Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Myth, Metaphor & Morality

by Field, Mark

  We’ve also seen this pattern with Spike himself. He came to Buffy (“in friendship… well, seething hatred”) and begged for help in Pangs. Against all reason, she extended it to him. That eventually paid off in Intervention. The question for S7 is what responsibility Buffy will feel for the situation now.

  I also saw the worm as representing Buffy's fears about Spike -- that he would stalk her and attack her. Spike instead attacked the demon (thereby protecting Buffy), and revealed that the demon was just a man inside it all. Same lesson Buffy learned about Spike himself a few moments later.

  Spike’s soliloquy has pretty obvious sexual references, but can also refer to Buffy’s death in The Gift: “And you make me weak, thinking of you, holding myself, and spilling useless buckets of… salt over your... ending.”

  The soliloquy also reaffirms that Spike sought his soul voluntarily.

  Anya’s situation parallels that of Spike in some ways, as confirmed when they both “demon up” in the fight at the Bronze. There’s also a contrast: Spike got his soul for Buffy; Anya returned to vengeance because of Xander. Both Buffy and Xander took actions in the past which led to this point, and Xander was very wrong when he told Nancy that Anya was “ruining his life” when it was he who ruined hers. But Xander’s right when he tells Anya “sooner or later, Anya, that excuse just stops working.” Yes, the actions of others contribute to our current situation, but that doesn’t relieve us of responsibility from this point forward.

  Anya has backed herself into a real corner. OTOH, as Hallie told her in Lessons, she has to worry about D’Hoffryn. If she fails to deliver the vengeance she’s supposed to mete out, then she will personally experience the fact that “it’s a bad time to be a good guy”. Hence her bravado in the confrontation at the Bronze.

  But D’Hoffryn isn’t her only problem. If she continues as a vengeance demon she’s on a collision course with Buffy, as we see from the way Buffy put the sword on the table in the Bronze. That’s Buffy’s way of saying she means business.

  It’s pretty clear that Anya herself is conflicted about her demon persona because she reverses the spell. She’s confused about what she is, but she’s reaching the point where she’s going to have to take a side.

  Trivia notes: (1) The teaser was expressly an homage to Run Lola Run. (2) Buffy mentioned Dawn kissing a vampire, which she did in All The Way. (3) The worm monster derives from the movie Tremors, or perhaps Dune if you’re older. (4) Nancy’s boyfriend was Ronnie, a joke on the names of President Reagan and his wife. (5) Note also the additional joke in the name of the “[Nancy and] Sluggoth” demon. There was also a character in the comic strip named Spike. He was a bully who beat up Sluggo. (h/t Allie) (6) There’s perhaps a third pun too. Spike looks much like Sid Vicious, whose girlfriend was Nancy Spungen. If you see the worm as a metaphor for Spike, then this pun follows naturally. (7) Anya’s grant of Nancy’s wish was a pun. Nancy asked to make her boyfriend a worm. Anya made him the “same phylum” in accordance with her usual “bait and switch”. (8) Spike asked Buffy if she was “up for another round on the balcony”, referring to their sex there in Dead Things. (9) Spike asked Buffy if she was “off to the batpoles”. Buffy then rescues Nancy in a scene very reminiscent of Batman. (10) One of critic Robin Wood’s (see trivia note 8 to Lessons) essays on horror films is called “What Lies Beneath?”, which he wrote in 2001, and the theme of which is Freud’s theory of repression and the return of the repressed, with particular reference to the movie Day of the Dead. Hm.

  Same Time, Same Place

  When I first saw Same Time, Same Place, I thought the Gnarl demon was too heavy-handed. In thinking about it since, I realized it works both metaphorically and in the context of the plot. As metaphor, Gnarl represents Buffy’s fears about Willow.

  As plot, I think we should see Gnarl as born of Willow’s guilt about how her friends perceive her:

  GNARL (O.S.)

  Your friends left you here. (singing) No one comes to save you. (talking) They wanted me to have you. Did they leave you as a gifty for me? Are you a tasty little gifty? … Or did they just throw you away?

  Gnarl then punishes Willow as her sense of guilt leads her to feel that she should be punished. The entire situation, then, was something she herself created, just as she created their mutual inability to see each other.

  Gnarl used the word “gifty” when referring to Willow, three times in fact. From Robert Burns’ poem To A Louse: "O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us/to see oursels as others see us!" And what does Willow say in her conversation with Buffy at the end? “Heck, I did a little [think it might have been her]”. Her own witchy power, combined with her sense of guilt, allowed her to see herself as others saw her.

  The demon makes a lot of sense from this perspective. And it’s creepy as Hell, for my money the second creepiest on the show after the Gentlemen in.

  As for the inability to see each other, it’s very much in character for Willow to try to hide, which is what her spell accomplished. That was one of the major themes in her dream in Restless:

  TARA: They will find out, you know. About you.

  ***

  BUFFY: (to Willow) Your costume is perfect. (Whispers) Nobody's gonna know the truth. You know, about you.

  WILLOW: (bemused) Costume?

  BUFFY: (pouting) You're already in character! Oh, I shoulda done that!

  ***

  TARA: (offscreen) Everyone's starting to wonder about you. The real you. If they find out, they'll punish you, I ... I can't help you with that.

  ***

  BUFFY: (straightens up) Play is long over. (Stares at Willow) Why are you still in costume?

  WILLOW: Okay, still having to explain wherein this is just my outfit.

  (Gesturing to her clothes)

  BUFFY: Willow, everybody already knows. Take it off.

  WILLOW: No. No. (Looks around nervously) I need it.

  (Buffy rolls her eyes.)

  BUFFY: Oh, for god's sake, just take it off.

  (Spins Willow around and rips her clothes off.)

  BUFFY: That's better. It's much more realistic.

  Three episodes into S7 and as always the themes for the season have been established and major developments prefigured. STSP is very important for that purpose, as it sets the stage for one major plot development later in S7 and for Buffy’s actions in the finale. It’s a very good episode IMO, but I’ll have to discuss some of the features later in the season just as I did with Real Me in S5.

  Obviously, too, unfinished business from S6 needs to be addressed, and those past issues have now been raised for Spike, Anya and Willow. Raised, but hardly finished. We did see a step forward for Willow, but Spike is back in the DTs. Anya seems to be making tentative moves back to humanity when she admits to Willow that the “vengeance isn’t as fulfilling”. Buffy’s quietly helping Anya by turning to her for help just as if she were human.

  The ending scene is lovely, and Buffy has developed formidable reservoirs of forgiveness since IOHEFY, reflected by the fact that her metaphorical heart has already forgiven Willow. If you doubt this, compare Faith and Willow. Faith is still in jail, having turned herself in. Putting aside the practical question of whether someone as powerful as Willow could be punished by others, Willow got to spend 3 months in England having Giles go all Dumbledore on her.

  We could say that the purpose of punishment is limited to making sure that the perpetrator no longer poses a danger to society. Even if that were true – and it’s doubtful this would garner universal agreement – Willow’s case isn’t certain: “DAWN: She didn't finish? She didn't finish being not evil?” No, punishment is imposed to reinforce the moral lesson. We don’t lecture children and expect them to understand the Kantian rules. We ground them, for example, because that drives home the explanation which accompanies it. The question for an adult is whether they’ve internalized the punishment. That Willow has done so seems to be the point of this episode.

  Another difference is t
hat Willow has done quite a lot of good in her time with Buffy. Faith doesn’t have that “credit”. Still, this comes perilously close to adopting Faith’s argument in Consequences that she shouldn’t be responsible for Allan Finch’s death:

  “Faith: (steps closer) Buffy, I'm not gonna *see* anything. I missed the mark last night and I'm sorry about the guy. I really am! But it happens! Anyway, how many people do you think we've saved by now, thousands? And didn't you stop the world from ending? Because in my book, that puts you and me in the plus column.

  Buffy: We help people! It doesn't mean we can do whatever we want.”

  Perhaps a better argument is that Willow is needed in order to meet the challenges of S7. That’s what Giles told her in Beneath You: “You will be needed.” She is, after all, Buffy’s metaphorical spirit. Keeping her locked in a dungeon would mean preventing Buffy from accessing all her power. It might even put Willow back on the wrong side. By taking Willow in, Buffy can help Willow forge her own recovery instead of blocking it. If this is true, you might then ask what the proper treatment of Faith might entail.

  Whether Buffy is the proper one to forgive Willow is an interesting question. If you apply the “Hero’s Journey” rubric to Buffy – and there are good arguments for doing so – then she’s reached the stage of a Christ figure. Her forgiveness of Willow is both appropriate and a necessary step on Willow’s own path to justification.

  Trivia note: (1) Xander’s description of Spike as “chock full of sanity” plays on the name of the coffee company “Chock Full O’ Nuts”. (2) Anya and Willow reconnect in a scene reminiscent of when they first met in Doppelgangland. That reference is hardly accidental, because that’s the source of VampWillow’s “bored now” which Willow repeated just before she flayed Warren. (3) The “find the demon” spell was the first spell Tara and Willow tried (in Goodbye Iowa; it failed because Tara sabotaged it), and Willow’s spells with Tara did eventually get very sexy. (4) Anya’s statement that “teleporting isn’t a right, it’s a privilege” plays off the expression usually used in the US to refer to driving. (5) Dawn’s “it’s smellementary” plays off the Sherlock Holmes expression “it’s elementary”. (6) The facts that Willow didn’t realize her own spell until the end, and that it had unintended consequences, should remind you of her “my will be done” spell in Something Blue. (7) Many viewers thought that Spike’s behavior in STSP, and Buffy’s behavior towards him, were odd in light of the ending of Beneath You. What apparently happened was that the ending scene of BY was re-shot after STSP was filmed. The changed ending, in turn, made Spike’s behavior here and Buffy’s reaction to him seem discordant.

  Help

  In my view, Help plays the same functional role for S7 that Inca Mummy Girl played in S2. Ampata was a Chosen girl who sucked the life out of others for her own selfish purposes. That’s exactly what Buffy saw herself as having done with Angel, as her emotional reaction in IOHEFY showed:

  “Buffy: No. James destroyed the one person he loved the most in a moment of blind passion. And that's not something you forgive. No matter why he did what he did. And no matter if he knows now that it was wrong and selfish and stupid, it is just something he's gonna have to live with.”

  Buffy gave in to her selfish desire when she slept with Angel and that sucked the (metaphorical) life out of him. She therefore saw herself as worse than even Ampata; she failed a “chosen one” test.

  Similarly, the events of Help create in Buffy’s mind a standard which she doesn’t know how to meet. This begins very subtly in the teaser. The dialogue there implicitly raises the issue Joyce first noted in Gingerbread, namely that Buffy can’t really put a dent in the vampire population:

  XANDER

  33 minutes. Since when do we go through all this trouble for one lousy vampire. Excuse me, one lousy potential vampire.

  BUFFY

  Vampire by vampire. It's the only way I know how.

  If you think about Buffy’s calling in the context of Joyce’s challenge, then Buffy’s response to Xander leads directly to her rhetorical questions at the end of the episode: “So what then? What do you do when you know that? When you know that maybe you can't help?” The connection with the teaser is that if Buffy can’t defeat all the vampires and demons, then there will inevitably be those, such as Cassie, whom she can’t save. Note that this builds on the accusations of the manifest spirits in Lessons, each of which berated Buffy for failing to save them. It also builds on the girls who’ve mysteriously died, one of whom Buffy saw in her dream in Beneath You.

  The questions she asked will haunt Buffy all season just as Ampata’s behavior haunted her in S2.

  The problem posed by Help is inherent in the role of the Slayer (another “back to the beginning” theme). If you’ll recall, Buffy eventually answered Joyce’s challenge in Graduation Day with an act of rebellion which incorporated the entire Sunnydale High student body to defeat the Mayor. Because Help ended as it did, many viewers see it as bleak, even despairing. At best it seems to suggest that you can’t stop trying even when failure is inevitable. I suggest that both of these interpretations are wrong.

  In the context of the season as a whole, this is a key moment -- it defines Buffy’s problem for the season arc just as Glory’s introduction in episode 4 of S5 defined Buffy’s problem that year, Flooded introduced the Trio, and Fear, Itself showed Buffy and the Scoobies separated by their fears but united at the end. (Are we seeing a pattern here?) Much of the season will explore possible solutions. Help isn’t intended to make you give up, or to slog on in existential despair, it’s intended to make you think about the problem a little harder. And Cassie’s last words are, indeed, prophetic.

  The opening of Help (up through the scene of Willow at Tara’s grave) is, IMO, terrific. Xander’s hammer analogy describes the adult dilemma perfectly. The episode remains very good while Buffy is talking to the students, but IMO the rest is problematic. When Buffy goes to see Cassie’s father, she’s doing what she thinks is the correct, adult thing to do, but she’s painfully, embarrassingly wrong and the scene grates on us (well, me) for that reason. (This I might justify on the ground that it may foreshadow another plot point later on.) The demon-raising boys are a metanarration on Reptile Boy (continuing the “back to the beginning” theme), the idea being that events which seemed important to a high schooler look downright lame when viewed from the perspective of an adult. The problem is, most people saw Reptile Boy itself as lame; lame on lame is not a pretty combination. Dawn’s over the top “friendship” with Cassie, while it works metaphorically to show Buffy’s human side determination to save Cassie, isn’t all that plausible as a story and MT’s acting in the final scene is off to me.

  One final point. Some fans criticized Buffy for being so determined to save Cassie and so worried about Willow, while leaving Spike in the basement all by himself. One way to explain this is to note the thematic connection between Buffy’s inability to save Cassie and the fact that Spike’s demons – whatever their source – are invisible and she can’t fight them. Getting Spike to help her save Cassie might well have been the best thing she could have done for him because it enabled him to “protect the girl” instead of wallowing in his guilt.

  Trivia notes: (1) Xander mentioned the jingle “I like Ike”, which was the slogan for President Eisenhower’s presidential campaigns. (2) Putting stones on a grave as Willow did is a Jewish tradition. You can find several different explanations on the internet, which is good evidence that the true origins of the tradition, and what it represents, are unknown. (3) Buffy mentioned “occupying Algeria” in connection with the French Foreign Legion because Algeria was once a French colony before it broke away in a civil war. (4) Cassandra was the name of a Trojan princess who could foretell the future but was fated never to be believed. Like Cassie, Cassandra knew her own fate but was powerless to avoid it. (5) The book Cassie is reading in the library, Slaughterhouse Five, involves a character who knows when he’ll die and publicly predicts i
t. (6) Though it doesn’t exist anymore, there actually was a website with the address cassienewton.com, where you could read Cassie’s poems. (7) Willow mentioned that she used to post Dougie Howser fanfic. Neil Patrick Harris, who played Dougie Howser in the TV show of that name, later starred in How I Met Your Mother with Alyson Hannigan, and in Joss Whedon’s internet hit Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. (8) The actual name of the rock group Buffy got wrong was Blue Oyster Cult, whose biggest hit was “Don’t Fear the Reaper”.

  Selfless

  Season 7 has its critics, but I’ve never seen anyone who dislikes Selfless (this being the internet, I’m sure someone will now prove me wrong). It’s in my top 25, and it’s one of many reasons I personally rate S7 so highly. I think it’s a perfect example of what Joss meant when he said that we would understand S6 much better when we saw S7 – Anya’s story here couldn’t be told without the background of Hell’s Bells and succeeding episodes.

  Although Spike’s very brief scene seems unrelated to the main story line, I think it’s very much on point. I’ve always seen Anya as a parallel to Spike. Both were long-time cold-blooded killers. Both would have preferred to remain that way. Anya lost her amulet, Spike gained a chip. These events resulted in forced socialization that originated in attraction to one member of the SG. Both struggled with the adaptation to humanity after so many years as a demon.

  Spike and Anya are now both struggling with their consciences. Spike’s dialogue with the first Buffy is, as I see it, an internal dialogue in which he’s imagining that she would understand if he went to her for help, though he knows that he has no right to ask. The Buffy he “sees” in that dialogue represents something internal to him, the nature and purpose of which I’ll explain later: