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Thoughts on Rewatching S3E07, “Revelations” (2/3): Secrets are good, there must be a reason why we keep them

So the episode title is about revelations, the flipside of which is, as Willow says, secrets. The show sets up a lot of secrets - most centrally the secret that Angel is still alive, but also fairly obviously the secret that Willow and Xander are having illegitimate kisses, and that Gwendolyn Post is, not to put too fine a point on it, evil.

There’s also a couple of extra, smaller scale ‘secrets’: in the early scene of Faith and Buffy discussing their history with boys, Faith clearly feels hurt that Buffy is, as she sees it, keeping her own romantic history secret, refusing to talk about it, and later on Faith is turned against Buffy et al. partly by Post mentioning their ‘secret meetings’, and it is in fact true and notable that Faith and Post are not brought into all the discussions (to the point that Giles deliberately obfuscates things by calling Angel “a friend of Buffy’s” when talking to Post).

So secrets and secrecy abound. But no doubt you want to know: who’s right and who’s wrong and what should they have done instead? Never fear, weird internet nerd is here, ready to delve into the ethical minutiae of a teenage horror show from 25 years ago, for your entertainment.

The tl;dr, of course, is that everyone makes mistakes for understandable reasons, and overall it manages to be a good episode in part because you can both see where everyone is coming from and see some of their blind spots. But I also think there’s a lot of complexity to unpack so, you know, it’s a dirty job but someone’s gotta do it.

So some of the secrets are pretty morally straightforward: Willow and Xander shouldn’t be kissing, and Gwendolyn Post shouldn’t be evil, and if they’re not going to stop they should at least tell people. But what about the central secret, about Angel?

I think if you watch without really thinking about it, the sense you’d get is: Buffy keeping this secret was the wrong decision, but still done for understandable reasons; the others overreact at first, though again for understandable reasons. In the final scene where Buffy asks if they’re cool and Xander affirms that they’re cool, they’ve all accepted this, as should we the audience.

But this time around I’ve had three things that have made me reconsider this a bit. Two come from posts by @coraniaid:

One, pointing out that the natural conclusion for Buffy’s friends to jump to isn’t that she sent Angel to hell and then recently he inexplicably came back, but that she was lying all along and possibly spent the summer with him.

The other, pointing out that Giles’s stance, that “you owe it to us as a matter of Slayer duty to share all this information” stance, is rather undercut by the fact that he’s not including Faith or Gwendolyn Post in these discussions.

And a third was something that struck me while watching “Beauty and the Beasts”: Buffy might very reasonably expect that if she revealed Angel’s presence, her friends would insist on killing him.

And all of this complicates things, so I’m going to try to work through the different choices made by different characters. Perhaps not exhaustively, hopefully not exhaustingly, but enough to disentangle some of the tangles.

Question 1. So the question we have to start with, I think, is: should Buffy have killed Angel in Episode 4?

The case for saying “no” is fairly easy: he’s got a soul again, he seems to be at least somewhat responsive to her reaching out, it seems like a live possibility that he can recover and become a force for good, and, y’know, a healthy default is “if in doubt, don’t kill someone”. Especially from the point of view that he’s just suffered an enormously traumatic stay in hell for some unknown length of time.

But here’s the case for saying “yes”: at this point, she has no way of knowing how quickly he’ll recover, or if he ever will. It’s a live possibility that he’ll be a dangerous, unpredictable animal forever, and it’s a live possibility that he’ll break free and kill more people.

Moreover, when Buffy first meets him in the woods, there’s blood on his mouth! We never find out if it’s human or animal, if he killed someone or wounded someone or found a dead body (like the boy who everyone ends up assuming was killed by Pete… but who might in fact have been killed by Angel!)

And if Buffy had staked him when she first met him, then most likely Pete Clarner would still be alive: she tries to chain him up, but he breaks free and immediately kills someone. Now, I shed no tears for Pete, he’s an abusive murderer, but he’s also a teenage human, and there’s no guarantee that the next victim would be as deserving.

So it looks to me like the decision Buffy faces in Episode 4 (and which she is, perhaps, psyching herself up to make when she’s talking to Debbie, and inwardly debating when she's talking to Giles about whether anyone who came back from hell would be "a lost cause"), of whether to kill Angel (again!), is basically a toss-up. Do you sacrifice one life, and all the future lives he might help save, or do you gamble on his recovery and risk sacrificing other, innocent, lives for nothing? I don’t think there’s a clearly right answer there, even from a purely objective point of view.

(With hindsight we can see that not killing Angel was the right thing to (however annoying he ends up being, and however much he messes up Buffy’s chances with Faith) but that’s not knowable at the time.)

Of course, Buffy isn’t being purely objective: she presumably very strongly wants to keep Angel alive (though I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t a deeply-buried part that’s angry enough to want to kill him, but we don’t need to get into that…). It’s just that this desire isn’t working against her objective duty, it’s just a tiebreaker.

Question 2 Ok, so having suggested an answer to that first question, the second question is: should Buffy have told her friends about Angel in Episode 4?

And here the very fact that question 1 is objectively a toss-up provides a pretty good reason to say ‘no.’ These guys are not inherently more objective than Buffy is (in this episode, Williams stance is half-determined by her own guilt about an unrelated matter, Xander clearly has all of his own issues, and even Giles makes a point of bringing up his own personal experiences with Angel, which are clearly weighing on his mind). So there’s a live chance that they might decide the toss-up the ‘wrong’ way and force Buffy to kill Angel. Which would be 1) devastating for her, 2) bad for him and for the world, and 3) probably experienced by them both as a sort of betrayal - he lost everything because of things she did in season 2 (either unknowingly, like having sex, or for good reason, like sending him to hell) and now when he crosses dimensional boundaries to get back to her, she fails to protect him.

Of course there are also reasons to say ‘yes’ - most notably:

Her friends and others may be in personal danger, if Angel turns evil or remain feral

As her friends, they have a reasonable expectation of honesty about things important to their friendship

As her comrades in arms, they have a reasonable expectation of honesty about things relevant to the Slayer cause

If you buy the claim of identity-continuity between versions of Angel, maybe he just deserves to die anyway

They might end up making the ‘right’ call, and if they agree with her about what that is then Buffy herself will be a lot happier

But… I think it’s actually perfectly fair that none of these win out against “I have someone whose life is at stake who I need to protect.” So again, I think the objective considerations here are pretty balanced, and personal feelings are just a tie-breaker.

Question 3: Should Buffy have told her friends about Angel in this episode?

If I’m right that a lot depends on whether people would want to kill Angel, which in turn depends on the odds of him recovering or staying feral (/getting worse), then the balance shifts after he’s made visible progress at becoming lucid and controlled. And since the five considerations listed above continue to have weight, I think it’s pretty clear that Buffy should have told everyone about Angel now.

But of course, how soon is now? Angel has been getting better gradually for a few episodes, without any clear moment when it’s clearly the right time to go public with it. And of course the longer it goes on, the more the others are going to feel lied to, and of course also the kissing is not great. I mean, I don’t think they were at serious risk of “getting pelvic” (they have a whole season of yearning ahead and never even really get close), but it’s not great.

Was Buffy going to tell the others at some point? She claims so, but her scenes with Angel are sort of ambiguous: last episode they had the exchange: “I’m getting stronger. Yeah, pretty soon, you won't even need me. That'll be better. Yeah.”

Which is heavy on the angst but light on the specifics. I suspect if not found out, Buffy might have prevaricated a few episodes longer, but I do think she would have told people eventually. It would have been better to do it sooner, and better if it came out differently, but I don’t actually think the decision to hide Angel was clearly wrong from the start.

So in sum, I think I come out of all this holding a membership card for the Buffy Summers Defence Squad. To put it metaphorically: Willow is right that when it comes to Angel, Buffy “can’t see straight”, but she has her non-visual senses, and she can feel her way through pretty well. She has a good feel for what’s really important, even when bursting clouds of angst and hormones and guilt are filling her vision. Like Xander at the end of the episode, I basically trust her.

Question 4 Should Buffy’s friends have reacted the way they did?

So this one is extra complicated both because I think it matters which friends we’re talking about, and it matters which situation they think they’re responding to.

To tackle the which-person thing first, I noted above some different reasons why Buffy should tell them, and I think these yield basically three reasons why they might feel upset that she didn’t: that it puts them in danger, that it betrays their trust as friends, and that it betrays their trust as (to use a slightly archaic term) comrades in arms.

But take Cordelia. Cordelia’s… not really Buffy’s friend? They hang out together in a group but she’s not shy about telling Buffy how much she thinks she’s a freak, how much she doesn’t trust her, etc. She shows zero remorse over leaving her out of the yearbook photos in episode 5. They just don’t really have the sort of relationship where she would reasonably expect honesty and openness. So it makes sense that Cordelia’s complaints during the intervention are all safety-focused: she’s worried that Angel is going to hurt or kill her.

Giles talks in very different terms, about “respect for me [and] the job I perform.” But it’s also pretty clearly a personal thing for Giles (for a start, he doesn’t have Gwendolyn Post, who performs the exact same job, here in the meeting). And like Giles, I think Xander and Willow could reasonably feel personally hurt, as friends, to not be in the loop about something so seemingly important.

It’s not clear if it makes sense for Xander and Willow to also feel “professionally” disrespected, because it’s not clear if “Slayerette” qualifies as a role with responsibilities and expectations. Indeed, I think that’s sort of a long-running undercurrent of tension: Willow and Xander want it to, they want to be recognised parts of the group and not just hangers-on, while Buffy is ambivalent (and has more than once tried to dissuade them from being involved).

Ok but it also matters what situation they think they’re discovering. The actual scenarios, with the going to hell and coming back and recovering from trauma stuff, is quite different from the scenario they might naturally be suspecting, that Angel has been alive and in this dimension all summer, possibly hanging out with Buffy in LA.

On the issue of safety, I think it’s actually not clear which scenario is more dangerous? On the one hand, if he’s been around (and kissing?) all summer and (hopefully) not killing people or trying to end the world, then that maybe suggests things are pretty stable - if he’s popping in and out of hell dimensions and losing his mind, that’s arguably more worrying. On the other hand, if he’s been around all summer then the scope of what he might have done, and how much might have been concealed, is much larger.

But on the issue of trust between friends, or between Slayer, Watcher, and (possibly) Slayerettes, the difference is huge. The actual scenario is one where Buffy has mostly told them all the truth, with omissions - she’s left out details of the Summer, and of the events of “Becoming”, and this really weird thing happened recently that she hasn’t (yet) told them about, but she’s shared the broad brushstrokes accurately. When people have made space or pushed her in the right ways, she’s been more forthcoming (e.g. when Giles got her to admit that Angel’s soul was restored). That’s not ideal, but it fits with what you might realistically expect from a good friend who’s got some specific secrets.

But the alternative scenario, that she took Angel away for a summer, then came back and claimed to have killed him, while actually hiding him (and bringing him back to Sunnydale to hide him?), feels much more like: who are you? The whole story of what’s been happening, of what Buffy’s life is about, of who she’s loyal to and what she’s planning, is suddenly up in the air. It would feel like discovering your best friend isn’t really your friend any more.

(Which is why it’s really hard for us as viewers to even think of that option! It rewrites the entire last 7 episodes of the show we’ve been watching!)

If that’s the scenario they think they’re working with, then honestly Willow’s really under-reacting! Her readiness to forgive Buffy for “keeping a secret” feels out of proportion to the scale of this - potentially everything Buffy’s said to her so far this school year was a lie, or infected by one.

Whereas Xander’s reaction, while unsympathetic and uncharitable, feels at least on the right level of emotion. What’s missing from Xander’s reaction, and arguably from Cordelia’s (taking her as the exemplar of “I don't care about our relationship, I just don’t want to get murdered”), is curiosity. Surely the first thing you’d want to do here is find out as much as you can about what happened.

Did Buffy actually “kill” Angel and in what sense? Why is he still alive then? How long has this been going on? Has he, e.g. killed anyone at this school recently? Are we sure that “getting pelvic” is actually the only way for him to lose his soul again? Are we really really sure? What happened to him in Hell? Did he spend hundreds of years with demons putting hypnotic triggers in his brain? Is he possessed? Will he see me and the red mists descend and through hundreds of years of repression the name “Xander Harris” will float up, subtitled “that guy just bugs me” and the violence will begin again?

And no, “he's better for how long, did you even think about that?” doesn’t really count as curiosity, by my lights. “Did you even think about (the thing that’s been consuming you for almost a year now)?” is not what you say when you’re actually interested in understanding someone's perspective better. Nor is bringing up Jenny from last year to blame Buffy for it.

I dunno, I just think that in this episode, like Dead Man’s Party, Xander comes across not just as jealous of Angel but as resentful and vindictive about Buffy’s sex life generally, and as not particularly interested in letting her defend herself because he fears it’ll blunt the edge of his righteous anger.

(Righteous anger which you’d think would already be blunted by the fact that he rather notably lied to Buffy about Angel in “Becoming”, and is right at this moment hiding his own secret affair, but which instead seems to be intensified by those things.)

(Sorry, I am not on the Xander Harris Defence Squad today.)

(I mean I am maybe on the Xander Harris Intelligibility Squad - this is, in a certain dark sense, his perfect day, the confirmation of all his greivances, it's not surprising that he hangs onto like a dog with a dead rat.)

But equally, I’m not really on the Willow Rosenberg Defence Squad, because, as I said above, if she’s not privy to the information we viewers have, it actually seems like she should take this much more seriously than she does. It’s weird that only a couple of scenes later she’s saying that she feels “zero” negative feelings about this, saying that Buffy just “kept a secret”, and asking salaciously about "a not so secret rendezvous with Angel.”

And objectively, given the actual facts of what’s happened, this seems pretty reasonable, but it doesn’t feel like she’s reacting this way because it’s reasonable. It feels like she’s reacting this way because 1) she feels guilty about her own secret, 2) she’s in love with/very close to Buffy, and 3) she’s a Bangel shipper, and that adds up to wanting to keep seeing Buffy/herself as intrinsically good people who can always endlessly be forgiven. She and Xander, as is often the case, are going in opposite directions here for equally personal reasons.

Final thought on the question of scenarios: with a few days to digest @coraniaid's post about what Buffy’s friends are likely to think, I’m sort of feeling like the writers are pulling a Schrodinger’s lie maneuver. To maximise the emotional stakes of the confrontation, have them accuse her of lying, and talk as though they believe the radical scenario (Angel has been around all summer). To allow for a swift and efficient resolution, don't have them ever explicitly say this, so that people can move on and be cool with each other in light of the real scenario (specific and isolated details were held back).

The cost is… either Buffy’s friends remain wildly misinformed for several more episodes (or forever?) or a lot of important discussion happens offscreen. I can sort of see why they don’t show it on-screen, because explaining everything that’s already happened and then having a lot of people go “oh, that’s actually much less bad than I thought” would be anticlimactic.

But then again, that’s sort of their fault for setting up tension based on a misunderstanding. It can be comic, when it’s resolved, or tragic, if it’s never resolved, but it’s not particularly dramatic. Since the library confrontation does manage to be very dramatic, I suppose I can forgive that.

Question 5

Final question: should Giles have held the meeting the way he did? The meeting ends with Giles saying:

“Buffy knows our concerns, and her actions, however ill-advised, can be understood. Our priority right now is to retrieve the Glove of Myhnegon and try to destroy it.”

He’s clearly not thrilled at how everything went (nobody was doing the I-statements!) but it does make me wonder what would have counted as it going well. Like, here are four possible goals:

An intervention, i.e. an attempt to compel the intervened-on person to change their behaviour in some way. Get Buffy to stop seeing Angel or… maybe kill him?

A briefing/debriefing, i.e. an attempt to compile and share information, to get a clearer sense of why Angel is alive and what’s been going on.

A trial, i.e. an attempt to ascertain and declare guilt, and dole out appropriate punishment.

A heart-to-heart, i.e. an attempt to (re-)establish emotional equilibrium in relationships, share feelings, reconcile, etc.

Willow, at least, seems to see it mostly as a heart-to-heart, while Buffy clearly experiences it as a trial, and it definitely comes across, in her exchange with Xander about excuses and reasons, and his subsequent actions with Faith, like he was hoping it would be an intervention with a dusty ending. But it doesn’t really succeed at any of these: everyone is still seething and mistrustful, no new plans for what to do about Angel, no particular resolution.

(I’ve suggested that there’s a pressing need for a debriefing, but they really don’t get that much information out of Buffy: she insists Angel is better, that their relationship isn’t sexual, and that she was going to tell them but “didn’t know why he came back” - and nobody asks “came back from where?”)

All of which suggests to me that Giles’s main goal here is more crisis management than anything else: have people in one place where they can reveal what they all know, and feel their big feelings, and then hopefully wind it down before anyone says anything they can’t take back. Hence the remarkably anodyne “Buffy knows our concerns [but] her actions [...] are understandable.” Because, as he says, the priority is the glove and the meeting is mostly to try and stop this new complication from messing everything up.

(Which actually provides a fairly sympathetic reason for not including Faith and Post - if you’re expecting your gang of teenagers to get messy and loud with each other, it’s probably kinder to not have two famously blunt outsiders there. You think Gwendolyn Post is going to be using I-statements?)

(Yes I suppose I’m on the Rupert Giles Defence Squad as well today.)

(But! This is still only compatible with all the duty and respect stuff if he is planning to tell them eventually… when they have the glove and have destroyed it? Or when?)

(Oh ho ho the “I was just getting around to eventually telling you” shoe is on the other foot now isn’t it?)

(But also just to add: I think there’s a good case for not having Faith and Post there for the initial meeting, in terms of kindness to all the teenagers involved, but it’s pretty clear that there’s also a personal motivation: this is pretty damn embarrassing for Giles, who was just insisting that he has total trust in Buffy and complete control of the situation when Xander bursts in with the bad news. He probably does plan to come share everything with Post eventually, but… he’s not exactly in a rush.)

Now by that standard, with those goals, does he succeed? Well, no! Partly because Gwendolyn post turns out to be evil, but also because he seems to completely misjudge both Xander (who he expects to, what, walk away from the meeting satisfied?) and Faith (who, let’s be honest, he probably didn’t think about much at all).

He might fairly ask ‘how was I to know that Faith would immediately set out to kill Angel?’, or ‘how was I to know that Xander would tell her anything?’, or ‘how was I to know that she’d get wind of us holding secret meetings that she wasn’t part of specifically because she’s seen as an outsider to the group?”, or “how was I to know that she’d already been primed to resent that sort of secrecy because Buffy wouldn’t trade stories of bad exes with her?”

But I think a fair response to all of these would be “these are exactly the kind of things that you should expect might happen.” His job, which he says Buffy has no respect for, is ultimately to manage hormonal teenagers engaged in traumatic violence, so actually, yes, being aware of their emotional state and pro-actively trying to make sure they trust you and manage what and when they find out things is pretty much his job. And he’s pretty good at it with Buffy! He just doesn’t seem to even try with Faith. Post is better at this than him after two days!

Maybe that’s because Giles just doesn’t vibe with Faith, maybe it’s because he figures he’s already got one Slayer and that's enough, maybe it’s because he thinks the way he’s cultivated a sensitivity to Buffy’s emotional state is actually a failure of boundaries that he needs to try not to repeat with Faith (that is, after all, what Quentin Travers will say to his face in five episodes’ time). But for whatever reason, it blows up and almost leads to the group imploding.

So I count Giles as failing pretty seriously in this episode. And here’s a final note - look, watch, I’m going to tie this altogether into a big thematic point.

Xander, Willow, Cordelia, and Faith all operate in this episode in pretty much the way you’d expect for teenagers: things make them feel a certain way, they react to that feeling. Buffy and Giles are at least trying to do something more advanced: balance their feelings against the needs of saving lives, even when it’s hard and even when it's deeply unclear what will actually save the most lives. But they both fail, and they both fail in similar ways: they hold back information because they’re worried about managing the fallout, with the result that this information comes out at the worst moment and has even more fallout.

Because Buffy and Giles exhibit the same contradictory pattern: their role requires them to keep secret after secret (including, in Giles’s case, secrets from Buffy, as we’ll see in 5 episodes’ time), and they both develop a habit of compulsive secrecy and withdrawal on top of that to deal with stress (see: Giles in “The Dark Age”, or Buffy in basically every episode so far this season). Neither of them, I think, can really register or address how others around them (like Joyce) perceive this as a betrayal, because after all they’re only doing it for the greater good!

And yet they both feel deeply betrayed when someone holds information back from them (see, among other things, their reactions to Jenny’s secret identity last season).

And, just to go back to something I said back in season 1, I think this reflects the show’s conflict as well. Its genre and setting require secrecy, but its ethos condemns it: and so you get these characters, swimming in secrets, keeping one more secret and then Learning the Lesson that honesty is the best policy. It’s… fascinating? And at times frustrating, but overall I think manages it to pull off being rich and interesting rather than collapsing into total incoherence.

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