Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan blog. Mostly focused on sapphic relationships and being a huge nerd.
Fanfic can be read here: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BTVSFE/profile
Fic update: Research leads to a breakthrough in understanding why vampire Willow can enter Willow's bedroom uninvited, and suggests a way to turn it against her. Also more BDSM.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
“Here.” Kendra pointed at the page, and the other two crowded around. “If this translation is to be believed, a Bodhisattva travelled backwards through time to repair the damage caused in an earlier age by his previous incarnation as a vampire.”
Willow stared at the English annotations beside the Pali. “It… it says that he was surprised when the vampire entered a house where he had been staying and slew all the inhabitants.” She glanced up. “Wait, are Bodhisattvas real?”
“Almost everything is real, almost nothing is fully understood,” her master replied, “these annals are probably 50% accurate records of what people at the time thought was happening, but if we believe them then it sounds like by inviting him in, they also invited in the vampire.”
“Right,” Willow was nodding thoughtfully, “because they were the same person, just time-displaced.”
“So it is indeed a result of her status as your Doppelgänger.” Kendra concluded.
Thoughts on Rewatching S3E03, “Faith, Hope, and Trick” (3/3): We could fit right in here. Have us some fun.
Ok, scraping in just before watching the next episode, I wanted to say a bit about the villains in this episode, and more broadly about the… the plight. The menace. The ambient situation of imminent peril. How are life and death, in general, in Sunnydale, at the beginning of season 3?
But let’s start with the tragedy of Mr. Trick. Seasons 1 and 2 both make a point of introducing both a second Slayer (Kendra/Faith) and a self-consciously modern vampire (Spike/Mr. Trick). It is somewhat aggrieving that in both cases it’s the White one who survives to season 7 and beyond and the Black one who dies after only featuring in a few episodes.
But the thing about Trick is that he does actually get to show off his distinctive skills a few times, they’re just not very spotlight-grabbing. In this episode, he assures Kakistos that he’s checking records in order to find Faith… and a little bit later Kakistos turns up at her door. In episode 5 he succeeds at putting at least one Slayer exactly where he wants her to be, for other people to ambush. In episode 6 he brings in Ethan Rayne to organise the whole baby-stealing distraction. I think we can probably assume that he’s the only reason Kakistos was even able to follow Faith to this particular town. He knows how to handle information and put people in the right place at the right time. But in none of those cases is he front and centre, so his role can be easy to miss.
What this brings out is that he’s a schemer, not a heavy-hitter. Schemers need heavy-hitters to go out and hit things, but his problem at the beginning of this episode is that the heavy-hitter (Kakistos) is in charge, and so the schemer can’t properly scheme. Trick needed some heavy-hitting minions, and he never really got that: instead he swiftly falls into the orbit of the mayor, another schemer.
And the other part of why Trick’s arc in season 3 feels sort of disappointing is how it ends. His boss (who clearly would prefer a more simple-minded heavy-hitter, see how much he loves Faith) panics and mismanages him, sending him after Two Slayers at once as if he’s a heavy-hitter. He manages to work some scheming into it - he almost takes Buffy out because he managed to hit her with a cargo crate before ambushing her with a band of minions. But ultimately he dies acting like a minion. Which, honestly, is a waste.
And (if it’s not overly woke to accuse mass-murdering immortal sorcerers of racism) you could definitely look at this as: old White dude falls victim to stereotype and fails to make proper use of his intellectual Black underling, instead treating them like a muscle bound goon.
(Alternatively, you might think the mayor was being very deliberate - a too-smart minion is a potential liability, who knows what too-smart ideas he might get into his head, so send him on a suicide mission. I guess this is an exculpatory reading of the mayor - rather an “I can excuse treachery and murder, but I draw the line at racism” moment...)
Either way, he dies, and because he’s stayed in the shadows so effectively, the protagonists don’t even see it as a big deal when they kill him: it’s secondary to their evolving situationship.
Anyway, focusing back on this episode, Trick is a lot of fun to watch even if he doesn’t quite go anywhere: ordering diet soda and then eating the worker is funny, likewise I love the sun-proof glove for pulling delivery guys through doorways. He’s also a great foil for Kakistos, who’s like an exaggerated dumber version of the Master. A vampire so old even Giles recognises his name!
I will say though, I feel like I remember him being a bit bigger and more imposing than he actually turns out to be: he’s big, sure, but… hmm. I think I somehow got the idea he had horns?
(Also I continue to be unsure what sort of wounds vampires can and can't heal from - presumably Angel's chest isn't still riddled with holes from Darla's bullets and Faith's crossbow bolt, that sort of thing heals up, but then why is Kakistos's eye wound unhealed?)
But also just to zoom out from these particular vampires, it’s notable that this is the first time in a while that Sunnydale has had no big boss vampire around - until now it’s been the Master, then the Anointed One, then Spike, then Angelus, and now finally it’s no-one. The Scooby team over the summer were specifically trying to “keep vampire numbers low”, suggesting that they are in fact low. So this seems to be a relative lull in vampire numbers, at least.
(Not as low as immediately after “Prophecy Girl”: Xander says in S2E01 that the vampire that attacks them is the first one they’ve seen since the Master’s death, though admittedly Angel later in that episode says that the Anointed One “has been gathering forces somewhere in town”.)
(But lower than in the mild lull between season 3 and season 4 - Buffy comaplains in S4E01 that “It's been a very slay-heavy summer. I just haven't had a whole lot of time to think about life at UC Sunnydale.”)
So in terms of vampire numbers, this might be the most depopulated the town’s been in a while - there are a few around, but with no-one to lead them, actively recruit/sire more, or help them hide and build up strength undetected. So right now this might actually be a relatively easy place for Kakistos and Trick to move into and take over.
Except that there is a big boss, in the form of the mayor… except that he was mayor during the last two years too, and that didn’t stop vampire bosses bossing the vampires around. So my read is something like: the mayor prioritises secrecy first, stability second. When there’s a boss vampire, that both provides a way to stabilise and monitor vampire activities, and also makes it more costly to intervene - fighting them for control would draw too much attention. When there’s no boss vampire, then taking direct control is both easier and more necessary to maintain stability. So for the last few years he’s been happy to manipulate from the shadows, but now this year he steps in to take more direct control. And as the Ascension approaches he's more willing to take risks to secure control. Maybe if his Ascension clock had been pushed back by one year, we could have ended up with a season of Mr. Trick as the boss vampire?
(This also raises some interesting questions about the shift you start to see in this season, with less danger from vampires and more from obviously inhuman demons… much to dwell on for an aspiring diablo-ecologist…)
A few other loosely-connected thoughts:
Joyce hates knowing that Buffy is in near-constant physical danger and has temporarily died. You’d think she might also be a little worried that her friend Pat also died and didn’t even properly come back, and that she lives in “zombies might crash your party”-dale. As Mr. Trick says, the murder rate here is exceptionally high, and “ain't nobody saying boo about it.” Which is in some ways a cheap shot about the overly-episodic nature of the show, but also does sort of get to the heart of the issue. Buffy being the Slayer in itself doesn’t add any danger to her life: it removes danger (it lets her defend herself when zombies crash her party). What adds danger is going out to hunt monsters, and the reason she does that is to reduce the danger that random Bronze-goers and regular women like Pat (and Joyce!) would otherwise be in. The danger doesn’t come from Buffy, it comes from the fact that there are monsters everywhere, and there’s something a bit blinkered about Joyce ignoring that to focus on the danger that falls specifically on Buffy.
Which… again, to some extent I’m just pointing out that an episodic show is episodic, Joyce has to be somewhat blinkered and overly-protective to play her appointed role. But I also think this is sort of going to be the tension between them all season, that Joyce sees monsters and vampires as a Buffy thing, and latently as a Buffy problem, rather than adjusting her view of the entire world and then recognising Buffy as responding rationally and responsibly to that (utterly utterly terrifying) new world. Which is pretty relatable, actually? You make people aware of a systematic problem, and their perception is that you are the problem…
But maybe, Joyce suggests, Buffy could hand over the responsibility of dealing with that world to Faith? (As Buffy said after meeting Kendra, “maybe I can say, Kendra, you slay, I’m going to Disneyland.”) I think this is a really interesting idea, and there’s both a logic to it - Faith “loves” slaying, Buffy often complains about it - and a fairly ugly undercurrent. The nice middle-class girl shouldn’t have to put herself in danger - she has college to go to! Wouldn’t it make more sense for the girl from the broken home, with the storied past and the loose morals, who’s not going to college anyway, to do it? Isn’t she more suitable, more… dispensable? Of course that’s sort of the ugliness of the whole Slayer gig, she dies so that others don’t, but at least there you’ve got a mathematical justification for it: one Slayer can save many many lives. When it’s just one life for one life it does convey a lot more about whose life matters more, and of course Joyce can be forgiven for prioritising her own daughter's life but…
And I sort of wish that Faith had heard more of this planning, at some point, because I think she would pick up on that undercurrent and… i don’t know if she’d be enthusiastic (replacing Buffy!) or resentful (doing Buffy’s dirty work!) or both, probably it depends on exactly what state she’s in when she hears it.
Um, this is getting long. Acathla is still around. I feel like I should have something to say about that but I sort of just like it, "yeah that statue in Giles’s garden could end the world but we have more pressing things to worry about right now." I had fun in this post imagining some minor villains getting hold of it and falling apart arguing over who is or isn’t “worthy” to awaken it, but instead its role in this episode is a prop in Giles’s little ruse to get Buffy to share what happened with Angel. Which, for the record, I do really like, it’s an excellent little sequence and so much nicer than having Xander at a party lecturing her about “boy troubles” and what she “put her mom through” but no, I am not going to think about Dead Man’s Party, it is a bad episode. Instead I am just going to post this and immediately go and watch “Beauty and the Beasts”, because that is… hmm… well.
Fic update: Buffy tries to console Willow over her mistakes with vampire Willow by taking her to see Faith; Faith inadvertantly confesses a detail of the events of "Doppelgangland" she hadn't brought up before. Much angst, resolved with BDSM as per usual.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
"Wesley was right, it was stupid and selfish to keep her alive and now everybody’s paying the price!”
Willow looked overpoweringly miserable, and for some weird reason it made Faith like her more. She put a hand on her other shoulder, opposite Buffy’s hand.
“Hey, I get it Red. Carmilla’s, like, crazy hot. It’s not weird to act stupid over her.” Willow smiled at that, just as Faith realised that calling one of the pair ‘crazy hot’ might be taken to carry implications about the other. If she just dressed more like Carmilla…
“Plus, this chick’s such a fucking menace, when you catch her and get her working for us, I reckon the bad guys are toast.” The smile she got from Willow made her feel funny, but the smile she got from Buffy was like sunlight. She was on a roll. Say something else to make her feel better.
“Plus, you know, her turning up that night basically saved your life, so…” Their stares made her swiftly realise that had been a mistake. Fuck.
“What do you mean?” Fuck, fuck, fuck.
“Nothing, just, uh…” Think of something to say quickly. “I just meant, she might have scared off, other vampires, you know?”
“Oh… ok. Yeah.” Willow nodded slowly, but seemed to accept this. But Buffy was giving her a look.
“Faith, that doesn’t make sense.” And she just looked at Faith expectantly.
Thoughts on Rewatching S3E03, “Faith, Hope, and Trick” (2/3): Let’s go lesbians
So there’s no explicit lesbianism in this episode, but there’s a fair number of subtextually sapphic dimensions, and a lot of characters who in my wisdom I can perceive to be lesbian or bisexual. In fact, I think you could argue that this episode inaugurates the gayest era of BtVS so far!
So this post will sort of ramble about:
Willow!
Magic
Amy?
Buffy and Faith
Slaying
The boringness of boyfriends
Let me start with Willow, who is still over a year away from coming out on screen. Willow splits her time in this episode between three major activities, all of which are gay:
Being enamoured with Faith
Setting up Buffy (or Faith) with Scott Hope
Wanting to do magic
So, with Faith, of course it’s partly that Faith is, as @coraniaid puts it, “very good at convincing people who aren't at all cool that she herself is cool”. But it’s also in line with Willow being immediately very taken with Buffy when they first met in season 1, and I think (based on, uh, well basically vibes and headcanons) that there are some shared reasons. Buffy and Faith are both Slayers, which make them cool in the sense of being badass powerful girls, but also not cool in the sense of being popular and conventional. They offer a way out of being shy and helpless that isn’t just becoming a Cordelia. And all of that is, of course, very gay.
Next, with Scott Hope, obviously he is, as best we can tell, a boy. But he’s also not really a character here: he approaches Buffy based on Willow having gathered intelligence on his interest and dropped hints about where to find her, and Buffy seems to talk to him half in order to placate Willow. (It’s actually somewhat reminiscent of how Buffy is a major driver of Willow approaching Oz last season.)
And the reason I say it’s gay is that what’s clearly driving this is that Willow perceives her beloved friend as having unmet intimate needs, and sets about trying to satisfy them as best she can. Not possessively, the way Xander would, but guided by her best estimate of what Buffy would actually want and be satisfied by. (She is, as Chappell Roan might say, “a giver”.) I recently happened across this post (sadly the original link seems broken) but it’s Andrea Long Chu describing precisely this dynamic in Sex and the City, with the female characters building more intimate connections with each other via sharing their activities with men than they do with the men themselves:
“I’m hardly convinced that any of our protagonists actually like men; what they do seem to like is liking men, because empirically speaking, liking men translates, almost all of the time, into being with women: touching their hair, rubbing their shoulders, sharing their feelings.”
Indeed, Scott Hope’s essentially token nature is underlined by his most lasting legacy, season 7’s offhand remark “Scott Hope said you were gay.” Of course that’s as much about Buffy and Faith as about Buffy and Willow, but already in this episode, he’s essentially a tool employed by one woman to satisfy another woman’s intimate needs. He is, in the end, a walking strap.
Thirdly, magic. I take it as a fairly familiar point that by season 4 the symbolic linkage of witchcraft and lesbianism has become clear (and “Doppelgangland” already teases it). Indeed, being a witch is a lot like being a Slayer: a way for a girl to take on a strange sort of sexually charged power, not by better conforming to societal expectations but by more fully breaking from them.
Of course Willow doesn’t actually do any magic in this episode. But her interactions with Giles position it much more as a temptation and a desire than they have before. In “Becoming” he doesn’t want her to attempt the ritual of restoration because it’s dangerous, and he’s reluctant to put that burden on her to save the world - it’s about risk vs. duty. Here for the first time it’s about risk vs. desire: Willow wants to do magic, for basically any reason (and she knows what Marnok root can do when mixed with a virgin’s saliva…), even though Mr. Authority Figure discourages it. Hence, as I said, it’s the beginning of a new, gayer, era.
(Also, just to link back to something I said when discussing “Becoming”, Willow has very much shifted back out of “I’m the replacement Buffy leading the group” into “I can offer Buffy help with things that Slayer Strength doesn’t help with” - she can do spells for her, she can set her up with boys, and as it turns out at the very end of the episode, these are sort of connected: Giles is using the idea of a spell to get at Buffy’s emotional problems. Granny Weatherwax would call that “headology”, and it’s clear that it makes an impression on Willow of some sort.)
On the subject of magic and lesbians… where’s Amy? I mean, sure, Amy is never explicitly depicted doing any gay stuff but her whole arc and identity, at least from this season onwards, is tied up in her relationship to magic and to Willow Rosenberg in particular. She’s the girl Willow kept in a cage in her bedroom! And she’s conspicuously absent in these last few episodes on at least three points - she’s not shown at the huge party (of everyone Buffy knows and then some more people she doesn’t), she’s not part of the slaying team that operates over the summer, and she’s not mentioned when Willow talks about starting to practice witchcraft.
Why not? On some level it’s just writerly disinterest but in-universe, what’s the best interpretation? I think it’s easy enough to suppose she might have been at the party even if she’s not shown there, but why isn’t she helping to learn witchcraft or slay vampires? Especially because whatever explanation we offer can’t be too good, because in 8 episodes’ time she clearly is doing witchcraft with Willow.
I’ve already talked a bit about how I see Amy’s likely character arc in the background here, but to summarise: I think the fallout of “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” affects Amy more than it does Xander or Willow or Buffy, because she’s more isolated and generally closer to what all these weekly traumas might realistically do to a teenager’s brain. This comes out in a combination of resentment and fear - she’s mad at Xander and mad at the others for forgiving him (maybe for forgiving him faster than they forgive her), and she’s scared of vampires and scared because she’s learnt that even being able to do magic isn’t actually making her safer. So I imagine there’s some mutual bad blood between her and Willow for the remainder of season 2, but in the summer Willow reaches out and invites her to join the group, but she declines partly out of fear (“you want to go out every night trying to get attacked by vampires?”) and partly out of lingering resentment. The resentment fades or transforms over the first half of season 3 (during things like this are probably happening in the background), leading to them practicing together in S3E11, and then the ratastrophe occurs.
Ok, um, so also of course Buffy and Faith are getting their thing on in this episode. And their initial interact is not, as with Willow and either of them, immediate appeal. Rather, Buffy is initially very hostile, because Faith seems so similar to her. More precisely, she worries at first that Faith is a better her - a version without the hangups and depression and struggles, who can just exist happy and unrestrained as a Slayer and thereby be more appealing to her friends and family. (Except for Cordelia.)
But even in this initial stage of hostility there’s a degree of obsession: Buffy is clearly very interested in Faith, struggling not to orient to her when they’re together - and Faith is even more interested in her. She came to Sunnydale to find her, and in the initial conversation where Buffy feels upstaged, it’s not because Faith shows any lack of interest - she keeps trying to ask Buffy questions, and then the others interrupt.
Of course by the end of the episode they’re much closer: Buffy has seen that Faith is just as traumatised and frightened and prone to skipping town as she is, and responds by acting to help and protect her. She also specifically half-admits how much she and Faith are alike, when she asks “are you hungry?” after slaying Kakistos, echoing her evasive response earlier to “doesn’t slaying always make your hungry and horny?” Which is sort of emblematic of their whole dynamic at the end: she’ll admit to half of the pairing (hungry) which is enough to bond with Faith because it implies the second (horny) but she won’t quite go as far as admitting it outright.
I forget who I first read explaining this (probably @coraniaid, if not @herinsectreflection) but the gayness between Buffy and Faith is more than fanon. It’s unmistakeably the intended meaning of season 3 that Faith represents a forbidden temptation that she’s trying to get Buffy to indulge, and that Buffy is drawn to this and feels that temptation acutely. Yes, they always talk about the sexual aspect of this temptation in terms of sex with boys, but Faith becoming the incarnation of unrestrained sexuality that Buffy is drawn to is just… it’s gay. Add in Faith being jealous of, and trying to break up or appropriate, all of Buffy’s relationships with men, and Dushku’s decision to play up the gayness of it in her acting, and the idea of Sapphic tension between these two throughout season 3 is basically there in the text.
And honestly if Angel hadn’t come back from Acathla’s world to get in between them they’d had been kissing by episode 9. (I mean episode 9 opens with Buffy slaying a demon with a vertical slit for a face, and the group wondering why Faith isn’t there because “mucus-y demons are her favourite”… am I reaching? I guess maybe I’m reaching with that one.)
Finally, while disinterest in men is obviously neither necessary nor sufficient for Sapphic identity, I can’t help but notice that the peer-age male characters this episode don’t really… do much? Oz in episode 1 at least had the grand mystery of why he seemingly deliberately botched graduating high school, and in episode 2 the grand mystery of why he thought the gathering-shindig-hootenanny taxonomy was apropros, but this episode he just sort of sits there observing Willow and making occasional funny remarks. Xander likewise follows the group, makes the occasional jokey remark, completely ignores the boundary between flirting and leering, but otherwise doesn’t have anything distinctively his own to do. And Scott, of course… I don’t know, is it just me or is he like preternaturally lacking in chemistry?
So the upshot is that the boys are all sort of nonentities who follow women around as supporting characters. As it should be.
***
Now you may be tempted to dismiss all the above as the motivated reasoning of a crazed femslashenjoyer. But the writers see it to0 - they have Joyce say, with exasperation, “I have tried to march in the Slayer pride parade”, which is the most explicit equation yet of Slayerhood with queerness. The writers may not quite have grasped the truth about just how many of their characters are queer, but they know there’s something there.
And I think you could make a serious case for female queerness being, if not the fundamental meaning of Slayerhood and the show itself, at least inseparable from it. That’s for two reasons.
First, being a Slayer is always something isolating, something that separates Buffy from wider society and often earns her undeserved scorn or at best incomprehension. This pattern actually recurs sort of fractally: not only is Buffy herself isolated, most of her friends are losers and rejects of one sort or another even before falling in with her, and moreover even when those friends get that she’s the Slayer she’s often isolated from them specifically by her romantic relationships: with Angel, with Faith, and with Spike, she’s constantly having to defend her attachment to someone seen as dangerous or evil by those around her. (Does she have a love interest in season 4? I struggle to remember...)
But second, the parallel to queerness is more than just “something that isolates you from society”. The foundational idea of BtVS is, famously, to invert a cliched horror image by making the bubbly blonde girl in the alley with the monster into the powerful, dangerous one. And the danger and power of that cliche is obviously pretty heavily sexual, which means that the flipping it around and giving the girl the power and the danger is also sexual. Being a Slayer thus gets an affinity with every way that girls can be sexually threatening - promiscuous girls, kinky girls, sexually aggressive girls, girls who are sluts and perverts and ball-busters (all of which Buffy at one point or another fears she is). And, obviously, gay girls.
And it’s not just being a Slayer per se - it’s practicing witchcraft, sleeping with vampires, even becoming a vampire. Because it’s the central theme of the show, it repeats itself in multiple forms.
And to be clear, the show is sort of a hot mess about this. It doesn’t have a single coherent position on any of it, and so a fortiori it doesn’t have an unproblematically progressive position. Buffy, and others, are shamed and punished for this just as often as they’re celebrated and rewarded. And of course there are some notable disanalogies between these things: being a Slayer means killing and probably eventually dying, becoming a vampire requires dying first, and practicing witchcraft allows you to raise the dead. None of that applies to lesbianism! And so (thankfully) we get a diverse array of stories about those things, many of which don’t make sense if read as straightforward queer metaphors.
Instead we get this show that is a hundred different things, but with, so to speak, a constant background hum of lesbianism. More precisely, there’s a background hum of sex, and violence, and power, and monstrosity, all being inseparably wrapped up with one another, and a constant preoccupation with how girls have, or lack, or want, or reclaim, that sex-violence-power-monstrosity. And lesbianism is one of the most obvious real-world things that this resonates with. And I think that’s beautiful.
Fic update: Possibly the beginning of the actual Summersberg arc of Fix Her Eventually? Though oddly enough not through anything physical happening, so much as a long succession of confessions and confidences.
(Structurally also this is the collapsing of a bunch of built up dirty secrets to try and re-establish some sort of shared knowledge among the core protagonists)
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
For a little while they just sat, listening to each other’s breathing. It was a surprise, almost, how much weight felt lifted by sharing this. By knowing that her Willow understood, still saw her the same way.
“So who else knows?”
She shook her head. “Only Faith, and Kendra, and Jenny.” She leant against Willow, their heads and shoulders touching now as they supported each other. “And now you.”
“That’s probably enough people.” Buffy’s stomach had been twisting in fear that Willow might tell her to tell everyone. “I feel like the others, you know, they… they might not understand.”
“Yeah. I think you’re right.” She thought of something and allowed herself a teasing smile. “Like I guess they wouldn’t understand about you and Kendra?”
Willow started upright and squeaked in response, “That was just a one-time thing! Or, a two-time thing. Unless it happens again.” She bit her lip again. She has to stop doing that. It was too distracting. “I guess Kendra told you about that?”
“Yeah. And she told you about Faith and Carmilla?”
“Yeah… I guess there’s a whole bunch of things that the others wouldn’t understand, huh?”
They had relaxed against each other again, heads resting together, staring down at their interlaced hands. It felt comforting.
“I’m glad that we understand.” She felt Willow nod.
“Buffy and Willow, Willow and Buffy! Working together.”
“Right. Plus Jenny and Kendra and Faith…”
“Yeah, because they get that… that when you’re fighting evil, sometimes you make mistakes, or you have to do things that seem weird, or freaky, and it doesn’t mean… it’s just that the others would get too freaked out.”
Buffy nodded, and Willow went quiet for a bit. Eventually she asked an unexpected question.
“What about next year? Have you decided where you’re going, for uni?”
Utterly devastated to discover that this image is not in fact fan-art depicting the celebration of Buffy and Faith getting married, as I had long assumed, but rather an official comics panel depicting the celebration of them graduating from the police academy (!? (!?!?))!
Stray cat that had taken to living on my patio and that I was feeding isn't there today, and my brain keeps inventing ways that something I did over the last few nights (had friends over, closed blinds) could have somehow scared it or made it run off into the woods and get eaten by coyotes. This is helping nobody.
I love Faith, Hope and Trick and it's not even only because Faith is in this episode. We've moved beyond fully dwelling on the fallout and in the third episode we have our real start of S3. Though as the ending of this episode suggests we will still have a lot more fallout from Becoming to come.
First I wanna talk about the various parallels we have on offer in this episode, obviously we have a new love interest to show up to fill the Angel shaped hole in Buffy's heart. And just like Angel, Faith shows up to Sunnydale in search specifically of her, just like Angel she meets Buffy first outside of the Bronze and just like Angel she is decidedly less than fully forthcoming in that first meeting. There's also an ancient vampire, the only other vampire who is so old that their appearance has been permanently altered, Kakistos in town who is decidedly not a fan of her, as the Master is with Angel.
Obviously Faith also has parallels with Buffy beyond the superficial of they're both Slayers. Too many to really list but some of them; they're both putting up a blatant front pretending everything's all fine and dandy while suffering from the lingering trauma of the big bad vampire they'd recently encountered and will at least have made a fairly large step towards actually confronting said trauma by the end of the episode. They both have a tendency to overly beat on whatever monster they're fighting rather in favour of their issues (Buffy will in s5 even overly beat on a monster because a very different flavour of mother issues). The dynamic between Faith and Buffy is easy to read as being pretty similar to the dynamic between Buffy and Kendra but with Buffy in opposite directions. Which is easy to read as Buffy becoming more cautious with her fellow Slayer after blundering and getting Kendra killed. So I will.
I don't think Faith is quite fully realised yet, she's very solid don't get me wrong her personality comes through clear and I don't think it's like she'll have a big character rewrite like Jenny Calendar or anything. But I feel like the fully realised Faith is something we'll see more come Revelations. I mean it certainly gives us the aspect of her character that is will instantly fall in line for the authority figure she can cast as her parental figure after the slightest crumb of affection. We do however have some very important truths about Faith, not the tall tales she goes into a detail about that are almost certainly lies but the one liners that she very much does not go into detail on; "If I had friends like you, I probably would've still dropped out," "My dead mother hits harder than that," and "You can't touch me," interspersed with beating on that vampire really paint a vivid miserable picture of her pre slaying life for the real Faith heads to extrapolate from. She was still a loser with no friends back then, her mother was almost certainly abusive, she's very much not Buffy Summers, but as Buffy will later say, different circumstances that could be her, we saw some of those circumstances back in Anne where Buffy was a lot closer to where Faith was compared to now.
There's also Mr.Trick who shares some parallels with Spike, both are a more modern sort of vampire, both begin their runtime as subordinate to a more classical vampire who is either an embodiment or an adherent of the more classical style and both will end their first episode with betraying said vampire to take the reins of big bad for themselves. Both will then have sporadic appearances before being usurped by the real big bad of the series. I'm sure Mr.Trick will have just as much follow up attention as Spike did.
Honestly let's talk more about Trick, this is getting ahead of myself in the scope of rewatch but, I think he's kinda wasted as a potential character, there's a lot that could be mined from him as an antagonist for my money that never really is. Most obviously, he has a history with Faith, it's safe to assume he was present during the whole Faith's Watcher being killed incident given how he appears to be Kakistos' right hand vampire. And despite Trick not being interested in Kakistos' revenge plot I don't think Faith would agree and there's really gotta be an episode that can be mined there for Faith going too far in trying to get him slain in revenge. But I don't think they ever even appear on screen together until Faith kills him from behind in Consequences, he does admittedly try in Homecoming but alas. Imagine the pathos this could add to Faith of hours after finally killing the last vampire involved in her Watcher's death she just fills his shoes.
He's the most technologically inclined vampire we ever (I think) see, Willow is on the road to swapping computers for magic but not quite all the way yet and yet I'm fairly we never get a dumb 90s hacking battle between them. Imagine a Faith and Willow team up episode where we could've heard Willow say some completely nonsensical computing terminology and Faith got to tell her to dumb it down and speak English, then solve (or make worse) their problems by going to punch Trick instead. Maybe I'd also dislike Mr.Trick if he'd gotten as overexposed as certain other characters but I'd like for him to at least have the opportunity to.
The subplot of Giles lying to Buffy about this ritual to force to open up about how it went down with Angel is very very strong. It's also the sort of thing that I'm certain if Buffy had ever learned that it had all been a lie to manipulate her into opening up she'd hate Giles a bit for it. Well I say that but she forgives Giles very quickly when its necessary we'll see that again later in S3.
Minor thing here but we have one of my favourite recurring Faith character bits here where despite being a loser a lot of people upon first meeting come to the mistaken impression that she's really cool and put together, we see it with Willow, Xander, Giles and Joyce here. We'll see it again in Angel with the main cast who hadn't met her yet (most memorably for my money Connor wistfully saying Faith must be as strong as they said she was meanwhile Faith is lying in a pool of her own blood after getting into a fist fight with a demon made out of rocks) and once again in s7 when the potentials are so enamoured by her they enact a coup d’etat to put her in charge entirely against her will.
And a couple more quickfire minor things, Joyce is really good in this episode; successful united front with Buffy against Snyder, her reaction to finding out Buffy had died is truly fantastic, being fond of Faith, being fond of Faith spending time with Buffy and also at the same time saying how she's walking in the Slayer Pride Parade. Willow and Xander have shades of Dead Man's Party to them in the way they're blowing off Buffy for this (not) cool girl they just met but I can't blame them I mean they have just met Faith and all it's gonna take them a bit. And some more Willow misusing magic and Giles telling her she shouldn't be messing around with such forces that'll truly come to a head in s6. To admittedly mixed results.
I forgot to talk about Angel. Good decision to only come back after Buffy had made the decision to start moving on. I guess we'll talk more about it as we get there. Anyway live notes.
Xander and Cordelia walking up behind Willow and silently lifting her up with Oz to get past this soon to be long monologue about going off campus for lunch is a fun gag.
It's impressive how much of an icon Scott Hope becomes because of one mention in four series time.
Buffy should punch Xander more when he does things like call her a slut. (admittedly this one was much more light-hearted than him normally)
89 cents for a diet soda. Medium. What a world.
"Sunnydale, town's got quaint," Huh, has Mr.Trick been here before?
"Strictly of the caucasion persuasion," Trick will arguably be our most prominent black character with his five episodes of screen time until Robin Wood in s7. The heart says Kendra is still more prominent than Trick, but that it's even debatable like that is dire.
Anyway I like Trick, he's a fun novel vampire. I don't we really get one of his like again? Maybe like the last legitimate vampire the show'll ever introduce?
I always remember Kakistos looking a bit more imposing I can't lie. But they're a good double act.
Anyway it's a fun fake out, here for the Slayer but not the one we'd think. (Post script: They don't really go anywhere with this though the very next scene we have with them was them assuring us that it is actually Faith they're after)
We don't give Joyce enough credit for getting Buffy back in school it's true
Willow messing around with magic
FAITH SIGHTING!
How many vampires has she slain in the Bronze waiting for Buffy to be there to see her do it?
Buffy blowing off Scott for Faith
Which could mean anything
It's such a shame Faith didn't say "I'm Faith, the Vampire Slayer,"
Nothing but respect to Cordelia for being the only person in the world who knows who Kendra is.
A trademark incredible bad Buffy lie to say the Three. Vampires she didn't even kill. Just say the Master. It'd even fit with weird looking ancient vampire and the new weird looking ancient vampire you'll be meeting later
Willow notably not raising her hand for eww for being attracted to Giles.
Faith's ability to zero in on Buffy's romantic partners is impressive
"She's funny, and she's leaving," pulls Faith away. Why would Scott Hope come to the conclusions that he does?
"It's probably good that you were an only child,"
Joyce's face when Buffy says the only way you get a new Slayer is when the old Slayer dies is incredible.
"I don't want you to die," And as soon as Joyce isn't around to not want that any more
It's interesting Faith knew about the Judge before coming to town but not about Angel before the Slayerettes mentioned him.
To be fair to Giles Buffy has in the past gotten carried away like Faith has and will again.
We don't hear about Vampires' lineage much
How does Giles know Kakistos by name but literally no other vampire?
I wonder how many people thought Scott Hope was like a legitimate wrong 'un back in the day. Like just happening to give her the Claddagh Ring. What are the odds? He kinda gives the vibes of someone who could be running a Fordesque con.
How much restraint did it take Faith to throw something through the window instead of throwing herself through it.
Amy would also be relationshipless not that anyone would care (though to be fair it's not like she had a catastrophic breakup like Buffy did), she'd also be caught in the Faith is the coolest field that almost everyone but Buffy is upon first meeting her. She might get a vibe that Buffy might not be Scott's type that everyone else will shoot down but she'll be vindicated in several years time! She will not even be in a position to offer to help out with the ritual like Willow does but Willow might name drop her as being involved in some of the spells she's cast.
Great notes as always!
Trick is definitely underused, and I love the idea of a Trick-vs-Willow hackathon. I hadn’t even thought about playing up the history with Faith and her watcher - and now I think of it, you could imagine a fun further Spike parallel that, where Spike has a history of killing Slayers, Trick has a history of killing (or locating so that his boss can kill) Watchers.
God I hadn’t even realised that when Joyce says “I don’t want you to die”, yeah it is only a few months after she’s gone that Buffy does. Oof.
It’s definitely a good reaction, but the omission of Kendra means that there’s sort of another shoe to drop, that two Slayers died just in the past couple of years. Which I think she would like even less! (Been thinking about this for when Joyce meets vampire Kendra alongside Faith and Buffy…)
Re. Faith having heard of the rocket launcher but not Angel, I guess it makes sense that it got more news coverage, being public and explosive?
Also FWIW I gave this a 5/5 but I have low standards and give out 5/5s too easily...
Thoughts on Rewatching S3E03, "Faith, Hope, and Trick" (1/3): She doesn’t need a life, she has mine
It’s Faith! She’s here, here she is.
Ok so obviously on some level I knew that Faith and Buffy are parallels but the density of repetitions was still really striking, even beyond the basic fact of them both being Slayers. Like, over this episode and the last we get:
They’ve both skipped town once before and get interrupted while packing to skip town again
They both have baggage from a vampire that they “need to deal with” but are instead avoiding - brought out by Buffy asking Faith “what do you know about Angel?” and Faith asking Buffy “what do you know about Kakistos?”
They both first appear to the group by interrupting an attempt at vampire-hunting, and taking someone’s stake (Buffy from Xander, Faith from Buffy)
Looking further back in the show we get even more - both Buffy and Faith’s first slay in Sunnydale is a male vampire at the Bronze with noticeably outdated fashion-sense, Faith pounding on a vampire for no tactical reason mirrors what Buffy was doing in S2E11, “Ted”, Faith flirting with Xander and challenging an ally by saying “think you can take me?” mirror what Buffy was doing in S2E01, “When She Was Bad.” And both of them arrive in Sunnydale after their first Watcher dies and get Giles as their second.
There’s also, of course, the implicit mirroring involved in Faith appearing as threatening to “take over Buffy’s life” - she and Buffy are thus both popular with her friends, share a (superficial) interest in Scott Hope, are liked by her mom, etc. Indeed some of this positioning is quite specific: we see them mirrored as romantically encouraged/cheerleaded by Willow, desired by Xander, and shamed by Cordelia.
Of course there are differences, some of them very salient, but on examination they all involve Faith exhibiting a possibility that is live for Buffy, but rejected. Some are fairly minor (e.g. Faith’s use of slang and nicknames annoys Buffy just like hers annoys Giles). Some are more significant. For instance, Faith has dropped out of school and lives alone in a fleabag motel. That’s not true of Buffy… but one of the running threads is that it could be! She has to pass all these make-up exams, and if Snyder gets his way she’d be “in jail where she belongs.” Faith represents what authority figures see Buffy as.
Another difference is sex and romance, which this episode is consistently obsessed with. The very first scene has Buffy trying to be “Martha Stewart” and denying any interest in dating, only to eventually admit she does want to date. Also featuring Xander calling her a slut and Willow telling her to do “that thing with your mouth that boys like.” Faith’s very first scene has Cordelia calling her “slut-o-rama”, then the naked alligator wrestling stories (I mean, the alligator was), and the infamous nonfat yoghurt exchange. Faith flirts with Xander, with Giles, even (perhaps) with the motel owner. And throughout the episode the blank cipher that is Scott Hope is used as a canvas to depict this ambivalence.
But again, this isn’t a deep difference: Buffy is also a horny person, just one currently suffering the twin libido-crushing effects of shame and grief. Faith is just exhibiting in extreme form a side of herself that she’s currently suppressing.
And it’s actually more than that - what Faith is acting out in extreme form is itself a facade. I’m not sure the show always does a great job at separating these two things, but hypersexuality as an expression of genuine desire isn’t the same as hypersexuality as a defense mechanism… Buffy wants sex but she largely doesn’t use sex as a tool for controlling or appeasing other people (the most controlling and abusive she gets is with Spike in season 6, where it’s still clearly driven by her desires). To her eyes Faith might seem like someone completely uninhibited and free to enjoy life, but… already she’s yelling “you can’t touch me!” while repeatedly cathartically punching a vampire, there’s clearly a lot more under the surface. The very fact that she flirts with every man she meets suggests that it’s not driven by attraction. Looking ahead, I’m not sure this ends up getting addressed very well, and I sometimes wonder if the writers are falling for the same free-spirited illusion that Buffy and co. are, so… let’s put a pin in that.
Something similar goes for the interaction between Faith and Joyce, where Faith plays up her positive attitude and grateful joie de vivre, leading Joyce to chide Buffy for being so negative sometimes. “I don't let that kind of negative thinking in.” Except that she clearly does, and is paralysed by it when Kakistos catches up to her. She’s upbeat and effervescent with Joyce, and with Willow and Xander-as-friend, and it sort of feels like the equivalent of her flirting, just what she’s learnt to do with women to ensure her safety and control. We will see later on that is not actually a super-cheery ray of sunshine, she has a lot of, uh, “negative thinking” going on.
All of which is just to say that the episode sets up how Faith and Buffy will relate for much of this season: both performing false fronts to hide their trauma, both on some level mistaking the other’s front for their real self. But both drawn to the other because on another level they can sense that it’s a false front. Buffy keeps insisting “Faith’s not a bad person, she’s just me if I had some bad breaks”, Faith keeps insisting “Buffy’s not a joyless prude, she’s got the lust in her same as me.” And they’re both right!
Ok but there is one way they seem to genuinely differ, and I think it’s worth drawing out. From the perspective of Buffy’s current, depressed/repressed condition, there are two more positive visions that she aspires to but cannot quite get herself to embrace: the vision of “normal life”, where she can “date and shop and hang out and go to school”, and the vision Faith represents of “living entirely large” - or, as she puts it in Episode 14, “take, want, have.” These both involve fun and carefree good times, so they often sort of run together in their contrast with Buffy, whose bottle needs uncorking, but they’re not the same and the divergence will become more prominent as the season goes on. What Willow wants Buffy to do with Scott Hope isn’t the same as what Faith proposes in two episode’s time: “find a couple studs […] use 'em and discard 'em.” And by the end of the season that might have progressed to stabbing the studs instead of discarding them. Which, to be clear, is bad, but if “normal life” proves unsustainable (because the authorities are compromised and your watcher betrays you and you’re still subject to Cordelia’s meticulous sexuality-policing) then you can maybe see the appeal.
As the season goes on you see Faith shifting more into that specific role: as offering a joyful alternative to normal life, and by extension as drawing Buffy closer to her and away from her friends and Watcher(s).
But in this episode that’s not quite happening yet: here she’s more a threat to Buffy’s slow recovery of her normal life, appearing as able to do better than Buffy at being popular and happy and charismatic. But that’s a very superficial first impression, born of Buffy’s anxiety interacting with Faith’s desperation. I think part of what I like about Faith is that she manages to feel fleshed out and layered enough to play these contrasting roles in such quick succession.
(Honestly, can I say that I feel like after this episode I already have a richer picture of her interiority than I do of either Oz’s or Cordelia’s? Though to be fair I am not an unbiased or statistically normal representative viewer...)
While thinking about what Cordelia’s codename would be (to go with Xander’s “Nighthawk”) my sleep-deprived brain kept saying “Posh Spice.”
Now, we don’t have time to go into all the ways that’s silly, but then my brain said “huh actually based purely on superficial physical traits, the equivalences do sort of work: Cordelia as Posh Spice, Buffy as Baby Spice, Willow as Ginger Spice (/Sexy Spice), Kendra as Scary Spice, Faith as Sporty Spice."
The personalities don’t really match up so well but that’s fine because this is an insane and nonsensical idea anyway.
Laying back in bed, she opened the envelope eagerly, then stopped.
This is wrong. She could feel that there were several photos inside… and whoever they were of probably wouldn’t want her to see them. And Carmilla did.
You should take it into school, show Giles and the others. She put the envelope down.
If someone wouldn’t want you to see this, would they want half a dozen people to all see it? She picked the envelope up again, pulled out the stack of photos, face down.
You should just get rid of them. Burn them. Don’t let Carmilla play her mind games. But could she really go on never knowing what they showed?
What if they show someone in danger? What if they’re a warning? What if they’re a mistake? What if Carmilla slipped up and included a fatal clue?
There are a couple of things I rather like about the First, at least in theory.
The fact it/she can take the appearance of dead characters (which, as we see in Lessons when she takes the appearance of Drusilla, includes "merely" undead vampires who are still walking around and talking somewhere in the world) has a lot of (largely untapped) potential. In particular, it provides the show with a lot of (mostly unrealized) opportunities for Buffy to be confronted by the people she blames herself for not saving, whether that's Joyce or Jenny or Kendra or anyone else. Plus, it's a nice change of pace to have a Big Bad that can't be defeated just by punching it hard enough or frequently enough.
On the other hand, there's a lot I don't like about the First Evil. Starting with ... well, the claim (largely unchallenged by anyone on the show) that she actually is somehow the 'first evil'. To me that's just too grandiose an idea; it makes her scope too great to be credible, and (like the very literal Powers That Be over on Angel) has implications for the show's wider world-building that I don't like. To be unkind, it feels a little bit lazy and it makes the use of the First Evil in Season 7 feel like the show is desperately trying to one-up the stakes of Season 5. It's not really compatible with the show's wider morality, as I understand it. Aesthetically, I just don't like it.
So, here's my counter-proposal for the First's origins.
The First is a very old, very powerful demon (using the word 'demon' to mean 'an entity roughly comparable with Glory / Jasmine / Illyria', not the humanoids with bumps and green skin that the show also calls 'demons'). The reason she can't touch anything physically is because she's not incarnated in a mortal body the way that those characters were. She left our reality a very long time ago, not by choice, and isn't able to return. She's not as old as her worshipers claim she is, and she's certainly not the original source of evil, but she is the source of a specific type of evil. A type of evil of particular relevance to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Season 7 is (or starts off being) a kind of Buffy: Year Zero. Back to high school and "back to the beginning ... the true beginning" as the First itself tells us in Lessons.
Well, if we go back (almost) to the beginning, we have this quote by Giles from Season 1's The Harvest:
"This world is older than any of you know. Contrary to popular mythology, it did not begin as a paradise. For untold eons demons walked the Earth. They made it their home, their Hell. But in time they lost their purchase on this reality. [...]
"The books tell the last demon to leave this reality fed off a human, mixed their blood. He was a human form possessed, infected by the demon's soul. He bit another, and another, and so they walk the Earth, feeding… Killing some, mixing their blood with others to make more of their kind. Waiting for the animals to die out, and the old ones to return."
This bit of world-building never really gets brought up again. Starting in Season 2 the show increasingly moves away from this kind of cosmic horror. Indeed, in Season 4, the writers come up with the rather bizarre retcon that vampires and demons are somehow natural enemies who don't get along. But, if we're going back to the start of the show for our lore, I think there are worst places we could look than this.
What if the self-described First Evil is, in fact, the Last Demon that Giles talks about here? The origin not of something as "nebulous and ill-defined" as Evil (to quote Giles again), as such, but specifically the origin of vampires. What if the First Evil is the last of the Old Ones that lost their purchase on this reality and that the Master and other true believers are waiting to return?
Wouldn't this explain the "First"'s specific interests in vampires in general (and specific animosity towards ensouled vampires like Angel in Amends or Spike in Season 7) and in the vampire slayer line in particular? "Evil" in general probably has bigger concerns than a line of teenage girls who fight vampires, but if the First is in fact a kind of vampire progenitor then that particular focus makes a lot more sense to me. And wouldn't this explain why the First never seems to manifest very far from the Hellmouth and is so interested in opening it? The First can project itself near the Hellmouth because she's not too far away -- on the other side of the Hellmouth, waiting for the animals to die out.
Ok this is such an improvement. I had been headcanoning that the First is just some slightly unusual big demon that likes to lie about itself to sound grandiose (newsflash people, demons lie!), but I hadn't thought of making it the origin of vampires, and that actually ties so many things together so much more nicely than canon.
Anyone else want to weigh in here? (S2EO3, part 3)
Unlike a lot of episodes of the show I don't enjoy, I do think there's a Good Version of Dead Man's Party lurking somewhere not too far below the surface. Looking at the big picture, it's good that things between Buffy and her friends don't magically go back to normal. It was worth taking an episode to show the fallout from the Season 2 finale, and it's surely correct that this includes some awkwardness and some evasiveness and some fairly ugly emotions.
@badwolfwho1 has already mentioned one previous episode that handled this sort of thing well: Season 2's When She Was Bad. And looking into the future, I'd nominate Season 6's After Life as another entry in the loose "Buffy comes back to Sunnydale after a summer Away and things are awkward and uncomfortable when she returns" trilogy (for increasingly escalating interpretations of the word 'Away'...).
For reasons I've already gone into -- and I think everyone else rewatching the episode has talked about -- both those episodes work in a way this one doesn't. But I do think the problem is fundamentally one of execution, as opposed to (for example) something like Teacher's Pet or Bewitched, Bothered & Bewildered, where the central premise of the episode is just obviously not salvageable. I think this episode should be better, but I don't think it shouldn't exist.
Anyway, as threatened, here's my summary of how I'd have rewritten Dead Man's Party.
No zombies (or any other supernatural problems at all, except a few background vampires that we don't particularly need to see). No evil mask of dubious origin. The focus of the episode is purely on Buffy (eventually) reconciling with her friends and resuming her duties as the Slayer. (Obviously this means renaming the episode.) I think it might be a bit early in the show's run for an episode (almost) entirely devoid of any supernatural metaphor or menace, but on the other hand I don't think the metaphor we got works, so it feels like it would have been worth the try to experiment. (I would probably keep the impromptu cat funeral scene, which I think works quite well in its own right, but nothing more.)
Beyond that, the main thing I'd try to do is to flip the perspectives: have the episode follow mostly the POV of Giles and Joyce and Willow and Xander. Buffy can be present in scenes with them, of course, but when she makes her excuses and leaves, which she keeps doing, we should exclusively follow them, not her. We never see Buffy alone (until nearly the end of the episode). Buffy puts on a brave face and doesn't seem to want to talk about what happened over the last three months, and her friends and family try (but fail) to reconnect with her. (And at the very least, if you want the theme to be "Buffy's friends are put out that Buffy doesn't seem to care what the last few months were like for them", then obviously you cut out lines like Buffy asking Xander exactly that only for him not to answer...)
Instead of having Willow stand Buffy up, play it the other way around. We see Willow at the Espresso Pump waiting to meet Buffy, who's late. Amy Madison (who can play a Pat like role, in the sense of voicing unpleasant things that Buffy can assume Willow agrees with even if she doesn't) comes over and talks to her a bit. Despite herself, Willow lets herself be coaxed into talking about magic and their plans to do more spells together over the weekend. Then, in the background, we see (but Willow doesn't) a brief shot of Buffy standing outside looking hurt; a car drives past and, when Willow turns around to look, Buffy is gone again. Buffy can start to convince herself that Willow's moved on and found a new best friend even though Willow never says this (and, indeed, would never say it because it's not true). Meanwhile from Willow's perspective Buffy just didn't show up, just like she didn't try to stay in touch or worry how Willow was coping over the summer.
Similarly, I think this should be the episode where we actually get to see a day in the life of Joyce Summers. We see her working late in the gallery, where Pat or [her never seen on screen assistant] Carol can ask her what it's like having her daughter back. We see her driving home, the streets dark, Joyce looking around nervously at the shadows now that she knows about vampires. She gets home and calls out for Buffy, apologizing for being late. No answer. She goes upstairs and knocks on her door. Still nothing. Opens the door: no sign of her. Increasingly frantic, she's about to pick up the phone when the kitchen door opens and Buffy -- who (we can infer, but didn't see!) went Slaying after bailing on her catch-up with Willow and lost track of time -- tries to sneak back in. Then we can have Joyce blow up at Buffy (deliberately mirroring the Becoming scene) and complain about her "taking off whenever she feels like it", because we've set things up so the audience (who already know and like Buffy) have been shown why Joyce might be worried about her daughter leaving again and how her first reaction was to be afraid.
Have Giles say something about Kendra (the dead Slayer whose body the police -- the same police who have already questioned him about more than one strange death! -- found in his library!). Have him mention Mr Zabuto, or the funeral Kendra presumably had. Have him be the one who talks to Buffy about the police dropping their murder investigation (you can chalk that up to the work of the Council, even: this helps set up later plot threads this season). Have him say something sympathetic and well-meaning, but which Buffy just isn't ready to talk about. Then (largely as in the episode), we can follow Giles to the kitchen where he smiles and looks relieved while he makes them both tea. When he comes back out of the kitchen, he sees Buffy has left without saying goodbye.
You can have the big party nobody really wants at Buffy's house, if you must. But make it clearer that all of the gang think / have managed to persuade themselves they're doing it For Buffy, not to spite her (which is very much how it comes off in the actual filmed episode). And make Buffy be more clearly the one who's avoiding talking to them: don't have them avoid talking to her and then get mad at her for not asking them questions!
As I mentioned last week, I'd have liked to see Buffy following up on her promise to check in with Anne. And seeing that from somebody else's perspective would work as a way of furthering setting up the idea that the Buffy who came back to Sunnydale isn't quite the same girl who left. And from Willow's perspective, Buffy's got a new friend who she laughs with and has been through things together with and who she doesn't want to discuss with Willow. In fact I'd have this conversation be happening in Buffy's room when Willow finds her during the party: I think Buffy literally being in the middle of packing to leave again is a bit too dramatic, but Buffy on the phone talking ambiguously about arrangements to pay the rent or whatever (with Anne, but Willow and Joyce don't know that) works better. You can have Willow assume Buffy is thinking of leaving again even if she isn't.
And at (and indeed before) the party, have somebody ask Buffy about Angel! Buffy doesn't have to say anything in response: maybe it's better if she doesn't until the big climatic confrontation. Maybe you can get away with them talking about this behind her back and concluding that she'd prefer them not to ask. But I think you have to have them raise the idea on screen, at least. Have Cordelia ask, if you need it to be tactless. And then, instead of the big zombie attack, have the key moment come when Buffy admits she killed Angel. (You can set it up by having the various party guests speculate about the rumors that Buffy killed somebody last year, with none of them quite agreeing whether it was a girl in the library or her mom's boyfriend or the computer science she attached in front of her class one day....)
Xander Harris is simply not allowed to speak this episode.
(I do think it would have been good to eventually have some sort of resolution to Xander's Lie, which -- like Kendra' death -- is a cloud that hangs unspoken over the episode, but I don't think it should happen until after the gang find out Angel isn't as dead as Buffy thinks. Sometime between Revelations and Amends, ideally? Obviously if it isn't addressed in Season 3 it would be absurd to bring it up again later, especially in a throwaway comment four years later that never gets any further follow-up, so I'm glad that never happens.)
I especially love "Buffy admits she killed Angel. (You can set it up by having the various party guests speculate about the rumors that Buffy killed somebody last year, with none of them quite agreeing whether it was a girl in the library or her mom's boyfriend or the computer science she attached in front of her class one day"
(I am just a sucker for the moments where we get an outsider's view on what's been happening and it's completely wrong but also makes perfect sense)
Glad to have Kendra and Amy make appearances - and also Patches. Maybe Patches can get raised from the dead at some point after all? (Maybe episode 4 is about a zombie mask instead of weird mixed messages about domestic violence?)
But one thing I do think this brings out is that "showing the fallout" can mean very different things, because it feels like this way of writing the episode very much makes the issue one of distance and avoidance and difficulty connecting, and while there's a bit of that in DMP, it's really much more about anger and hurt and accountability. This version is probably better, but it's also shifting what the theme is as well as executing that theme better.
Ok, fic updates on AO3 have been outpacing posts about them here, so trying to catch up: two chapters from Willow's POV, one that's 5000 words of graphic Vampire-Willow-on-Willow sexual violence, as Willow learns the truth about the dreams she's been having each night.
“I just meant, it was nifty that we foiled the evil scheme! We beat her! I mean, we beat you… the real you.” Willow saw something harden in Carmilla’s eyes, and then suddenly, like a snake uncoiling, her face transformed and she surged up from between Willow’s legs and everything changed.
“You beat me?” Now Willow was pinned down, one steel-strong hand around her neck, the other gripping her wrist and pulling her hand away from the breast it had been squeezing. Willow’s other hand was still tangled in Carmilla’s hair, but with the vampire pinning her down like this, any sense of power that might have given her was a joke.
“You think you’re winning this game?” She stared helplessly into those yellow eyes, shocked at her dream suddenly taking such a turn into the nightmareish… but the delicious thrill in her body told her that it might still end the same way. It’s fun when she’s on the bottom, and it’s fun in a different way when she’s on top. She felt the hints of a smile at the corners of her open mouth. It was scary, but scary-fun, like a ghost story.
“Yeah, I think I am… you keep trying to destroy the orb and failing, and one day soon you’re gonna get orbed!” She stuck out her tongue playfully. She had never thought of herself as a brat before, but… Carmilla had been a brat while she had been held captive, and anything in Carmilla must have some roots in Willow. So she stuck out her tongue to see what would happen next.
“Oh really?” In a heartbeat Carmilla had shifted off her, keeping her grip, and then flipped her roughly over onto her belly, shoving her half off the bed, bent over so that her face was pressed into the carpet and her butt was stuck up in the air. “You want to know who’s winning?”
She felt her arm pulled up behind her back, twisted painfully while her other arm tried desperately to stop her sliding further down onto the floor. Carmilla was sitting on the bed, with one leg wrapped around Wilow’s legs to pin them, and one off the bed, pressing her foot down onto Willow’s head. She held Willow’s arm with one hand and spread her labia apart with the other, lowering her mouth towards them.
“How about this?” She could feel every cold breath from Carmilla’s mouth over her wet lips. Yes. Yes, please just touch me. “What if one player had been sneaking into the other player’s room every night to rape her, and every single time she just thought it was a dream?” No, wait. This was a weird dream. But still a dream. “Would that player be winning?” She was starting to feel queasy. The arm that was being twisted up behind her back hurt - a very concrete, clear, anatomical kind of hurt. Not the sort she usually felt in dreams.
Then a much shorter chapter, of the fallout the next day.
All through the walk to school and her first class she fought to keep these thoughts at bay. The greatest fear wasn’t even what would follow if the dream had been real. It was how she might have to explain it to the others. She couldn’t keep something like this to herself, after all, that would be irresponsible. But maybe if she just told Jenny… except she felt Jenny would consider this a lapse in vigilance worthy of punishment. Or maybe if she just told Buffy… but then how much else would she have to tell Buffy? She definitely didn’t want to tell Xander, and the thought of Giles or any of the others finding out was mortifying…
Then she walked into the library and saw the others gathered around a lavender envelope. I’m in so much trouble.
There were four of them: Giles, Wesley, Xander, and Cordelia. It was Cordelia who greeted her.
“Oh hey, it’s about time. Your girlfriend left another of her little love letters in my locker.”
Thoughts on Rewatching S3E02, “Dead Man’s Party” (3/3): Do you like my mask? Isn't it pretty? It raises the dead!
Ok so I said that the zombie-demon-mask plotline is also bad, but it is at least bad in a fairly familiar and standard way for the show. There are roughly three big problems as I see it:
The plot is weirdly disconnected. Ovu Mobani arrives by coincidence and starts activating for unclear reasons. Giles figures out his nature too late to do anything about it, and then arrives at the last minute with a crucial bit of information that… Buffy also figures out by herself?
The antagonist is under-explained. What does it mean for there to be a zombie demon? Who bound him in this mask and why? Was he raising the dead before, and if so why didn’t the art dealer mention that? How did it get here, if it’s originally Nigerian? What was it going to do if allowed to be active - just rampage at random, or find more zombies? Or what?
The impact is weirdly enormous and ignored. At least two people died at this party! Possibly dozens? It’s very unclear but either way, this feels like this should be its own new devastating thing to handle the aftermath of. Joyce appears to have made exactly one (1) friend since moving to Sunnydale and she just died! It’s sort of weird to completely ignore that in favour of the good vibes now flowing between the Scooby Gang?
The only redeeming feature, really, is that there’s a cat - I think only the second cat we’ve seen on the show, since Katharine Madison’s in S1E03. But they don’t even give poor Patches much to do.
Ok but I’m going to try and be constructive here. Starting with the disjointed structure. The effort to make things not link up is so oddly concerted (why would you think to have Oz arrive with the message to attack the eyes right after Buffy does so?) that it feels like it must be deliberately trying to say something. I think you could read it as suggesting two things. First: the gang is stricken by dysfunction and distracted by their petty grievances, and so rather than actively addressing the threat they find themselves lagging behind - essentially, exactly the same things happen as if the crack team of monster-hunters hadn’t been involved at all. Except right at the end, where (second point): Buffy is so good at slaying that she can intuit the solution to the problem and thereby save everybody’s lives?
(Also: Buffy got bad vibes from the mask in the first place - maybe if people listened to her more this whole thing could have been averted?)
Ok but… that’s still stupid? Like, are we bending over backwards to make the point that the Scoobies are incompetent and Buffy’s a badass? That is not actually a fun point to make (I’d rather watch a show with more than one cool character) and it doesn’t actually resolve any of the issues between them, certainly not in a way that fits with the way the show seems to think things have been resolved at the end.
So…. Maybe it’s making a deliberate point but it’s a bad point to make so maybe we should just take it to be incompetent plotting?
Next, what’s the deal with Ovu Mobani? One thought is: every time we see his eyes glow, it’s in the immediate aftermath of Buffy feeling miserable and alone at home. Now, that might be a coincidence - after all, most scenes in this episode involve Buffy feeling miserable and alone. But to me it suggests the possibility that her misery is somehow feeding it: every time someone rebuffs or alienates her, Ovu Mobani is given the power to reach out and raise a zombie servant. This happens intermittently at first, then during the party the misery is coming thick and fast. That might explain why it wasn’t raising the dead before: it was in galleries or similar relatively calm places, not at home in the house of a deeply miserable individual.
The other thought is entirely self-indulgent: the disappearance of the zombies when Ovu Mobani’s main form was killed was a localised shockwave. Meaning that patches was still a zombie cat stuck in a cave in the library. At some point that night, they managed to shake the cage enough for it to fall off the table, and the impact released the door. Patches the zombie car, containing the last traces of the power of Ovu Mobani, wanders the streets of Sunnydale still, flesh and skin long since rotted away, now simply a skeleton held together by a few dried-up ligaments. Scary living cats, and waiting to meet a witch who’s willing to take a chance on a less photogenic familiar….
Ok but what about the third point? All across Sunnydale, doctors and police officers and others have seen dead bodies rise to their feet and stagger towards the Summers’ residence. Now those bodies are missing, along with some unknown number of partygoers who are now just gone. The house is trashed.
(And a… team of cheerleaders was killed at some point that night? Killed by the zombies or in an unrelated accident?)
Like, Buffy was wanted for murder based on one dead body, what’s the fallout from this going to be? Even if we assume that most of the partygoers fled and got away, they are presumably going to mention that they went to a party at that house and then were attacked and their friend’s gone now.
And yes, I know that the show sort of has a habit of throwing deaths around and expecting us to forget about them, but it feels especially egregious and especially casual this time, and it would have been very easy to avoid - there don’t need to be so many zombies, and they could have disrupted the party very easily by just bursting in and trying to get upstairs, without snapping people’s necks and all.
And the worst bit is that for characters in the universe, who can’t hear the ending credits roll, it’s going to be hard not to start asking “why did this happen?” And there’s sort of two equally bad answers.
One answer is that it’s pure coincidence: one local woman happened to acquire a piece of art that happens to kill people, and nobody had any way to know in advance it would do that, and then it killed a bunch of people. That woman happened to be lucky enough that there were monster-hunters in her house at the time, or it would have killed even more.
The other answer is… well, Buffy was away all summer, and then she comes back, and within a couple of days there’s a mass casualty event at her house. People will put two-and-two together, won’t they? Joyce even half-insinuates this: is it a “regular day at the office” for the slayer to be attacked out of nowhere at her own house? But that’s a pretty horrible implication to have hanging, in some ways worse than anything people were blaming Buffy for during the big arguments!
(And if I’m right that something about Buffy’s emotions was feeding the demon, then this explanation, though deeply unfair, isn’t entirely false?)
Um. Yeah I don’t really see an interpretation that saves things particularly. Just a badly thought-out plotline more or less from start to finish.
Thoughts on Rewatching S3E02, “Dead Man’s Party” (2/3): The perils of back-to-normal
So I follow the common opinion that Buffy’s friends in dead man’s party act pretty shabbily, and that this behaviour is both out of character in some ways and also not remotely explained or justified by what’s shown on screen.
But! Spinoza wrote that “I have tried my best not to ridicule human actions, nor to bewail them, nor to scorn them, but to understand them.”
So in that spirit, I’m going to do my best to reconstruct what went wrong between these kids, and in particular between Buffy and Willow/Xander.
(Warning, inordinately long post below the cut)
I want to take as my jumping-off point something that Xander says right before they make the worst decision of the episode, to turn the quiet dinner that Joyce invited them to into an enormous house party. To justify this, he says:
“She doesn't want to talk about it, we don't want to talk about it, so why don't we just shut up and dance?”
Is this true (where “it” is “Buffy leaving for LA and its causes and effects over the summer”)? I don’t think so. It’s clearly not true of Xander, since he keeps bringing it up! The third thing he says to her in the whole episode is “Mad? Just because you ran away and abandoned your post and your friends and your mom and made [Giles] lay awake every night worrying about you?” He misses few opportunities to bring it up.
I also don’t think it’s true that Willow or Buffy don’t want to talk about it, though with them it’s less obvious. They feel more resistance, but it’s resistance holding them back from satisfying a fairly clear emotional need - the lack of communicaton between them is clearly a source of distress to them both. So the question is, how did it come to seem to everyone like everyone didn’t want to talk about this “it” that everyone does actually want/need to talk about?
More broadly, the confrontation during the party has this strong vibe of everyone involved feeling like they’ve tried - they tried to meet the others halfway and were rebuffed, and so now whatever they’re saying/doing is a last resort. Yet the corollary of everyone feeling like they tried was that nobody feels like they rebuffed the other, despite the others feeling that way. So there’s some sort of failure of communication, or a failure to perceive what the other side needs.
From Willow and Xander’s side, my sense is that what they really want from Buffy can be best captured in the word “recognition.” Recognition of the impact her decision had, what they’ve been through, what they’ve achieved in responding to it. Note two things about this.
First, this could be spun in either a negative or a positive way. You may have seen a bit of memetic advice that floats around, to reframe excessive apologies as gratitude. Instead of the negative framing “sorry I’m late”, give it the positive framing “thank you for being patient”, etc.
And so while Xander and Willow in some respects sound very different this episode, they’re expressing two sides of the same drive. Xander focuses on the negative (e.g. the above quote), while Willow focuses on the positive - the first thing she says to Buffy in the whole episode is “we were getting good. We dusted nine out of ten!” (Then corrected to six out of ten.) So I think either gratitude or apology would probably satisfy this need for recognition.
Second, they want recognition of what’s different now, how things have changed. They’re not just assistants to the vampire slayer now, they’re vampire slayers! They’ve gone through stuff and changed, because they had to. So while I think Willow was sincere last episode when she said “Wouldn't it be great if Buffy just showed up tomorrow, like nothing happened?”, I think her uncharacteristic quietness in this episode is partly her realising that she doesn’t actually want that - that it actively hurts her feelings and her pride to act “like nothing happened.”
(Lurking in the background here is the fact that both Xander and Willow have, fairly clearly, long nurtured a certain level of subconscious envy of Buffy’s position as Slayer. This comes out much more obviously with Xander, in a heavily gendered and kind of gross form: he wishes he was the one beating up vampires in hand-to-hand combat, and the fact that it’s not him but a petite girl is a slight against his fragile masculinity. With Willow it comes out more slowly, and more subtly, and more ambivalently, and it’s less gendered and atagonistic - she doesn’t want to reduce Buffy to being a helpless damsel to be saved (like in Xander’s fantasy in S1E04), but she does slowly work her way into accepting and relishing leadership, into the power that comes from witchcraft, into not wanting to be, as she puts it in S4E04, Buffy’s “sidekick”, but maybe something closer to co-equal (or at least second in command, or chief science officer, or something). So while I think they both felt hurt and scared and disoriented by Buffy’s sudden disappearance, I reckon there’s a part of them both that actively welcomed it - a chance to show that they could do this job themselves, if they had to.)
Buffy consistently doesn’t give them that recognition. Her first words to them are a tease (“Didn't anyone ever warn you about playing with pointy sticks?”) and her first action is to sneak up on and disarm Xander, then slay a vampire that they were failing to Slay. Her remark that “You guys seem down with the slayage, all tricked out with your walkies and everything” reads to me as sort of ambivalently mocking, and note crucially that Willow’s reluctance to hang out with her the next day comes up right after the following exchange:
“you can leave the slaying to us while you settle in. We got you covered.”
[…]
“Well, thank you for the offer, but I think I just wanna get back to my normal routine.”
I think this is one of the moments where Willow and/or Xander feel rebuffed, but Buffy doesn’t realise. They say “we’ve done this thing that was really hard and scary and actually objectively kind of heroic” and she says “no, I’ll do that thing, just like before, we can forget you ever did that.”
In fact, from Willow and Xander’s perspective, this is sort of completing a whole scene of repeated scenes refusals of recognition. She doesn’t take their positive slaying efforts seriously, she doesn’t apologise or self-flagellate when Xander gives his little list of negatives, and she deflects their requests to know and understand what happened. She’s given three ways to recognise the significance of what happened, and refuses all three. She wants to “get back to normal”, just as Joyce and Giles say, and I don’t think that’s what Willow and Xander want at all.
But! That’s not what Buffy thinks she’s doing (this is key miscommunication 1). Rather than seeing “back to normal” as a selfish refusal of recognition, I think she sees it as the selfless option: if Xander is mad at her for “abandoning her post”, she’s going to get right back to her post. She’s going to resume doing her duty, being a good Slayer and an approximately normal daughter, and hopefully at some point feeling happy while doing it (and even the happiness is in part a matter of duty).
From her perspective, I think, there are basically four options:
Dwelling on her agonising pain around losing and damning Angel, the deaths of Kendra, Jenny, Theresa, and everyone else Angel killed, her fight with her mom, knowing that Angel is maybe being tortured right now, etc.
Pushing all of that down in order to keep going through the motions of her overburdened impossible life, doing her job but feeling as little as possible
Opening up and thereby becoming vulnerable to blame and anger from her family and friends
Leaving.
From her perspective, what’s salient is that she can’t face A, so she’s trying to do B instead of D, because that’s the right thing to do and that’s what everyone wants her to do. Option C is definitely on her radar but she’s terrified of it (“What if he's mad?”). So on my reading, although she is willing to go there, to apologise or explain herself, she really wants to insist on doing it slowly, gently, in safe conditions, and hopefully after first getting some signal of warmth or sympathy from the people she’d be opening up to.
Which I think is fair, and a basically reasonable sort of “bargain”. If her friends create a safe space for her, she can share what she’s been through and recognise the effect it had on them - but her very first meeting with them isn’t that safe space, for multiple reasons. Partly just because it’s the first meeting, so as Giles says she “could use a little time to adjust.” Partly because Cordelia is there to ask things like “So were you, like, living in a box, or what?” Partly because Cordelia and Oz are both, you know, not actually her close friends. Partly because while Giles and Willow and Xander are her close friends, they’re very different and what she would say to one of them isn’t the same as what she would say to another.
Notably, while she’s aware of the prospect of blame and anger, I don’t think she’s even registering her friends’ desire for recognition, something that could be positive, and this leads to key miscommunication 2: she perceives their requests for recognition as attempts to impose blame. So they make her shut down rather than prompting her to offer the recognition that they want.
(I think the extra line from the shooting script that @coraniaid found here I think reinforces this idea: "Then you come back and you didn't even ask about me. You just worried about whether I was mad at you." Willow doesn't want to direct blame or anger, she wants recognition, and is hurt that Buffy isn't thinking in those terms at all.)
And sure, Xander does express himself in a pretty blame-y way, but I don’t think he’s committed to being angry and blamey: from his perspective, he’s hurt that she gets back and immediately finds “nighthawk” funny, so he’s trying to half-jokily point out that they do surely deserve some credit for dealing with the situation which, hey by the way, she created. Like, I do think Xander is generally a fairly vindictive person but he does like Buffy a lot and I have to believe that there was a way that they could have had a conversation about the summer where Buffy would have given the kind of token apology between friends which is immediately accepted and forgiven and waved away because all it’s needed for is to signal recognition that a bad thing happened. And certainly that sort of conversation could have happened with Willow. The episode’s plot is about why that conversation doesn’t end up happening.
And note also that the bargain Buffy sees herself as making (I’ll make myself vulnerable after I receive a signal of sympathy, which I’m willing to earn by performing my duties and Getting Back to Normal) is one that is effectively validated by Joyce and Giles. They both make a point of hugging her or saying something nice as soon as they see her, they both encourage her to Get Back to Normal, they both signal that she doesn’t have to explain herself immediately (in fact they both sort of give the impression she might never have to, that they might be able to just “put all of this behind us”).
(That’s not to say that they’re flawless here: people have pointed out that Giles’s sweet little moment of relief is, though wonderfully acted, kept out of Buffy’s sight, and both of them are basically encouraging Buffy to keep repressing her feelings and ignoring her accumulated trauma and incipient depression (they do this for opposite reasons - Joyce doesn’t understand Buffy’s situation and Giles does understand, perhaps all too well, but has the wrong idea of how to deal with it). But they both recognise that Buffy is in great pain, and try their best to modulate their actions and reactions in ways that avoid causing her any more pain. Which is, I think, a reasonable minimum expectation for adults dealing with a teenager.)
But Willow and Xander don’t see or accept the emotional bargain Buffy is implicitly trying to strike. I think they’re trying to strike a different bargain: extend grateful recognition of what we’ve done in your absence, “kicking undead booty”, and then we’ll extend you sympathy and forgiveness.
But Buffy misinterprets the demand for recognition as specifically an attempt to impose blame, so she tries to deflect or defer it: as I said, I think she would be willing to accept blame if they first signalled that they’d be sympathetic, but they don’t because they want her to signal recognition first, so they’re stuck in a bad equilibrium where neither is happy and both feel like the other is rebuffing them and refusing to engage.
And I think partly this is just down to Xander and Willow being teenagers who are not very mature and who can see that Buffy is, in some vague sense, unhappy, but can’t properly grasp how deeply and severely. Partly though it’s also that they have a very different relationship to vampire slaying than she does.
For Buffy, slaying is something that turned up unwanted to disrupt her life, a life that had previously been basically happy, and which even before the series begins has forced her to 1) accept a degree of responsibility for the deaths of people she cares about (like her first watcher), and 2) accept misplaced blame from people she can’t explain herself to (like for getting kicked out of school), and which she nevertheless feels obligated to keep doing.
For Xander and Willow, slaying has, I think, pretty clearly been a positive thing in their lives, which they consequently and actively choose. At the beginning of the show they’re socially marginal and have home lives that seem lacklustre (in Willow’s case) or actively hostile and neglectful (in Xander’s). Involvement in vampire slaying gives them a sense of purpose, a friend group which, while small, has the allure of secret knowledge and prestige, and eventually attracts the most popular girl in school to start hanging out with them. It gives them an attentive and supportive adult figure (to different degrees, but in both cases more so than their parents - he likes Willow a lot, which seems to put him ahead of her supportive but inattentive parents, and he genially tolerates Xander, which unfortunately seems to put him ahead of Xander’s parents). It gives them a beautiful girl who they both immediately fall madly in love with (yes I am not accepting comments on this claim). There’s a sense in which it’s sort of… all they have. (More clearly so for Xander, but even though Willow has academic excellence and probably a bright professional future ahead of her, that’s not a very potent source of meaning in the here and now). It’s cool and sexy and exciting and so, as Willow will say later this season, “it’s a good fight, and I want in.”
There’s a part of Buffy that sees it that way too, and it’s going to become important when Faith arrives, but right now it’s buried under the part of her that sees slaying as a curse that’s forced her to live a life of endless murder and recriminations. So she has trouble consciously registering that Xander and Willow are proud of themselves and really want her recognition, rather than simply wanting her to take over the burden again so they don’t have to. She says don’t worry, I’ll get back to normal and she thinks she’s being a martyr and they think she’s telling them that they can never be more than hangers-on.
A caveat: I said I think she can’t consciously register that slaying is cool; I think she does subconsciously register it, and seeing that the others have taken over makes her feel subconsciously hurt because she has, slowly but surely, started to identify with her Slayerness and see it as a positive source of meaning, but she doesn’t particularly identify or understand that feeling until it comes out at the party, when everything breaks down.
And there’s a way in which throwing the party has a sort of logic to it. I mean, sure it’s an obviously bad idea, enormously rude to Joyce and cruel to Buffy, and I think that Willow and Xander are in denial about these facts. But on the level of pure id, it sort of works… they’re dissatisfied with Buffy saying “let’s just get back to normal”, so they escalate that idea to an extreme in order to destabilise it: “you want to act like nothing happened, sure let’s act like nothing happened.”
A mature adult would be able to simultaneously accept that 1) Buffy is obviously not ok with just acting like nothing happened, and 2) she needs to be able to grapple with stuff on her own timeline, not when we want her to. They’d see that her stated wishes and her underlying needs are different, but that both need to be respected. The Scoobies are not mature adults. They justify the decision to throw this dead woman’s party in different ways - Cordelia I think is just not thinking about it much at all, Oz isn’t too invested but feels comfortable reorienting things towards music and parties because that’s what he’s good at, Willow talks herself into it by focusing on Buffy’s explicit statements about doing normal fun kid stuff, even though on some level she must know that it’s not really what Buffy wants. Xander is… well I think he’s just letting himself go along with his resentment because he does that sometimes, because he’s a trash human a flawed teenager under difficult circumstances. And one of those flaws is vindictiveness.
And you know, if I’m allowed to attribute hidden inner conflicts to people to make then more realistic and sympathetic, then not only is Buffy thinking constantly about Kendra but never saying her name, but also Willow is thinking constantly about her spell to restore Angel’s soul because she really wants to know whether it works (and if it did she sort of wants the credit and recognition for that and if it didn’t she’ll feel guilty that she let down her best friend), and Xander is thinking constantly about his lie to Buffy being the last thing he said to her before she left and trying to externalise his guilt by blaming her and Joyce is thinking constantly about how “don’t even think about coming back” being the last thing she said to Buffy before she left and she wants to externalise that onto Giles and would have done so if he had arrived at the party and that’s part of why she invited him, but he’s not there so she externalises it by blaming Buffy and the language of “punishment” reflects that she feels guilty and doesn’t know how to handle it. And none of this is at all evidenced in the script but I maintain these are reasonable headcanons.
Anyway. The show’s thesis statement is “You can't just bury stuff, it’ll come right back up to get you”, in the sense that this is the line which, by means of a heavy-handed cut to zombies, is made to tie together the two plotlines. And in a way, I’ve suggested, it’s sort of apt. Everything difficult about what happened in “Becoming” and over the Summer is being buried, but it’s not being buried unilaterally by Buffy. It’s being buried because Buffy’s buying into the “get back to normal, establish sympathy and safety, then maybe I’ll be vulnerable” bargain, encouraged by Giles and Joyce, but Xander and Willow (with Oz and Cordelia as accomplices) are trying to push a “recognise what we’ve been through and accomplished, then we’ll extend sympathy” bargain, and neither side recognises this mismatch of bargains.
And so the difficult issues are buried by a bad equilibrium but the Scoobies are determined to destabilise this equilibrium and so instead of communicating sensitively with Buffy they “heighten the contradictions” of get-back-to-normal, like the worst sort of vulgar Marxists, and yeah, it works: Buffy concludes that “getting back to normal” doesn’t offer any prospect of escaping her ambient unhappiness, and so resorts to preparing to leave (I think it’s completely up in the air whether she would have done so, or threatened to do so as a way to express her unhappiness), and then they find her and the feelings all come out in the most hurtful and destructive way possible, in the least safe and supportive environment possible, and symbolic zombies burst in to try and kill everyone.
But. Well. The problem with vulgar Marxist accelerationism is that just because you destabilise a system and provoke political upheaval, there’s no guarantee that what emerges from that upheaval will be any better than before. It could easily be worse. And if I try to interpret the ending of this episode with as much psychological realism as possible, I’d have to say that that’s what happens here.
Because I think Xander and Willow get what they need: Buffy apologises, loudly and repeatedly, and even more in the final scene with Willow. She listens to Willow talk about her summer activities and lets her tease her and claim “moral superiority”, and because they are close friends it’s clear that Willow doesn’t want to hold anything against Buffy, she wants to forgive and move on, she just wants the recognition first.
But does Buffy get what she needs? I think it’s important to note two things. 1) during the big confrontation she repeatedly says thinks like “you don’t know”, “you wouldn’t understand”, “I couldn’t talk to you”, which connect apologising to being understood. I don’t think she’s unwilling to recognise the downsides of her leaving or to apologise for them, but she sees that as inseparable from explaining what she went through, sharing her experiences, getting them to recognise her pain. And she sees the latter as extremely hard and painful and uncertain of success (hence she wants to do it only under optimal conditions).
And 2) none of that happens. Nobody knows more about Angel now than they did at the beginning of the episode, nobody understands Buffy’s perspective or experiences more either. In fact, she’s received several statements suggesting that they actively won’t - Xander referring dismissively to her “boy troubles”, Cordelia confirming that she sees Angel’s murders as “basically [Buffy’s] fault”, Joyce suggesting that Buffy ran away to “punish” her, Willow drawing a comparison with her objectively much milder problems. Surely Buffy’s going to come away from this even more convinced that they’ll never understand her.
The horrible irony is that right at the moment when her friends are feeling good that they, like her, can (semi-)competently slay vampires, and her mother is embarking on a new, slayer-accepting lifestyle, they are confirming to her that she’ll always be, on some level, alone.
But don’t worry! There’s a happy ending, because of the catharsis of battling and defeating evil, and now everyone is smiling and hugging. I mean, let’s not worry about the fact that Pat is dead and that should really be a fairly huge issue at least for Joyce. Let’s not worry about the social or legal ramifications of this huge zombie-disrupted party. Even setting aside those basically extraneous problems, this is a very shallow catharsis: they cycled through arousal and impact and adrenaline and relaxation, and now they feel good and buzzy and connected. But has the “it” that nobody wanted to talk about been talked about? Has the buried stuff been exhumed? I think the Scoobies think yes, and don’t realise that they’ve actually retraumatised Buffy, and taught her that she can’t expect sympathy or understanding from them.
And so as I read it, the final scene with Buffy and Willow is just Buffy burying things again. She’s still pushing for “get back to normal”, and the thing is now that Willow and Xander feel sufficiently recognised (indeed, Willow’s moral superiority is “like a drug”) they’re happy to go along with that. Buffy smiles and jokes with Willow because at least they’re talking and at least Willow is being friendly now, and if she has to repress some horrible memories, and accept that she can’t expect Willow to understand her feelings or sympathise with her actions, so what? She’s already spent years having to hide her feelings and actions from people she cares about, sucking up their blame and judgement, surely there’s no harm in doing the same for another year. Surely this won’t lead to crippling suicidal depression.
So yeah. I think all the characters have understandable motivations, but that definitely doesn’t mean they’re all equally sympathetic or in the right. Buffy’s perspective reflects a succession of life-altering traumas which she struggles to even talk about; Willow and Xander’s perspective reflects, more than anything else, their failure to recognise this fact and appropriately weight it. And the outcome, which gives them what they want while moving Buffy further away from what she wants, is a product of them choosing to throw a party, a choice which is petulant at best and which they never seem to see as even slightly problematic. They do not come out of this episode seeming like good friends.
(Giles and Joyce I think come out looking mostly good but with some blind spots and lapses - really what we need to look at is whether they recognise the inadequacy of the seeming “resolution” at the end and how they relate to the ongoing “get back to normal” project. Which will have to be something we examine next week…)
So, yeah: that’s the story of what I headcanon was going on in this episode. Is it a good story? I’ve done my best to make it psychologically plausible and to populate it with intelligible and interesting characters.
But is it a fun story? A rewarding story? A story I want to watch?
The funny thing is, I think it is a compelling story if seen in the larger context of the show. It’s a tragedy and a cautionary tale about repression and misunderstanding and people who care about each but aren’t mature enough to give each other what they need. It makes sense of why Buffy is so drawn to Faith but so ill-equipped to give her what she, in turn, will need. It's a rather uniquely high-school-vampire-slayers story, in how it ties together danger and trauma and choice and obligation (it wouldn't survive a simple switch to either professional Van Helsings or regular low-stakes high school stuff.) It helps set up “Faith, Hope, and Trick”, and “Revelations”, and season 6, and more.
(And it will be cathartic once I write the fix-it-fic scenes in the post-S3 summer where Buffy confronts Xander about his lie and Willow has been through enough personal growth to re-evaluate things and Faith and Buffy are close enough to bond over their shared experience of running away from a town they can’t bear to stay in. The catharsis will flow.)
But is it a good episode? No! None of this story appears on screen, though I think there’s strong but subtle evidence for some of how I’ve characterised people’s motivations. And the show never comes back to any of this to make clear that the reconciliation at the end was false and one-sided. Instead the ending is written exactly the way you’d expect if Buffy actually was in the wrong, unilaterally responsible for “burying” stuff and finally rightfully forced to face reality at the end.
Indeed, a lot of the episode’s weaknesses (like everything people don’t say about Kendra and Angel) come from the episodic nature of the show at this point and the fact that it’s not letting itself tell stories over long stretches of time. So it’s ironic that the only way I can see to make this a compelling story is to put it into a longer narrative which turns on its resolution being a false resolution and a deepening of the original problem.
