The first outfit of Season 3, Episode 5 - "Death & Hysteria" is an afternoon tea dress in a stunning twilight blue, complete with a capelet and beautiful cloche.
Named the 'Twilight Ruffle Dress' by costume designer Marion Boyce, this afternoon tea dress is crafted from a 1920's embossed silk cut on the bias. The ruffles of the frock are built into godets (inserted triangles of fabric), which add fullness and lengthen the free edge of the garment, as well as adding visual interest and "flirtatiousness", according to the Costume Exhibition.
Her sapphire cloche has a wide front brim and is decorated with layers of blue and green dyed feathers. It had a fascinating transformation to become one of Phryne's many elegant headpieces.
"Miss Fisher initially wore this twilight blue afternoon tea dress in the daytime and needed a cloche to suit. 'We were having a really hard time trying to find something that was right for this dress. I was searching through a big pile of hats and there was this strange 1950's hat - it was an unusual colour but it suited the twilight blue perfectly. I looked inside the hat and discovered that the colour had not faded. I became quite excited about it and gave it to Costume Design Assistant Gareth Blaha and said "Oh now, this is it! I now want this hat inside out and a different shape. It needs to be quite a deep cloche." Gareth looked at me in total horror and said "Sure. I'll do that" (laughs). Which was really terrific of him because it was an incredibly big job and quite hard to do." - Marion Boyce, Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries Costume Exhibition
Phryne adds a capelet in a fabric patterned with series of circles, made from a fabric from Marion Boyce's collection that she had owned for years, waiting for the right project. The capelet is held together with ties made of lace netting. This same circular patterned fabric is used to cover her matching blue bag. She also accessorizes with her onyx earrings, dark blue gloves with two different types of lace designs, and strapped azure heels.
Season 3, Episode 5 - "Death & Hysteria"
Screencaps from screencapped.net, costume exhibition photos from Dayna's Blog, costume photo from Marion Boyce's website, promo photos from csfd.cz, allocine.fr, and the official Facebook (x, x).
Thoughts on Rewatching S3E05, “Homecoming” (2/2): Edge Girl, just what I always wanted to be
Ok, wrapping up for this week with three topics:
Willow and Xander’s nonsense
What’s a Slayerfest?
Faith, Hope, and Angel
Willow and Xander
I don’t have too much to say about this plotline. I don’t think I mind it all that much, I sort of like seeing my fictional characters doing messy dumb horny stuff that blows up in their faces. But I broadly agree with @coraniaid
“I think I can see why the writers convinced themselves this would work -- obviously Willow had had a crush on Xander for a long time, and we did get Xander telling Willow he loved her in Becoming (even if I think that was mean to be read platonically), and especially with Cordelia leaving for Angel next year I can see they wanted an excuse to break things up and (as Willow might put it) spin the whole group dynamic out of orbit. And giving Willow and Xander a big secret to parallel Buffy's own secret about Angel also makes a lot of sense. The problem is that, well. The execution just doesn't work.”
I agree that the execution is rushed, and weirdly lacking in chemistry. I also think… these two are both going through interesting growth, but that growth is largely pointing in the opposite direction from this!
Like, Willow is becoming a witch, Xander was until recently the dashing “Nighthawk”, they’re both dating people way more popular than themselves, they’re generally growing towards being more confident adult versions of themselves. And it’s going well - they haven’t suddenly suffered a horrifying shock or trauma, the previous episodes have mostly ended well for them. Turning back towards their childhood together feels like a regression for no good reason.
Now don’t get me wrong. People do dumb stuff for no good reason all the time. You could totally construct an explanation of why they might suddenly do this turning away from growth. The last few episodes even provide some candidate reasons:
Xander doesn’t really like Cordelia, but has trapped himself in a relationship with her because of messed up ideas about status and success. (As @coranaid notes, it’s significant that Xander insists “that he would never cheat on his girlfriend with his best friend, because he respects Willow and Oz too much”, with no mention of respecting Cordelia.)
Cordelia isn’t shy about how much disdain she has for Xander and how inexplicable she finds her own attraction to him (in a way that often targets the wealth disparity between their families, which the borrowed tuxedo might be reminding him of?)
Oz is very uncommunicative, including about things like (not to come back to this but) whether he has graduated high school or not! Willow likes to know stuff, so this might really frustrate her and Xander’s tendency to over-share might seem attractive by comparison
Willow’s gay (?), and maybe can’t banish this creeping feeling that all her snuggling and smooching with Oz doesn’t quite feel the way she knows it’s meant to feel, and is panicking and casting about for some sort of alternative.
Incredibly fucked up stuff keeps happening to them. Willow just saw an abused girlfriend defend her boyfriend up to the point where he killed her, right after she spent an episode defending her not-abusive-but-a-werewolf boyfriend. That might shake her into taking the werewolf thing more seriously as a red flag!
Lots of people came to the welcome-home party they threw for Buffy, but supposedly “they were killed by zombies”. Whether that means ‘all’ or just ‘some’, you can imagine that messing with their sense of finally being popular - ‘yeah I can get a big party together, but then people die…’
(My suspension of disbelief refuses to let me read this as “all”: if dozens of high school students died in Buffy’s house that would surely have to be a bigger deal than it’s presented as here. If one or two people died and everyone else fled the zombies, yeah, ok, that can just about fit with the general “I skip straight to the obits” attitude…)
So there’s six interesting potential explanations for why these two would cheat like this. The issue just… none of this is even hinted at on-screen. All of these are things which the show broadly encourages us to skim past and not think too much about, so if we were supposed to see them as the operative cause here, we’d need to at least see a scene or two highlighting them and their impact on the characters. Without that it’s just: oh, so now this is happening.
Slayerfest
So in some respects Slayerfest is a perfect idea for Mr. Trick. He observes, coordinates, pulls some strings to put Buffy and (supposedly) Faith in the right place at the right time, and then sits back in a win-win situation, where either the Slayers are eliminated or all the contestants die and he’s just rich and untouched.
(Would have been even better if he hadn’t recorded a video so they could see his face and potentially hunt him down afterwards…)
At the same time, it does raise the question of why the contestants are not only taking on this huge risk of death, but actually paying for the privilege. And I can see two interesting ways of answering that.
One is sparked by @coraniaid reporting that supposedly the “Jungle Bob” character was meant to be Gib Cain, the werewolf hunter from “Pangs.” I think that’s would have given the whole thing a nice “former antagonists come back and team up” sort of vibe: Gorch from S2E12, Caine from S2E15, Trick from S3E03.
I think then it would really have felt like a grudge thing, with some extra folks (yellow-skinned and/or German) brought into the mix too. (And it works with the title - chickens “coming home” to roost kind of thing.)
But with Cain not returning, it shifts to a slightly different reading: apparently “amoral big game hunter who hunts supernaturally-empowered beings despite their human status” is a common enough thing for two of them to pass through the same area of California in less than a year.
Back in S1E09, “The Puppet Show”, we got our first tease that “demon hunters” existed who weren’t Slayers; we’ll see another one in a prominent role with Robin Wood in season 7, and I know they become a bit more of a thing on AtS, but they always stay a bit underdeveloped as a concept. And going by what the show has presented so far… well, the list of non-magic-using, non-cultist, non-supernatural people who knowingly engage with the supernatural (and have no connection to Slayers or Watchers) is:
Pre-Dummy Sid
Willy the Snitch
Billy Fordham
Patrice (and maybe Octarus?) from the order of Taraka
Gib Caine
Jungle Bob in this episode (ok apparently his name was Frawley?)
These two Germans and their sugar daddy
Of these ten or so people, it’s striking how little evidence there is of any sort of “protect humans” mentality - that might have been Sid’s motivation, but really the great majority of these guys seem to be motivated primarily by killing. Sid’s mission is to kill certain demons, the Order of Taraka is out to kill their targets, Caine and Frawley are out to kill werewolves, the Germans are out to kill for completely unclear, vaguely Nazi-coded reasons?
So implicitly the worldbuilding that emerges from all this is that when people get involved with the supernatural, they tend to be ones who love killing, and are looking for bigger and badder things to kill. Which is an interesting data point!
And just to add: I think it would have been cool to explore this a bit more in connection to Slayers. Their job description makes them sound pretty similar (it's just a synonym for "killer"), and Faith, at least, talks a lot about the pleasure and joy of slaying (with the implication that Buffy has similar feelings (plus Kendra just likes to hit)). I think it would have been really interesting to show them during a “good period” when the vampire numbers actually drop down low enough that asses to kick are in short supply, and showing the conflict between “yay this is good we made the world safe” and “god I just need something to kill”.
And I sort of wish we’d had more calling back, in later seasons, to the Class Protector award, which offers a different definition of what Buffy’s job is - a very “I love not the sword for its sharpness, the arrow for its swiftness, or the warrior for his glory; I love only what they defend” sort of moment. And I wish we got to see Faith find out about the class protector award…
Faith
Because let’s talk about Faith. Like in the last episode, she has some minor scenes that manage to convey her distinctive outlook. Reading @coraniaid that the writers still weren’t sure what they would eventually do with her, I can believe it: she’s being established as a recognisable character but not driving much in the way of plot.
(You don’t need me to tell you how gay it all is: “boys should break up with you more often”, “why don’t the two of us go?”, the vengefulness at Scott on Buffy’s behalf. I will note that this is possibly the only time we see Faith in a dress until the pink one in “Graduation Day” that the mayor makes her try on? Black suits her better but it’s still unusual… I mean symbolically she’s here temporarily in place of Cordelia, who’s out being mistaken for a Slayer, so I guess it makes sense to not quite be her usual self...)
(In a sense, Faith spends most of this episode not as a character but as a false image, projected onto Cordelia. Which makes sense in relation to Buffy: being a Cordelia-esque girl mistaken for a Faith-esque Slayer sort of captures this disconnect between her two halves. It doesn’t really connect to Faith herself: she doesn’t have a Cordelia side, and indeed she and Cordelia basically haven’t interacted… at all?)
(Wait, do Faith and Cordelia ever interact? Like, we have Cordelia referring to her as “slut-o-rama”, and rolling her eyes at Xander when he flirts with her, but are there any scenes where one of them actually speaks directly to the other?)
But I guess I do want to expand on how Faith fits into the saga of Buffy Summers' deteriorating mental health. The last few episodes have really revolved this division and opposition between her two worlds - the supernatural world, here represented by Angel, and the mundane world, here represented by Scott.
And her problem is that both of them are sources of pain. The supernatural world is non-stop violence and pain and secrets and guilt and solitude - being tormented by Angel, killing Angel, running away from home, and now this shivering flinching avatar of trauma she’s hiding from everyone else. The mundane world is what she thinks she wants, what everyone expects her to want, what she’s trying really hard to want. But it’s not working, she can’t inhabit it, it doesn’t make her happy. And when people notice this, they blame her. Hence Scott, the "solid dependable guy she can rely on" /smash cut to him dumping her.
And this prompts her to make a last-ditch effort to aggressively re-insert herself into the mundane world by campaigning for homecoming queen, only to 1) completely fail, and 2) get assailed by the supernatural world anyway.
This episode re-uses the “it’s a long story”/“apparently not that long” gag from S3E03, which I think is fun but also an effective way to distill the sense of separation between her and her friends. They all experience supernatural shenanigans, but Buffy feels defined by them and so feels like it matters to get the details and the context and the mitigating factors right. It’s the same as how she says in this episode that she’s hiding Angel because the other’s wouldn’t understand, and in the last episode went to talk to Mr. Platt because Giles or Willow would freak out, and in S3E02 she shies away from telling everyone about where she was, and tells Willow that she wouldn’t understand if she tried to explain what she was going through. Understanding the adventures properly means understanding her life; misunderstanding them means misunderstanding her. But her friends are able to boil the whole affair down to “got bit” or “got hunted”, as one episode in their otherwise normal life, and move on.
Faith offers a third way: embracing the supernatural side of Slayer life and enjoying it, not worrying constantly about duty and wrongness. Her one interaction with Buffy this episode begins with her complimenting Buffy on being angry and good at punching (not commiserating or tiptoeing around her romantic frustrations the way that her other friends do in the first scene). She gets some of the very few unforced smiles that Buffy smiles in this episode (possibly the only ones?). She wants to hear the long story. She’s uniquely positioned to make Buffy feel happy, and alive, and good about herself, in between two competing forces of depression.
And sure, she does it in part by embracing an ethos ("violence is fun and good; rules and responsibilities are a distraction") that’s not safe or sustainable by itself. Unless restrained and moderated, it risks leading towards being the kind of weirdo who participates in Slayerfest 98, or else towards being an evil sorcerer’s right-hand murder-girl. But it’s still, I would argue, essential to restoring Buffy’s will to live, and they’d have been kissing by Episode 9 if Angel hadn’t turned up to ruin everything.
