Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Myth, Metaphor & Morality

by Field, Mark

  Two To Go

  Let’s say this right upfront: Giles’s entry into the Magic Box at the end of Two to Go is one of the great moments of the series. Maybe not quite as good as Buffy’s “Me.” in Becoming 2, but still damn fine.

  Alas, the rest of this episode is pretty much a train wreck. The problems include the return with a vengeance [heh] of the magic/drugs theme, complete with hit-us-over-the-head terminology; the low quality of the special effects; and some fairly pedestrian dialogue. But the real problem is much more substantial than any of these and cuts right at the heart of not just this episode, but the whole end of the season.

  In Villains, Buffy tries to save Willow before she gets to Warren. Why? Because “BUFFY: Willow, if you do this [kill Warren], you let Warren destroy you too. … [to Xander and Dawn] There are limits to what we can do. There should be. Willow doesn't want to believe that. … Warren's going to get what he deserves. I promise . But I will *not* let Willow destroy herself [by killing Warren].”

  But at the end of Villains, Willow kills Warren anyway, and does so in a horrifying way. So now that Buffy is faced with the fact that Willow did the very thing which Buffy said would “destroy” her, what does Buffy say in TTG: “XANDER: Warren was a cold-blooded killer of women just warming up. You ask me, that bastard had it coming to him. BUFFY: Maybe. Andrew and Jonathan don't. … whatever she's gonna do, she starts with those two. (indicating Andrew and Jonathan) They're the line she cannot cross. … I'm not protecting you, Jonathan. None of us are. We're doing this for Willow. The only reason it happens to be your lucky day? Is because Willow kills you, she crosses a line, I lose a friend.”

  Somehow, the line Willow couldn’t cross went from Warren to Jonathan/Andrew without a beat. It’s an ethical copout. Making things worse is that there are several bits of dialogue suggesting that it’s not “really” Willow, that the magic is “making” her do these things. For example, Buffy says in Villains that Willow is “messing with forces that want to hurt her. All of us.” All of these lines tend to obscure Willow’s ethical responsibility for having killed Warren. To me, that diminishes the force of the entire sequence of events. After all, if Warren “had it coming”, or if it was the magicks, not Willow, which tortured and killed him, then there’s no reason to hold Willow responsible for what “she” did and no reason to worry about her “crossing a line”. Villains manages to keep this distinction pretty clear, but it all collapses in TTG.

  The central scenes involve the confrontation between Buffy and Willow. I see that as metaphor, but I don’t want to discuss the metaphor now because that would spoil Grave. Similarly, Spike’s goal remains ambiguous but will be clear by the end of Grave. I’ll hold off discussion until then. In the meantime I’ll offer a more light-hearted take on one scene.

  Some viewers felt that the scene of Willow breaking into the jail was too unrealistic, too public, within the accepted mythology of the show. It’s not a particularly good scene, but calling it “unrealistic” because she would have been arrested led me to make this response:

  People v. Rosenberg:

  (The judge turns to defense counsel: "Your witness."):

  DC: Officer, where were you standing when you saw this damage to the police station?

  Officer: Outside, on the sidewalk.

  DC: What was the nature of the damage?

  Officer: Well, bricks and stones were torn out of the front of the building until there was a large hole. Also, some of the bricks fell on the squad cars on the street and damaged them.

  DC: Officer, did you get a good look at the defendant?

  Officer: Yes.

  DC: And you can see her in court today, right?

  Officer: Yes.

  DC: How tall is she?

  Officer: About 5'5"

  DC: And how much does she weigh?

  Officer: Maybe 115.

  DC: How tall are you?

  Officer: 6'1"

  DC: How much do you weigh?

  Officer: 210.

  DC: Officer, you have to stay in shape for your job, don't you?

  Officer: Yes.

  DC: Do you lift weights for that?

  Officer: Yes.

  DC: Could you tear bricks and stones out of the wall of the police station with your bare hands?

  Officer: No way.

  DC: Do you believe this woman could?

  Officer: No.

  DC: Did the defendant have any tool that you saw?

  Officer: No.

  DC: How, then, did she remove the bricks?

  Officer: I don't know. They just came flying out.

  DC: Let me get this straight. The defendant was just standing there on the sidewalk and the bricks came out.

  Officer (defensively): Right.

  DC: She never touched the police station, not with her hands, not with a tool, not at all?

  Officer (standing his ground): No.

  DC: But the bricks came out without her touching them?

  Officer (very defensive): That's what I saw.

  DC (sarcastically): So the defendant used some psychic power, then?

  Officer (angry): I don't know.

  DC: If the defendant never touched the wall, how do you know she was the one who used these (sarcastic again) psychic powers?

  Officer (unsure): She was standing there.

  DC: Well, you were standing there too, weren't you?

  Officer: Yes.

  DC: How do we know you didn't do it? Did you use your psychic powers to damage the police station?

  (Laughter)

  Officer (resigned): No.

  DC: Did you use your (sarcastic) psychic power to stop her?

  Officer: I don't have psychic power.

  DC: But she does?

  Officer: Yes.

  DC: No more questions.

  Trivia notes: (1) The title follows from Willow’s last words at the end of Villains: “One down.” (2) Andrew’s “Laugh it up, fuzzball” to Jonathan is a quote from Star Wars. (3) When Andrew says that being in prison is “like his [Warren’s] test”, it’s a very similar reaction to that of April in IWMTLY: she suggested that Warren had given her a “girlfriend test”. (4) Andrew’s description of Willow as “Dark Phoenix” makes the story line source explicit (see trivia notes to Villains). (5) Jonathan said that Willow wore “floods”, referring to pants which are too short. (6) The scene of Willow on the truck was taken from the movie Vampires. (7) Spike’s “Here we are now. Entertain us.” is presumably quoting the Nirvana song “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. (8) Dawn told Clem that Rack’s place moves, which we learned in Wrecked. (9) Willow told Rack that she “just wanted to take a little tour.” That’s what he told her in Wrecked. (10) Anya asked what would happen if Willow “filleted their souls”, a pun on filet of sole. (11) Willow’s reference to herself as “side man” goes back at least to Fear, Itself, where she tells Buffy “I’m not your sidekick”. (12) Andrew described Willow as “Sabrina”, referring to Sabrina the Teen-Age Witch. (13) When Willow tells Buffy that being a slayer is “about the power”, that hearkens back to Checkpoint and forward to all of S7.

  Grave

  Grave is the only finale which was not written by Joss and the only one to end on a cliffhanger. For these reasons and others, as I mentioned in my post on Bargaining, I’ve come to think of seasons 6 and 7 as an extended two-year arc which comes to completion only with Chosen. That makes Grave less a conclusion than a transition. If you look at the seasons this way – roughly, IMO, as the two seasons which deal with Buffy as an adult subsequent to the five seasons she spent becoming an adult – then it makes sense both that Grave ended with issues unresolved and that it would seem less like the other finales. Joss: “I've said this before, that I think when people look at the seventh season, as a story, they'll understand season six better.”

  I’ll talk first about the major unresolved issue. The short version is that the last three episodes were deliberately ambiguous about whether Spike wanted his soul back or t
he chip out, to the point that James Marsters was instructed to play it as wanting the chip out. So many viewers were confused – *raises hand* – that Joss issued a statement afterward confirming that Spike did, in fact, go to the demon with the intent of having his soul restored. In an interview, Jane Espenson said, “But it was that moment, in the bathroom, when Spike looked at the demon in him, that's what made him want to go get a soul…. We did mislead on you all, led you to believe it was the chip. We knew all the time. If all he wanted to do was hurt Buffy, he could have hurt Buffy [so he didn’t need the chip out]."

  In general, the fans were not amused by this trickery. While I won’t go into the issue in detail, the phrases "Make me what I was" and "former self" present major problems if he intended to become a souled vampire. Most thought it unfair, and I know many who absolutely refused to believe that Spike wanted his soul until Joss said it.

  There’s a difficult issue raised by the decision to stick with the soul canon rather than to reform Spike as a vampire. The problem is that they implicitly reformed him in order to insist that they were following the soul canon. It’s hard to explain why a vampire would come to want his soul back. That should be, to coin a word, inconceivable. When we first met Spike in School Hard, he told Angel that demons don’t change: “Angel: Things change. Spike: Not us! Not demons!” By the end of Seeing Red, he had an epiphany: “CLEM: Hey. Come on now, Mr. Negative. You never know what's just around the corner. Things change. SPIKE: Yeah, they do. … If you make them.” The whole series is predicated on the idea that vampires don’t change. Spike did.

  One possibility is that Spike changed in some fundamental way since he acquired the chip in The Initiative. Maybe the behavior modification changed him. Or maybe it post-dated the chip: he fell in love with Buffy 3 episodes earlier, (h/t Aeryl) in Out Of My Mind. I don’t think there’s a right answer here, but my own view is that it was contact with Buffy which did it (see below on the religious imagery in this episode).

  In my post on Crush, I pointed out that writer David Fury got the message of The Hunchback of Notre Dame all wrong. He had Tara say that Quasimodo’s love for Esmerelda was selfish, such that he could never end up with her. He meant her statement as a prefiguring of Spike and Buffy. In fact, the whole point of Hunchback was that Quasimodo’s love redeemed him. Here in Grave, David Fury wrote the scene in which Spike’s love for Buffy has put him on the road to redemption. The trials constituted Spike’s rite of passage and the soul signifies Spike’s willingness to change himself.

  I’ll discuss Spike’s journey, including its relationship to A Clockwork Orange, in my posts on S7. For now, consider the purpose of Spike’s chip in that novel. Consider, too, my post Amends, where I discussed Angel’s culpability for the deeds of Angelus. Spike’s dark night of the soul raises the same issues. And it’s not by accident that the relevant episode is Amends.

  Grave does share one characteristic of the other finales: Buffy has the epiphany – quite literally – which solves her season-long challenge. As prefigured in Life Serial, it was a puzzle that resisted solving, but she eventually got there. Buffy told Giles here in Grave that “It was like ... when I clawed my way out of that grave, I left something behind. Part of me.” That part of her was Dawn. In my post on Bargaining I said this:

  “As applied in its original form -- to impending death -- bargaining ‘involves the hope that the individual can somehow postpone or delay death. Usually, the negotiation for an extended life is made with a higher power in exchange for a reformed lifestyle. Psychologically, the individual is saying, “I understand I will die, but if I could just have more time...”’

  It’s worth asking whether someone in these episodes promised to be better – to reform her life – as part of a bargain, and what that might mean metaphorically:

  DAWN: You told me I had to be strong ... and I've tried. (tearful) But it's been so hard without you.

  Buffy still has eyes closed, frowning.

  DAWN: I'm sorry. I promise I'll do better, I will! (still tearful) If you're with me. Stay with me ... please. I need you to live.

  In my view, we need to interpret this via the metaphor. Dawn isn’t the Key anymore, but she still has a metaphorical role as Buffy’s inner child. Buffy’s inner child wants her slayer half – the adult half – to pay more attention to her, and promises to be better in return. Keep that metaphor in mind as we go through S6.”

  Buffy thought she needed to repress her humanity, her inner child, in order to be an adult. All season long Buffy ignored Dawn, pushed her aside, insisted on protecting her – “sheltering” would be more accurate – in her effort to adopt adult behavior. We also see this reflected in Willow’s attacks on Dawn in TTG – Buffy’s metaphorical spirit lashing out. Dawn’s whiny reaction to being ignored led most viewers to take Buffy’s side, but metaphorically Buffy was wrong: “BUFFY: No. Giles, you were right about everything. It is time I was an adult. … I guess ... I wasn't ready before.”

  Here in Grave, Buffy realizes that she doesn’t need to suppress her human, younger self (Dawn, in the metaphor) in order to be an adult, but to accept that aspect of her as an essential part of her adult life. When Willow took the power from Giles, she exulted in feeling “connected to everything”. But that connection was false, and it led Willow to try to destroy the world. Buffy found the true connection in her inner humanity: “I don’t want to protect you from the world, I want to show it to you.”

  Buffy climbs out of the tomb, just as she had to do in Bargaining 2, metaphorically ending her depression by bringing her seasonal journey full circle. She wants to show Dawn the world, the exact opposite of her inadequate solution in Older And Far Away, where she stayed inside at the end. Staying inside with Dawn represented one step forward (willingness to recognize and include Dawn) and one step back/sideways because "staying in" continued to shelter her.

  One reason S6 got so much criticism, I think, was that viewers didn’t expect Buffy’s depression to last all season. Joss: “We really went to a dark, dark place. … I also understand that it got too depressing for too long, but I don't think all of my instincts are perfect.” In fairness, Joss had promised that her return from the dead would be hard, but most of us didn’t expect it to be that hard. And we can’t say we weren’t warned: the season theme was, as always, given in the opening episodes. Depression and acceptance are, of course, the two stages of grief after bargaining.

  Metaphorically, Buffy reaches acceptance after Andrew and Jonathan, who represent the lure of immaturity, flee the scene and immediately after her metaphorical heart and spirit achieve catharsis and reconciliation. In my reading, it’s Willow’s rage at Tara’s murder which leads to the catharsis. I mentioned in my essay on After Life that Buffy didn’t get catharsis there; she had to wait until now.

  The catharsis isn’t just Willow’s, though it’s obviously that too. Willow’s rage is also Buffy’s rage – rage against the petty sexism represented by the Trio, rage at herself for what she thinks she is and what she thinks she’s done, demonstrated in her confrontation with her metaphorical spirit in TTG: “WILLOW: The [world] where you lie to your friends when you're not trying to kill them? And you screw a vampire just to feel? And insane asylums are the comfy alternative?” Similarly, Willow’s confrontation with Giles in Grave is an extended attack on the rational part of Buffy, the part that for years now has insisted that she grow up.

  That explosion of emotion metaphorically breaks the blunted affect characteristic of Buffy’s depression. Her heart accepts her spirit with all its flaws and puts aside its own self-hatred – in the story, Xander’s, but in metaphor Buffy’s: “Well, last season [S6] was very much about Buffy doubting herself and the concept of power, sort of hating herself….” (Joss) We saw that self-hatred, a common symptom of depression, repeatedly emphasized in Two to Go as well as here in Grave:

  XANDER: (calls after her) Okay, then, I'll just ... catch up. She's only my best friend, you know. No big deal, just... />
  He trails off in frustration. He has walked up to the car and now he slams his fist down on its lid angrily. Then winces in pain.