Thoughts on Rewatching S3E06, “Band Candy” (1/3): You want to slay stuff and I’m not allowed to do anything about it
Ok I like Band Candy; I don’t think it’s one of my favourite episodes but it does a bunch of fun stuff. I’m going to do a post of miscellaneous thoughts and reactions, and a post about our four (four!) villains in this episode, but first I want to talk about Joyce and Giles.
Obviously getting to see their sexy younger versions is very fun. I think for the timeline to add up we have to assume this is pre-actual-dark-magic, like “Ripper” started out as an aspirational teenage act that only later becomes real, (or: maybe Ethan’s candy just makes people revert to whatever age they felt most ‘chaotic’ at?). Young Joyce being a bit like Buffy is nice (especially the parallels between her and Giles here and Buffy and Faith in “Bad Girls”). The handcuffs might just be from the police officer but after watching season 6 I think we can also surmise that kinkiness is hereditary.
But I actually want to talk about the versions of Joyce and Giles that we see before and after the Band Candy’s effects - and who, I think we have to assume, are broadly representative of how they’re operating, and how they relate to Buffy and to each other, for most of the rest of the season.
There’s this exchange right after confronting Buffy together where the two of them sit down on a couch, and Joyce says oh I just want to protect her but it’s so hard, and Giles nods along sympathetically and says yeah, as though they’re on the same side here. It’s very “here’s Buffy’s mom and dad” coded.
And yet. A moment’s thought makes this exchange distinctly weird. One way to put it is that they both have good cause to give the other a hard time here.
Like, Joyce should give Giles a hard time because he’s not actually on her side, trying to protect Buffy. He’s the thing she needs protecting from! I mean, obviously he does care about her and want her to be safe, but it’s secondary: he wants to keep her as safe as possible while also shoving her directly into the path of every monster that comes through. The single line “I blame you” ended up being about the sum total of Joyce’s anger at the guy who, more than anyone else, is responsible for putting Buffy into the firing line of everything that endangers her.
Yet at the same time, Giles might reasonably point out that Joyce is going about “protecting” Buffy in a completely wrong-headed (though understandable) way. She doesn’t want her driving - and when explaining why she brings up the summer in LA. She doesn’t want her going to the Bronze without them knowing where she is - and again, when arguing about why, she brings up the summer in LA. It seems clear that the lesson she’s internalised is that Buffy did something irresponsible because she had too much freedom, so to protect her Joyce needs to limit and monitor and restrict her more. Limited modes of transportation, more oversight, etc. “I want you here.”
Which is just obviously not actually what’s going on: Buffy ran away to LA because of being under unbearable pressure, not because she’s a flighty fun-loving kid who can’t “be trusted”. More rules and restrictions will do the opposite of help. And Giles, to his credit, seems like the only member of the cast who really gets this - unlike both Joyce and her friends, he never gives her a hard time about running away, he seems to recognise the extent to which she is burdened and obligated out of all proportion to her peers, he even devises clever schemes to get her to open up about what happened with Angel.
So the fact that they’re here slumping down together is a bit odd. I think probably the best reading is that they’re both, on some level, aware that they don’t really have a good handle on things, that their way of relating to Buffy isn’t really what it should be, and moreover that they’re not really on the same side. But they don’t have a better option, and they’re don’t want to be pushing all alone. So they overlook their differences and humour each other’s unworkable approaches for the sake of having someone they can think of as an ally.
(And also, maybe, because they’re horny for each other, and/or lonely - Joyce next season says she hasn’t made many friends, Giles is probably not over Jenny yet…)
Ok but I want to say a bit more about Joyce, because Giles here is not that different from how he’s been for two prior seasons, and the conflict between his role as Watcher and his feelings towards Buffy is pretty clear and straightforward (and will come to a head in six episodes’ time). But this is a new stage in Joyce’s reckoning with all of this.
As I noted above, I think Joyce seems to have taken somewhat the wrong lesson from the summer. And I think we get more insight from something she says while Band Candy’d:
“Screw you! I want candy! You want to slay stuff and I’m not allowed to do anything about it. Well, this is what I wanna do, so get off my back!”
This is pretty funny, but it also expresses the same misreading of Buffy’s situation that I’ve been suggesting: that the basic problem is Buffy acting on her desires, being too free, doing what she wants.
(Of course the Band Candy has altered her, but mostly to remove inhibitions: I think the rest of the time she still feels this way, but doesn’t say it.)
This amounts to saying that Joyce has only partially shifted from her viewpoint last year. Back then she thought that Buffy was involved in some unknown sort of persistent misbehaviour, for unknown reasons, which kept interfering with her schooling and getting her in trouble, and which Joyce was trying her best to get Buffy to quit, but which she kept choosing not to quit for reasons that might turn out to be sympathetic (because she’s not a bad kid) but are still ultimately bad reasons.
Now Joyce has found out what sort of trouble it is: fighting monsters. And she’s accepted that this is a fact of life that she can’t change: she’s no longer trying to Buffy her to quit, she’s determined to be supportive and “cool about it”. But she still sees it as fundamentally something coming from Buffy rather than something imposed onto her. It’s like a sort of eccentric extra-curricular activity that Buffy insists on choosing despite its dangers.
(And just to link this to some of what I’ve been saying about Xander, Willow, et al., I think on some level they also see slaying this way, as something fun and exciting and sexy. They do in fact keep choosing it despite its dangers, and there’s definitely something admirable in that but it does contribute to the disconnect between them and Buffy that we see in episodes like “Dead Man’s Party” and “Faith, Hope, and Trick”.)
(I don’t know how far the queer metaphor can really be pushed but I think this does map pretty well onto a certain sort of still-latently-homophobic parent: they’ve accepted that their kid being queer isn’t a tragedy or a sin or a terrible sick perversion they need to fight to save them from. But on some level they still feel like: why did my kid have to be like this, why did they have to pick the life that’s //bad and scary// complicated and dangerous?)
I mean, Joyce doesn’t seem like someone who’s internalised that if Buffy had listened to her and done what she wanted in their fight in Becoming, then Joyce and everyone else in town (and maybe the world) would be dead. I suspect she might intellectually accept that sort of claim - that Buffy going off to do her Slayer-activities is necessary to save lives, including Joyce’s life and those of her friends - but she might not even do that. She might nod and sort of humour it while thinking it must be exaggerated somehow.
More broadly: she doesn’t really seem to accept that Buffy handles higher-stakes responsibilities than she does, is under greater pressure than she is, has more serious things to worry about than she does. That Buffy could make a reasonable case for being the more adult one of them, in some respects.
Which, you know, isn’t completely unreasonable - it’s a lot to take in, and it’s sort of just the fantasy premise of the show that this is true. It’s reasonable to default to thinking that a teenager is probably being immature and exaggerating the significance of their struggles and is liable to mess things up if given free rein. It’s just that in the actual events of the show, that’s not the case. The reason Buffy is sneaking around and hiding it is because she’s tending to an otherwise helpless person’s psychological and physical wounds. As soon as she registers that something has gone wrong in the town, she immediately takes responsibility for identifying and fixing the problem.
Anyway, this is all to say: I like Joyce and I think she’s expressing a flawed outlook here in a very relatable and compelling way. Specifically, she’s unwilling to give up on the basic framework she’s got entrenched in, unwilling to fully adjust to how weird and bizarre Slayerhood makes things between her and Buffy. Because if she did, she’d have to accept that she 1) can’t really protect Buffy from violence or death, 2) can’t really keep herself safe either because these damn vampires are everywhere.
But the result is that the burdens of Slayerhood are still, as often as not, something that Joyce holds against Buffy rather than something she helps her manage. Which means that if last year Buffy had the ambient feeling that she was always always disappointing someone and had no way to satisfy the people in her life no matter how hard she tried, she might still be feeling that this year. Not great.
A final observation: to a certain extent Joyce has to be this way for the show’s premise. The mundane world has to be uncomprehending and obstructive so that we can televise the struggle of both living in it and defending it. Joyce is, after all, one of the few remaining characters who hasn’t gotten enmeshed in the supernatural one way or another. And so you might read this as simply an artefact of the show’s genre set-up, with little symbolic resonance in and of itself.
(After all, if Buffy’s monsters are symbols of everyday teenage problems, then Joyce not taking them as seriously as Buffy does is, like, out-of-universe-appropriate: it’s a mistake if taken literally, but it’s an appropriate attitude to the things they symbolise.)
But you could also read it as symbolic in itself, if we think of Buffy’s monster problems not just as symbolising “teenage problems” like SATS and homecoming dances, but as symbolising real life-crippling problems that sometimes befall teenagers, like drug overdoses or sexual violence or poverty or domestic abuse. Because teenagers do sometimes find themselves dealing with those things in contexts where the adults around them turn a blind eye and powerful institutions mostly function to protect themselves and nobody will cut you a break even on things that really are matters of life and death. And sometimes that’s because adults who could help are too attached to their mental models of the world to see how dangerous reality can be, and end up perceiving the teenagers (or others) who do respond to those problems as being themselves the problem, as histrionic or trouble-makers or just as naive kids who need to grow up and reconcile themselves to how the world works.
To be clear, I don’t think “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” is primarily written with that dynamic in mind. It’s much more conscious of conjoining supernatural horror with relatively minor problems (like SATs and Homecoming dances), and when it tries to tackle things like domestic violence it often trips over its own feet (as in “Beauty and the Beasts”). I’m just saying that this other sort of symbolic resonance is available, and can add to the texture of it.
