You Don't Have A Good Choice (Becoming: Part Four)
(This is the fourth of four essays on ‘Becoming’. They are standalone and you do not have to read them to understand this one, but if you want to, you can find them all here.)
This is the episode where we meet Buffy Summers.
We have seen Buffy, the Slayer, fighting evil for two seasons now. We were introduced to her in Welcome to the Hellmouth, as she introduced us to the show. In Killed by Death, we saw her experiencing some vital firsts: her first brush with the supernatural, her first acts of heroism, and her first experience with death. We got a full non-canonical-but-informative prequel story in 1992. But this episode, right here, is where we finally get it. Buffy Summers’ origin story. This is the start of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
You Made Me The Man I Am Today (Becoming: Part Two)
(This is the second of four essays on 'Becoming'. They are standalone and you do not have to read them to understand this one, but if you want you can find them all here)
It’s a shame that Darla's dead. She is notable for her absence in this season, which introduces and then focuses so heavily on the surviving members of her vampire family: Angel, Drusilla, and Spike. One of the great tragedies of the Buffyverse is that we never get to enjoy a modern-day reunion for the Fanged Four, all together in one dysfunctional room.
But we must appreciate what we have, and there’s an awful lot to appreciate here. Here, we learn so much about these three remaining vampires. This is a revelatory episode on first watch, and even moreso on a rewatch, with the context of ten more Buffyverse seasons. We see the events that have brought Drusilla to this point, the events that will trigger Spike’s development, and for Angel we see both. We see how the three of them are linked – to each other, but also all to Buffy, their fates irrevocably tied to her and her influence. We see what has brought them to this point, what sends them in new directions. All the possible people that they could become.
Part 19 of the Insect Reflection, a series of essays covering every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
If season one was about placing the basic foundations of the show, then season two is about expanding its scope, and its complexity. It holds a prism up to the light that season one shines on the characters, splitting it into a thousand rays, a thousand ways to look at the show. This is a show that grows like a wild garden, always becoming more complex and intricate, shoots and vines emerging in unexpected places. This isn’t always necessarily good, but it is always interesting.
Though nearly every episode contributes towards this exponential complexity in some way, there are certain ones that I would call tentpoles. Episodes which expand the scope in some way, that take some significant stride towards transforming this show from a fun teen-drama romp with likeable characters, to a serious and complex piece of art, which is also still a fun teen-drama romp. After Prophecy Girl and School Hard, this is the third of those tentpole episodes. This is a quietly stunning installment, which gives ink to a theme that has been sketched into the background so far, and will go on to be perhaps the defining theme of the series: the theme of choice.
There comes a point in the life cycle of every piece of popular culture, when a major twist stops being a spoiler, and becomes instead common knowledge, presumably known by anyone who has not dwelt beneath rock for their entire life. Darth Vader is Luke’s father. Rosebud was his sled. It was Earth the whole time. Snape kills Dumbledore. I’m not tagging these as spoilers, because you already know them, even if you haven’t seen these films. And the fact that you do know these twists changes the fundamental experience of viewing them. You can never have the same experience that those original audiences did. The emotions that they originally intended to invoke are lost to time. The pop-cultural osmosis that these texts have undergone has twisted the texts themselves into something new.
It is in this context that we must view this seventh episode, Angel. Because this episode is built around a major twist: the shocking revelation that the mysterious Angel, the man who has been following Buffy around dropping cryptic warnings, is in fact…
SPOILERS BENEATH THE CUT
An Episode Within an Episode: An Analysis of ‘The Zeppo’
The Zeppo is one of those episodes that so consistently shows up on fan lists of “underrated” episodes, that I don’t know if it can really be considered “underrated” anymore, but I think it deserves a little extra appreciation. It’s definitely an episode that takes a second viewing to appreciate, thanks to how oddly it is constructed, in a way that isn’t immediately advertised to the viewer. Other episodes with unusual styles such as Once More With Feeling or Hush very much wear their concepts on their sleeve; you can’t watch them and not immediately realise what they are doing. That’s not a knock against those episodes - part of what makes them so great and iconic is that they get right to the point and so can do interesting things with the concept. The Zeppo is just a quieter kind of unique. It uses the limited perspective of both the characters and the audience themselves to show a cracked-mirror version of the world. It’s an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer told from the perspective of somebody looking in on another episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s fun and weird and I want to dig into it a little bit.
We start off with a very typical Buffy scene. In its third season now, the show is pretty aware of and confident in its own tropes, and trusts the audience to be too. We don’t need any build-up explaining exactly what Giles has found out and what spell Willow is performing and what these monsters are doing and exactly how Buffy and Faith know how to kill them. We’ve all seen an episode of Buffy before, and we can fill in the blanks pretty easily. This confidence in the show’s own tropes and what the audience expects of it is key to what makes this episode work. We know exactly how a typical episode of Buffy goes, so we can receive this barely-cliff-notes version of one and understand it perfectly. It’s an episode that can only be done in a show’s third year, when viewers have become fluent in the show’s language.
After the fight and exposition is over, Xander stands up from the garbage, as out of context as we are as viewers. As this is a Xander-centric episode, he becomes the audience identification figure. As the one character not supernaturally gifted or linked in any way (as the episode points out several times), Xander makes sense as the viewer stand-in. Xander comments on how he wants to be more involved in the fights but is firmly rebuffed - and it’s clear he wouldn’t be able to impact them anyway. All he can do is watch the fights and plots happen from a distance. In this sense, Xander is no different to the viewer, watching an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, unable to affect it in any way.
This is where the structure of the episode comes into play. The A plot is a fairly meaningless runaround with zombies, while the B-plot is a finale-worthy epic apocalyptic showdown. We only catch glimpses of it, but it seems to contain all the standard hallmarks of a Buffy apocalypse - an evil cult, opening the hellmouth, tearful Buffy/Angel melodrama. Specifically, it echoes the previous two season finales, with the final showdown apparently featuring both the literal monster from the S1 finale, and some kind of sacrifice that involved Angel (evoking the S2 finale). The very last bit of dialogue we hear during this plot is “Faith, go for the heart!” from Buffy, encouraging her to kill the demon in the library, which you could argue foreshadows the S3 finale, where Buffy will use the Mayor’s love for Faith to kill him in the library. This plot is a facsimile of a Buffy season finale, giving us everything we expect and have seen before, stripped of all context, the very bare bones of a story.
What this achieves is that it alienates the viewer from this story-within-a story, forcing us into an intentionally uncomfortable position, where it feels like we’re watching an episode through a keyhole. It intentionally exacerbates the divide between viewer and show, to highlight our inability to fully perceive or at all impact this world we tune into each week.
Xander is very purposefully chosen as the POV character for this experience. He is feeling very insecure and ineffectual - unable to help with either brains or brawn, and not having a whole lot of impact on the story. He feels alienated from his friends, fearful that they will leave him behind. The structure of this episode highlights this feeling of ineffectualness. Xander feels so alienated from the events and people around him that he, like the audience, becomes separated from them. A character from Buffy the Vampire Slayer becomes an outsider to the story, watching an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We are encouraged to empathise with Xander because we are in the same position. We too have been robbed of our usual intimacy with this group of people, forced to perceive the shadows of an episode. This meta-emotion dovetails with the character’s internal mental state nicely.
I think my favourite instance of this meta-perception being played with is in the scene between Buffy and Angel, where we are dropped without context into a tearful, dramatic argument where apparently Angel’s life is in the balance, filled with declarations of love and poetic exaltations, backed by this sweeping orchestral score - and then Xander pops his head in. The music immediately stops, he exchanges a few awkward lines with them before realising they have bigger things to worry about. As he leaves, Buffy turns back to the melodrama and the sweeping music surges back in. It’s brilliantly funny - it feels like Xander put an episode on pause for a quick interjection, then re-started it where we left off. It’s a joke relying entirely on the audience’s expectations of the kind of epic melodrama we might get from Buffy and Angel, and it works really well. In this moment, Xander completely becomes the viewer, peeking in on these two actors, observing through glass.
The Zeppo is very concerned with meta references, TV, and the act of watching. Obviously the title is a reference to Zeppo Marx, and there is also a running gag likening Xander to Jimmy Olsen. We are encouraged to think of Xander in relation to his narrative function as a fictional character, and so to watch this episode through this meta lens. One key shot just after Faith and Xander sleep together shows the two of them literally reflected in a TV screen. We are literally seeing a distorted reflection of reality in a TV screen, which on one level is essentially all we do whenever we watch any television show, but is also what we are seeing within this episode - a fuzzy reflection of a Buffy episode within a Buffy episode.
There’s another shot later that I like, of one of the zombies pausing during the final chase scene to look through the library window at the demon emerging from the hellmouth. We see him looking through the glass at this apocalypse monster for a couple of seconds before continuing on with his chase, like a channel-hopping viewer taking a brief glimpse of Buffy, momentarily enraptured, before switching back to what they were watching before.
One thing that stood out to me on this rewatch was how the villains are described. We purposefully get very little on the group, but what we do get is telling.
“’Sisterhood of Jhe. Race of female demons, fierce warriors...' Eww. '...celebrate victory in battle by eating their foes.’”
A race of all-female warriors sounds very much like Slayers. They apparently eat after battles too, which according to Faith is also a feature of Slayers. The villain in this story is kind of a representation of the central concept of the show, which makes sense since it deals with Xander navigating around a typical episode of the show. You could also read it as representative of Xander’s pathologies when it comes to women and specifically women who are stronger than him.
What I like about this episode is that it doesn’t conclude by giving Xander a big important role in stopping the apocalypse, proving his worth to the group. That’s what a lesser show might have done. I like that here, Xander never gets involved with the epic finale-esque plot. He carries on existing in the spaces around it, becoming instead the hero of the monster-of-the-week runaround episode he has found himself in. Xander cannot be the hero of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, because he’s not Buffy. But he is still a human being, and all of us as human beings are the protagonists and heroes of our own stories. He can be the hero of his own life.
S3 is largely about identity and forging one’s own path in life - obviously Buffy starts by having given up her name, then has to deal with facing off against her dark equivalent and making major decisions about her future. This season’s focus-episodes for the other characters reflect that: Giles is stripped of his role in Helpless, Willow rails against hers in Doppelgangland. This episode is all about Xander coming to terms with his narrative role within Buffy - as the non-powered comedic relief and occasional pep-talker. He could become frustrated with that, throw up his hands and let himself be at the mercy of his narrative function. But this episode allows him to find his own space, his own story. He accepts that he can’t colonise Buffy’s story, but he is still in control of his own decisions, and he can still have his own story. He can create a little one-off episode of Xander the Zombie Fighter that can co-exist peacefully with the episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer happening at the same time. It’s a smaller, quieter story without the same world-shaking melodrama - but that’s OK. As Xander says himself, he likes the quiet.
As viewers, we can never shape the course of the media we watch. That’s part of the appeal - we don’t always know what we want or need - a problem Xander faces himself when he clutches at things like “being cool” or “a car” for things that might make him happy - but a good show gives us what we didn’t realise we needed. But it remains an eternal frustration, that we can connect on a deep emotional level with these characters, but can never help them or solve their problems. A good set of characters can feel like family, but a character can never love you back. When Xander faces up against this same uselessness as he observes an episode of Buffy from afar, it is the same uselessness the viewer feels. When he accepts this and inhabits his own story, it reminds us that we can do the same thing. Television can be a great comfort, but it is not our lives. Because we can affect our own lives. We aren’t in control of them, but we can guide and impact them, and we can each be the hero of our own individual existences.
I haven't really seen anyone else talk about this parallel, so I'm gonna try. Here we have the two sidekicks of the show both declare what their narrative role is not. Willow claims she is not a "bad guy", but by the end of the season she will emerge as the indisputable Big Bad and try to destroy the world. Xander states, in typical self-critical fashion, that he is not the Hero, but he will be the one who stands against the villain Willow and single-handedly save the world.
That's some pretty cool foreshadowing that I hadn't appreciated before. But I also wonder if it's an intentional attempt from the writers to comment on choice and identity. I wouldn't be surprised if it it was, because these writers fucking love to talk about choice and identity. One of the central ideas of the show is that you always do have a choice in how you react the world around you. You might not have a good choice, but you have a choice. And one of the key ways that you can we interact with the world is by defining our own identity. Others might try to impose roles onto us, but we can reject that and declare our own identity. Every queer and trans fan will be intimately familiar with this concept, and the show uses its own queer metaphor) (being a slayer) to comment on self-identification In Anne, Buffy rejects an attempt to eradicate her identity by declaring her slayer-ness (”Who are you?” / “I’m Buffy. The vampire slayer. And you are?”). In Restless, she does the opposite, rejecting the First Slayer’s attempt to reduce her to solely to a slayer and asserting her human side. (”I walk. I talk. I shop. I sneeze.”)
*(It’s not just a queer thing though - being a slayer is also used as a metaphor for growing up, and part of growing up is deciding who you are and declaring that. Most of these thoughts aren’t really relevant to the queer experience, it was just something I wanted to note)
What is interesting is that in these moments, Buffy declaring her chosen identity is a powerful moment of triumph and catharsis. She says who she is, punches the enemy in the face, and victory music plays. But I think what the show is trying to say now is that that is not enough. As Michael Scott showed us all, just because you declare something, that doesn't make anything happen. Willow justifies her actions in bringing Buffy back on the basis of self-image - she sees herself as Not A Bad Guy, ergo what she did was Not A Bad Thing (implying of course that if a Bad Guy did the same then it would be a Bad Thing). But Willow's actions continue to get more and more morally dubious, revealing the truth - Willow's claim that she is Good is meaningless against the material consequences of her actions. Her perception of herself allows her to take actions that prove that perception false.
One lens you could use to view this, which is far more appropriate than a queer reading at this point, is through the idea of privilege, and how people will deny their own privilege by claiming their identity as a Good Person. So many white people deny the existence of white privilege by saying "well, I'm not A Racist". They think that they can brush away any benefit they receive from white supremacy, any complicity in unconsciously upholding racist ideas and racist institutions, by simply not identifying as A Racist.
This season is filled with others declaring their own narrative role, but failing to actually live up to it. The Trio call themselves Buffy's nemeses(eses), but that insistence doesn't make them anything other than sad little boys playing dress-up. It is especially notable in Dead Things, where Jonathan and Andrew are shocked when told that their mind-control of Katrina constitutes rape, because they don’t perceive themselves as rapists. Spike sees himself as a romantic lead, "deserving" of Buffy's love, but his actions in Seeing Red prove that untrue. He doesn’t understand why Buffy can’t just love him, when he’s obviously a suave Byronic hero. Buffy has to spell it out (”Ask me again why I could never love you”). Anya's arc has shades of this theme, though it won't be fully explored until Selfless next season.
Xander I think is the more positive flip-side of this. Because he doesn’t think of himself as a hero, he has the humility to simply turn up and be there for Willow “just to hang”. He doesn’t try and save the day all guns blazing - if he had, Willow would’ve blasted him to pieces. He’s not the archetypical Hero, he’s the sidekick - the Zeppo. His self-identification as just a guy who turns up and helps out is what allows him to be the exact hero that this story needs - a guy who turns up, just to be there if Willow needs him.
Buffy herself constantly struggles to fulfil the roles she tries to all season - whether that be Buffy the vampire slayer, Buffy the retail worker, Buffy the mother figure. So she constructs an identity that justifies her own struggles - Buffy the Came Back Wrong. If she says she came back wrong, then that justifies all her actions (not that her actions need justifying necessarily, but they do in Buffy's mind), and she can claim helplessness. But that is denied her. She is not allowed to surrender to the chaos of the universe and so absolve herself of agency. Everything she has done was done by Buffy Summers, human being in control of her own choices, and she has to confront and reckon with that fact. It is only once she accepts and owns the things that she has done and that have been done to her that she can move forward as an authentic person. Her metaphorical heart (Xander) and spirit (Willow) have demonstrated that simply saying who you are isn’t enough - you have to be who you are.
Oh man, this ending. This final line. This final shot. It’s just perfect. This show, which asks so much about choice and free will and identity and how to live in a fundamentally unjust and uncaring universe. It answers that question here. The only way to live is to decide for yourself, to make a choice. Sometimes all you have are bad choices, but you always have a choice, and you are defined by the ones you make. Buffy is clear on that all the way through. And Buffy is finally free, in an episode called Chosen, to finally make a true active choice, and decide what she wants to do next. Free to define herself and her future on her own terms. She is still cookie dough, but now she’s out of the mould. The future will shape her, and she will shape the future. No wonder she smiles.
