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

by Gilene Yeffeth

  Eventually, Spike and Buffy enter into a secretive sexual relationship so volatile and unstable that it’s frequently unclear to both of them whether he’s currently her lover or her ex-lover.

  So, who is Spike? Is he really the stalker outside Buffy’s bedroom windows, the obsessed creep who steals pieces of her clothing to sniff in his crypt? The demon who chains her up and threatens to kill her if she won’t say she has feelings for him? Or is he really the strong knight who serves Buffy selflessly in “The Gift” (5-22), faithfully guards her sister in “Bargaining” (6-1), and is Buffy’s patient confidante in “Life Serial” (6-5)?

  The beauty of Spike’s characterization is that he’s really all of these. He repels us and wins our admiration in equal measure precisely because he is equally repellent and admirable. He is both villain and hero; both demon and knight. Any attempt to define him as primarily one thing or the other is bound to fail, because he refuses to remain consistent with either definition. He regularly goes to both extremes, and that is precisely why he is such a riveting character.

  Spike tells Buffy numerous times that loving her has changed him. Yet in “Smashed” (6-9), when Spike mistakenly thinks his chip has stopped working, the first thing he does is stalk, attack, and try to kill an innocent woman.

  Spike has spent more than a century killing hundreds—perhaps thousands—of people, and, prior to having a soul in season seven, he never expresses or demonstrates even a wisp of remorse for any of those murders. As Buffy argues in “Crush” (5-14), the chip in his head isn’t moral change, it just makes him like a serial killer in prison. According to the established natural laws of the Buffyverse, no matter how exceptional Spike is, no matter how much he loves Buffy, and no matter how much he wants to be worthy of her love, he can never become a compassionate, morally developed, trustworthy being, because he lacks the one absolutely essential ingredient for such a transformation: a soul.

  Yet, despite this void, Spike demonstrates over and over that he is capable of love, loyalty, adaptation, even of kindness. Whether because of these qualities, or because of his charm, or simply because he wants it so badly, we want to believe he is capable of the changes he keeps trying to claim. And yet, without a soul, he clearly has no moral compass. In “Smashed” (6-9), he tries to kill an innocent woman; in “As You Were” (6-15), he’s involved in a scheme to sell deadly demon eggs; in “Dead Things” (6-13), he can’t understand Buffy’s moral dilemma over having killed an innocent bystander.

  However, Spike does have a moral code, and he states it plainly to Buffy: “I don’t hurt you.”

  And this is why Spike finally reaches a moral crisis in “Seeing Red” (6-19) after he tries to rape Buffy. Acting upon life without a soul, Spike is ultimately capable of horrifying even himself. At this nadir of his existence, even he becomes repelled by his own extremes in one direction.

  Being Spike, of course, he then goes to another unforeseen extreme in the opposite direction: He risks his life in pursuit of regaining his human soul, hoping it will make him worthy of Buffy. And, Spike being Spike, his demon nature and his human nature are so incompatibly extreme that trying to incorporate them into one persona makes him mentally unstable at first—and therefore vulnerable to The First in season seven.

  Despite the soul, there’s enough demon in Spike that The First easily manipulates him into killing many victims; and, in the perpetual paradox which is Spike, despite the demon inside him, he begs Buffy to kill him in “Never Leave Me” (7-9) so that he can’t cause any more suffering. In “Lies My Parents Told Me” (7-17), he refuses to feel any remorse for killing Principal Wood’s mother, who was a Slayer, because killing each other is what vampires and Slayers do; but he spares Wood’s life, despite his anger over Wood’s ambush, because he understands—even empathizes with—what his slaughter of the mother meant to the son. So the acquisition of a soul only serves to strengthen the persistent contradictions of this fascinating character.

  Finally, the central figure of Buffy, the Slayer herself, may not be the show’s most ambivalent character, but she, too, endures the same kind of internal struggle. The Slayer has, after all, been in love with not one but two vampires. Moreover, she took one of them as a lover even when he didn’t have a soul. And we suspect that Faith is not wrong when she suggests in “Consequences” (3-15) that Buffy was attracted to Angel “even when he went psycho,” i.e., lost his soul and was evil for half a season. When Spike tells Riley Finn that Buffy likes some monster in her man, he’s right; the power of Buffy’s feelings for Riley never equals her love for Angel or her obsession with Spike.

  It’s no coincidence that possibly the most honest conversation of Buffy’s adult life occurs with a vampire when she confesses her emotional secrets to one, in season seven’s wonderfully twisted “Conversations with Dead People” (7-7). As we see here, there are some things about Buffy that the evil undead are more capable of understanding than her closest human friends are. Indeed, this is precisely Spike’s emphatic assertion on numerous occasions, even before they start sleeping together. It’s a theme that he explores thoroughly in “Fool For Love” (5-7), and Buffy’s riveted attention as he talks in that episode about her inescapable flirtation with death is clear evidence, despite her angry rejection, that he’s found a path to the darkest part of her heart. And Buffy exercises these dark impulses in that same scene by intentionally humiliating Spike as punishment for having exposed her this way.

  Of course, Spike isn’t the first character to probe Buffy’s dark side. In “Bad Girls” (3-14), Faith makes a giddy effort to convince Buffy that the Slayer’s rightful motto should be “Want, take, have.” Under Faith’s influence, Buffy clearly starts finding visceral pleasure in the kill, and she winds up gleefully participating in an episode of wanton vandalism and burglary, though she does not follow Faith across the thick dark line into murder and betrayal.

  Throughout Buffy’s tenure as the Slayer, there is a ruthless, ambivalent side of her character which is, in fact, crucial to her survival. In “Becoming” (3-21, 3-22), as Buffy approaches her showdown with Angelus, she coldly warns Xander that he’ll be solely responsible for saving Giles because “I’ll be too busy killing.” In “The Wish” (3-9), we see a chilling, dispassionate Buffy, the persona which our Buffy would have developed under different circumstances. Much of Buffy’s growth as a Slayer has involved her learning to understand, accept, and utilize this dark side, rather than continue denying it. In “Restless” (4-22) and “Intervention” (5-18), the First Slayer makes it clear that a seamless incorporation of dark strength is necessary to a Slayer’s success. And by season seven’s “Selfless” (7-5), Buffy explains to Xander that an essential part of being the Slayer is being able to do what others find unthinkable—such as killing a friend or loved one.

  In her struggle to incorporate character traits that conventional morality tells us we’re not supposed to have, let alone accept—and which, nonetheless, many of us either have or fear finding within ourselves—Buffy the Vampire Slayer is not only the bright-and-dark heroine of her own world; she is also us. It is precisely because her painful internal ambivalence is all too familiar to us that she inevitably becomes terribly real to us despite her supernatural trappings.

  Longtime Buffy fan Laura Resnick is the author of such fantasy novels as In Legend Born, The White Dragon: In Fire Forged I, and The Destroyer Goddess: In Fire Forged II. This Campbell Award–winning author of forty SF/F short stories is also the author of over a dozen romance novels published under the pseudonym Laura Leone. She is a regular contributor to the SFWA Bulletin, the Romance Writers Report, and Nink. You can find her on the Web at www.sff.net/people/laresnick.

  Michelle Sagara West

  FOR THE LOVE

  OF RILEY

  Among the great debates in the history of mankind—capitalism vs. communism, Big Crunch vs. an ever-expanding universe, guns vs. butter, and Kirk vs. Picard—surely belongs the irresolvable question of who is the better b
oyfriend for Buffy: Angel or Spike. Much ink has been spilled on this question (or electrons splashed, whatever). But this debate, a bit of which goes on in this modest volume, ignores Riley, hated by many, dismissed by most. Is this right? Michelle Sagara West makes the case for Riley.

  RILEY.

  Just two syllables, but concatenate them in that particular order, and you’ll cause a rash among a surprisingly large number of the more civil of Buffy aficionados. Among the less civil, you’ll be the proud recipient of linguistic eruptions of a particular and unenviable nature, although if you’re into safety, you can cover your momentary lack of taste by tacking on a different last name, and then turning the subject of conversation to either Angel or Spike.

  And why shouldn’t people complain? Let me get to that in a moment.

  First, let’s look at the introduction of Riley Finn.

  One, he appeared in the meandering and directionless fourth season. While many episodes of note—well, one at least (“Hush,” 4-10)—made their debut in season four, possibly the worst of the Buffy episodes to date also called it home (“Beer Bad,” 4-9). His initial introduction—as the target for a large number of falling books—went without a hitch, as did saving Willow’s life, and he sealed the “all good” vignettes with a direct punch to the loathsome mouth of Parker, a boy who slept with Buffy and dumped her after his one-sided one-night stand.

  How could it have gone wrong from there?

  Well, actually, it goes wrong from way, way back.

  The Scoobies were misfits. They managed to be cute without projecting cute (Alyson Hannigan. Sarah Michelle Gellar. Need I say more?); Alyson Hannigan was the nerd’s nerd, Nicholas Brendan’s Xander was the witty pop-culture guru who couldn’t get a date with something that wasn’t trying to eat him or his friends, and Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Buffy, although beautiful, was considered too weird for words. The Scoobies were misfits.

  People seemed to identify with that.

  Hell, I did.

  Self-confidence changed the Scoobies slowly but surely—it does that in real life too. Saving the world a few dozen times or more tends to make the little things in life less and less important. But this growing self-confidence is problematic because it conflicts with the major theme of the first three years of the show: that horror is a metaphor for life, especially among outsiders, underdogs, and people who go unheard in the halls of comfortable authority. Buffy, Xander, Willow, Oz, and even Cordelia survived all of this at a point when Joss Whedon’s metaphor had just hit the shoals with the benefit of a dim and shaky lighthouse of dubious intent. Sort of like this metaphor just did.

  Riley Finn was parachuted into the archetypal Buffy landscape when he very clearly had no such outsider archetype to anchor himself to.

  On top of that, he was delivered into the arms of Buffy, a woman who had just lost the Love of Her Life. The end of season two—the death of Angel—marked the coming of age of the Slayer. It’s hard to die in the line of duty, and she did that so perfectly in “Prophecy Girl” (1-12) it broke my heart to watch her take that final step.

  But as much as that moved me, “Becoming: Part Two” (2-22) was the true heart-stomper, because if Buffy could kill in the line of duty, she stood on the precipice of a much, much more difficult act: to kill someone who you are so certain—especially at eighteen—is the love of your life. It’s possibly the most dramatic and moving season end I’ve ever seen.

  Nothing that Riley Finn could offer her could come close to that because, for one, he wasn’t attempting to destroy the entire world. Any growth that could come out of the relationship with someone like Riley is a quiet growth.

  David Boreanaz should have stayed dead, and would have if it weren’t for his following in television land. The sacrifice of Buffy’s love for him was an act of duty, and the certainty of its necessity, along with the pain of the loss, would have meant so much more in the context of a permanent death. But hell, if Marvel could bring back Jean Grey, writers can do anything.

  So, for no reason whatsoever—certainly none that was given an onscreen explanation in anything but a cursory and ill-conceived way—Angel was unceremoniously dumped back in the lap of our heroine, a loose end that was handled with less grace than even television dictated.

  And because of this, he lingers like shadow in the myth of Buffy. People even now want them to get back together because they feel that they’re fated for each other. I suppose killing a person does that.

  I’ll confess up front that it was the episode “Angel” (1-7) that first drew me to Buffy. I was sick as a dog, and I caught the last twenty minutes of that episode. Being a fan of Phantom of the Opera, Beauty and the Beast, and a host of other similar tales, it intrigued me. But it was the next episode I watched that sold me on the series: “When She Was Bad” (2-1). This showed that fear and reaction—to death, admittedly something pretty severe—could change the character; that in the Whedon universe, experience counted. Angel figured prominently in both. I thought SMG was fabulous; I thought DB was worthy of Babylon 5. (I’ll get hate mail for that, if it’s taken in the proper context, but I digress again.)

  SMG carried the weight of their on-screen romance; she projected vulnerability and confused desire in a pitch-perfect way.

  I believed in their doomed-from-the-start romance. Isn’t that almost the point of it? We almost always believe most intensely in the earliest of our romances, those relationships that are built on air and hope and insecurity and the inability to actually see what we are because we haven’t become it yet.

  It’s the time of life when we confuse love and longing, and believe that they’re the same thing. Joss Whedon, fashioning his darkly comedic drama from those early years, brought back this emotional intensity with his gifted cast. Angel was the boyfriend that you sleep with only to discover the morning after that he’s really a jerk. And you want desperately to somehow get an explanation that will make him not be that jerk.

  High-school Love.

  But Joss didn’t stay a high-school student forever.

  And neither did I.

  What cured me of high-school intensity was experience. I’m not a great believer in pain. I’m not in favor of self-inflicted wounds, although in other ways I’m not terribly militaristic.

  Spike is, sadly, another High-school Boyfriend.

  All that snide, clever sniping? All that posturing, all that heavy coolness that someone like Spike exudes? Those are high-school things. Attractive, yes, because at that time, and in that place, they speak of power—of those things that aren’t our parents or our brothers. Rebellion is always attractive.

  But in the end, the little things whittle away at the core of emotional belief, embittering love—which is often fragile in the early stages. Posturing almost by its very nature excludes the type of vulnerability, the type of risk, that honesty requires.

  And it’s my belief that without it, there is no lasting relationship.

  Riley Finn, as introduced, was the antithesis of Angel. Fair, where Angel was dark, directed where Angel was directionless, and focused where Angel was scrambling to redefine himself. Riley was the “nice” boy. The boy next door.

  Big crime, that.

  Riley Finn was—until the experiments of the Professor came to light—normal. And nice. The type of person who no doubt belonged to a Boy Scout troop, possibly even leading it. The type of guy who gets straight As, not because he’s a quirky, insecure genius, but because he works at it. The boy who doesn’t get wildly drunk, doesn’t experiment with drugs, doesn’t spend his adolescence experimenting on the fringes of a law he doesn’t care for because he doesn’t feel like being told what to do.

  He is also the type of person who helps old ladies and blind people across the street because they need help and he happens to be standing there. He holds the doors open without drawing enormous attention to himself. He’s just . . . nice.

  Why is that word such a cultural epithet?

  Why does it seem to lurk in collu
sion with normal to form an equation that says boring in the minds of so many people?

  What the writers chose to do with Riley in season five was the antithesis of what he was presented to be in season four—and it was perhaps the only thing that was done that made him more palatable, barely, to the legion of people who hated him. I understood Riley’s insecurity; I understood the writer’s manipulation behind his character change.

  But even in this, there was some important truth: Riley grew to understand that you cannot define yourself by love alone. It puts the weight of the relationship on the shoulders of a single person—and it takes it outside of the realm of adult interaction. He had no life, after the initiative was gone; he had—as Graham pointed out—no Mission. He was dating his mission, and in the end, that wasn’t enough.

  It took him a while to figure this out. Sometimes that happens.

  But I was upset when he left—not for his sake, and not for mine, but for what it says in general about our tolerance for television drama. Buffy was no longer a high-school girl. Riley was not a high-school relationship. In many ways, with his understanding, his lack of ego, the lack of baggage that he brought to Buffy, he was the type of person that exists in, and for, the long haul.

  And Buffy was not allowed to grow into that. The metaphor that guided the early show failed here. She went from Angel, the HSB, to Spike, the HSB, and Riley, who treated her with respect up until the doubts and insecurities overwhelmed him, was given short shrift and shorter understanding. He deserved so much better.