In the last few episodes Buffy’s chosen family is tested nearly to destruction. The young potential slayers squabble and rebel against authority like any group of teenagers. Faith returns, redeemed in her own way, and is accepted into Buffy’s family only to betray it by undermining Buffy’s authority in “Empty Places.” However, Faith quickly recognizes her inadequacy as a parent figure.
Buffy is compared to King Arthur in the final episodes, from her sending Angel away because it is her fight, not his, right down to pulling the weapon with which to defeat The First out of a stone. However, that weapon on the one hand is not a sword but a scythe, the weapon of the Grim Reaper, and on the other hand is not wielded alone: when Buffy is wounded in battle and thinks she cannot continue, she tosses it to Faith. And there is the crux of the difference between Buffy and Arthur (or any other hero of the monomyth): Buffy defies the tradition that has the hero of the monomyth dying in the final battle by fighting alone or with only a single faithful companion at his side. Like a mother providing for her children, Buffy shares her power and survives.
Arthur’s round table was his family, and Camelot ended when Mordred succeeded in dividing the ranks of that family. Dawn would be the obvious Mordred analogue, but instead Faith is brought back, Buffy’s evil twin, as it were. Faith’s betrayal, though, this time lasts only one night; the very next day she cedes authority back to Buffy, sisterhood is restored, and Buffy resolves the problem in a way that would never have occurred to Arthur: she gives her power to all the potential slayers, thereby changing the very laws of her universe.
The only person with the power to confer such powers is Willow, who has not conjured such power since she almost destroyed the world at the end of season six. A year later she redeems herself and becomes a goddess, transforming all the Potentials into slayers, and making it possible for them to hold back The First until the surviving members of Buffy’s family can escape.
However, the Hellmouth has been irrevocably opened. In the monomyth, the hero dies saving his society. There is no saving Sunnydale, most of whose citizens have left anyway. Only Buffy’s family can be saved, and not without sacrifice. More than half the Potentials die in the fight, as does Anya. But Spike achieves transcendency. If there is any question in the mind of the audience that Spike had redeemed himself (there is plenty in the mind of every character except Buffy), it is dispelled when he becomes the conduit for the energy that destroys the Sunnydale Hellmouth once and for all.
Buffy’s surviving family escape, ironically, in a Sunnydale High schoolbus, and pause to take stock. Buffy has come full circle in one sense, but spiraled higher in another. She is once more part of a broken family, one that has lost many of its members not to divorce but to the finality of death. The members of that yet again broken family must move on—some of them possibly to Cleveland—and build new families as Buffy built hers in Sunnydale and Angel his in Los Angeles.
But Willow is now a force for Good as powerful as any Evil they have fought in the past seven years, while Buffy, who may not have the sheer power that Willow wields, is the inspirational force whose idea has permanently changed the universe she lives in. Buffy, Willow, Giles, and Xander, the only survivors of the original Buffy family at the beginning of the seventh season, have all survived to fight again. Xander, despite losing an eye, is still the one who sees clearly, and the one who keeps up everyone’s hopes.
Redemption and survival seem to be the final themes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, made possible through the creation first of the tightly-knit central family, and then the extended family that can even admit and protect a weak link like Andrew.
A highly untraditional family, perhaps, but a successful one because of its bonds of love.
New York Times best-selling author Jean Lorrah is the author of the award-winning vampire romance Blood Will Tell, the award-winning children’s book Nessie and the Living Stone, and the acclaimed Savage Empire series. She is co-author of First Channel, Channel’s Destiny and Zelerod’s Doom, part of the cult classic Sime~Gen series.
Margaret L. Carter
A WORLD
WITHOUT SHRIMP
Joss loves to play mind games with us. Like in the opening credits to “Superstar,” in which Jonathan is featured as the star of the show. Or in “Normal Again,” where Joss leaves us with the prospect of the entire series being the delusional imaginings of a psychotic Buffy. Or in “Buffy vs. Dracula,” in which Buffy suddenly and inexplicably has a sister. It gets a bit confusing. Do the monks change history in creating Dawn or do they just change everyone’s memories (and create physical changes like photos, etc.)? Does Anya create an alternate universe or does she just tap into an existing one? (And if there is an infinite number of alternate universes, can we collect an army of Buffys to fight the next Big Bad? . . . I guess this will have to wait for the movie.) Margaret Carter sorts this out for us.
ALTERNATE REALITIES ARE NEAT,” declares Anya in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Superstar” (4-17). Apparently the creators of the series agree, for the malleable nature of “reality” proves to be one of the Buffyverse’s central themes. Anya reminds us of the infinite variety of possible worlds and the great differences that seemingly minor changes can produce: “You could, uh, have a world without shrimp. Or with, you know, nothing but shrimp” (“Superstar,” 4-17). Or Buffy could inhabit a world with or without a younger sister. The advent of Dawn at the end of the first episode of season five sharply draws the viewer’s attention to the fluidity of this fictional universe. The transformation of the Buffyverse by the sudden appearance of Dawn (“sudden” to the audience, not to the characters, who “know” Buffy has always had a sister) highlights the importance of the “alternate reality” theme in this series. Most television programs imitate the presumed stability of the primary world, the “real” world we live in. At most, the average series may feature an occasional fantasy sequence or It’s a Wonderful Life pastiche. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in contrast, presents several alternate reality episodes that produce major dislocations of the world as the characters know it. This recurring motif infects the Buffyverse with a fundamental instability. The introduction of a younger sister retroactively transforms Buffy’s entire family history. Cordelia wishes into existence (or possibly just reveals) a timeline in which Buffy never moved to Sunnydale. Jonathan works a spell to create a timeline in which he stars as a superhero. And the episode “Normal Again” (6-17) reveals a timeline in which Buffy is, rather than the powerful Slayer, a helpless mental patient. Unlike most secondary (i.e., invented) worlds, the reality of Buffy undergoes frequent, unsettling alterations.
All these episodes produce deviations from the “original” reality of Buffy, the world we viewers recognize as being altered when Dawn appears, which I refer to as the dominant reality, or dominant timeline. The magical transformations in the various episodes create alternate realities, worlds that resemble our own but deviate at some point in their history to generate timelines that can vary widely from the dominant one as a result of a single critical change. I use “alternate reality” and “alternate universe” interchangeably. Note, however, that the various transformed realities in the series are not all of the same type, but belong to at least two different categories. If the alternate reality exists in complete independence from the dominant timeline, I classify it as a separate dimensional plane. Alternate realities that replace the dominant one and run in the “real time” of the characters’ lives can be labeled alternate histories. I consider “The Wish” (3-9), for example, to belong to the first category and “Superstar” (4-17) to the second. As for the “demon” or “hell” dimensions often mentioned in the series, they exist on other dimensional planes but do not qualify as alternate realities in the sense being considered, because they do not conform to the model of a universe that parallels ours except for the ramifications of one critical change.
For instance, Dawn’s insertion into the story reshapes the dominant reality of the Buffyverse
, thereby situating every episode after that one in a parallel universe. Dawn’s arrival retroactively alters the Buffyverse’s past as well as its present, so that the changed past becomes the “real” past. The fact that the audience remembers a different history does not invalidate the reality of the “new” past within the universe of the series. By all criteria the characters can apply, including confirmation from other people in the external world (with a few exceptions to be discussed below), their memories reflect objective fact. Moreover, the parallel worlds briefly experienced by the characters possess objective reality. I maintain that they do not exist solely in the characters’ minds. They exist alongside the dominant reality, with no necessarily compelling reason to privilege that timeline over the alternate ones. By their existence, they foreground the malleability of the universe inhabited by the Buffy characters.
As mentioned, each of the Buffyverse alternate realities creates a parallel world through some relatively minor “alteration” in the dominant reality as the characters know it. Events in postseason five episodes and events in “Superstar” (4-17) feature one change and its consequences integrated into an otherwise unchanged timeline. After the nullification of Jonathan’s spell in “Superstar” (4-17), the characters remember the events (at least dimly), and actions taken during the period of altered reality have consequences in the restored dominant timeline. “The Wish” (3-9) also begins with a single change and explores its consequences, but Cordelia’s visit to that reality occupies no time in the dominant reality. With the reversal of her wish, she returns to the instant when she made it, and neither she nor Anyanka remember the alternate world. “Doppelgangland” (3-16) later suggests that the world spawned by Cordelia’s wish has an independent existence on a separate dimensional plane. As for Buffy’s alternate life in “Normal Again” (6-17), it occupies a space-time completely distinct from the dominant timeline and thus can claim the status of a true parallel universe.
It may be objected that “Superstar” (4-17) and the entire sequence of events after the first episode in season five do not occupy alternate universes, but the original universe with altered memories. This objection, however, makes an unwarranted distinction between perception and reality. The audience, standing outside the Buffyverse, is aware of both realities, old and new. To the characters, though, the old reality does not exist and never has existed. In the context of the respective episodes, Buffy has always had a sister named Dawn, and Jonathan has always been a superhero. As far as any practical effects are concerned, the world as they perceive it in the present and remember it in the past is the only reality. On an emotional level, they idolize Jonathan and love and protect Dawn even after they become intellectually convinced of the magical alterations that have produced these situations. That perception and reality are, in practical terms, indistinguishable, is particularly highlighted by “Normal Again” (6-17), as discussed below.
Thus we find no valid distinction between the world as perceived by the characters and as it “really is.” Particularly when applied to the past, this dichotomy becomes meaningless. If a character’s own memory and the consensus of his or her companions’ memories recall the past in a certain way, and if all external sources that can be checked confirm this recollection, in what sense can this remembered past be considered “not real”? Although as viewers we assume the dominant Buffyverse timeline in “Normal Again” (6-17) to be real and the asylum experiences delusional, within the world of the episode neither realm can be privileged over the other. Similarly, the characters’ current memories of a Sunnydale and a Summers household that include Dawn are neither less nor more “real” than the previous, and now erased, memories of a Dawnless world were during the period before Dawn’s advent. The various magics that create the parallel worlds retroactively rewrite reality. The term “rewrite” is deliberate, since the fluidity of the Buffyverse’s reality draws attention to its fictional nature. After all, the dominant reality of the Buffyverse is, in what we call the “real world,” only the invented setting for a television series, and “rewriting” is precisely what the writers of the series did at the beginning of season five.
Each of the three alternate worlds considered here—found in “The Wish” (3-9)/ “Doppelgangland” (3-16), “Superstar” (4-17), and “Normal Again” (6-17)—comes into existence (or, possibly, the characters simply become aware of its existence) through the force of desire. In each case, one character’s will finds expression in an altered reality. And, in each case, a relatively small shift in the dominant reality causes an alternate world to branch off at the point of the change. In the world of “The Wish” (3-9), Buffy is still the Slayer, but she operates in Cleveland instead of Sunnydale. “Superstar” (4-17) alters the personality and biography of Jonathan, while leaving all other aspects of reality unchanged except insofar as Jonathan’s transformation affects them. “Normal Again” (6-17) introduces Buffy to the timeline that would have unfolded if she had remained in the institution where she spent a brief period as a patient right after learning of her destiny. We may note that the outside world, not just Sunnydale alone, reflects the repercussions of these changes. In Cordelia’s “bizarro” realm, Giles telephones Buffy’s Watcher in Cleveland, and Buffy travels to Sunnydale from there. In “Superstar” (4-17), Jonathan has coached the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team, starred in The Matrix, and invented the Internet, actions that must certainly affect the world as a whole. The reshaping of the past along with the present does not change Sunnydale alone. As for “Normal Again” (6-17), we see none of the alternate reality outside the mental ward; however, a world in which either (1) demons and monsters do not exist, or (2) Buffy has not embraced her destiny of fighting the monsters, would be a radically different place from the dominant reality of the Buffyverse.
The role of desire/will in evoking the alternate reality is most obvious in “The Wish” (3-9), when Cordelia wishes Buffy had never come to Sunnydale, and in “Superstar” (4-17), when Jonathan works an augmentation spell to transform himself into “a sort of paragon, the best of everything.” The transformed reality of “Normal Again” (6-17), however, also expresses desire, but in a less direct way—Buffy’s yearning to be “normal,” an ordinary girl, a wish demonstrated on many occasions, such as her tryout for the cheerleading squad and her campaign for Homecoming Queen. As Dawn accuses, “It’s your ideal reality, and I’m not a part of it” (“Normal Again,” 6-17). Willow later recognizes the same unacknowledged desire: “You’re trying to sell me on the world. The one where you lie to your friends when you’re not trying to kill them? . . . And insane asylums are a comfy alternative?” (“Two to Go,” 6-21). The alternate timeline Buffy imagines (or possibly accesses) as a result of the demon’s venom gives her back her parents as well as a stunted version of a normal life. In that place/time, she does not have to fight monsters, her parents are alive and together, and, as an only child with a serious illness, she has their full attention.
Buffy’s “shadow” (in the Jungian sense, a repressed or neglected aspect of the self) appears in at least two guises in this episode. In the mental ward, we see Buffy as the ordinary girl she has, on one level, always longed to be. Ironically, in this “normal” world where demons do not exist and the Summers family unit remains unbroken, Buffy herself is normal only in the sense of having no superhuman powers. Her shadow self, a helpless, terrified schizophrenic, is far from the conventional definition of “normal.” Within the dominant reality of Sunnydale as we know it, Buffy’s shadow expresses itself in the outbreak of violence against her friends. It seems likely that she harbors repressed resentment against them for bringing her back from Heaven. In the context of the alternate reality of the mental ward, the asylum itself fills the role of Heaven. The doctor reminds Buffy: “Last summer, when you had a momentary awakening, it was them [her friends] that pulled you back in” (“Normal Again,” 6-17). As Willow later taunts her, “The only time you were ever at peace in your whole life is when you were dead” (“Tw
o to Go,” 6-21). In the Buffyverse dominant reality, Buffy was in Heaven during that period of “peace”; in the alternate reality, she was in the asylum, momentarily “awakened” and, presumably, happy in the awareness of her parents’ presence and love. Her covert hostility against the Scoobies for dragging her out of this “peace” finds an outlet in her attempt to kill them.
Another incarnation of Buffy’s shadow appears in “The Wish” (3-9), Buffy as she would have become without the guidance of Giles and the friendship of the Scoobies. This alternate-world Slayer, hardened and cynical, unable to “play well with others” (“The Wish,” 3-9), foreshadows Faith, even in her clothing style, although without (as far as we can tell) Faith’s blatant sensuality. Survival and destruction consume all other facets of this Buffy’s personality. The bizarro realm also displays the shadow selves of Willow and Xander (whose personalities and mannerisms, interestingly, parallel those of Drusilla and Spike, who apparently never visited Sunnydale in this timeline, where the Master still rules). The bizarro-world Willow appears deliberately constructed to embody the extreme opposite of the gentle, shy girl familiar to viewers. Vamp Willow’s foreshadowing (in “Doppelgangland,” 3-16) of dominant-world Willow’s later coming out as a lesbian is, of course, obvious and often noted. As the dark side of Willow, however, her vampire incarnation also foreshadows her embrace of evil at the end of season six. The incarnation of a character’s shadow is displayed most explicitly in “Superstar.” When Jonathan transforms himself into a “paragon,” Giles explains, “In order to balance the new force of good, the spell has to create the opposing force of evil, the worst of everything” (“Superstar,” 4-17). As in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, an attempt to suppress the negative aspects of humanity only makes them break out more powerfully. Jonathan’s augmentation spell unleashes a force of evil that literally shadows him. The weakness suffered by Jonathan when Buffy attacks the monster confirms that the creature is the rejected part of himself. Therefore its destruction causes the world to revert to its dominant-reality status.
Seven Seasons of Buffy: Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors Discuss Their Favorite Television Show (Smart Pop series) Page 23
