Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Myth, Metaphor & Morality

by Field, Mark

  XANDER: ...glad I could help. (TTG)

  ANYA: You know, none of this would be happening if it weren't for you.

  XANDER: You think I don't know that? You think I'm the hero of this piece? (upset) I saw the gun. Before Warren raised it, I ... I saw it, and I couldn't move. He shot two of my friends ... before I could even.... You want me to know how useless I am? That it's my fault? Thanks. Already got the memo. (TTG)

  DAWN: Where are we going?

  XANDER: I have no idea.

  DAWN: What?

  XANDER: I don't know, okay? I can't even run away well. And that's something I'm usually good at.

  DAWN: Maybe we should we go back and help.

  XANDER: Yeah, 'cause I've been such a big help already. Standing around like a monkey while Buffy gets shot. Tara's dead ... and Willow ... losing...

  DAWN: (annoyed) Well, feeling sorry for yourself isn't helping either, Xander, okay? (Grave)

  The ending scenes complete the parallel between Buffy and Willow which I’ve mentioned in previous posts: both need to access their humanity in order to solve their problem. Buffy does this by accepting Dawn in Dawn’s metaphorical role, Willow through the agency of the magic Giles “dosed” her with and through Xander as Buffy’s metaphorical heart:

  ANYA: Oh. (getting it) You dosed her.

  GILES: Yes.

  ANYA: You knew she'd going to take your powers all along.

  GILES: The gift I was given by the coven was the true essence of magic. Willow's magic came from a ... place of rage and power.

  ANYA: And vengeance. Don't forget vengeance.

  GILES: Oh. How could I? In any case, the magic she took from me tapped into ... the spark of humanity she had left. Helped her to feel again. Gave Xander the opportunity to ... reach her.

  I’m not a particularly big fan of the hilltop scene with Xander and Willow. I see the show through a very Buffy-centric lens, so I don’t get as much emotional resonance from Xander’s actions. It didn’t help that I was angry with Xander already in the episode for telling Dawn about the attempted rape. Xander had no right to tell Dawn about it. That works in metaphor – the heart breaking a hard truth to the human, child part of Buffy’s self. But it can’t work at all in real life even if, as farmgirl62 pointed out in comments, “she was throwing Spike in Xander's face in an attempt to get him to go back into the fight. Xander bites back by throwing Spike under the bus as a bad individual for Dawn to idolize.” It would be unforgivable (h/t farmgirl62) incredibly obnoxious for someone to tell anyone such a personal fact. To disclose it to family is a flat out betrayal of friendship, especially after Buffy stopped him from telling Dawn in Villains.

  In fairness, here’s a counterpoint to my view of the hilltop scene from Solitude1056:

  “The first time I watched the episode, I thought: geezuz, doesn't Giles realize where Willow is heading, with all her protestations that she can't take it, must end it, must stop all the pain? Why is he encouraging her with the phrase "you can stop it," spoken yet again, and even included (I think) the nail-in-the-coffin phrase of you can end this. It seemed logical that she'd think in global terms, seeing as how she was feeling in global terms. How the hell could he push her like that? But on second watching, I realized, Giles was playing a dangerous game, betting on the fact that he knew the players well. Hence his pushing - because sometimes, you've got to really hit bottom in grieving before you can claw yourself up again - and hence him sending the message with Anya, betting on Xander being there to hear it as well. Dawn's pleading did nothing, Buffy's fighting got nowhere, Anya's separateness backfired, and it was down to Giles as the deliverer of humanity-magic, and Xander's love. Giles couldn't save the day, and didn't - he just created the door and could only hope Xander would step through it. In second viewing, I can see how touch-and- go it was, and strangely, as a result the whole thing affected me much more than it had the first time around.”

  Putting aside my personal views, my critical evaluation is that (1) Buffy’s speech to Dawn – “I want to show you the world” – fits the theme, but, along with too much other dialogue in the episode, particularly the magic/drugs methaphor (heh), is clunky; (2) Buffy’s joie de vivre seems a bit out of place. Tara is dead. Anya is a vengeance demon again. Willow killed a human being, tried to kill others, threatened Dawn, beat Buffy senseless, and tried to end the world; and (3) there’s an awful lot of forgiveness necessary in the story line for what Willow did.

  Still, the hilltop scene is affecting and Willow’s breakdown very classically cathartic:

  “Priam wept freely…as Achilles wept himself

  now for his father, now for Patroclus once again,

  and their sobbing rose and fell throughout the house.

  Then, when brilliant Achilles had had his fill of tears…

  he spoke out winging words, flying straight to the heart…

  Enough of endless tears,

  the pain that breaks the spirit.

  Grief for your son will do no good at all.

  You will never bring him back to life….”

  When Buffy climbs out of the tomb after being dead, first literally in Bargaining and then emotionally and spiritually here, she is truly born again. The music – Sarah McLachlan’s “Prayer of St. Francis” – emphasizes this theme:

  Lord make me an instrument of your peace

  Where there is hatred, let me sow love;

  Where there is injury, pardon...

  Where there is doubt, faith...

  Where there is despair, hope

  Where there is darkness, light

  And where there is sadness, joy...

  O divine master grant that I may...

  ...not so much seek to be consoled as to console...

  ...to be understood as to understand...

  ...to be loved as to love...

  For it is in giving that we receive

  And it's in pardoning that we are pardoned

  And it's in dying that we are born...

  ...to eternal life...

  Amen.

  Recall also that at the end of Entropy Tara quoted a line from Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming”, consistent with Buffy being born again. I think this resurrection imagery is quite deliberate and that the consequences will be important in S7. The flash cuts to Spike receiving his soul as the song plays make it apparent that we’re to see this journey as implicating Spike also.

  In the scene just after the teaser, Buffy tells Giles that she doesn’t know why she was brought back, and Giles has no answer for her:

  BUFFY: (quietly) I guess ... I wasn't ready before. It took a long time for that feeling to go away ... the feeling that I wasn't really here. It was like ... when I clawed my way out of that grave, I left something behind. Part of me. I just... (pauses, looks Giles in the eye) I don't understand ... why I'm back.

  GILES: You have a calling.

  BUFFY: But it was my time, Giles. Someone would have taken my place. (Giles grimacing) So why?

  Giles looks away, pensive, not answering.

  Note that this is the question Angel asked Giles in Amends. Giles had no answer for him either. As with Spike, the reference to Amends is no accident.

  As I see this, it means that Buffy doesn’t yet recognize the Ultimate Boon of the Hero’s Journey: “The ultimate boon is the achievement of the goal of the quest. It is what the person went on the journey to get. All the previous steps serve to prepare and purify the person for this step, since in many myths the boon is something transcendent like the elixir of life itself, or a plant that supplies immortality, or the holy grail.” That Boon is the subject of S7.

  Trivia notes: (1) I rather doubt Buffy told Giles about Spike’s attempted rape when she was bringing him up to date in the teaser. That might have put a serious damper on their laughter. (2) Willow reminds Giles that he called her a “rank, arrogant amateur” in Flooded. (3) Giles said that Willow killed “a human being” (singular). The DVD commentary strongly implies that Rack wa
s not human. (4) Willow uses flying knives against Giles just as she did against Glory in Tough Love. (5) Willow refers to Giles as Jeeves, the character from P.G. Wodehouse novels. (6) Willow describes Andrew and Jonathan as “dead men walking” after the movie of that title. (7) Willow sent off the fireball with the words “fly, my pretty, fly”, from the movie The Wizard of Oz. (8) When Xander called Willow “black-eyed girl”, that was probably a play on the Van Morrison song “Brown-Eyed Girl”. (9) The hilltop scene reminds me of the climax of A Wrinkle in Time, in which Meg’s love saves Charles Wallace, though I don’t know if that was used as the exemplar or not. (10) Joss wrote Xander’s “yellow crayon” dialogue. (11) During the summer, Joss announced that the theme for S7 would be “back to the beginning”.

  SEASON SEVEN

  Lessons

  “It’s about power.” Those words open Season 7 and close Lessons, and so it is about power – Season 7, I mean. Not in the sense we understood it in Checkpoint (where we hear Buffy say these very words to Quentin Travers), nor in the sense that something similar was said in TTG and in Grave, but in a very different way entirely. The whole point of S7 is to explore what the show means by “power”.

  Buffy tells Dawn in the teaser that “the stake is not the power”. That’s easy to see. But there’s an important aspect of the lesson Buffy gives Dawn which contains a clue to what Buffy will realize about power in the finale.

  We next see Willow talking to Giles in England, and Willow tells us that “it’s all connected”. She said something very similar in Grave: “It's like I, I'm connected to everything.” Again, though, it’s clear that we’re to interpret this in a fundamentally different way. There, her sense of being connected came from a dark power, like Jesse after he’d been vamped in The Harvest: “I feel good, Xander! I feel strong! I'm connected, man, to everything!” Here, the fact that everything is connected gives Willow a form of power, in this case to bring forth a flower. I think this scene is important for the season as well.

  Lessons opens Season 7 much like Buffy v. Dracula opened S5. By this I mean that the key moment in BvD came in the final scene, which introduced Dawn. The final scene of Lessons should be just as challenging and lead to similar questions: who or what was/were that in the room with Spike?

  More questions: Joss said before that season that the theme would be “back to the beginning”, but what is “the true beginning” we’re going back to according to the Master? What is it about power that’s so important? Who was that girl in the teaser and what’s her connection, if any, to anything else? I’ll give one clue about the unidentified girl: Joss: “this is absolutely the primal scene for me, because it's everything that I made 'Buffy' to get rid of. Was the girl who couldn’t get through it.”

  Setting up the season isn’t the only purpose of Lessons, of course. There’s a new high school in town, which Dawn is starting just as we saw Buffy start in WttH, and it’s terrifying to the kids. But Buffy’s an adult now so it “seems smaller”. The “manifest spirits” – I think they represent Buffy’s fears that she won’t be able to protect Dawn in high school – turn out to pose little real challenge. She can confidently tell Dawn, Kit, and Carlos that “You guys are gonna be OK. School is intense, but you'll do all right as long as you're careful.”

  There is, by the way, a huge clue to the identity of the season’s Big Bad in Spike’s conversation with Buffy. He told Buffy that her “ghosts” were “manifest spirits raised by a talisman”. His wording here references a previous episode, and I’ll make the connection explicit when we get to Never Leave Me.

  Spike’s story in S7 follows the metaphor of a pretty well-laid-out path for recovery from addiction. Here in Lessons, we see Spike in what we might call the DTs, alone by himself in the basement and acting delusional. Keep this in mind and I’ll note the steps as we go through the season.

  In Buffy v. Dracula we heard Dracula tell Buffy that her power was rooted in darkness. Here we see that the same is true of Willow. She may want to have the magic “just taken from her”, but as Giles tells her, “You're connected to a great power, whether you feel it or not. … This isn't a hobby or an addiction. It's inside you now, this magic. You’re responsible for it.” This is the final nail in the coffin of the magic/drugs metaphor; the best part about this is that we eliminate the distraction and get to see how Willow responds to the challenge that Buffy faces every day.

  Lessons also contains perhaps my personal favorite line in the entire series: “In the end, we all are who we are, no matter how much we may appear to have changed.” Note, by the way, that the camera then jump cuts to Xander, dressed, unusually, in a suit. Giles spoke the line to Willow, but the jump cut tells us that it also applies to Xander.

  I think Lessons is one of the best season openers.

  Trivia notes: There are many more references to previous seasons in S7, so lots of trivia: (1) Like every season opener beginning with When She Was Bad, Lessons opens in a graveyard. (2) Buffy did indeed miss the heart her first time, as we were shown in Becoming 1. (3) The scenes in England were shot at ASH’s home there. (4) When Giles tells Willow the magic is inside her, this also hearkens back to Becoming 1, where he told her “channeling... such potent magicks through yourself, it could open a door that you may not be able to close.” (5) Dawn called Xander “Double-0 Xander”, a reference to James Bond. (6) Xander mentioned that the last two principals of Sunnydale High were eaten: Principal Flutie in The Pack and Principal Snyder in Graduation Day 2. (7) Buffy’s warnings to Dawn about high school included references to The Pack, Go Fish, and Out of Mind, Out of Sight. (8) The new principal introduced himself as Robin Wood. Robin Wood is the name of a famous horror film analyst with a strong feminist bent. (9) As Dawn went into the school without Buffy, she said “to serve man is a cookbook”. To Serve Man was a Twilight Zone episode based on the short story of the same title by Damon Knight. (10) The song in the coffee house is “So High” by Strange Radio. (11) Hallie said the song was “happy, shiny crap”. That’s a reference to the song “Shiny Happy People” by R.E.M. (12) The reference to Mrs. Czolgosz in the conversation between Anya and Hallie is an obscure joke on Jane Espenson growing out of her reference to the McKinley assassination in Superstar. Leon Czolgosz was McKinley’s assassin. (13) Anya made someone’s boyfriend French, although she wished him to be a frog, because the English historically called the French “frogs”. (14) Buffy called the spirits “resentful dead guys”, a play on the Grateful Dead. (15) Principal Wood used the phrase “curiouser and curiouser”, which is from Alice in Wonderland. (16) It’s a truly awful pun when Warren says that he’s “more than flesh”. (17) Adam called Spike “Number 17”, a reference back to the Initiative (and to The Prisoner), which called Spike “Hostile 17”. (18) Because the show had been evicted from Torrance (see trivia notes on Graduation Day), they found a new location for the high school in Northridge, CA.

  Beneath You

  The closing scene of Beneath You is, IMHO, the best dramatic scene in the entire series (Joss wrote it). When S6 first aired, I had a lot of criticisms of Spike’s storyline from Seeing Red through Grave. I gave them all up when I saw this scene. It’s so transcendently beautiful that the set-up is worth it.

  Joss said later that one thing he wanted to explore in S7 was the extent of forgiveness – what evil can be done yet still be forgivable. The ending of BY is a key moment for this exploration, but there will be many others throughout the season.

  The title resonates not only with the theme of this episode and of the season, but with Fool For Love, where both Cecily and Buffy told Spike “you’re beneath me”. In his soliloquy Spike says that he sought a spark. Sparks glow; they are, one might say, effulgent.

  Spike’s behavior follows the recovering alcoholic trope I mentioned in the post on Lessons. He begins the episode still in the DTs, saying repeatedly that “it’s not the time” and that he’s “not ready”. We see him later, however, come into the world with bravado, claiming he’
s “changed” (note the change in clothing; it is, as he later admits, a costume) and therefore can handle "it" all on his own. As we’ll see later, there’s a reason for this behavior, but I won’t go into it now in order to avoid spoilers.

  It turns out that Spike can’t “handle it”, and he tries to hide his new condition. Stabbing Ronnie was so traumatic, both emotionally and because of the chip (yes, it did fire), that he can’t hold the pretense. He loses his emotional control and confesses to Buffy in the church scene that she’s inspired him to “quit”.

  We can see Ronnie as a metaphor for Spike – as a demon, he pursues one woman single-mindedly, but when the spell is reversed he ends up human -- naked, vulnerable and wounded like Spike in the church. For once in his life, Spike is not wearing any costume. It’s that stripping off of layers which allows him to confess to Buffy that he got his soul. This is an essential step in his progress – he understood his fatal flaw and confessed his commitment to change.

  Spike got his soul for Buffy and, I think we can say, because of Buffy. Does this mean he’s now her responsibility? I’ll let Rufus and Rahael take two sides of this:

  Rufus: “Whatever Spike is now, whatever he is to become, I feel that Buffy has the power to shape [him]....will she choose to forgive, or will she reject the newly souled vampire? The choice is hers, and remember a certain guide in Intervention told her....."love give forgive"....to do anything else would be wrong.”

  Rahael: “We cannot look to other people to save us. When we start trying to save ourselves, that's the key. That's what gives us responsibility and respect for ourselves. That's how we save ourselves. Others can give us motivations - but they cannot be held responsible for what we do - if they were, our 'salvation' is meaningless.”

  I see it as a little bit of both. Buffy, having died and returned, is Spike’s route to salvation. To put it in Christian terms, his justification comes through Buffy. But unless you’re a strict Calvinist, that doesn’t mean Spike’s own conduct is irrelevant. As I interpret Joss’s view, seen in previous experience with Angel, Spike might lean on Buffy – he clearly wants her forgiveness but knows he has no right to ask for it – but eventually he has to take responsibility for himself. No, he can’t rest. Not yet.