Dead Things, Part 2
This is the long-delayed continuation of my analysis of the intratextual parallels in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Dead Things.” I made some edits and added a section to that first part, so you might want to revisit it before reading the rest. In this half I’ll be discussing: (1) the issues of personhood and self-possession that the parallels to Faith bring up during the alley beating scene, (2) the context being used to frame Buffy turning herself in as a pseudo-suicidal act, (3) how the episode’s takes on identity and romantic love expand on the takes in the earlier seasons, and (4) why this sort of parallelism is interesting and valuable. More discussion of the episode’s themes around moral responsibility, agency, and identity is threaded throughout.
[Warnings: (1) This post assumes knowledge of the episode and show. (2) I discuss pretty much everything that happens in season six, which means there will be references to rape/assault. In addition to all the other unpleasant things that happen that season that one might not want to read about. (3) It’s about 11,000 words long.]
Part Three: Personhood and Possession
Buffy beating Spike in the alley is arguably the climax of the episode. So it’s significant that in the build-up to that moment, the episode establishes multiple parallels between Spike and Faith, and culminates in a parallel between Buffy and Faith. These are probably the most obvious references that the episode makes, the ones the average audience member is most likely to pick up on, and are therefore worth looking at in detail.
10. “Where’d they find her?”
Faith failing to dump the body in Consequences:
NEWS ANCHOR: We go now live to our field reporter, who is standing by at the waterfront with this breaking news about the murder that has shocked the Mayor and residents of Sunnydale.
FIELD REPORTER: Fishermen discovered the body today, the victim of a brutal stabbing.
Spike failing to dump the body in Dead Things:
COP #1: Where’d they find her?
COP #2: The river. She washed up half a mile from the cemetery.
What’s important about the parallels between Spike and Faith is, in my opinion, not just that the characters parallel each other on a meta level, but also the fact that what Spike does and says reminds Buffy of Faith. As we’ll see further on, Buffy’s attitudes towards Spike in this scene can be clearly read as her attitudes towards (and fears about) herself, which is also a role that Faith--as her season-three shadow self--once played. He reminds her of the tactics that Faith used to excuse her behavior and escape her moral responsibility. Like Faith, Spike attempts to cover up the death. Also like Faith, he expresses zero emotional conflict about it. Here’s what Faith said to Buffy when Buffy confronted her at the end of Bad Girls:
FAITH: Okay, this is the last time we're gonna have this conversation, and we're not even having it now, you understand me? There is no body. I took it, weighted it, and dumped it. The body doesn't exist.
BUFFY: (shocked) Getting rid of the evidence doesn't make the problem go away.
FAITH: It does for me.
BUFFY: Faith, you don't get it. You killed a man.
FAITH: No, you don't get it. (smiles) I don't care!
It’s a pretty chilling moment, both for Buffy and the viewer. It’s actually a bit like the moment that Warren kills Katrina. Faith has not yet descended into murder and betrayal, but that scene is when we realize that her bad-girl, devil-may-care attitude might actually go much further than we expected. So of course it would disturb Buffy that Spike plainly and firmly says that hiding the body was “what [he] had to do” and that it “doesn’t matter now.” His cool “Show them what?” is very similar to Faith’s “There is no body.” Both negate the existence of the problem--that a person died--which means, if you look at it a certain way, that they’re negating the dead person entirely. They’re not simply objectifying the person by calling them “a body”, they’re denying that the person existed or mattered at all.
The Dead Things scene is complicated, because on the one hand Buffy is right that these kinds of problems can’t necessarily be papered over, and given that both bodies are easily discovered, one can probably assume the show agrees with her. It’s also true that Spike’s lack of emotion about either Katrina’s death or personhood is almost certainly mean to reflect his inherent moral deficiencies (ie, soullessness). He was thinking of protecting Buffy just as Faith was thinking of protecting herself, rather than about what was “right.”
But it’s also obvious that Buffy too is trying to paper over something. If Spike and Faith were negating the personhood of Katrina and Allan Finch, then we might say that Buffy, by ignoring her own problems, is negating herself. An idea that’s backed up by the very self-abnegating language she uses when she beats Spike up--more on that in a bit. But just as Spike and Faith failed to truly hide the bodies, Buffy’s own problems will soon rise to the surface.
11. “How many have you saved?”
Faith in Consequences:
FAITH: I missed the mark last night and I’m sorry about the guy. I really am! But it happens! Anyway, how many people do you think we’ve saved by now, thousands? And didn’t you stop the world from ending? Because in my book, that puts you and me in the plus column.
Spike in Dead Things:
SPIKE: Why are you doing this to yourself?
BUFFY: A girl is dead because of me.
SPIKE: And how many people are alive because of you? How many have you saved? One dead girl doesn’t tip the scale.
Once again, Faith and Spike are both advocates of a position that is not necessarily wrong, but also doesn’t demonstrate care for the moral value of the individual. Once again, Faith is trying to get herself morally off the hook, whereas Spike wants to help Buffy but lacks the ability to intuit moral distinctions. Yet both of them end up in the same place.
In general, Buffy the Vampire Slayer has never been a big fan of consequentialism. It seems to believe that actions can be absolutely moral or immoral, and that choice and intent matters for assessing that (im)morality. On the question of “chip versus soul,” for example, the show comes down decidedly on the side that Spike not killing people is morally meaningless given that it isn’t his decision. Giles’s moments of ruthless pragmatism are treated as just that: ruthless. When Giles kills Ben in The Gift, he describes it as an action not worthy of a hero. No matter how many people Ben’s death probably saves, Giles killing him is still treated as an inherently immoral act.
So Spike and Faith’s position is “wrong” according to both Buffy and Buffy’s moral philosophies, because it suggests that actions don’t have absolute, inherent morality. If Buffy accepted Spike and Faith’s argument, then she’d be in the moral black even if she had killed Katrina deliberately. Moreover, because their position values relative outcomes, then saving 80 out of 100 people from a burning building would potentially be morally acceptable even if saving all 100 people had been possible. So when I say that their position “ignores the moral value of the individual” I mean that it (a) underplays the relevance of an individual’s particular moral choices, and (b) doesn’t treat people as worth morally caring about for their own sake. In other words, it undervalues personhood on two separate counts.
(Whether or not this is a good or coherent position on the part of the show, is something else entirely. One which I’ll leave actual moral philosophers to argue over. I’m only trying to articulate what I think the show thinks.)
What’s really interesting about this moment though, is the way it subverts the show’s own tendencies towards moral absolutism. As in the previous section, one could argue that Buffy, for all her goodness, is nonetheless undervaluing her own personhood. She is taking issue with Spike and Faith’s avoidant, overly-quantified relativism while failing to consider that punishing herself for something accidental is not a good outcome because she herself is a person. Not only that, but punishing herself would have consequences for all of the people she’s responsible for, which means she’s undervaluing them at the expense of overvaluing Katrina. So even though Spike’s position may be “incorrect”, Buffy is not clearly correct either, the way she was in Consequences. In fact, she is using Spike’s wrongness to justify her own flawed moral logic. She isn’t simply “valuing” Katrina, but also following an impulse to self-destruct. She’s taking refuge in absolutism in order to avoid responsibility and moral decision-making.
12. “That’s my girl”
Faith in Consequences:
FAITH: See, you need me to toe the line because you’re afraid you’ll go over it, aren’t you, B? You can’t handle watching me living my own way, having a blast, because it tempts you! You know it could be you!
Buffy punches her.
FAITH: There’s my girl.
BUFFY: No. I’m not gonna do this.
Spike in Dead Things:
BUFFY: You can’t understand why this is killing me, can you?
SPIKE: Why don’t you explain it?
She punches him. He takes it.
SPIKE: Come on, that’s it, put it on me. Put it all on me. (She kicks him) That’s my girl.
BUFFY: I am not your girl!
Bonus: The Mayor in 3x17 Enemies:
MAYOR WILKINS: Wonderful, wonderful. We don't want a replacement Slayer anytime soon. They can't all turn out like my girl Faith.
Bonus: Angel in 3x17 Enemies:
ANGEL: You still my girl?
BUFFY: Always.
Neither the Buffy and Angel scene nor the Mayor and Faith scene have the same structure as the Consequences and Dead Things scenes, but Enemies and Consequences happen in such close proximity and “my girl” is such a particular phrase, that I’m immediately inclined to try to link them. “My girl” is possessive, of course. It usually has romantic undertones, but doesn’t necessarily have to. It could also, as the Mayor demonstrates, be used by a fond and encouraging parent.
Looking at this on the page, it would be easy to read that exchange between Buffy and Angel as romantic. I suppose it is on some level. But I’ve always found something sad about it, particularly in the context of the Mayor/Faith dynamic. Just before the scene between Buffy and Angel, here’s what the Mayor says to Faith:
WILKINS: Well, you win some, you lose some. From where I'm sitting, it's batting average that counts. So you lost some friends.
FAITH: I wouldn't exactly call them friends.
WILKINS: Well, what are you worried about? Chin up! You don't see me looking disappointed. Heck, no. You know why? Because I know you'll always have me, Faith. I'm the best, the most important friend you'll ever have.
In other words, the Mayor’s promises of “always” are intended to keep Faith away from connections with others. Similarly, most of the Buffy/Angel arc in season three is about how they’re hanging onto something that cannot work, and it’s keeping them from developing as individuals. So the fact that Buffy and Angel echo the Mayor by using both “my girl” and “always,” seems to indicate that we’re meant to find the sentiments troubling as much as we’re meant to potentially find them romantic. Neither Buffy nor Angel are being strictly manipulative the way the Mayor is, but the idea that Buffy would think she “belongs” to Angel, even when she’s trying to get some distance from him, nonetheless comes off as an attitude that is meant to be seen as being dubiously good for her, and that she must ultimately outgrow.
In light of those scenes, I think it’s worth thinking of “my girl” in terms of self-ownership. When Buffy resists Faith, it’s after two episodes of Faith first emphasizing her and Buffy’s shared Slayerness, and later their (supposedly) shared guilt. As she says: “You know it could be you.” In other words, Faith repeatedly attempts to define Buffy’s identity for her, by claiming they’re of a kind. Similarly, Spike has suggested multiple times throughout season six that Buffy, as he says in Dead Things, belongs “in the shadows...with [him].” In Life Serial he tells her that she’s “a creature of the darkness, like [him]” and in Doublemeat Palace he baits her by asking her what kind of demon she is. In other words, he emphasizes Buffy’s (supposedly) dark and demonic nature in order to suggest that they belong together. In both cases, Spike and Faith’s assertions can in turn be read as metaphors for Buffy’s own fears that her nature as a Slayer is to be what Spike and Faith say it is, and that she does not feel in control of her identity.
Spike and Faith even phrase their seduction the same way. In Bad Girls, Faith says multiple variants of “Tell me you don’t get off on this” to Buffy, which Spike echoes in the Dead Things balcony scene, when he says “Tell me you don’t love getting away with this.” Both, in other words, suggest that Buffy not only has dark or selfish impulses like Spike and Faith do, but that she actively derives sexually-coded pleasure from them. Which, as we saw in the dream sequence’s blurry combination of sex and violence, is something that Buffy has anxiety about.
So in both cases, when Buffy resists the “my girl” claim, she is resisting the other person’s pattern of attempting to define her identity. Their pattern of attempting to “own” or be the authority of her identity. Faith and Spike call Buffy “my girl” the moment she behaves violently, because it’s in their interests for Buffy to think of herself as violent--for her to feel more connected to them than to her righteous convictions. (Even if, in Spike’s case, he potentially thinks he’s doing something helpful--“Put it all on me”.) Just as the Mayor was trying to get Faith to feel more connected to him than to her friends, or Buffy and Angel were acting more connected to each other than to themselves. Still--because Spike and Faith are Buffy’s shadow-selves, her denials are not just about her resisting external influences. She’s also, even mostly, resisting the genuine, internal temptation that both characters represent.
But yet again, the moral situation in Dead Things is different and more complicated than it was in Consequences, and yet again, Buffy fails to understand that. In season three, the Mayor uses his leadership and authority to pursue his demonic agenda, and Faith uses her physical abilities to hurt other people. They’re relevant but pretty morally clear-cut foils in a season about Buffy growing into her own power and authority. It’s easy to say that Buffy should not be tempted to behave the same way.
But in season six, the problem is that Buffy is afraid of power. Spike is a temptation to Buffy, but the temptation isn’t about Buffy becoming an evil murderer, or even becoming the kind of person who would hide that she killed someone. Buffy is not particularly tempted to become a “creature of the darkness.” But she is tempted to believe that she is one. She’s tempted to isolate herself, and to hate herself, and to punish herself. She’s tempted to give herself a reason to not participate in the world. As a vampire, Spike is not immoral so much as amoral, someone that needs things like chips and love to tell him what to do because he can’t form his own moral identity. So the fact that Spike is Buffy’s shadow doesn’t mean that she’s tempted to become a monster. It means that she’s tempted to become a void. A “dead thing.”
In the leadup to Buffy attacking Spike, Spike (unlike Faith) doesn’t actually make any comments about who Buffy is, or whether she’s “wrong”. Instead, he tries to tell her she shouldn’t punish herself, and asks her to explain why she’s doing what she’s doing. Only that’s exactly what Buffy cannot tolerate in that moment. She cannot tolerate feeling like her identity is open-ended, or like she needs to defend her moral convictions, or like she might not deserve to be punished. But she also can’t tolerate the reminder that she’s been letting Spike define her, because she doesn’t like what he’s been defining her as. She doesn’t want to be her own girl, but she also can’t let herself be his. And this conflict pushes her to the breaking point.
13. “You’re nothing!”
Faith-in-Buffy beating up Buffy-in-Faith in 4x16 Who Are You?:
FAITH: Shut up! Do you think I’m afraid of you!? You’re nothing! Disgusting! Murderous bitch! You’re nothing! You’re disgusting!
Buffy beating up Spike in Dead Things:
BUFFY: I am not your girl! You don’t…have a soul! There is nothing good or clean in you. You are dead inside! You can’t feel anything real! I could never…be your girl.
In both scenes, Buffy and Faith are each clearly beating up the other person as a proxy for beating themselves. Both, as mentioned, use self-abnegating language. Faith describes herself as “nothing” and Buffy describes Spike (herself) as “dead inside,” with “nothing good or clean” in him (her). The parallel is made even more obvious by the fact that in both scenes it’s Buffy’s face delivering the beating.
What I’ve always liked about Who Are You? is the way it comments on Faith’s season three role as Buffy’s foil and pseudo-doppelganger. In season three, Faith was introduced to throw Buffy’s identity into relief. To make her conscious, even possessive, of her identity in ways she’d never been before. It was all very literary at the time, but the problem is, a real person can’t be a doppelganger or a foil. In real life, seeing yourself as a reflection or extension of someone else just means that you’re afraid or unable to create your own identity. Which is what Who Are You? makes explicit. The episode turns Faith from an abstract foil figure into a fully-fledged character who literally steals Buffy’s identity, and is shown to have a tenuous grasp on what kind of person she wants to be. It strips her of all the external things she once used to define herself--the Mayor, her body, being the anti-Buffy--and leaves her as “nothing”.
Without an external identity, Faith is forced to realize just how weak her internal sense of self is. How she’s failed to cultivate a self, because she doesn’t like herself (the irony of simultaneously hating and not having a self is perfectly illustrated by the way Faith switches between “You’re nothing” and “You’re disgusting”). How she maybe does yearn to have a self, but only knows how to steal one, not create one. The beating scene is the climax of the episode because it marks the moment in which Faith’s passive, figurative self-destruction is transformed into active, literal self-destruction. It is, ironically, one of Faith’s first true expressions of self, which is symbolically represented by the fact that she is returned to her own body in the middle of it.
But if Who Are You? was about Faith realizing how little self she has, then Dead Things is about Buffy realizing how much self she has. In Who Are You? Faith role-plays heroism in an attempt to dismiss it as silly and/or secretly egoistic and corruptible. But ends up disturbed by the taste of purpose and selfhood that it actually gives her. Whereas in Dead Things Buffy role-plays...not evil, but perhaps abjection. Powerlessness. And is disturbed to realize that she has power and selfhood after all. She spends the episode thinking she’s like Faith because she killed someone, when she’s actually acting like Faith by thinking of herself as “bad” and letting other people define her.
I’d argue that the point of the Dead Things scene is that it confronts Buffy with physical, violent evidence of her emotional state. She is forced to see evidence of the fact that she has feelings, and that her feelings affect people, including herself. She is forced to see her desire for self-destruction in full bloody technicolor. It echoes the opening scene, in which Spike and Buffy talk about the sex they just had, and it’s all unusually companionable right up until Spike tells her that he’s “never been with such an animal.”
BUFFY: (disturbed) I'm not an animal.
SPIKE: You wanna see the bite marks?
BUFFY: (looking away) You know, it's late, I-I should get home before Dawn goes to sleep.
In other words, Spike offers to show Buffy evidence of what she’s just been doing, evidence of her violence and desire, and she immediately wants to leave. She doesn’t want to see it. She hasn’t wanted to look at what she’s been doing with Spike at any point during their relationship. Just before they kiss for the first time, Buffy says “this isn’t real.” In Doublemeat Palace Buffy doesn’t look at him as they have sex behind the restaurant. In Gone Buffy only lets herself sleep with him once she’s invisible. At the beginning of Dead Things they’re shown swept “under the rug” together. Spike says it himself: after they have sex, she’ll usually “kick [him] in the head, and run out.”
The joke is, throughout the entire episode, Buffy has been trying to externalize her emotions. She’s been trying to externalize her desire to be punished. She sees Katrina as evidence of her wrongness, and jumps at the opportunity to be locked up for it. Not only that, but throughout her relationship with Spike, she’s been trying to “feel.” The line before they kiss is actually “This isn’t real / but I just wanna feel,” and she describes her encounters with Spike as “the only time [she feels] anything.” Moreover, for all that Spike insists that Buffy belongs “in the dark,” he also repeatedly suggests that she needs to “go on living,” “let [her]self live already,” stop punishing herself, etc. In other words, Buffy’s relationship with Spike is not just about her being self-destructive; it’s about her being caught between the desire to be alive, or to enjoy being alive, and the desire to be dead.
So when Buffy beats Spike bloody, she finally externalizes her emotions. She finally sees the bite marks. She finally has proof that she feels, and is not dead. Only it’s exactly in the way she didn’t want, so once again she runs away.
Part Four: Suicide and Self-Destruction
While Buffy’s attack on Spike is implicitly self-destructive, thanks to its parallel with Faith’s implicitly self-destructive scene, the lead-up to that attack has a few other very important parallels that also suggest that Buffy is in a self-destructive, even suicidal mindset.
14. “Dawnie, I have to”
Buffy in 5x22 The Gift, about to sacrifice herself:
DAWN: Buffy...no.
BUFFY: Dawnie, I have to.
DAWN: No!
Buffy in 6x02 Bargaining, Part 2, on the tower she sacrificed herself on:
DAWN: (in flashback) Buffy...no.
BUFFY: (in present) Dawnie, I have to.
DAWN: Buffy?
Buffy in Dead Things:
BUFFY: There's something I have to do. I have to tell what I did. I have to go to the police.
DAWN: The police?
BUFFY: Dawnie, I have to.
Bonus: Buffy’s final monologue in The Gift:
BUFFY: (voiceover) I love you. I will always love you. But this is the work that I have to do.
Bonus: Buffy to Dawn, earlier in the Dead Things conversation:
BUFFY: I know I haven't been everything I should be...everything Mom was. But I love you. I always will.
Buffy’s final scene with Dawn in The Gift shares a lot of language with her conversation with Dawn in Dead Things. There’s the “Dawnie, I have to” repetition. But Buffy also says things that sound a lot like “I love you. I will always love you” and “But this is the work that I have to do.” The implication of these similarities is twofold. First, it suggests that Buffy is in a mindset of righteous self-sacrifice. Second, it suggests that that sacrifice is pseudo-suicidal in nature. Dawn’s tearful claims that Buffy “wants to go away again” and was “happier where [she was],” make a lot more sense from a character perspective when you understand that the scene is calling back to the last times that Buffy killed or almost killed herself. Of course Dawn would think that the same thing is happening all over again.
Symbolically speaking, Dawn represents the idea of “life” in season six. On the tower in Bargaining, it’s Dawn (life) that calls Buffy back from the edge. As Buffy sinks deeper into her depression, it’s Dawn (life) that she neglects. In The Gift Buffy describes Dawn as “a part of me” and in Grave she says to Giles that when she crawled out of her grave she left “a part of me” behind. Grave then ends with Buffy taking Dawn with her out of a hole in the middle of a graveyard. Because she has finally found that part of herself again: the part that wants to be alive. With all of that in mind, it’s no coincidence that almost every time that Buffy is about to do something literally or metaphorically suicidal, it is framed in terms of Buffy abandoning Dawn. Because suicide is an “abandonment” of life.
But unlike The Gift, Dead Things does not frame Buffy’s self-sacrificial impulse in a positive light. In The Gift, Buffy sacrificing herself is a heroic moment because it’s her beating the pressures that have been telling her to sacrifice her values and kill her sister. In a season that is all about Buffy and the other characters feeling helpless in the face of mortality, Buffy killing herself is her, in a weird way, taking ownership of her mortality. Buffy is not portrayed as abandoning life in a bad way; she is allowing life (Dawn) to go on. Whereas in Dead Things, her “sacrifice” is not enabling anything. And because it does not enable anything, it is simply an act of self-destruction. One that Buffy is using her heroic nature--consciously or unconsciously--to justify.
15. “You’re not really here anyway”
Dawn in 6x02 Bargaining, Part 2:
DAWN: Buffy. You...you...you're really here.
Dawn hugs Buffy.
DAWN: (crying) You're alive, and you're home. You're home.
Dawn in Dead Things:
DAWN: You're never here. You can't even stand to be around me.
BUFFY: That is not true.
DAWN: You don't want to be here with me. You didn't want to come back. I know that. You were happier where you were. (crying) You want to go away again.
BUFFY: Dawn...
DAWN: Then go! You're not really here anyway.
To continue the discussion of Dawn-as-life, there’s another parallel happening during the conversation between Buffy and Dawn. Throughout the first half of the season, there are multiple shots of Buffy being hugged by someone and staring past them with a blank, unengaged expression. The first of those shots happens at the end of Bargaining, Part 2. Dawn hugs Buffy in relief, and tearfully says that Buffy is “really here”, but Buffy’s distant, haunted expression suggests that she may have been resurrected, but is not actually “really there”. If you think of Dawn as “life”, then the fact that Buffy is unable to participate in their emotional moment means that she’s not able to participate in life either. She still feels dead. At the end of After Life, Buffy shares another disconnected hug with Dawn. She is clearly trying to participate during that hug, but it nonetheless rings emotionally false. The scene calls back to an early moment from Bargaining, Part 1, in which the Buffybot dresses femininely, makes Dawn lunch, and hugs her. The implication being that Buffy in After Life is putting on a Buffybot-like act, behaving like a mechanical object, in order to make the people around her feel better. She is acting like something not-alive.
So when Dawn hugs Buffy in Dead Things, and Buffy stares emptily over Dawn’s shoulder, it is part of this pattern. Dawn thinks that she’s comforting her sister, but Buffy has already checked out. She’s chosen to pursue a kind of death, and this leaves her disconnected from Dawn. But this time Dawn picks up on it. In contrast to her dialogue in Bargaining, Part 2, Dawn now says that Buffy “[isn’t] really here anyway.” She’s been so absent from her own life that she may as well be dead again.
But Dead Things is Buffy’s low point, not the end of the story. Over the course of the rest of the season, she becomes gradually more emotionally engaged and committed to Dawn’s well-being. When Buffy and Dawn finally hug again in Grave, Buffy is right there with her sister. Her grip is intense, and her face is full of emotion. Her gaze points downwards instead of distractedly away. In Dead Things Dawn says “you don’t want to be here with me,” but in Grave Buffy says:
Things have really sucked lately, but it's all gonna change. And I wanna be there when it does. I want to see my friends happy again. And I want to see you grow up. The woman you're gonna become. Because she's gonna be beautiful.
In other words, Buffy’s desire to “be there” with Dawn is directly tied to her desire to live in general. The fact that Buffy is now fully present with Dawn means that she has finally worked her way to once more being fully present in life.
16. “Just let me go”
Buffy and Angel in 3x10 Amends
Buffy and Spike in Dead Things
The parallels between the Dead Things alley scene and the conversation between Buffy and Angel on the bluff in Amends are numerous, though they don’t share any exact dialogue. In Dead Things, Spike plays the role of Buffy, the desperate lover trying to use that love to convince the other to rise above their guilt, and Buffy plays the role of Angel, the guilty soul that has been tricked by the villain into feeling their guilt more acutely. Both Buffy and Angel are ambiguously responsible for the crimes that they are supposedly feeling guilty about--Buffy because Katrina’s death was, as far as she knows, an accident, and Angel because he didn’t have a soul. But their guilt over those crimes goes along with guilt about sexual and romantic desire that they do feel responsible for. Whether or not they should, of course. Angel is afraid that his desire for Buffy will cause him to lose his soul and become a monster again. Meanwhile Buffy is afraid that her desire for Spike means that she is somehow like (or complicit in the actions of) a soulless being. Angel speaking about “taking comfort” in Buffy is similar to Buffy saying that being with Spike is the only time she “feels anything.” It’s also potentially relevant that both Buffy and Angel are coping with having been brought back to life. Much of Angel’s guilt in Amends centers around his fear that he was only brought back from hell to be the tool of an evil force. And much of Buffy’s guilt in Dead Things is centered on her fear that she has been brought back “wrong.”
Both Spike and Buffy speak of wishing that they didn’t love their counterparts so much (“I wish that I wished you dead,” “You think I haven’t tried not to?”). Both Buffy and Spike try to forcibly prevent them from falling on their own swords. Both fail. Buffy and Angel only relent in their pursuit of self-destruction when divine snow and chance exoneration intervene. The basic message is the same in both episodes, that true moral responsibility means not giving up even when you want to. But in keeping with the rest of the episode, Dead Things adds new layers of complexity to that previously-established theme. In Amends, Buffy tries to talk Angel down by emphasizing that he has to keep fighting in the face of his guilt, and is pretty clearly acting as the voice of the author. Whereas Spike tries to talk Buffy down by using Faith’s Consequences logic and emphasizing the ways that Buffy isn’t actually guilty. He’s the voice of what both Buffy and the audience are used to thinking of as bad-guy logic. And yet he isn’t necessarily wrong. But Buffy can’t even consider that, because it doesn’t conform to the moral narratives that she’s familiar with--the narratives of Consequences and Amends. Where Amends has a romantic, Christmas-episode aesthetic, Dead Things is almost nauseating in its darkness. There is something fittingly “dead” about it. This complete lack of romance, moodwise, echoes the ambiguity that Dead Things introduces to the show’s formerly clear-cut morality. It is not obvious which choice--Buffy turning herself in, or not turning herself in--is actually the morally responsible, non-self-destructive one. Neither Buffy nor Spike are obviously speaking the author’s beliefs and telling the audience the lesson that they should come away with. Instead, the audience is left as adrift as Buffy is.
Part Five: Love and Identity
17. “I love you.” “No, you don’t.”
Buffy and Spike in Dead Things:
BUFFY: I have to do this. Just let me go.
SPIKE: I can’t. I love you.
BUFFY: No, you don’t.
Buffy and Spike in 7x22 Chosen:
SPIKE: I mean it! I gotta do this.
Buffy laces her fingers with his, and their hands burst into flames.
BUFFY: I love you.
SPIKE: No you don’t. But thanks for saying it.
In both scenes, the text leaves it ambiguous as to who is actually right. In both scenes, who is right is sort of beside the point. In Dead Things, the “I love you” exchange immediately precedes Buffy’s beatdown. When Buffy says “No, you don’t” it’s in the context of her own self-loathing, of her belief that she herself “can’t feel anything real.” She may genuinely believe that Spike doesn’t love her, for some definition of love, but what’s important is the fact that she feels the need to throw it in both of their faces. The point is that in order to treat both him and herself badly, she has to tell herself that neither of them have real feelings, that both of them are “dead things.” She even goes so far as to insist that Spike “try harder” not to love her. She wants to escape moral culpability by believing that neither of them have moral value.
What’s interesting about the Dead Things exchange is the way it suggests that both Buffy and Spike think that romantic love is somehow ennobling. Something human and good. Spike mentions love to excuse and exalt his behavior, to explain why he can’t let Buffy make a choice she considers morally important. Meanwhile Buffy mentions love to imply that neither of them are living up to what love is supposed to be. How neither of them are human nor good. She is not lovable, and he cannot love.
Both of them, in other words, are using the ideal of love to escape responsibility in different ways. Similar to how Willow and Warren used “love” to justify their actions towards Tara and Katrina.
(Note that Tara brings up love again at the very end of the episode. She asks whether Buffy loves Spike, and states with a sort of straightforward sincerity that Spike “does love” Buffy. And this mention of love is part of the immediate leadup to Buffy’s emotional breakdown. The fact that Tara sees them both as capable of love in such an uncomplicated way is arguably the final piece of Buffy being unable to hide behind any external “wrongness.” By attempting to be comforting, Tara accidentally takes away Buffy’s last means of escape.)
Chosen, by contrast, I believe is meant to show that both Buffy and Spike are finally able to take responsibility in the ways they once avoided. It is Spike’s last scene on the show, one of the last scenes of the show, period, and it is therefore natural to read it as a resolution of (parts of) Spike and Buffy’s arcs. Spike’s “No you don’t” makes it clear that his self-sacrifice is not a romantic gesture, or at least not selfishly so, and is therefore free of suspect motives. He doesn’t need to make his behavior look good, doesn’t need to couch it in love, because he’s doing something bigger than himself that he considers important. His echo of Buffy’s “I have to do this” (“I gotta do this”) shows that he now understands the instinct to self-sacrifice that so baffled him when he didn’t have a soul. Buffy, in turn, honors both her own feelings and the sincerity of Spike’s actions. By stating that she loves him, Buffy is in some sense affirming that they are both “live things”. People who can love and be loved. People who can feel. People who can do good.
18. “I didn’t come back wrong?”
Buffy and Spike in 6x03 After Life
Buffy and Tara in Dead Things
I can’t prove that this was on purpose, though I’m fairly sure it was. Regardless, I found it notable that both After Life and Dead Things feature a two-shot with Buffy in her living room, and that in the Dead Things scene Buffy has not only switched places with Spike, she’s now the one in black. Both scenes also feature a similar little pas de deux (pictured), in which the characters look down, contemplating Buffy’s situation, and then look up to meet each other’s eyes.
I like the idea that this is calling back to After Life for a couple different reasons. Firstly, After Life is the episode that introduces the idea that Buffy “came back wrong.” Spike even uses that exact phrase:
SPIKE: Listen. I've figured it out. Maybe you haven't, but I have. Willow knew there was a chance that [Buffy]'d come back wrong.
Throughout After Life, characters fret that something’s wrong with Buffy. Anya thinks that Buffy’s “broken” and Tara wonders if Buffy’s “not right, or-or maybe like, dangerous?” They worry at how distracted and emotionally flat she is. Willow muses that when Angel came back from hell in season three, “Buffy said...he was wild. Like an animal.” It makes sense that Buffy would recoil when Spike calls her an “animal” at the beginning of Dead Things, just on the principle that it’s a word that makes her sound less than human. But that line takes on extra significance when you see it in the context of Willow’s After Life dialogue. “Animal,” “broken”, “dangerous”, “not right”, “wrong”: these are the words that have dogged Buffy since the moment she returned.
But ultimately, the Scoobies are eager to believe that Buffy’s fine. It’s Buffy herself that ends up most preoccupied about whether or not she “came back wrong.” Since she came back, she’s been miserable and disconnected from life. She began her sexual relationship with Spike the night he gleefully announced that his chip no longer registered her as human (“You came back wrong”), and the show implies that she’s been banking on that knowledge to explain her behavior to herself ever since. So by revisiting the immediate aftermath of Buffy’s resurrection, Dead Things is pointedly reframing the narrative of the season thus far. Both for the viewer, and for Buffy herself. It encourages one to go back to that moment in After Life and then replay the whole season with the understanding that everything Buffy did and said was her acting of her own volition, and with her full humanity. It’s a “twist” but not in a cheap, or even particularly shocking way. It’s a twist that’s central to the story of self-responsibility that the season and episode is telling.
Buffy sitting in Spike’s place is also a choice that’s rich with meaning. Season six spends a lot of time creating parallels between Buffy and Spike, and that process begins in After Life. Towards the beginning of After Life, Spike notices that Buffy must have “clawed her way out of a coffin” because he’d “done it [him]self.” In the scene pictured above he tends to her bloody knuckles, and then later in the episode he punches a wall and is shown with bloody knuckles as well.
In general, the season up until Dead Things leans hard into the idea that both Buffy and Spike, as resurrected/reanimated beings, are “dead” or have an understanding of “deadness.” It would take forever to list all of the references to Buffy or Spike being not-alive in Once More, With Feeling alone (“I just want to be / Alive”, “Since I’m only dead to you,” “Whisper in a dead man’s ear”, “So one of us is living,” etc). They have many scenes where they’re alone together, often in dark, chthonic places like crypts and basements, and Buffy tells him things that she doesn’t tell anyone else. In the opening shot of Dead Things, we see a literal casket next to Spike’s unused bed, a bit of scene-setting that tells us we should still see his crypt as a place of death, however domesticated.
That underground imagery has another connotation too. One of the biggest motifs associated with Spike and Buffy is the idea that Spike is “beneath” Buffy. He is frequently shown in a supplicating position, looking up at her while she looks down at him. We see it in Fool For Love (“Where does it lead you?”), The Gift (“I know you’ll never love me”), After Life (“Her hands”), and Once More, With Feeling (“You know / You’ve got a willing slave”). We’ll see it again in season seven, in Touched (“You’re a hell of a woman”) and the significantly-titled Beneath You. Compare the eye-lines of these two-shots from Fool For Love and Touched to After Life:
So it’s meaningful that season six features imagery of Buffy “being brought to Spike’s level”. In After Life she descends her house stairs towards him, a mirror image of the way she ascended them away from him in The Gift. In Once More, With Feeling she falls into an open grave with him, and in Smashed they fall into a basement while consummating their long-standing sexual tension. Many of their assignations take place in the lower-level of Spike’s crypt, including the one at the beginning of Dead Things. So there is a kind of full-circle finality, imagistically speaking, to seeing Buffy in Spike’s place, and later in a position of supplication (see 17).
The simplest reading of the reversal is that Buffy has reached her lowest point. I think it’s the intended reading too. But understanding what Buffy’s “lowest point” means depends on understanding what it means for Spike to be Buffy’s shadow. Because again, it’s not about him being a monster, it’s about him being a “dead thing.” The season would not spend so much time telling us that Buffy feels “dead” otherwise. It’s about Buffy seeing herself as evil and wrong, and using that self-image to avoid her problems and check out of life. It’s about her potentially ending up doing immoral things because of that avoidance. Instead of embracing her agency, Buffy flat-out begs for Tara’s moral authority (“Tell me that I’m wrong”) the way that Spike has relied upon the moral authority of his chip or “what Buffy would want.”
But there’s also a more hopeful reading. When Buffy and Spike meet each other’s eyes in the After Life scene, the show suggests that the two of them are now on the same level, or could be on the same level. Instead of Buffy looking down at Spike and Spike looking up at Buffy, the two of them look equally at each other, and the camera looks equally at both of them. The framing of the shot is intimately close, an early indication both of where their relationship will go, and perhaps also the isolation of it. With that in mind, there is arguably something hopeful in the idea that however low Buffy feels in Dead Things, she is still on a level with Tara, someone who is unambiguously alive. The reversal also means that Buffy is now looking to a figure of life instead of to a figure of death. Lastly, the pulled-out framing of the shot speaks to the way that Buffy and the viewer are now seeing things as they are. Buffy now has full knowledge of the fact that she did not “come back wrong” in any meaningful sense. She has explored “death” in its entirety, and has nowhere left to go but towards life.
19. “Please don’t forgive me”
Faith in Angel 1x18 Five By Five:
ANGEL: I'm not gonna make it easy for you.
Faith throws herself against Angel.
FAITH: I'm evil! I'm bad! I'm evil! Do you hear me? I'm bad! Angel, I'm bad! (sobbing) I'm ba-ad. Do you hear me? I'm bad! I'm bad! I'm bad. Please. Angel, please, just do it. (still sobbing) Angel please, just do it. Just do it. Just kill me. Just kill me.
Angel wraps his arms around her, and they sink to their knees.
Willow in 6x10 Wrecked:
BUFFY: Get up.
WILLOW: I screwed it up, everything, Tara...
BUFFY: Yeah, you know what, you did screw up, okay? You could have killed [Dawn]! You almost did!
WILLOW: (crying) I know! I know! I can't stop, Buffy! I tried and I can't.
BUFFY: You can.
WILLOW: I can't! I can't, I ju...god, I need help. Please! (sobbing) Please help me, please.
Buffy in Dead Things:
TARA: I-It's okay if you [love Spike]. He's done a lot of good, and, and he does love you. A-and Buffy, it's okay if you don't. You're going through a really hard time, and you're...
BUFFY: What? Using him? What's okay about that?
TARA: It's not that simple.
BUFFY: It is! It's wrong. I'm wrong. Tell me that I'm wrong, please…(starts to cry) Please don't forgive me, please... (sobbing) Please don't...
She slides to the floor and puts her head in Tara's lap.
BUFFY: (sobbing) Please don't forgive me...
Despite the superficial similarities between these scenes, I’m most interested in the differences between the nature of each character’s crisis. There’s something telling in the implications of “Please kill me” versus “Please help me” versus “Please don’t forgive me.” What each character is begging for speaks to the problem they don’t want to do the hard work of solving for themselves.
In Faith’s case, the thing she doesn’t want to do is the hard work of atonement. In the Who Are You? beating scene (which aired not long before Five By Five, if you’re not up on the Buffy/Angel chronology) Faith, as discussed, describes herself as “nothing.” It therefore makes perfect sense that she’d beg to be killed, as being killed would in some sense mean permanently becoming “nothing.” If Angel killed Faith, not only would Faith not have to live with the weight of everything she’d done, she wouldn’t have to become anything better either.
In Willow’s case, the thing she’s avoiding is emotional self-management. Willow has long had a problem with looking for the easy way out of emotionally difficult situations. In Lovers Walk, she tries to perform a “delusting spell” so that she and Xander will stop cheating. In Wild At Heart she tries to perform a revenge spell on Oz and Veruca, and in Something Blue she attempts to magic her heartbreak away. Not to mention how she handles her fights with Tara in season six. When she says that she “can’t stop” and “needs help” Willow may sincerely want to get better, but she’s also repeating her pattern of feeling like she can’t reign in her emotions or behaviors herself, and instead needs something or someone else to do it for her.
In Buffy’s case, the thing she’s struggling with is seeing herself as fully human. She cannot square her image of herself with the reality of how she’s been feeling since she came back. If Buffy were to forgive herself for her basic humanity, she would have to acknowledge that she is human in the first place. And therefore fallible and capable of feelings she doesn’t want to have, but also not consigned by her nature to be any particular way, morally speaking, the way a soulless vampire is. She would have to ask herself the question of whether she’d actually done something that needed forgiving. She would have to be her own moral authority. She would have to accept the possibility that she’s capable of feeling and doing better, and doesn’t inherently deserve to suffer.
But in all three cases, what looks like a moral crisis is actually more of a crisis of identity and agency. All three characters have been making decisions based on a certain image of themselves, and using it to not think about their behavior. They’re terrified by the prospect that that image was never based on any kind of objective, unchangeable truth. They are terrified by the prospect that they can define their identities themselves.
20. “Do you trust me?”
Spike to Buffy:
SPIKE: Do you trust me?
BUFFY: Never.
Buffy to Katrina in the dream sequence:
BUFFY: Do you trust me?
Bonus: Willow and Giles in 6x04 Flooded:
GILES: Do you have any idea what you've done? The forces you've harnessed, the lines you've crossed?
WILLOW: I thought you'd be impressed, or-or something.
GILES: Oh, don't worry, you've made a very deep impression. Of everyone here, you were the one I trusted most to respect the forces of nature.
WILLOW: Are you saying you don't trust me?
Bonus: Dawn’s theft revealed in 6x14 Older and Far Away:
BUFFY: Oh.
DAWN: Buffy...
ANYA: How are we supposed to trust you, Dawn? I mean, you...you say you didn't put us here, but look at this stuff! How are we supposed to believe you?
Bonus: Anya practicing her wedding vows in 6x16 Hell’s Bells:
ANYA: 'However, I do entrust you with...' (hears the others chuckling) What? Is something funny?
TARA: No, n-nothing, sweetie, just, just keep still. (smiling at Willow)
ANYA: Okay. Blah, blah, blah, misogynistic. Blah, blah, 'I do however entrust you...um, with my heart. Take care of my heart, won't you please? Take care of it because, it's all that I have. And, if you let me, I'll take care of your heart too.'
Willow and Tara look meaningfully at each other.
Bonus: Buffy and Spike in 6x19 Seeing Red:
SPIKE: Why do you keep lying to yourself?
BUFFY: How many times--(she composes herself). I have feelings for you. I do. But it's not love. I could never trust you enough for it to be love.
SPIKE: Trust is for old marrieds, Buffy. Great love is wild and passionate and dangerous. It burns and consumes.
BUFFY: Until there's nothing left. Love like that doesn't last.
Bonus: Buffy and Angel in 2x01 When She Was Bad:
ANGEL: Why are you riding me?
BUFFY: Because I don't trust you. You're a vampire. Oh I'm sorry, was that an offensive term? Should I say 'undead American'?
ANGEL: You have to trust someone. You can't do this alone.
BUFFY: I trust me.
Bonus: Buffy and Angel in 2x07 Lie To Me:
ANGEL: Do you love me?
BUFFY: What?
ANGEL: Do you?
She takes a moment to consider her answer.
BUFFY: I love you. I don't know if I trust you.
ANGEL: Maybe you shouldn't do either.
Circling back to the very beginning of the episode now. I’ve saved this parallel for last because I think it’s a good summation of why Dead Things is so important to the season.
There are a lot of references to trust throughout season six. In fact there are so many references to it and they all seem so relevant, that it was hard to pick what to include here. The natural connection to make would be to Seeing Red, given that that episode features Spike’s catastrophic failure to live up to Buffy’s trust. And I have obviously included the dialogue from that episode. But Seeing Red is so controversial, and rape is such a thorny topic, that I think it can obscure how much groundwork the season lays around the concept of trust in general. The Spike and Buffy relationship, while crucial, is still just one part of it.
Willow’s trustworthiness, for example, is questioned throughout the season. First by Giles and later by Tara (“Wish I could trust / that it was just this once”) and the rest of the Scoobies. Just as Spike ends up justifying Buffy’s lack of trust, Willow ends up justifying everyone else’s lack of trust. She keeps on abusing magic even after Giles reprimands her, she violates Buffy and Tara’s memories even after she says she won’t use magic, and of course there’s eventually the Dark Willow arc, in which she uses her power to deliberately hurt everyone around her. Even Xander and Dawn aren’t exempt from discussion of trust in season six, despite the fact that they play a relatively minor role in it. In Hell’s Bells Xander betrays the trust Anya wants to put in him by leaving her at the altar. Dawn betrays the trust she wants the adults to put in her by stealing.
And of course Buffy, as the title character around whom all these trust issues revolve, isn’t exempt either. When Giles leaves her in Tabula Rasa, he phrases it as a matter of Buffy needing to trust herself:
GILES: I've taught you all I can about being a slayer, and your mother taught you what you needed to know about life. You...you're not gonna trust that until you're forced to stand alone.
Buffy’s lack of trust towards Spike is thus framed extremely early in the season as a reflection of her lack of trust toward herself. But more on this shortly.
I see the season six preoccupation with trust as an extension of its preoccupation with agency, consent and violation, especially among intimate partners. Because the thing is, if being an adult means being responsible for creating your own life and identity, then that means that every other person can create their own life and identity as well. They can make their own choices. Which also means that they might choose to hurt you, or do something you don’t want. It means that if you want to open yourself to the vulnerability of loving someone, while also accepting that you cannot control or be responsible for their behavior, then the only option you have is to trust them. Love is vulnerable because you have to trust them.
Which also implies that those who haven’t formed their own moral identity are inherently untrustworthy, especially in love. Spike is the most obvious representation of this. Of course Buffy wouldn’t trust Spike, of course everyone expresses distrust towards Spike throughout the season. Not just because he’s personally tried to kill them on multiple occasions, but because he has no independent moral self. In Smashed the story makes a point of showing how Spike behaves when he thinks his chip is no longer active, and is stinging from Buffy’s assertion that he’s an “evil, disgusting thing”: he attempts to bite someone. He’s not of one mind about biting the person, he appears to be talking himself into it, but he still attempts to bite them. Yet in Tabula Rasa we see how Spike behaves when he has no memory of being a vampire: he thinks he’s a hero.
SPIKE: I'm a hero really. I mean, to be cast such an ugly lot in life and then to rise above it. To seek out better, nobler things. It's inspirational, isn't it? And the two of us...natural enemies, thrown together to stand against the forces of darkness. Utter trust.
In other words, Spike’s moral identity is extremely unstable. It’s based on external notions of how he thinks he should behave, whether that’s as someone “dangerous”, “evil”, “a killer” or as “a good guy, on a mission of redemption.” And “unstable” is basically the definition of untrustworthy.
(There are many other cases of Spike being unreliable or fluctuating between different moral responses over the course of season six. See his “First I’ll kill her / then I’ll save her” lines in Once More, With Feeling, his promise to Buffy that “I don’t hurt you” just an episode before Seeing Red, him saying he can be a man in Smashed before going off to bite someone, him saying “trust me” in Dead Things before hiding Katrina’s body. Et cetera.)
While none of the other characters are soulless vampires, their identities are also in a state of flux. I’d argue that one of the points season six tries to make is that people in this stage of life, or maturity, are prone to hurting other people because they don’t know who they are yet. Xander proves he cannot be “entrusted with” Anya’s heart because he still thinks he’s going to end up like his parents. Willow hurts Tara because she’s insecure in her sense of power and usefulness. Xander deals with the vulnerability of love by giving up, and Willow deals with the vulnerability of love by taking away her partner’s agency. They ruin their romantic relationships either because they lack faith in their own identity, or because they’re threatened by the other person’s, or both.
So when Buffy echoes Spike by saying “Do you trust me?” the writing isn’t just suggesting that Buffy sees herself as the dominant partner. It’s suggesting that Buffy sees herself as an untrustworthy figure like Spike. It also implies that by ceding her agency to him, she is making herself as untrustworthy as him. But not “untrustworthy” in a general sense--untrustworthy in the sense that her identity, especially her moral identity, is unstable. Buffy letting Spike cuff her right after she says she would “never” trust him, is a very Spike-like kind of unreliability. Throughout their relationship, Buffy constantly says that she wants nothing more to do with Spike, before proceeding to...have things to do with him. The ambiguous consent that characterizes their sex life (“Don’t” “Stop me”) echoes Buffy’s own ambiguous feelings about who she is and what she wants.
Of course, Buffy eventually works past that. She draws a hard line in As You Were, and sticks to it. In turn, I’d argue that one of the points that Seeing Red tries to make is that Spike is not capable of doing this. This is why the bathroom scene brings up trust so explicitly, and why Spike is not in vamp-face at any point during it. Because his assault is not about him being a bloodthirsty monster. In the context of the season, monstrousness is not what being soulless means, and the purpose of the scene, among other things, is to reach a crisis point that convinces Spike that he needs a soul. Or more metaphorically, to be an apotheosis of the season’s dysfunctions. Instead, the scene is about the fact that he cannot see moral lines, or keep to them, even when it concerns the woman that he claims to love. He goes to Buffy intending to apologize, but ends up trespassing every single one of her boundaries. And it is this precise kind of inconsistency that makes him “untrustworthy”. He’s even inconsistent about the value of trust in the first place, considering that he asks to be trusted in Dead Things, but dismisses trust in Seeing Red. The point is that he may not be a monster, but he “can’t be a man” either. No matter how often he wears the face of one. He cannot grow in the way that Buffy was able to grow. Buffy’s untrustworthiness was a phase, but for Spike it is his nature. In turn, the fact that Spike ultimately chooses to change his nature, to commit to an identity by getting a soul, acts as a metaphor for Buffy’s own commitment to live by the end of the season.
(Whether that scene was the right way to accomplish this is a question that so many other people have tried to answer, that I’m not going to bother to address it. Whether it was wrong or right or right-but-badly-executed, there is nonetheless plenty that can be analyzed about it.)
Spike, as the soulless vampiric id of the show, is an exaggeration of being untrustworthy. But he was not the show’s first vampire exaggeration of untrustworthiness. The connection between love and trust that season six is so obsessed with has its origins in the season two relationship between Buffy and Angel. In season two, the show attempted to puncture the romance of the “mysterious older man” by having Angel lose his soul after he and Buffy sleep together. In both When She Was Bad and Lie To Me, Buffy suggests that Angel’s vampiric nature makes him untrustworthy, but that she loves him in spite of it. This ends disastrously, and no doubt is meant to inform her insistence that she cannot trust Spike enough to love him. Whereas Spike, as I discussed in the very first section, is still stuck in that Romantic season two mindset, in which passion is enough for love. The fact that Buffy has this association between passionate but untrusting relationships and pain, is one way of showing that her relationship with Spike is something that she’s using to hurt herself. But Spike, as a vampire, for whom “love and death and sex and pain” is “all the same damn thing”, cannot fully understand that this is what Buffy is doing. Nor can he fully understand that pain or a lack of trust is a bad thing. His statement that “You always hurt the one you love” echoes previous lines of his like “Love hurts, baby” in The Harsh Light of Day. Spike does not internalize that this association between love and pain is not desirable, until he attempts to combine passion with violence in a way that violates trust so badly that even he can tell it’s unromantic.
The line “Do you trust me?” may or may not have been meant to specifically echo Angel’s “Do you love me?” in Lie To Me, or Tara’s “Do you love him?” at the end of the episode, but evoking trust at all, particularly in the context of love and sex, is again, a way of showing that Buffy is doing something she knows to be painful and ill-advised. She is in a place of deep confusion. It’s yet another complicated update on the show’s early-season morality. In season two, the onus of trust was entirely on Angel’s shoulders and the point was the tragedy of needing to let go of teenage notions of romance, and less poetically--to beware of the dark side of men. But for all that season six makes a bogeyman of rapacious male sexuality, it also has its female protagonists make serious mistakes. Buffy in season six fears she’s become like the male vampires she’s so often called untrustworthy in the context of romance. Thus when she ultimately chooses to become trustworthy, to trust herself, it’s a decision that has weight because she was faced with the alternative.
End thoughts
Buffy is a good example of the kind of improvised narrative that I was discussing in a recent post. I’m aware that the writers of the show were making many things up as they went. Season six in particular I believe was one of the most improvised seasons, and that they were figuring out the specifics of the character arcs as the season went on. I’m aware that it’s quite possible that some of the connections I’ve made here weren’t intentional, or not to the degree of depth that I’ve ascribed to them. But at the same time, the undeniable intratextuality on display, to whatever degree of intentionality, is exactly how I’d expect a work that was improvising with a sense of Johnstone-type reincorporation to look. I have no idea whether the writers had planned out any of the details of season six back when they were writing the high school seasons. But that sort of planning isn’t necessary for a work to have meaning. Instead, Dead Things--and the rest of the season--has an attunement to what came before. It treats its own canon the way that another work might treat a broader cultural canon--as something to play with, and draw from, and which it expects its audience to have common knowledge of.
And because the show is so willing to integrate, and then reintegrate, both the images and themes it’s already established, you’re left with a feeling that the work has a continuity of idea, not just character or plot. Dead Things is able to present a complicated take on moral responsibility because it can build on, and respond to, the takes the show has explored already. Images like Buffy secluding herself on the Bronze balcony become a kind of anaphoric shorthand. This sort of self-referentiality works particularly well in season six, because the season’s themes are so bound up in the transition from childhood and adolescence to adulthood. When season six complicates the simpler morality of the earlier seasons, it echoes the way that growing up leads to seeing the world in a more morally complicated light. When the protagonists make mistakes that parallel the actions of “bad” characters, it echoes the way that growing up means becoming fully morally responsible for oneself. Which means being held accountable in ways one wouldn’t have been when one was younger, and accepting that one can have things in common with villains.
The parallelism also fits with the season’s more meta themes that I discussed in my post on season six as a “post-myth” work. In particular, parallelism enables self-reflexivity. By comparing itself against itself, the show is able to criticize--or at least reframe--its own creative choices. Willow going off the deep end reframes her earlier-season moments of thoughtlessness as concerning foreshadowing instead of charming mistakes. Tabula Rasa and Dead Things reframe the sort of mind control that was played for comedy in episodes like Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered as something not quite so funny or easily forgivable. Spike’s increasingly harmful behavior reframes his charismatic roguishness as something to be more seriously questioned. Buffy’s season-long depression reframes her one-episode depressions in Anne and When She Was Bad as perhaps too-easily-resolved TV psychology. The parallels give these choices a self-conscious depth that they wouldn’t have if the writing simply attempted to make things “dark” in a way that had no connection to what came before.
Buffy is certainly a flawed show, writing-wise. It at times mixes metaphors and can be bizarrely morally and tonally inconsistent. But at its best, like in episodes like Dead Things, the seasons-long layering of imagery and theme result in TV with a truly unusual and masterful density of meaning.