Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Myth, Metaphor & Morality

by Field, Mark

  Prophecy Girl

  BtVS began as a mid-season replacement show. All 12 episodes of S1 were shot before it aired, giving Joss the chance to go back and change or add scenes. However, he didn’t know until they were done shooting that the show would be renewed for a second season. He therefore made the decision, which he repeated every year until S6 (when he had a 2 year contract), to end the season in such a way that it could serve as a series finale if necessary. He wrote Prophecy Girl, as he wrote all season finales except S6, with that aim in mind.

  Because it wrapped up the season so completely, I’m going to discuss both the episode itself and how the whole season led up to it. I’ll begin with what I see as the key scene: Buffy’s power walk to confront the Master. I’ll say right up front that I love this scene, cheesy though it may be. That’s not why I think it’s important, though. It’s important because I see this as highlighting the fact that Buffy has finally committed to her destiny, that is to growing up. That’s why, as I see it, the Buffy theme music plays over her walk; it’s the only time in the whole series where that music is heard during an episode. It signifies that this is Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

  The immediate trigger for this commitment was her death. Buffy died in the storyline. In metaphor, though, I see it as the death of her childhood. Not necessarily the child within us – that perhaps never dies – but childhood. When she revived, her newfound strength – “I feel strong” – stems from her now-demonstrated commitment to her destiny. Buffy’s no longer Chosen (passive), she has chosen (active).

  The way I see S1, the entire season has led her to this point. Buffy first had to be called to her destiny, which Giles did in WTTH. She started out on the road thanks to her friends, but her steps were halting and uncertain. She had the fear of bad examples to overcome in Catherine Madison and Ms. French, fears that she might become the wrong kind of adult. She had seductive distractions along the way like Owen and Angel, who might keep her trapped in fairytale (i.e., child-like) romance. But she also had good examples, too.

  Sid was not just an exemplar in terms of his commitment to killing demons even at the cost of his life, prefiguring Buffy in Prophecy Girl. There’s another metaphor as well, namely that Sid leaves behind his existing state in order to move on to the next one. Indeed, the contrast between Sid, who’s willing to move on, and the demon, who’s trying to stay forever young, couldn’t be stronger. Buffy, by committing to being the Slayer in Prophecy Girl, has committed to growing up. She may feel like she’s trapped by her Slayer identity, controlled by others like Giles. But just as Sid the puppet demonstrated his own freedom from control by others, Buffy’s prepared to make the choice to leave childhood behind and take the necessary steps towards becoming an adult. She has a ways to go, as we’ll see in the remaining seasons, but she’s now on the road.

  Just to clean up a point I left open earlier, I mentioned in discussing The Puppet Show that the dramatic reading from Oedipus was deliberate. The key component of that story is that Oedipus, by trying to avoid his fate, actually caused the disastrous sequence in which he fulfilled the prophecy made at his birth, killing his father and marrying his mother. Similarly, in Prophecy Girl (this is no accident, people!) Buffy at first rejected her destiny, but because she had the courage to reconsider her choice and go meet the Anointed One, she avoided what surely would have been a worse fate.

  In my post on NKABOTFD, I asked you to think about why the Anointed One was a child. The word “anointed” means “chosen by … divine election.” In other words, the Anointed One is himself a Chosen One. But just as the Master’s “family” was a perverted mirror image of a true human family, so the vampire Chosen One is a perverted mirror image of Buffy. When she tells the Anointed One, “I know who you are”, she’s recognizing Him as her (perverted) destiny – perpetual childhood – if she doesn’t face her fear.

  Thus, Buffy had another good example in Billy, who prefigured Buffy’s confrontation of her fear when she faced the Master in his lair. What was that fear? The Master symbolizes everything awful about adulthood. He’s old, he’s wrinkled, he’s controlling. Buffy doesn’t want to be an adult if that’s the consequence; who would? She may be dead, but she’s still pretty.

  Her fear was subconscious; that’s why the Master is at the Hellmouth, a metaphor for her subconscious. By facing her fear, though, she was able to master it: “We are defined by the things we fear. (goes to the large cross) This symbol, these two planks of wood, it confounds me. Suffuses me with mortal dread. But fear is in the mind. (puts his hand on the cross and holds on while it burns) Like pain. It can be controlled. (lets go) If I can face my fear, it cannot master me.” When she freed the Master, Buffy took her fear out of her subconscious and into the world where she could and did master it.

  For this final step, she needed help from all of her attributes, not just her conscious mind. By recognizing and coming to terms with Cordelia, her shadow, she could, in Jungian terms, create a wholly integrated personality from her conscious mind and her subconscious. She needed Cordelia’s determination and ruthlessness to face and defeat the Master.

  Now let’s get to a few details of Prophecy Girl itself. In my view it’s the first great Buffy episode, meaning it’s in my top 20 or so. I’d rate it that high just for the scene when Buffy overhears Giles and Angel talking about the prophecy. Her reaction – “I’m 16 years old; I don’t want to die.” – and SMG’s delivery are like a knife in my gut. But it’s also great because it so wonderfully culminates the season and allows us to understand the meaning and purpose of the preceding 11 episodes.

  Another great detail, and a consistent theme for Joss, is Buffy’s moral judgment. Sure, she showed great moral courage overcoming her fear of death. But her reason for acting is even more important. It was Willow who caused her to act. Buffy wasn’t making any grand gesture when she went back to the library after her conversation with Willow. She didn’t necessarily even go to save the world. She went for a much more personal reason: to save Willow. A world without Willow in it just wouldn’t be worth living in. Xander, her metaphorical heart, expresses this same moral sentiment: “Ms. Calendar: Hey! Once the Master gets free, the Hellmouth opens, the demons come to party, and everybody dies. Xander: Uh, uh, I don't care. I'm sorry, I don't. Right now I gotta help Buffy.”

  And Xander does help Buffy. While I think he would be wrong for her, I can’t help but feel for him in this episode. He’s a real hero when he puts aside his disappointment to rescue Buffy anyway.

  The portents, especially the earthquake, are traditional portents for the end of the world, but if you want to see them as reflecting events in Buffy’s subconscious, I wouldn’t say you were wrong. The religious imagery is also pretty obvious, what with her wearing her virginally white dress; being reborn after baptism; and the Master telling her she’s the lLamb. In addition, Isaiah 11:6 is generally seen in Christian hermeneutics as foretelling the reign of the Messiah:

  “By nature the wolf preys upon the lamb, and the leopard upon the kid, and the adder is venomous, and the bear, and the cow, and the lion, and the ox, cannot live together. But if a state of things should arise, where all this hostility would cease; where the wild animals would lay aside their ferocity, and where the feeble and the gentle would be safe; where the adder would cease to be venomous, and where all would be so mild and harmless that a little child would be safe, and could lead even the most ferocious animals, that state would represent the reign of the Messiah.”

  To sum up, the entire season is, in my view, a very carefully constructed outline, in metaphor, of the steps a teenager takes along the road to adulthood. If the show had ended here, Joss would have told the story he wanted to tell; it’s a realization, in outline form, of his entire vision. Buffy fans often rate S1 among their least favorite seasons, but I think it’s tightly constructed and that it’s remarkable Joss could accomplish so much in just 12 episodes (Firefly, anyone?). As luck would have it, there will be 6 more seasons for h
im to elaborate on the themes raised in S1.

  Trivia notes: (1) As a resident of Southern California, I can attest that the first thing everyone does after an earthquake is try to guess the magnitude. The scene is hilarious if you’ve experienced this. (2) Xander first asked Buffy to dance in Angel. He asks again here. It’s coming Xander, it’s coming. (3) I have no idea who was fascinated with Cortona, Italy. First IRYJ, now here. (4) Buffy rejected Giles’ offer to face the Master just as Sid rejected Buffy’s offer to kill the last demon. (5) The prophecy read by the Master in NKABOTFD stated, in part “And the Slayer will not know him….” How, then, could Buffy tell the Anointed One, “I know who you are.”? Because the prophecy had already come true in NKABOTFD. Buffy didn’t know Collin then and mistook Andrew Borba for the Anointed One. (6) I probably don’t need to explain Star Trek references to Buffy fans, but Locutus of the Borg is a reference to Star Trek: The Next Generation. (7) The Hellmouth demon has 3 heads, like Cerberus, the guardian of the underworld in Greek mythology. (8) The Master’s line “Where are your jibes now?” is a quote from Hamlet, part of the passage which begins “Alas poor Yorick…” (9) It’s hard to hear, but as the group walks out of the library, Buffy says “I’m hungry. … Is anybody else hungry? … I'm really, really hungry.” Keep this in mind.

  SEASON TWO

  When She Was Bad

  While Joss got to tell his story in outline form in S1, beginning with S2 he will pick up on themes which first appeared in S1 and expand on them. This adds both depth to the story and sophistication to Buffy’s journey to adulthood. When She Was Bad transitions us from the clear but relatively simple outline we saw in S1 to the profound and deeply moving experience of S2. If Buffy was the show which made television great, to paraphrase Robert Morgan from the Introduction, Season 2 was the season which made Buffy great.

  In my experience, Buffy fans tend to underrate the season openers. I think there’s a simple explanation for this: the openers are setting the stage for the rest of the season and contain important clues to other episodes. On first watch, we don’t realize this. Since our first impression tends to stay with us even after we’ve watched them a second time (or a…. well, manyth time for some of us), they never get their due.

  WSWB is perhaps my favorite season opener, partly on its own and partly because it sets in motion events which will have ramifications throughout the entire series. What’s remarkable about this is that I can tell a new viewer this and it isn’t a spoiler because that new viewer will have no idea what the important points are. Joss (who wrote this and most other openers) weaves the story together so subtly that you don’t even realize it.

  The straight story line makes perfectly good sense, with one caveat I’ll note below. Buffy really did die in Prophecy Girl, even if only for a few minutes, and anyone who suffers such an experience is bound to have a few “issues” about it, as Giles says. If nothing else, it would tend to isolate you from your friends who haven’t undergone such trauma, all the more so if the reason it happened was something unique to you: being the Slayer. Making matters worse, Buffy can’t tell her parents that she’s the Slayer, so it’s not surprising that her father would find her “distant. Not brooding or sulking, just... there was no connection. The more time we spent together, the more I felt like she was nowhere to be seen.”

  Similarly, the events of Prophecy Girl brought home to Buffy in a very direct way the risks she, like every Slayer, runs. Xander, Willow, and Giles have taken some chances so far, but none have faced the prospect of death every single night. Post-traumatic stress disorder is a very real phenomenon, and we see some here with Buffy. This will naturally isolate her even from her friends.

  This isolation interacts with her friends’ inability to grasp emotionally what Buffy goes through nightly, which we see most acutely in Xander’s reaction when Buffy returns to the library. Xander had the right to be angry with Buffy for her attitude – and I’m not even counting the dance he finally got that didn’t really work out for him – but his reaction was over the top. First, while everyone had recognized the note as a trap, all of them thought the trap was for Buffy: “It is a trap. … It just isn’t for her.” Xander’s angry reaction suggests that Buffy could have avoided the problem if “she’d worked with [them]”, but that’s not really true because no one realized the nature of the trap (nor could they have).

  Second, Xander completely failed to show any understanding of Buffy’s emotional state. His reaction – “If they hurt Willow I’ll kill you.” – was indefensible. I mean, let’s get real here. Kill her? This was the first time I got angry with Xander, but it won’t be the last. There’s always going to be some distance between Buffy and her friends simply because she’s following such a different path.

  Now let’s consider Buffy’s situation in metaphor. She made the commitment in Prophecy Girl to face her fear of adulthood and to grow up. She can’t tell her parents that; it’s just not what a child does. In fact, parents are often reluctant for it to happen, and the child thinks the consequence will be losing her parents. Hence the commitment to growing up means that you become more distant from your parents, just as Hank described.

  It also has consequences for Buffy’s friends. They haven’t yet made that commitment, or at least she doesn’t sense that from them; she even tells Willow to “grow up”, while Xander is childish with his “bitca”. As a result, she’s feeling isolated from them. Then too, the push for her to make the commitment came from Giles, her metaphorical mind. While Giles therefore is the most insightful now in explaining her situation to others, Buffy sees him (in her dream) as the one who killed her childhood.

  Worse yet, her heart (Xander) and her spirit (Willow) don’t understand the consequences of Prophecy Girl and may not be all that sure about this decision. In her dream they ignore her as she struggles with Giles/The Master. She sees them as not understanding her situation and lashes out at them in return. I’ll hint for the season that it’s no accident that Xander bears the brunt of her anger in the painful but brilliant dance scene.

  Her shadow self makes matters worse (h/t Cherrycoke), which is what the shadow often does. Cordy’s first words in the episode are “it was a nightmare, a total nightmare.” She’s not talking about Prophecy Girl, or is she? Practically the first thing Cordy says when she sees Buffy brings back the worst memories: “I'm talking about big squiggly demons that came from the ground? Remember? Prom night? With all the vampires. … it was all so creepy. That Master guy? And all the screaming? I don't even like to think about it.” This could be Buffy talking to herself.

  Of course, the shadow didn’t really like the effect of all that on Buffy’s conscious self and later tells Buffy to knock off the Joan Collins ‘tude. The shadow really doesn’t need the competition.

  Why is it that Buffy is so upset about the Master’s bones? The obvious reason is that it leaves open the possibility that her fears of adulthood are buried but not destroyed like she thought. Only at the end, with the catharsis of grinding him into talcum powder, can she be certain that her fears are gone forever.

  Trivia notes: (1) The title of the episode comes, of course, from the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem: “There was a little girl, who had a little curl/Right in the middle of her forehead,/And when she was good, she was very, very good,/But when she was bad she was horrid.” (2) The presence of the Master’s bones requires a little comment. It’s the only time we ever see a vampire’s bones survive dusting, and it’s never really explained. This drives some people crazy. As I mentioned in the Introduction, though, Joss doesn’t really worry about plot details when he’s trying to get at an emotional truth, which is the whole point of art. This is a perfect example. (3) While I haven’t mentioned the song lyrics in every essay, and don’t plan to, it’s worth noting how perfectly Alison Krause’s lyrics capture Buffy’s emotions in the car ride: “You've been on a road… Don't know where it goes or where it leads….” The Cibo Matto lyrics similarly fit the scene.


  Some Assembly Required

  Some Assembly Required is, I get the impression, viewed by most fans as a light, funny, but not very good or important episode. I half agree with this – it’s light and funny, but, per usual, I think it’s also telling us something important.

  There’s a strong couples theme to the episode, so let’s start with that. Giles wants to date Jenny; Jenny subtly asks Giles out; Angel approaches Buffy, but is insecure enough to worry about Xander; Cordy hits on Angel, yet again; Xander’s still jonesin’ for Buffy and likewise Willow for him. That all sounds pretty normal and natural.

  The dialogue tells us that at least some of this attempted coupling is the result of not wanting to be left out. Fittingly enough, Xander, Buffy’s metaphorical heart, explains it at the end:

  “Xander: Well, I guess that makes it official. Everybody's paired off. Vampires get dates. Hell, even the school librarian sees more action than me. You ever think that the world is a giant game of musical chairs, and the music's stopped and we're the only ones who don't have a chair?

  Willow: All the time.”

  There can be good reasons for being left out – I left out the passage where Cordelia tries to thank Xander and he blows her off – but nobody wants to be left out even if they’re at fault.

  Ok, so what does this have to do with Chris, our Doctor Frankenstein, or his monster, Daryl? The way I see it, Chris and Daryl are, in metaphor, one person. Chris is the ego and Daryl the id. Consider this dialogue in that light:

  “Chris: Maybe you could... you could go out...

  Daryl: No!

  Chris: Let people know.

  Daryl: They can't see me. Chris, you've always been smarter than me. You were always the brains. You're the only one who can help me now.”