Hard, so we know they are in a good place with each other. But the intense romantic feelings of teenagers don’t untangle easily, and if this show is going to live up to its promise of real emotions then it needs to look harder.

But let’s start with the monster. Inca Mummy Girl (her real name is never revealed) is a complex character. She was an innocent girl chosen for an unpleasant fate, and now she is willing to sacrifice people in order to experience some of the joys she missed before. Her powers are classic Bathory – draining the life from other people to maintain her own youth! It’s really just vampirism in a slightly different form (a form traditionally marked as feminine, in fact, with its emphasis on looking youthful).

The show takes care to portray Inca Mummy Girl with sympathy, but also to point out repeatedly that her murders are horrific and inexcusable. It’s an effective balance, and she remains understandable even when she decisively chooses murder at the end.

So, what’s the monster-as-metaphor this time? The argument she has with her bodyguard points the way – he insists she must accept her fate rather than hurting other people. This is ultimately a monstrous riff on that blinkered teenage selfishness where you think the whole world revolves around you, and anyone (usually a parent) who stops you doing what you want is a monster who is ruining your life! The show is savvy enough to complicate this metaphor, because the people who sacrificed the Inca Mummy Girl were indeed monstrously unfair, and submitting to her fate will indeed ruin her life. So the show cleverly has its cake and eats it too – it criticises that selfishness while also agreeing that teenagers can be right about stuff.

This metaphor works just fine. She is a moral counterpoint to Buffy, who explicitly notes the parallels between them (although Xander has to remind Buffy that she made a different choice when she was faced with death). It also ties her to Xander, who is at the centre of this episode. Xander’s behaviour in season one was pretty awful, although the show tried to make it forgivable. Xander even had a heroic redemption after hitting rock bottom in Prophecy Girl. His post-redemption relationship with Buffy is given a lot of time this episode, and it’s pretty damn healthy. There’s hope for him after all!

But Xander still manifests the fundamental flaw of patriarchy: thinking the whole world revolves around you. (That’s also the fundamental flaw of teenagers, it’s just people who ain’t white male heterosexuals get it knocked out of them faster.) For all his obvious love for Willow – he outright states it, even – he still hurts her, over and over again, by not considering her feelings. And because it’s Willow getting hurt, the show knows you will feel that pain thanks to Alyson Hannigan’s talent for being a wounded puppy. These harmful acts don’t make Xander a villain, far from it – but he doesn’t get to be an uncomplicated hero either.

The climax brings Xander’s and IMG’s respective selfishnesses into collision. Xander is the one who demands the Inca Mummy Girl leave Willow alone – if she’s going to murder anyone, it’s got to be him. It’s his turn to step up to his responsibilities, the same test that Buffy passed, and that Inca Mummy Girl failed. For all is failures with the day-to-day business of not being a dick, when the choices are clear, he chooses well. After saving him from the consequences of his sacrifice here, Buffy gives her endorsement by comparing this to his saving her from her sacrifice in Prophecy Girl. Through Buffy, the show forgives him his weaknesses. The implication is that he will learn to see himself more clearly and do better all ’round. He’ll grow up. It’s a hopeful moment.

Willow, meanwhile, drifts along in the wake of Xander’s journey. She’s not over him, and she’s stuck. She doesn’t even get any dialogue after Xander makes his big heroic stand to save her life. All you get from this episode is that Willow feels unnoticed. However, even though Willow doesn’t get to address this problem, the show solves it for her by having someone notice her. This is quite heartening too – Willow hasn’t been doing anything wrong, after all, and by introducing Oz the show acknowledges this. In the rhythm of the episode the Oz scenes are very strange – why are we suddenly cutting away to some random other person? – but because we have been primed to sympathy for Willow this episode they work, another hopeful moment, and an emphatic expansion of possibilities for our core characters and the show.

Other notes:
* When you appeal to a sympathetic villain with the power of love, the villain is supposed to have a crisis of conscience and repent. Hasn’t Inca Mummy Girl seen any movies! Oh well okay I guess she hasn’t. This is the episode’s biggest swerve.
* Who’s that near-victim? Hey, it’s Jonathan! Like Harmony, he’s another bit player from the unaired pilot who returned in a very minor role in the regular series and ended up becoming an important part of the story.
* This ep was written by Matt Kiene and Joe Reinkemeyer, who were also behind The Pack, another episode that did smart work with the monster-as-metaphor. The Pack had a significant rewrite from Joss Whedon, though, and I suspect this episode did as well.