Seven Seasons of Buffy: Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors Discuss Their Favorite Television Show (Smart Pop series)

by Gilene Yeffeth

  With the creation of a cadre of slayers, and therefore enlarging the nature of slayer predation, the Buffy cosmology has shifted its emphasis but not its nature. The complex dance of non-carnivorous predator and carnivorous prey continued to the very end of Joss Whedon’s compelling vision.

  A professional writer for more than thirty years, Yarbro has sold over seventy books and more than sixty works of short fiction. She lives in her hometown—Berkeley, California—with two autocratic cats. When not busy writing, she rides her Norwegian Fjord horse Pikku or attends the symphony or opera.

  Laura Resnick

  THE GOOD,

  THE BAD, AND

  THE AMBIVALENT

  When I first began planning this anthology, I received an e-mail from Laura Resnick, which said, “If you don’t let me play, I will be forced to kill you . . . I hope you’ll be interested in asking me to participate. For the sake of your life.” After careful but prudently brief consideration, I invited Laura to contribute. I think you’ll be glad I did . . .

  I WANTED TO KILL YOU TONIGHT,” Angel says to Buffy in “Angel” (1-7), as he’s explaining not only his life story to her, but also the truth about his nature.

  As Angel’s dialogue indicates in that same scene, the Buffy ethos equates a soul with humanity, with a conscience, with the ability to experience remorse and guilt. Prior to regaining his soul via the infamous gypsy curse, Angel was (as Giles describes him when first researching Angel’s past) “a vicious, violent killer.” Two seasons later, when Angel tries to twelve-step the rogue Slayer Faith while she’s chained to his wall in “Enemies” (3-17), he recalls the pre-soul clarity and exhilaration of killing without remorse, which he remembers as an addictive pleasure. And when Angel loses his soul in season two’s “Innocence” (2-14) and spends the rest of the year tormenting Buffy, killing innocent people, and wreaking havoc in Sunnydale, we see for ourselves just how evil Angel is without a soul.

  But what’s interesting about Angel is not how evil he is when he’s bad . . . but rather, how evil he is when he’s “good.”

  “I wanted to kill you tonight,” says the good version of Angel in that season-one episode, the version of Angel whom Buffy invites into her home, trusts with her life, and grows to love. This is the kind of stark, unmitigated impulse that can (and often does) seize Angel. Many desires and instincts just like this one live inside his skin, and he struggles nightly with them.

  When “good” Angel stops his sire, Darla, from killing Buffy’s mother in “Angel,” his heroic gesture starts crumbling under the onslaught of his blood hunger when Darla shoves Joyce’s warm, wounded body into his arms and urges him to drink; his face transforms into the familiar monster-mask of Buffy vampires, he licks his lips, and his body is as taut as that of a long-denied lover on the verge of consummation. In season three’s “Amends” (3-10), when a tormented, hallucinating Angel comes to Buffy’s bedroom to warn her that he has become a danger to her, he stalks her as they talk, his gaze fixed hungrily on her jugular vein. Angel may have stopped feeding on humans years ago, but it’s not as if he doesn’t still want to; and it’s not as if we can ever be sure he’ll never do it again.

  Nor is Angel’s struggle with his vampire nature purely gustatory. In numerous instances, Angel’s inner demon gains ascendancy in moments of high emotion. When his first-ever embrace with Buffy gets passionate in “Angel,” his self-control slips—immediately revealing his demon face. When Angel is near death and refusing Buffy’s self-sacrificing cure for him in season three’s “Graduation Day” (3-21, 3-22), Buffy deliberately provokes him with physical violence, intentionally inciting visceral anger so that Angel’s vampire nature will take control and override his human judgment. When Angel revisits Sunnydale in “The Yoko Factor” (4-20), Riley Finn finds his manner so dark, menacing, and “king of pain” that he mistakenly assumes Angel has gone evil again, and he’s stunned when Buffy explains that no, this is how Angel behaves with a soul.

  Whatever sexual, moral, or spiritual metaphors may be inferred from Angel’s storyline in Buffy, the key point here is that his characterization is built on the inherent struggle between his evil demon nature and the soul which gives him a “good” human nature; and this perpetual internal conflict is precisely what makes him such a compelling character.

  Angel’s inner darkness may be supernatural and demonic, but it’s a rare person—and therefore a rare Buffy fan—who has never once wanted to seize something he has no right to take; never once wanted to give free rein to instinct and desire with no thought for social mores; never once wanted to act out of anger without consideration for the consequences; and never once wanted to break a strict and unsatisfying diet (even in context, cold pig’s blood sounds pretty unappetizing). When someone really pisses me off, I don’t break out in a monster face and roar like the MGM lion; but sometimes, I’d really like to. In fact, some surveys suggest that more than half of all people in our culture have occasionally fantasized about killing someone. Though we may feel repelled by or wary of the demonic urges living so close to his surface, Angel’s struggles are nonetheless our struggles—taken to dramatically heightened extremes by the supernatural qualities of the Buffyverse.

  Of course, this moral ambivalence, this duality of nature, is not unique to Angel; in one way or another, it’s at the heart of all of Buffy’s most compelling characterizations.

  It’s a well-known craft premise among writers (and probably a well-recognized one among readers and viewers) that a flawed character is usually more interesting than a perfect one. Stories in the fantasy and horror genres are usually about the struggle between good and evil, in one form or another; and in Buffy, good and evil are personalized. Not just in the sense that Buffy regularly comes face to face with evil, learns its name, and then gets to beat it up and kill it; but also in the sense that most major Buffy characters manifest both qualities—good and evil, bright and dark, cruelty and compassion. In doing so, they continue to surprise us, as real people do throughout our lives; and they thereby accurately reflect the confusing ambiguity of life in our own world, thus making the supernatural Buffyverse compelling and seemingly real because of its visceral truths.

  Surely no one, during season one of the show, could look at the shy, obsequious, sweet-natured Willow and predict that she’d one day, due to her own character flaws (as opposed to demonic possession, for example), try to destroy the world. Now, frankly, the season-six twist of Willow becoming “addicted” to magic was just weak writing. Prior to the sudden appearance of this premise in “Smashed” (6-9) and “Wrecked” (6-10), there was no precedent for it in her characterization or in the portrayal of magic, and it was a theme pursued at the expense of the meaningful conflict which had already been well established for Willow—which was the abuse of power: Willow habitually and willfully misused magic for her personal convenience the way some people in our reality misuse wealth or political power, for example.

  Starting with season three’s “Lover’s Walk” (3-8), we see a tendency in Willow to use magic as a shortcut for the ordinary troubles of life; in this particular episode, she tries to cast a spell which will eliminate her mutual attraction with Xander and thereby solve this volatile personal problem. While the incident is fairly minor, it’s Willow’s first misstep on a long, slippery slope over the next few seasons. She again tries to use magic to solve the emotional problems of her personal life in “Something Blue” (4-9). Although that incident nearly gets her friends killed and wins her accolades from the capo of the vengeance demons, Willow nonetheless reverts to such behavior again. In “Tabula Rasa” (6-8), she once again nearly gets all her friends killed by abusing her magical powers in an attempt to make her own emotional life easier (this time with an intrusive spell intended to affect those closest to her). So down that slippery slope this character goes, until this kind of misuse of her power eventually combines with a moment of such terrible emotional rage, upon Tara’s death, that Willow becomes the big bad villain
whom the Slayer must confront and defeat in the season-six finale.

  Sitting through season one, we might have guessed that, say, Cordelia could potentially become a murderous world-destroying bitch wielding enormous power to the detriment of mankind. But who knew that such potential for evil even existed inside of the soft-natured Willow?

  It is through this slowly developing good-and-evil struggle within herself that Willow eventually becomes a fascinating character in her own right. Surely Willow’s most interesting year is season seven, as she struggles with the evil she has encountered within herself and which, like Angel, she must now learn to understand, incorporate, and utilize with good judgment. Now Willow’s magic turns inadvertently against herself, revealing her insecurities as she becomes “invisible” to her loved ones in “Same Time, Same Place” (7-3). Her power also exposes her remorse in “The Killer In Me” (7-13), when she takes on the appearance of the man she murdered, an event which also forces her to recognize how guilty she feels about starting a new relationship while her lover, Tara, lies dead.

  All power comes hand in hand with danger as well as with temptations to misuse it, and Willow’s struggle with this is real to us, even if her immense magical power is clearly fictional.

  Meanwhile, whereas one might have originally assumed Buffy’s Cordelia might turn into a major villainess in Sunnydale, she instead becomes, like Xander, a person whom we often don’t know whether to love or hate. Cordelia’s and Xander’s “evil” in Buffy is ordinary, familiar, and all too human.

  Cordelia is self-centered, snide, arrogant, and malicious. We’d love to hate her; but we can’t, because Cordelia mixes too much good with her daily dose of mundane evil. She’s brave; she often joins the Scooby gang in battling monsters, and she conquers vampires with mere words in “Homecoming” (3-5). She’s honest; note how Cordelia says everything she thinks and never thinks anything she doesn’t say in “Earshot” (3-18). She’s sincere and capable of love, as we see in her volatile relationship with Xander; and we realize in “Lover’s Walk” (3-8) and “The Wish”(3-9), when Xander breaks her heart, that she’s as vulnerable as we are. Moreover, rather than whining and feeling sorry for herself thereafter, she relieves her pain by inflicting any number of clever, sharp-edged verbal assaults on Xander in subsequent episodes. Sure, she’s a bitch; but who among us doesn’t envy how bold and articulate she is when confronting someone who has hurt her?

  If Cordelia is the evil bitch whom we can’t help liking, then Xander is the good guy whom we can’t help despising. Xander is a catalogue of petty weaknesses and minor evils; his characterization is practically a template for a venial sinner. During the gang’s high-school years, Xander often speaks and acts out of spite when it comes to Angel. Whether it’s something as minor as his many snide little comments or something as major as his urging Faith to kill Angel in “Revelations” (3-7), his jealousy over Buffy’s feelings for Angel is always among his motives. Nor is he a guy you’d want your sister to date. Even prior to his nuzzling with Willow behind his girlfriend’s back in season three, he demonstrates a roving eye with his obvious sexual interest in Faith (“Faith, Hope, and Trick,” 3-3) and his ongoing crush on Buffy while dating Cordelia. He takes Willow for granted, sometimes to a truly insensitive and unconscionable extent . . . right up until she has a boyfriend. It’s only when another guy loves her that Willow finally becomes sexually interesting to Xander. In subsequent years, he proposes to Anya, abandons her at the altar, and then attacks her with verbal viciousness when she later sleeps with someone else for solace. And he is harshly judgmental when he learns that Buffy has slept with Spike.

  Yet, despite all this, Xander inevitably comes through in the end as a decent, loving, and loyal friend. Moreover, though it’s not his “destiny” and he has no supernatural defenses, he nonetheless regularly chooses to be on the frontlines of the battle against dark forces on the Hellmouth. No matter how often we despise Xander for his petty evils, we also always respect him for his virtues.

  The seemingly straight-arrow Giles was a rock ’n’ rolling rebel who resented and resisted his assigned duty to become a Watcher, and who even dabbled in demonology as a young man. Usually the figure of wise restraint and fatherly wisdom, he betrays Buffy in “Lies My Parents Told Me” (7-17) by colluding in the attempted murder of Spike. The laid-back Oz gets bitten by a werewolf in season two and eventually learns, as did Angel, that there’s no ignoring a monster inhabiting your body. By season four, in “Wild at Heart” (4-6), Oz realizes that he can’t progress as a person until he learns how to incorporate the wolf.

  Faith is a colorful character when first introduced to us, but she becomes far more compelling when she tumbles across the unseen line into the dark side of her nature and then joins Buffy’s enemies. Faith’s longing to belong is most moving after she’s ensured that she can never belong again. Her desire to be a true Slayer only becomes truly apparent in season four, after she has betrayed and abandoned all that being a Slayer means. Prior to her downfall, Faith disregarded the moral principles of Slaying and enjoyed the violence and power. Only much later, as she struggles alone in a mentally unstable state during “This Year’s Girl” (4-15) and “Who Are You” (4-16), does Faith start grappling with what it means to be a Slayer, to protect the innocent, to commit murder, and (in the related Angel episodes) to atone for evil. Only after her own “demon” has dominated her life can Faith’s soul find a place to make its stand, ultimately enabling her to return in season seven as the edgy, wisecracking, self-aware ex-con who’s ready to die to save the world. And it is the journey to these extremes which makes Faith so memorable.

  Faith’s story, of course, is entwined with the schemes of that great Buffy villain, Mayor Wilkins. Is there any fan who didn’t love finding such immense evil in the form of the squeakily clean-cut, self-righteous, platitude-spouting authority figure whom we have all known at some point in our lives? Yet, as delightful as he initially was, the Mayor continued growing and surprising us until, no matter how evil he was, it was impossible to see him only as a villain.

  Eschewing the indiscriminately libidinous stereotype of so many boring villains, the Mayor kindly but firmly rejects Faith’s sexual overtures when they become allies in season three. Not only does he deliberately choose the role of protective, supportive father figure with her, he also grows to love her in a selfless parental way. He talks with her about her problems, tries to build her self-confidence, and worries about her happiness. His genuine love for Faith is the weakness that Buffy exploits to defeat him in “Graduation Day” (3-21, 3-22). In “This Year’s Girl” (4-15) we learn that even as the Mayor was preparing for his Ascension, he made plans to protect Faith from beyond death in case his own schemes turned to ashes (as they did).

  Apart from Buffy’s mother, the Mayor is the only person candid and clear-sighted enough to confront Angel about the huge sacrifices that his relationship with Buffy will force on her. The Mayor’s condemnatory comments about this in season three’s “Choices” (3-19), are so articulate and convincing that we realize, as does Angel, that he’s right. Though he is Buffy’s mortal enemy, the Mayor sees her dilemma with compassionate understanding. Mayor Wilkins is so vivid a character because of the ambivalent responses he continually creates in us with his contradictory nature.

  However, probably no Buffy character’s ambivalence has ever fascinated us as much as that of Spike. His characterization as an exceptional and unpredictable individual began with his very first appearance, in “School Hard” (2-15): A particularly dangerous vampire who has killed two Slayers in his time, he stalks Buffy, despises Angel, kills Sunnydale citizens, and even murders the Anointed One (or, as Spike calls him, the “annoying” one); and yet this epitome of ruthless, bloodthirsty, wisecracking villainy loves Drusilla with a tender and selfless devotion that, frankly, not many human lovers can equal. He humors her strange moods, apologizes sincerely whenever he hurts her feelings, looks after her with the patience of a good n
urse, and gives her unconditional, monogamous, and enduring devotion. He goes to great lengths to cure Drusilla’s physical weakness. Later, he’s emotionally devastated by her abandonment.

  Nor is Spike just a devoted (or besotted) lover. Like the Mayor, he’s shrewd enough to understand the emotional lives of his enemies. As Buffy notes in “Lover’s Walk” (3-8), she can fool her friends about her feelings for Angel, but she can’t fool Spike. Though Spike usually uses his understanding of human emotion to torment his victims and inflict pain on his enemies, he can nonetheless demonstrate an unexpected sensitivity. In season four’s “Something Blue” (4-9), he snaps at Giles and Buffy for failing to recognize the depth of Willow’s emotional pain over losing Oz. In “Fool for Love” (5-7), Spike credibly asserts that he understands Slayers even better than they understand themselves.

  After the Initiative has planted the lifestyle-altering chip in Spike’s head in season four, Spike’s new habits gradually bring him into more frequent and intimate contact with the Scooby gang; and it’s ultimately only a matter of time before Spike’s empathy and insight combine with his penchant for grand passions and lead to the most interesting development in his story: He falls in love with the Slayer.

  Spike’s extremes thereafter make him the most challenging characterization Buffy has ever explored. His sincere, tormented confession of love is heart-rending in “Crush” (5-14); yet he chains Buffy up in his crypt to make this declaration to her and threatens to let Drusilla kill her if she won’t admit to having feelings for him! In “Intervention” (5-18), Spike’s antics with the Buffybot are wonderfully comedic, but it’s nonetheless incredibly creepy that he’s had a robotic sex slave made in Buffy’s image; yet just as we’re thinking that a smart Slayer would definitely stake him for this . . . Spike endures torture at Glory’s hands rather than reveal to her that Dawn is the Key she wants, because he’d rather die than let Buffy endure the pain of losing her sister. In equal measures, Spike regularly repels us and wins our admiration.