Someone bless your so complete answers! XD anyway, what's your view on the episode Restless? I rather enjoy it, and I feel like it gives a lot of hints for the next season, specially with the quote "Comeback before dawn.", so I'm really curious about what you think and take from that episode.
Oh gosh, literally the entire episode is one giant reference to either past things or things to come (the most obvious being to Dawn). EXCEPT the Cheese Man. Joss himself has said the Cheese Man only appears to be the random bit of chaos in all of the dreams without deeper meaning. I’m going to point out a few interesting things from the episode, but this is by no means a comprehensive list. That would take me literally days! xD I think the most subtle thing that may have been overlooked is that they all have the dreams in the order of which they took the spell, Willow, Xander, Giles, Buffy, and then they’re all attacked/killed in the same way. (Spirit, heart, mind, strength, respectively.) Willow’s Dream:Most of the dream dictates Willow’s abuse of magic later on, although it does also foreshadow her relationship with Tara when she tells her, “You don’t know everything about me” specifically alluding to “Family” when her parents come to visit. But the most damning thing about her abuse of magic is when Buffy rips off her costume to reveal her high school clothes and tells her, “Your costume is perfect. No one’s going to know the truth, about you.” Basically, everyone still sees her as smart, innocent little school-girl Willow. Willow’s actually in conflict with herself as to whether or not she actually still is that same person, but moreso it specifically addresses how her abuse of magic gets so out of control so fast: Because this is Willow. Tara also says something similar at the beginning, that “They will find out about you.”The Dawn mention is right in the beginning:Tara: I think it’s strange. I mean, I think I should worry that we haven’t found her name.Willow: Who, Miss Kitty? Tara: You’d think she’d let us know her name by now.Then when the play starts, the curtain opens to reveal sunrise or AKA dawn.One of the most interesting things for me personally is Buffy in Willow’s rendition of “Death of A Salesman.” Buffy says: “But what else could I expect from a bunch of low-rent, no account hoodlums like you? Hoodlums yes! I mean you and your friends, your whole sex. Throw ‘em in the sea for all I care! Throw 'em in and wait for the bubbles. Men with your groping and spitting, all groin, no brain, three billion of you passing around the same worn-out urge. Men! With your … sales.” I don’t think she’s referring to any specific guy here, but basically all of them combined, from the sexual assault she experienced and got blamed for on campus in, “Go Fish” to Parker from the beginning of her time in college, perhaps even Xander, which leads us to:Xander’s Dream:
Xander’s dream is ridiculously long compared to the others, but I think that’s fair to say that Xander puts the most roadblocks up in his own path. His dream is mostly about the fear of becoming his parents, which is shown at the end of the dream when his father literally rips his heart out. However, Xander perhaps fits the best mention of “all groin, no brain” out of just the Scooby Gang, considering how when the dream first starts, Joyce is coming on to him, and then Willow and Tara show up looking like they popped out a B-grade porno and beckon for Xander to join him. I think one of the best parts of this whole dream though is when Buffy calls Xander “brother” literally referencing how she feels about him and kind of seriously dispelling any notion there could be anything more romantic between them. Yes, this is something that she stated all the way back in season 1, but this could be Xander actually coming to terms with that. His scene then in the ice cream truck is the most obvious, with him sitting in the driver’s seat and Anya asking if he knows where he’s going, obviously representing his anxiety with life. Though then she says she wants to get back into vengeance, that she has a feeling it’s going to be a big year for vengeance, foreshadowing the outcome of their wedding.Then, later, Anya and Giles are trying to tell him what to do, where to go, but they’re speaking French so he can’t understand them, basically people trying to help Xander and point him in the right direction, but he doesn’t understand them unless they physically lead him to that conclusion. It makes me think back to season 1 when Buffy reads the note the vampires left her after they kidnapped Cordelia and he says, “They’re going to cook her dinner?” He’s always just a little bit behind on the uptake, mostly for comedic effect, but it’s part of his character now. Also: I love how he tells Snyder, “You know, I never got the chance to tell you how glad I was you were eaten by a snake,” foreshadowing the conversation he had with Snyder back in season 2 when he said that one day he hoped to be as honest with Snyder as Snyder was with him. Also forgot to mention, Giles’ comment, “Spike’s like a son to me.” Well, besides the obvious implications of Tabula Rasa, it also shows how Giles sees his relationship with Spike: angry/disappointed father, resentful son, which is something that Xander can relate to in a way.
I think Giles dream is the most obvious representation of what’s to come because it has many literal foreshadowings as opposed to opaque. For example, Olivia (his girlfriend) gently chides him about Buffy’s training, and then is sitting on an overturned baby stroller, crying. Basically, he feels conflicted about having a family life vs his role as Buffy’s father figure/Watcher, hence where he leaves for England to have a life of his own. The “look into the light” comment Giles tells her is equally as ominous, that he, her Watcher, will lead her to her death, which he did back in season 1 and will do at the end of the next season. It’s also interesting (and a post I read a long while back that I can’t find now actually pointed this out) that dream Spike is wearing the same suit he wears later in Tabula Rasa, further referencing the father/son relationship he has with Giles although Giles later laments, “I still think Buffy should’ve killed you.” Unlike Gandalf in LOTR, where Gandalf sees that Gollum yet has a part to play in all this, Giles just wants Spike dead, regardless of the role he is going to play as the champion in season 7.Giles also bursting into song that describes the “plot” is also a clear reference of things to come, as he is the first person to start singing when the Scoobies are all together in “Once More With Feeling” when he starts singing, “I’ve Got a Theory.” The most interesting thing here isn’t actually a foreshadowing, but Giles claiming that he can defeat the Primitive with his intellect, which may be true, given how quickly she then kills him. Buffy’s Dream:
Tons and tons of references to Dawn here, and of things to come. Right away, Buffy tells Tara that she just made the bed, but when Tara asks for who, Buffy says, “I thought you were here to tell me.” When Buffy leaves to go find the others, Tara tells her, “Be back before dawn,” which is probably the most explicit reference possible. There’s also something about the clock that I’ll have to look up later because I honestly read it somewhere and don’t remember. Also, there’s this: Tara: You think you know, what’s to come, what you are. You haven’t even begun.Dracula (next episode): You think you know who you are, what’s to come. You haven’t even begun.
Joyce in the walls saying really weird random things is probably a reference to her erratic behavior later as a result of…well, you know, but her conversation with Riley has tons of implications. Riley calls her a killer, which is basically a callback to season 3 with her and Faith, that there was a distinction between “Slayers” and “killers” but probably alludes to the fact that Riley still doesn’t understand the difference and subtleties of the demon world, and he’s probably never going to get it, which is why at the end of the sequence he says, “If that’s the way you want it, I guess you’re on your own” and leaves, foreshadowing his leaving for good. It also shows that he is still engrossed in his military plans and stuff, again signifying that he’ll leave with the government. The best part of this though for me is when Buffy tells Adam that, “We’re not demons” and Adam asks, “Is that a fact?” signifying that Slayers were created with the essence of a demon, which to me is kind of one of the best foreshadowing in this entire episode, next to her encounter with the first slayer, only waking up when she doesn’t so much reject the power that the first slayer has given her, but when she says, “You are not the source of me,” rejecting that it is pure demon-power alone that gives her strength as a Slayer and that she needs the strength of her friends and family around her (something she visibly lacks in season 6, which is when Buffy is at her “weakest).
And the clock thing I looked online to find it: “Also in Buffy’s dream, Buffy mentions how late it is, after looking at the clock in the room (which says 7:30), to which Tara replies “oh, that clock’s completely wrong.” This is a foreshadowing of her death at the end of Season 5, and a reminder of Buffy’s dream in the season 3 finale, in which Faith says “…counting down from 7-3-0” (it was approximately 730 days later that Buffy died). Tara saying that the clock is wrong means that she no longer has 730 days.” Source: http://buffy.wikia.com/wiki/Restless
Some interesting things to point out: this episode was supposed to have a lot more cameos, and Angel specifically was supposed to be the “dream guide” which honestly doesn’t make sense to me. The role later fell to Tara which makes a lot more sense just because of how intuitive she is that the first would choose her to speak for her, but given how Joss originally wanted Angel there’s probably no real significance or deeper meaning in the selection of Tara.
Another thing that I wanted to pointed out was that, aside from the Cheese Man, Anya was the only person to show up in everyone’s dreams as well, signifying the different kind of relationship she has with each of the Scoobies. Whereas Tara was mostly seen as an extension of Willow, Anya actually had different kinds of encounters with each of the Scoobies, from helping Giles out in the Magic Box to being at the end of Buffy’s stake when she turns back into a vengeance demon.
Okay, that’s all I can think of for now. I’m sure none of this is new information in that other people have probably brought these things up before (I actually found a lot of things I mentioned in the Wiki….probably should have just linked back to that instead of typing everything out) but I read through the entire transcript, where it’s a bit easier to catch on to things (at least for me.)Transcript: http://www.buffyworld.com/buffy/transcripts/078_tran.html
