So ordinary men, including Xander, are out. Extraordinary men we’ll get to in a moment, but first let’s consider some other categories.
I think we can immediately eliminate virtually all vampires. Vampires are, as Buffy told Spike repeatedly during season six, not men, but dead, soulless things. These may work as sex toys, but not as partners and lovers.
There are vampires with souls—two of them, anyway—who get around the “soulless thing” problem, and who can defend themselves, but neither of them is really going to work.
Angel has the gypsy curse on him, of course, whereby a single moment of true happiness will turn him back into the soulless, sadistic monster called Angelus. We’ve already seen that a night with Buffy is enough to provide that moment—and even if it actually isn’t anymore, even if Willow’s version of the curse doesn’t have that problem, even if worrying about the possibility would mar Angel’s happiness enough to prevent the transformation, Angel and Buffy are not going to take that chance.
And that’s just one reason they won’t reunite. As Angel told Buffy in “The Prom” (3-20), he thinks she deserves a more normal life than he can ever provide, someone who can give her children. Whether he’s right or not, merely the fact that he believes it will doom any relationship they might have.
In a way, they have each idealized their image of the other until they can’t possibly stay together successfully—Angel sees Buffy as a creature of light who he cannot be worthy of, who he can never give what she deserves, rather than as a flawed and human girl, while Buffy sees Angel as an ancient, dark, and powerful figure, recognizing nothing of the Irish ne’er-do-well Liam was, nor of what a doofus Angel can still sometimes be.
That takes Angel out of contention, even though Buffy may still think of him as the great love of her life.
Ignoring for the moment his apparent destruction, that leaves one other ensouled vampire, one who loves her, one who got his soul restored entirely in hopes she could learn to love him—but Buffy has pretty definitely established that she doesn’t love Spike and doesn’t want to, soul or no soul. Respect him, yes; love him, no.
A third vampire acquiring a soul is extremely unlikely; acquiring a soul and remaining sane and being someone suited to Buffy is just not going to happen.
Not a vampire, then. Another variety of demon, perhaps?
Who? Most of them are pretty thoroughly evil, many are of subhuman intelligence, and I can’t see Buffy settling for either evil or stupid. There are a few who are neither, such as the estimable Clem, but we haven’t seen any who really look like relationship fodder, nor have we seen any human-demon hybrids and other monsters who show much promise. Also, let’s face it, most of them are ugly, and Buffy does like a handsome face and well-built body.
What does that leave?
It leaves men who are not ordinary mortals, men who can take care of themselves when faced with supernatural menaces of all sorts. Men like Riley Finn.
Let us look, then, at what made Riley special—and what went wrong with the Riley-Buffy pairing.
Riley was extensively trained and fed performance-enhancing drugs; he was big and strong and smart, knew how to fight, and had an idea what he was up against. That made him almost as effective at monster-fighting as a Slayer. Physically, he could hold his own.
Emotionally, though, he and Buffy never quite meshed. Much as he admired her strength and power, it also did intimidate him a little. He wanted to be worthy of her; he wanted her to admire him as he admired her.
Buffy didn’t cooperate. She’s never been very impressed by mere physical prowess; she’s spent too much time beating on creatures twice her size.
Also, she never really opened up to him emotionally. Angel and Spike, perhaps by virtue of their centuries of experience, have always been able to read Buffy in a way that poor innocent Riley could not. He needed her to tell him what she was feeling, what she wanted, and she never did.
That’s inherent in their personalities. Riley is very much a team player, while Buffy, much as she appreciates and relies on her friends, is basically a loner, and has always been aware that she is the Chosen One, emphasis on the “One.”
And there’s that whole darkness issue. Riley saw that Buffy was drawn to the dark, that however much she might like him, she found him unexciting in his wholesomeness. The thrill of the forbidden was not there. He tried to find the darkness within himself, and only managed the sordid in his visits to the vampire hookers. Buffy found that repulsive rather than exciting.
Might it have worked out anyway? Need every relationship be thrilling to succeed? Buffy got over her revulsion, and was willing to carry on—but Riley wasn’t looking for simple companionship. He was passionately in love with Buffy, and wanted passion in return. Buffy wasn’t ready to provide it.
I think we really need to consider that relationship a near-miss.
Could another highly trained human do better? Maybe. But we’d need to find a man who doesn’t mind being outclassed by his girlfriend, who fights for the good guys but has a little darkness in him . . .
It’s not an easy combination. In particular, if we’re talking about physical training, a man like that is going to be unlikely. You don’t build serious muscle without a little pride and a lot of testosterone; combine that with a streak of wildness, and you’re probably not looking at someone who wants to live with a girlfriend who can punch him out.
Is there some other sort of training that might serve?
Well, of course there is: mental training, which in the Buffyverse is going to include magic.
We’ve certainly seen that. Buffy has always had other people around as her support structure, doing her research and providing the occasional spell—people like Willow and Giles.
Imagine if Willow were a straight male. She has power enough to defend herself; she has dallied with the darkness. She and Buffy are friends, able to live in the same house without fraying too many nerves.
She is, however, female, and Buffy, unlike Willow, is pretty definitely heterosexual. Not gonna work. We know from “Him” that Willow could probably change either her own sex or Buffy’s orientation, but I can’t see that happening. Willow knows better (now) than to mess with such things.
So Willow the witch is eliminated, but entirely on the basis of her sex. Is there anyone like her who doesn’t have that particular drawback? What magic-using males have we seen?
Well, Giles is the obvious one, and he certainly has toyed with the darkness, both as Ripper in his youth and, when pressed, more recently—as Ethan Rayne or Ben/Glory could testify.
But he’s too old for Buffy, and has played the surrogate father so long that quite aside from the age difference it would undoubtedly feel incestuous for them both. I don’t think that’s the sort of darkness Buffy’s after—it’s not so much dark as just icky.
What about Ethan Rayne, then, since we’ve mentioned him?
No. Far too untrustworthy. Buffy wants a man who can watch her back, as Angel did, or Riley, or Spike. Ethan would be much more likely to decide he’d rather run and protect his own hide.
But if we’ve eliminated Giles, Buffy’s own Watcher, are there any other Watchers who might serve? Watchers younger than Giles, but with something of his style and experience? Not just any Watcher will do; we’ve seen too many who were stiff-necked fools with no real-world experience. Are there any more Watchers who are not hidebound morons?
With the Watchers’ Council largely destroyed, the odds of finding a suitable survivor don’t look promising.
Who does that leave, then? Must we resort to creating a new character—a male witch, or a sympathetic Watcher?
I think not. There is one more possibility. I have in mind a man a few years older than Buffy, but not old enough to make a relationship awkward; a man who has been fighting the forces of darkness for years, both alone and as part of a team; a man who knows and respects Buffy; a man experienced in the use of magic, greatly learned in the history of the a
rcane, and able to hold his own in a fight. This man was trained as a Watcher, but is no longer beholden to the Council. He has walked on the dark side, flirted with evil—and more than flirted, on occasion. While capable of passion, he does not demand the sort of commitment Riley hoped for; he knows how to give a woman her space.
And there’s pretty good evidence that he’s not bad in bed.
I refer, of course, to Wesley Wyndham-Price.
Before you reject the idea, think it over carefully. Oh, it’s true that when they last worked together he was an utter twit, and Buffy despised him; it may take some time for Buffy to get over that, but as we have all seen, he has grown far beyond that now. Buffy, too, would quickly see as much, should they meet again. Wesley is not the inexperienced coward she knew; he has faced his fears and found courage, and survived everything from slime demons to a slit throat.
Yes, his interests lie elsewhere at the moment, and Buffy is not currently resident in Los Angeles, but these are trivial obstacles, easily dealt with. Let Wesley finally give up all hope of gaining Fred’s affection, send Buffy to the city to face some menace there, and there you are.
Imagine it—the rogue demon hunter fighting back to back with the Slayer . . .
It would be perfect.
Which, of course, is why it will never happen. Joss Whedon doesn’t believe in happy endings.
But if he did . . .
Lawrence Watt-Evans is the author of some three dozen novels and over a hundred short stories, mostly in the fields of fantasy, science fiction, and horror. He won the Hugo Award for Short Story in 1988 for “Why I Left Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers,” served as president of the Horror Writers Association from 1994 to 1996, and lives in Maryland with his wife, two teenaged kids, a pet snake named Billy-Bob, and the obligatory writer’s cat.
Nancy Holder
SLAYERS OF THE
LAST ARC
With the airing of “Chosen,” the “Buffy era” (as the late 90’s to early 00’s will come to be known) is finally over. We will all mourn its ending in our own ways. Some will bitterly conclude that the series had run past its prime in any event (see Larbastier’s essay in this volume). Others will, in desperation, turn to Angel, which, for all its recent brilliance, can never replace the hole in our psyches left by Buffy’s departure. Yet others will pine for possible sequels featuring Dawn or Faith or Giles, or for the major motion picture that surely will come soon. Nancy Holder chooses to celebrate the ending with an examination of Buffy’s final story arc. She describes how well it fits an ancient and profound mythological structure, which perhaps goes a little way towards explaining the uncanny way the final sequence—and, even more, the entire series—got under our skins and touched us in ways no show ever had before.
WITH THE ANNOUNCEMENT that Buffy the Vampire Slayer was ending its seven-year run, viewers went on high alert and speculation mounted about how Joss Whedon and his staff would conclude Buffy’s story. There had been discussions about the fate of the show before, by savvy fans who knew that Sarah Michelle Gellar’s contract was due to run out at the end of season seven (as were the contracts of most of the regular cast.) They were aware that Gellar could decide to renew her contract, but the prevailing feeling was that she would not. Surely for a show titled Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the character of Buffy Summers was pivotal—or was she? If Gellar left but the show went on, would it be revamped (sorry) and titled Slayer, as it had originally almost been called? Would Buffy die? Would Faith survive and take over the job? Would Buffy “jump” into Faith’s body? Would the Buffybot provide a model for a new Slayer? Would Dawn take on the mantel? What about a new unknown becoming the Chosen One?
During the course of season seven, most of the possibilities fans discussed among themselves were brought into play. The opening shot of “Lessons,” the last season’s first episode, shows the assassination of a Potential (though not revealed to be so at first.) Potentials were murdered; Willow had visions; The First drove the newly ensouled Spike even crazier, and haunted the living with their dead. Potential Slayers by the dozens hurried to Buffy for safety, and Giles returned to mentor and guide them. In “Potential” (7-12) it appeared that yes, Dawn was in line to become the next Slayer. Then in “Dirty Girls” (7-18), Faith herself showed up. And the race to figure out how Buffy would end was on.
The official announcement drew casual Buffy viewers into the guessing game, and the puzzle mainstreamed to the point that the media began running articles about the end of “The best show that you (probably) didn’t watch” (San Diego Union, May 18, 2003.) Pieces appeared in publications such as The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer Magazine itself, all posing the Big Question: What’s going to happen?
Joyce Millman of the New York Times wrote:
Frankly, as long as Whedon doesn’t try to tell us that the whole series was a figment of Buffy’s imagination, I’ll be happy. I’ll be even happier if the finale grandly articulates, one last time, the show’s main themes: woman power, friendship, growing up and sacrifice.
(appearing in the Kansas City Star April 21, 2003)
Entertainment Weekly asked Whedon which of “our favorite characters” were scheduled to be “slaughtered.” And although he wouldn’t say, he did promise “one hell of an ending.”
It’s my position that he delivered, and that the ending he provided took off in a fabulously clever miniature arc consisting of the last five episodes, which delivered on three levels: as a mini-quest of its own; as the satisfying conclusion of season seven; and as the well-structured and premeditated closure to the entire Buffy the Vampire Slayer series.
Although the fate of the series was unknown at the beginning of season seven, there was a definite consciousness on the part of Joss Whedon and the writing staff that they needed to guide the show toward possible closure. As Co-executive Producer Marti Noxon noted, in an interview in Buffy the Vampire Slayer Magazine in the June/July 2003 issue, “The way that Joss designed the final episodes left things very flexible. Even though it’s a complete end to the series and you’ll feel very satisfied, it also leaves open a lot of possibilities.”
Those possibilities have now been revealed, and as of this writing (June of 2003), the fan boards have lit up with arguments and debates about the show’s finale. Some fans feel cheated, arguing that if the original concept was that there can be only one Slayer, there should only ever be one Slayer. Others are exuberant that the new, improved, open-ended nature of Slayerdom—that there are now many Slayers—may indicate that spin-offs of many forms will be the offing.
Taking all that into account—and having read all twenty-two scripts of season seven back-to-back—I’d like to offer that what Whedon and Company did to end the series “works” in every sense of the notion of mythic storytelling. And nowhere is this more evident than in the last arc of the show. That this is an arc was suggested by Marti Noxon herself when she stated in Buffy the Vampire Slayer Magazine, “Faith’s arrival in episode eighteen obviously sets off some fireworks that will propel us into our season’s end.”
First, on Buffy and arcs: In its first season and a half, Buffy the Vampire Slayer started out as an anthology show, with primarily standalone episodes featuring “monsters of the week”—the “phlibotenum,” in the Buffyspeak of the show’s writers’ room. Although the evil Master dwelled in his underground prison, the individual episodes were not linked week-by-week to his presence. Instead, monsters drawn to the evil energy of the Hellmouth provided the forces of darkness that Buffy and her friends had to battle, as in The X-Files or the first season of the more current Smallville. These were episodes such as “Teacher’s Pet” (1-4) and “Go Fish” (2-20).
However, once the show established Buffy’s world and the operating definition of her heroic nature, the storylines expanded into arcs that lasted a few episodes—the arrival and demise of Kendra in the Becoming arc, for example—to the notion that a Big Bad would dominate each season: Mayor Wil
kins for season three, Glory for season five; and arcs that extended past seasons: the duo of Spike and Dru, introduced in “School Hard” (2-19) in season two and, one might argue, extending until the end of the show. But as the story of Buffy herself unfolded, all seven seasons become a linear, organic whole, and as I posit, the last arc not only underscores this, but provides a perfect conclusion to the 144-episode-long Hero’s Journey that Buffy undertook.
The notion of a universal Hero’s Journey in the mythos of humanity was first popularized by folklorist Joseph Campbell in his book, Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell held that there are universal storytelling elements to be found in myths and legends worldwide, and he described these elements in Jungian terms of archetypes and stages. The subject of many books, TV series, and documentaries, his work probably entered the cultural mainstream when George Lucas cited his influence on the development of Star Wars (“It’s possible that if I had not run across Joseph Campbell, I would still be writing Star Wars today,” he has been quoted as saying.)
Then Christopher Vogler, now a story consultant at Fox, took Campbell’s work and applied it to his own observations about story and structure as he evaluated over 10,000 screenplays. His book, The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, provides a template for describing this last arc of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And using his template, I’d like to bolster my argument that Joss Whedon’s last arc for Buffy “works” beautifully.
Seven Seasons of Buffy: Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors Discuss Their Favorite Television Show (Smart Pop series) Page 25
