My best friend Sue is coming down this weekend so we can watch the Oscars together with a few people on Sunday. Before I had kids, she and I would put on THE most elaborate Oscar parties you could imagine. We’d have close to 40 people, all crammed in a room (or various rooms on various TVs) and throwing snark at the show we were all watching. We’d run a pool -- $5 at the door and you filled out a ballot, and the one with the most points at the end of the night won (one year the pot was $175). I was a movie hound at the time, and made it my mission to see every single film nominated in a major category – writing, acting, directing, picture, or music. I found it clouded my judgement; you’d become passionate about a certain film that was nominated even though only you and three other people ever watched it, and you’d vote for that person to win even though they didn’t have a chance. The people who saw none of the films usually did the best, because they just listened to the pundits on TV in the days leading up to it.
I should probably mention that I kind of hate the Oscars. Actually... I loathe them. And yet, I cannot look away. So our idea was to devise a party that would allow us to actually celebrate the cheesiness of them and enjoy watching all of the categories, no matter how overblown the actual production was.
We had an Oscar statue… we’d make montages of everyone nominated by cutting out pictures in magazines and creating these massive posters… one year my friend’s younger sister showed up in this long, sequined, form-fitting gown and acted as the hostess at the door, leading people in (did I mention we also had a red carpet outside that went all along the porch, down the stairs, and out to the driveway?) We had trivia on the commercial breaks where you could win fabulous prizes. Yeah. We went all out.
But we never worked as hard at anything as we did our menu. We’d begin planning it around Christmas, and have amassed a large collection of appetizer cookbooks that I still have. In January we’d begin guessing what movies would be featured and would continue to hone in the dishes, and by Oscar night we had the dishes, the names of the dishes, and elaborate menus written up that would describe each one. They were corny as hell (and groceries were usually over $300 and we’d be up first thing on Sunday morning to begin assembling everything) but we loved it.
A couple of weeks ago Sue found the old menus on her computer and forwarded them to me, and we laughed and laughed and laughed. Sue is the queen of cheeseball writing... the two of us would sit down and come up with ideas, and one would throw out the idea, the other would cheese it up in the descriptions. (I've rarely laughed as hard as I have when we're writing something together... one of these days we need to collaborate.) This Sunday, we’re having about eight people in total, still doing the ballots, but the snackies will be of the “open up the bag and pour it into a bowl” variety. Kids kinda change those priorities (I’d rather hang out with the kids all weekend than cook! Although strangely enough, while my daughter has very little interest in cooking or baking, my son loves it). But we’ll always have our corny menus from the days of yore. So here I present to you, a couple of our old Oscar menus... here's hoping they make you groan. Enjoy the Oscars!
The 2002 Oscar Party Menu! Sit back, watch the Oscars, and enjoy our Denzel Dips and Beautiful Finds, and groan at our cheesy descriptions (hey, we aim to please). And because everything you see below is made from scratch, Jen and Sue can assure you there will be no A.I. (Artificial Ingredients).
Moulin Rouge Pepper Dip (Rye bread with red pepper dip) ♪ How wonderful life is, now this dip’s in the world. ♪ You can-can-can and will-will-will love this yummy dip!
Russell Crudité (Veggie Tray) As long as he’s a staple on the Oscar ballot, this dish will be a staple at our Oscar party. Just take a look at those succulent carrots, the yummy cucumbers, the, um, celery, and — oh my god, I think the Russians have put secret messages in our veggie tray!
One Shrimp Ring to Rule Them All… … one shrimp ring to find them. One piece of shrimp to tickle your tastebuds, and in its goodness, spellbind them.
In the Bedshroom (Feta cheese and breadcrumb-stuffed mushrooms) You won’t want to bury this fungilicious dish in the woods!
Monster’s Cheese Ball Made with three different kinds of cheeses, this luscious cheese ball has more zing in it than an electric chair!
Halle Berry Punch With a mixture of ginger ale, and tastes of orchard apples and cranberry juice, this little recipe packs a huge punch! Kinda like Halle.
Sissy Spanakopita She’s gone from a pig-blood-drenched telekinetic prom queen to a coal miner’s daughter, and now she’s a tasty Greek treat!
Pimento (Olives) Yeah, yeah, it might not be as fancy as the other dishes, but we can promise you won’t easily forget this wonderf--… what was I saying?
Sexy Beef (Swedish meatballs) Spicy yet sweet, like Ben Kingsley’s various roles. The kind of meatballs that would make Don Logan visit your house to try them out. So you might not want to keep them around…
Marisa Tomeitoes (Avacado-stuffed tomatoes) You say tomato, I say to-mah-to, you say Marisa won in 1993, Rex Reed says Jack Palance was drunk in 1993… we can’t say if the ballot box was stuffed when she won for My Cousin Vinny, but these tomatoes sure are! (And hey, this time she deserves to be nominated!)
Gosford Bark (Chocolate bark with roasted almonds) Upstairs or downstairs, you’ll kill for a taste of this delicious treat!
The 2003 Oscar Party Menu! We’ve been wiling away The Hours in the kitchen all day to bring you these Catch Me If You Canapés. We hope you are Spirited Away by our culinary delights that we guarantee will leave you Spellbound! We’ve discarded some of our other ideas (Renee Zellburgers, Attack of the Scones, Gangs of New Pork, Road to Fruition) and we hope you enjoy our Adaptations of some traditional foods. You won’t feel Far From Heaven after eating these!
Razzle Dazzle Raspberry Punch ♪ “Give ’em the old razzle dazzle/ Razzle Dazzle ’em!/ Give ’em a punch with lots of zing in it,/ And the reaction will be passionate!” ♪
Unfatful Worried about the size of your waistline for the nude roll in the hay scene with the sexy young foreign stud? No need to worry, these veggies and dip will keep your waistline so slim that your husband will overlook your adulterous cravings and take you back.
Queen Tortifah Roll-Ups This is one mighty big appetizer for you all to enjoy. Its rich flavourful centre is fit for a queen. Remember, if you’re good to us, we're good to you! (Tip jar is near the door.) Who’s queen? Why, Queen Tortifah of course!
Polanski’s Piroshki’s You’ll risk an arrest warrant to try one of these vegetarian delights! A meatless concoction for our herbivore friends, these veggie-filled pastries contain eggplant, onions, garlic, and tomatoes. Recommended for ages 13 and up.
Eminems ♪ “You better lose yourself in the candy, the chocolate/ You ate it, you better never let it melt! [in your hands]/ You only get one red, do not miss your chance to eat it now/ This opportunity comes once in a lifetime, yo!” ♪
Catherine Feta-Shrooms Get ready for all that ’shroom. Your fight to get the last ’shroom may end up with you behind bars for murder — but they had it comin’. It’s the feta that made you do it.
My Big Fat Greek Baklava The clock’s ticking and you’re not getting any less full — you’re ready for dessert! Baklava combines “baka” a Greek word for “heavenly” and “lava,” meaning “mouthwatering.” Put it together and what do you have? A heavenly mouthwatering treat! Opa!
Julianne MoOreo Cheesecakes These heavenly cheesecakes are so good you’ll want to toss that old cake in the garbage! They’ll make you forget about your confused son, your gay husband, and your black gardener… you’ll just want more and moreo!
2.9 What’s My Line, Part 1 2.10 What’s My Line, Part 2 2.11 Ted
This week we have two amazing episodes . . . and “Ted.” Season 2 is interesting because it moves in waves. There is a bit of a slow start, and then School Hard happens. Then a couple of okay episodes that feel very season one-ish, followed by the hilarity of “Halloween” and the darkness of “Lie to Me” and “The Dark Age.” The “What’s My Line?” episodes further the idea of Buffy realizing she has no future and bringBuffy and Angel together so they actually feel like a couple, where until now it’s been more like puppy love. And then there’s “Ted” and “Bad Eggs,” which are the “meh” episodes in the middle of the season, followed by the spectacular “Surprise”/ “Innocence” combo you’re going to get next week, and after that it pretty much hurtles forward until the end without stopping. (Well, okay, stopping briefly for a couple of monster-of-the-week eps near the end, but that’s fine.)
I’ve often wondered how Buffy would have looked if it had followed the HBO model of 13 episodes a season. Every season of BtVS always has those throwaway episodes that are standalones and don’t do much to further the plot. Lost had them, too, but they were less noticeable – either the backstory was just meaningless or the on-island material was boring, but rarely did an episode of Lost completely miss on both counts. BtVS, on the other hand, has those filler episodes each season where they took the scripts they’d originally relegated to the scrap heap and pulled them out, saying, “Hey, let’s do THIS one!” But as many a Buffy fan will say (and I’m one of them), the worst episode of Buffy is still better than 99% of everything else on TV. And even “Ted” is one of those episodes that’s instantly memorable... where I’ve forgotten some of the minute details of some of my favourite Buffy episodes, I remembered every minute of this one. Of course, I also remembered that I kind of hated it.
In light of one particular scene we watched this week, I do want to take this opportunity to mention a particular paper that really fascinated me at last year’s Slayage. It was by a German scholar, Marcus Recht, who provided this amazing look at BtVS that I’d never considered before. He watched the series with the sound turned off (!) and looked at the actual poses of the characters during torture scenes. He found that typically on Buffy and Angel, the vampires are pulled out into Jesus Christ poses, with their arms stretched out at their sides, shirtless, and vulnerable. The humans typically have their arms clasped behind them, usually in a chair. Watch for this in the rest of the series. In “What’s My Line, Part 2,” we see the first vampire torture scene with Drusilla going after Angel, and his arms are stretched out at his side and he’s shirtless, just like Marcus said. It was quite a stunning paper.
Highlights: • Buffy and Willow discussing their love of shrubs. • Drusilla’s whimper and the way Spike jumps up to soothe her instantly. • Spike “dancing” with Dru. • Mr. Gordo!! • Giles: “You’d be amazed at how numbingly pompous and long-winded some of these Watchers were.” Buffy: “Colour me stunned.” • Xander to Snyder: “I want to walk in your shoes. Well... not YOUR shoes. You’re a tiny person.” • Oz: “Canapé?” EEEEEE!!! • Buffy on what book was stolen from the tomb: “I’m guessing it wasn’t A Taste of the Vatican cookbook.” • I’ve always had a soft spot for Willy the Snitch. • Willow: “Don’t warn the tadpoles!” (This is the frog fear I was referring to a few weeks ago when I found it strange that she had a stuffed frog with her.) • Cordy: “What am I, mass transportation?” Xander: “That’s what a lot of the guys say, but it’s just locker room talk.” • Willow: “There’s a Slayer handbook?! . . . Is there a t-shirt, too?” • The orchestra that strikes up every time Cordy and Xander kiss always makes me laugh out loud. • Xander: “Who sponsored Career Day today? The British Soccer Fan Association??” • Xander: “I am the Bug Man, coo-coo-ca-choo.” • Drusilla: “Shh... grrrruh! Bad dog.” Drusilla torturing Angel is absolutely delicious. I adore her mania. • Spike calling Buffy “Rebecca of Sunnyhell Farm.” Ladies and gentleman, the original Sawyer. • Will’s first vamp kill! • That Gothic Spike/Dru scene at the end of “What’s My Line.” FanTAStic. • “Ted”: Cordy: “Feels like home! If it’s the 50s and you’re a psycho!” • Giles saying his layers of tweed are better than Kevlar. • Buffy: Do I have to sound an airhorn every time I walk into a room?!
Did You Notice? • For the new viewers, WML is Marti Noxon’s first writing appearance, and she would ultimately become the executive producer of the show and pretty much helm it when Joss was busy with Angel and Firefly. • I remember when the WML episodes first aired, there was a whole discussion on the Buffy posting boards about what “the whole 9 yards” really DID mean. Oh Wikipedia, how we longed for you and your suspect information in those days... • I always thought it was rather amusing that something as valuable and legendary as the du Lac cross was located in Sunnydale... a few minutes from the high school. How... convenient. • Ah, 1998. Remember a time when they didn’t show blood on television? Buffy slits the bounty hunter’s throat with her damn skate and there’s not a single drop of blood on the ice. • OMG, when the Worm Man comes to the door next to Buffy’s, the woman who answers the door is totally Jane Bodehouse from True Blood!! I recognized her the minute I saw her. Interesting she went from one line on Buffy to a full part in True Blood. • Eh, mon! Dee Award for WORST ACCENT ON BtVS goes to... “Kin-DRAH! Dee Vum-pire Slay-ER!” (At least, until we hear a certain accent in the Becoming episodes... the rewatchers know exactly which one I mean.) Oh Kin-DRAH, that accent. UGH. (Bianca Lawson is now on Vampire Diaries.) Bianca is American, but Kendra is the AsianAfricanJamaicanIrish WTF Slayer. “It cloods yer judg-MENT! It’s the rituelle!” What?! • So, in case the whole slayer thing wasn’t clear (and there are long-time viewers who still have a bit of an issue with the ascendancy thing), Buffy is no longer the active Slayer. When she “died,” Kendra was called. So if Buffy dies tomorrow, there’s no new Slayer. Only if Kendra dies will a new Slayer be called forth. It’s too bad only one is allowed at a time, otherwise you could just stop the Slayer’s heart over and over and create new Slayers all over the world. • “Back off, Pink Ranger!” That line was an in-joke, because Sarah Michelle Gellar’s stunt double was the Pink Ranger on Power Rangers (when she was inside the suit). • Buffy appears to be dressed like a homeless person for days in this episode. • “Ted”: Ack, floppy disks!! Now THAT dates the program. • Sorry, have to say it... “Ted” is one of the episodes that made me really dislike Joyce. Buffy comes to talk to her in the kitchen to say Ted threatened her and Joyce simply says, “He did no such thing.” She waves it off like her daughter’s on crack and doesn’t actually listen to Buffy at all. Argh. • OMG... a police station actually exists in SUNNYDALE!! With, like, procedure and interviews and everything! The mind boggles. • "Daddy's here." :::SHUDDER::: • While “Ted” is an easy ep to dismiss, it’s important to the idea that Buffy’s power could be dangerous to those close to her. It also speaks to something that a lot of viewers have experienced – a parent back out on the dating scene, and the ooginess that can follow.
This week I’m introducing a new element to the rewatch: the Cheeseman! Otherwise known as Janet Halfyard, or Steve Halfyard, depending on who you ask. Janet is Director of Undergraduate Studies at Birmingham Conservatoire in the UK. She wrote the first essay on Buffy and Music, which you can read here. She’ll be popping in every once in a while just to add a paragraph on some of the more interesting musical moments on Buffy, and since, as I’ve pointed out repeatedly so far, the addition of Christophe Beck really changed the tone of the show, I’m fascinated by this (and for the Losties, please help me in convincing Janet that she REALLY needs to watch Lost to hear how musical motifs are created and carried out for each character...) ;)
Think of me as the Cheeseman — not really a spoiler, just something that won’t make any sense (if you’re new to Buffy) until the end of season 4. But anyway, I’m the person who pops up now and then saying “look, I made a space for the music.” “What’s My Line” has one of my favourite ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ clever bits of musical game playing. One of the big themes of the double episode is Buffy’s desire to have some kind of normal life, other than just being locked into her life as the Slayer; and that’s one of the reasons she ends up going on her ice-skating date with Angel. As she waits for Angel at the ice rink in Part 1, we watch her skating to a sweet, wistful piano melody: but if you listen carefully, you’ll hear that it’s actually the series theme tune, reworked in a major key (the Nerf Herder theme is in a minor key). The Nerf Herder version is loud, aggressive – it’s all about Buffy as the Slayer; but this reworked version is not about that, it’s about Buffy as a fairly normal teenage girl with a bit of a Dorothy Hamill fixation. The conflict between those two identities is actually really clear at this moment as both she and her music attempt to distance themselves from the heroic identity of the kick-ass Nerf Herder theme: and yet the fact that she can never separate herself from being the hero is highlighted by this still actually being the same theme, seen from a different musical angle. Whether major or minor, aggressive or lyrical, it is still the theme of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: and we get that underlined at the end of Part 2 of as Buffy says goodbye to Kendra. The major key version of the theme plays again, mirroring musically what Kendra tells Buffy “You always do that…You talk about slaying like it’s a job. It’s not. It’s who you are.”
Thank you, Janet! And now on to the feature presentation of the week: Evan Munday! Evan is an illustrator and the publicist of Coach House Press, an excellent indie publisher in Toronto (like mine) and someone who comes to so many of my company’s launches that the publisher keeps joking he should get a frequent launcher card – go to five launches, and the book for the sixth one is free! He is very funny and an excellent writer. His upcoming first novel will be published by my press, ECW, in fall of this year. It’s a Y/A novel called “The Dead Kid Detective Agency,” about a group of kids who join forces with a group of ghosts of dead children who help them fight crimes. Dark and funny, all rolled into one. I asked him if he could do one of his patented videos for me so you could share in his kooky brand of humour, and he graciously complied. He sent this to me at work, and I started watching it but made it about two minutes in and was giggling so much I had to turn it off and watch the rest at home. So, take it away, Evan!
Night of the Living Ted “The subtext is rapidly becoming the text” by Evan Munday
When faced with the three episodes of the eighth week of the Great Buffy Rewatch, it seems obvious which episodes to focus on. The two-part ‘What’s My Line?’ is much more integral to the ongoing Buffy story arc, both for Season 2 and the entire series, yet, I just love ‘Ted’ too much. Consider the following arguments:
Reasons to study ‘What’s My Line? (Parts 1 & 2)’:
1) Kendra, the second vampire slayer is introduced. There’s more than one! And she dresses like Aladdin and speaks in a Jamairish accent! [OMG, Evan just came up with perfect name for her accent!! –Nik] This seems like it could be crucial to upcoming episodes. Not only her existence, but the entire idea of a slayer queue is integral to the mythos. When one slayer dies, another is ‘activated’ to take her place. Buffy very temporarily died when The Master drowned her, so Kendra shows up. Without spoiling too much, this becomes kind of a big deal in Season 3 and Season 7.
2) Xander and Cordelia totally make out! When faced with extreme danger (and possible doom), Xander presses his lips to those of his frenemy. This can only lead to either hilarity or heartbreak. Knowing this show, probably both.
3) Willow meets Oz, for real. After several "Who *is* that girl"s from television’s shortest heartthrob, Mr. Seth Green finally gets to talk to his dream woman at the school career fair. They share similar interests and aptitudes. And by the end of the second episode, they share an intense life experience together (when, y’know, that unhinged policewoman tries to shoot Willow). If Speed taught us anything, we can assume a solid romantic relationship will follow.
4) The whole slayer heavy-cross-to-bear really gets hammered home with the school career fair and Buffy’s lament that she already has a job, will have that job for the rest of her life. (Which begs an interesting question: what’s the usual life span of slayers? Seems like a high-risk job, but one could conceivably slay well into middle age, no? Or does Buffy break some kind of slayer age record by the end of the series?)
5) Spike and Drusilla are featured prominently. By the end of this two-parter, Martin Landau‘s favourite daughter is back to full strength and Brainiac (that’s right; I watched Smallville) has been crippled by a pipe organ falling onto him. By this point it’s clear Spike and Dru are the boss level bad guys this season.
Reasons to study ‘Ted’:
John Ritter guest-stars as a killer robot who is dating Buffy’s mom.
If you’ve read ‘John Ritter guest-stars as a killer robot’ and you haven’t convinced yourself this is where blog-post solid gold lies, I’m afraid you might not enjoy this week’s installment.
That said, I feel I should do my due diligence and point out some moments of note in the two-part ‘What’s My Line?’
5 Things to Ponder in ‘What’s My Line? (Parts 1 & 2)’
1) Spike obviously cares for Drusilla, which is strange as we’ve not seen any other vampires so lovesick. Angel has been cursed with a soul, so we give him a pass. But why does Spike demonstrate such a range of human (not demon) emotion?
2) Does anyone else think its bizarre that, given Buffy’s continual depression over the burden of being a slayer she’s not relieved when another slayer shows up? One that (on paper) looks like a better slayer candidate. She studies and trains more, for sure. Every episode so far has featured at least one Peter Parker ‘I’ll be Spider-Man no more!’ outburst. But when the bad guys are defeated, Buffy tosses Kendra her shirt like Mean Joe Greene (dated reference?) and sends her back to her (presumably) vampire-free hometown. I mean, they could at least take shifts, am I right?
3) That tumble-roll during the final Buffy-Kendra vs Spike-Drusilla fight is pretty rad. It reminded me of when Batman and Robin would drop some two-combatant moves on henchmen in the Adam West show. In reality, the move seems like way more effort than it’s worth, but it looks impressive.
4) Sarah-Michelle Gellar can really skate! If she joins the next season of Battle of the Blades, I might watch.
5) As I age, I find myself liking Principal Snyder more and more. Armin Shimerman is the bomb. ‘Every word out of your mouth is an airborne toxic event.’ Amazing. Let’s hear it from the Don DeLillo fans in the audience! I’m not sure if the band named themselves after this Buffy line or the novel White Noise it references. Either way, it severely tricked me into thinking I’d like their music.
6) Best line of the episodes: ‘That’s me favourite shirt! That’s me only shirt!’
Okay, but back to more important things: Ted.
‘Ted’ is simply an hour of great Buffy: the Vampire Slayer. It takes the show’s high-school-as-hell metaphor to a genius, genuinely uncomfortable but still highly entertaining end. As Giles puts is (and as is often the case in Buffy) ‘the subtext is rapidly becoming the text.’ Buffy’s mom gets a new boyfriend who seems like the perfect man (he’s got a good job, he can make mini-pizzas; what more do you want?), but slowly ... or quickly ... Buffy realizes he’s a monster. The abusive step-parent story, so popular in fairy tales and movies starring John Locke, gets the Buffy monster makeover. And who should be that abusive father-surrogate but Jack Tripper himself, John Ritter!
Now, I know The Master was that guy in Animal House and those Twisted Sister videos, but as a teenager, I remembered ‘Ted’ was evidence that Buffy had ‘made it.’ This was real guest star. This guy was in the Problem Child movies. And man, does he bring it! Ritter must have taken Robot Mimicry 101 at Julliard or something, because the guy hands in a stellar performance. So genuinely creepy that it’s sometimes uncomfortable to watch. (‘Daddy’s here,’ anyone?)
The show turns the abusive step-parent theme up a notch by implicating Joyce, Buffy’s mom. Joyce, never the most supportive or trusting of mothers at the best of times, refuses to believe Buffy when she suggests Ted threatened her. She doesn’t even ask Ted about it; just assumes Buffy is lying. (She is kind of a liar, after all.) But as absent as Joyce sometimes is, she’s never betrayed her daughter like this.
Most harrowing is the moment when Buffy retaliates after Ted confronts her in her own bedroom (after rummaging through all her slayer gear). First, Ted (having read her diary) calls her delusional. (This foreshadows the most mind-blowing episode of all, ‘Normal Again.’) And when he strikes her, Buffy fights back as if he were a vampire, eventually killing him. This is before we know he’s a robot! (There have been clues, mostly in the neverending parade of robot puns: ‘Who, The Machine?’ ‘I’m not wired that way.’) So, for the first-time viewer, it looks like Buffy just killed a regular man. An awful person, no doubt, but not a demon. Echoes of Faith and a vulcanologist in Season 3 abound.
As a super-nerdy aside, this scene brought flashbacks of a very affecting comic book arc from my youth. In the Marvel comic New Warriors, one of the teen superheroes had an abusive dad. The hero, Marvel Boy, had psychokinetic powers, and one issue fights back, killing his father. (Eventually Marvel Boy goes to trial, with Daredevil as his attorney, and serves hard time, for those who are interested.)
The Scooby gang and Giles attempt to make Buffy feel better about her very first manslaughter. (In one scene, Willow and Xander discover his mini-pizzas are drugged with ecstasy, which they seem to think will exonerate Buffy. Totally Death Wish: he drugged our pizza; he deserved to die.) But luckily, Ted is a robot. An obsessive, chauvanist serial killer robot, so Buffy doesn’t have to deal with her great power and great responsibility issues until a later episode. And that’s probably all the episode analysis I can handle before I feel self-conscious.
As Nikki has mentioned in my bio, I’m an original Buffy watcher. I’m pretty sure my first episode was ‘Halloween,’ and I continued to watch the show religiously, every Tuesday night (surely to the detriment of normal human socialization) throughout high school and university. And when I first started watching it, it was not through the ironic lens of the sophisticated adult I now imagine myself to be. No! It was heartrending and terrifying. It left me in tears at one point or another. Not, like, when I was watching it with friends, but later, when I watched homemade VHS copies by myself in my parents’ bedroom.
And, naturally, I was madly in love with Willow Rosenberg. The only ‘pin-up’ I had in my teenage bedroom was a full-page magazine photo of Alyson Hannigan that a friend had ripped out of Seventeen. The text on the page revealed that Hannigan had a horrid obsession with beanie babies of all things. Yet despite this, I loved her ... and though the crush isn’t nearly as intense as I rewatch, it’s still there. (Alyson Hannigan, if you’re reading this, call me.)
Additionally, when rewatching Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, I realized B:tVS was rarely a solo pursuit for me. Aside from those aforementioned deep-cry sessions in my parents’ bedroom, I always watched Buffy with friends. The show was a social event (of a sort). During high school, I was one of a faithful crew of three devoted viewers stationed in suburban basement, watching vampires, eating brownies and cracking wise. It was Buffy night!
In the film My Winnipeg, director Guy Maddin moves back into his childhood home with his mother, hires actors to portray his siblings and recreate seminal scenes in his youth in an attempt to understand how he’s become the man he is. In that same spirit, I have made the following video response to the episode, ‘Ted,’ wherein I attempt to recreate the original conditions under which I first viewed the show. Please enjoy the following, extremely self-indulgent video short as the remainder of my blog post:
Welcome to this week's spoiler edition! I've relegated a few more comments over to this section after there was some kerfuffle on the non-spoiler boards that I'd spoiled something by teasing it. I thought I was creating anticipation, but I clearly overstepped my bounds and upset people (who, granted, admitted that they turn the channel when movie trailers come on because they consider those to be spoilers, too). So anything that ties in to the future will be here, spoilery or no. ;)
Nikki’s Spoilery Bits: • Spike says of Buffy, “She’s the gristle in my teeth... the bloody thorn in my bloody side.” Uh, Spike? You forgot “apple of my eye.” • Is anyone else reminded of the “I Fall to Pieces” guy when we first see Pfister the Worm Man on WML? • First time we see Angel’s bed... THAT BED. Eek. Oh, Surprise and Innocence... I think I’m going to have my fingers over one eye in dreaded anticipation. • Kendra says “vumpyre” the same way Andrew does. • Buffy says, “Spike is going down!” Teehee... • Pay attention to Oz’s “I mock you with my monkey pants!” speech, because it’s what sparks Buffy’s loopy dream in “Surprise.” Willow asks if the monkey is French, and Oz says, “All monkeys are French, didn’t you know that?” In the dream, Willow is saying, “The monkey has lost his pants” in French when Buffy walks into the Bronze. • Jenny says, “I stayed out of mortal danger for three weeks... I could get used to it.” Um, Jenny? Don’t. • Ted: Buffy jokes with Will that she’s supposed to use her powers for good. It’s just a joke at this point, but we’ll see what happens when Will uses her powers for evil. • At the end of the episode, they joke that Willow could build her own robot to do things for her, which foreshadows Warren. And makes me wonder... who the HELL decided to make themselves robotic instead of just creating a wife robot?? It’s like this plot went haywire, and they fixed it on “I Was Made to Love You.”
This weekend is a long weekend in Ontario (and a couple of other provinces) because Monday is "Family Day." A couple of years ago the government realized there's a really long space between Christmas and March Break (or, for people who aren't teachers, Easter) where there are no holidays in between, so they created Family Day in February. Today is a PA Day, so I took the day off to spend it with my daughter. So in light of Family Weekend, I decided to do a family post. (Especially since y'all have caught a glimpse of my family here...) That was just a taste of my husband's guitar playing. A friend of mine found this earlier this week... a track from a CD my husband's long-defunct band put out in the mid-90s, when everyone I knew was in a band. I was a groupie for a while, joining the band on tour and hopping across the province selling merch for them. I did see everything (when they headed out to Halifax to tour with Sloan I had to stay put in Ontario because I had my stupid school). But it was a bit of a blast from the past to hear this track again! Check out the BritPop influence. ;) The band was actually pretty brilliant, but there were personality clashes, and they broke up.
My Facebook status earlier in the week actually made it onto David Lavery's blog, which made me laugh. (Go here to see what he said.) As I explained in it, I tell my daughter a bedtime story I make up every night, usually involving this elaborate land underground that we've both constructed over many years (it's become quite the place) and this boy above the ground who can go into that world and move around in it, and has become their protector. But I was tired, so I began telling her the story of Romeo and Juliet, complete with the deadly ending. She was saddened and delighted all at once, and she loved it. Ever since, she's wanted a new one every night. I don't know why I didn't think of this sooner!! Not only is she discovering Shakespeare for the first time, but it's making me skim through the plays after she goes to sleep so I'll be ready for the next night, and I'm remembering them all over again (remember, it's been a decade since I've read most of them... with the exception of The Tempest, which I reread for one of the Lost books).
Romeo and Juliet probably still remains her favourite. She was shocked when they both died, and at one point I began humming "What Is a Youth" from the Zeffirelli version of the play (one of my favourite versions... Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey have got to be two of the most beautiful creatures who ever walked this earth...) and now she wants me to sing that to her every night as she falls asleep.
The night after Romeo and Juliet she asked for another story "like that one." I said, "You mean, one written by the same person?" And she said yes. So I told her Twelfth Night. I had to go and check a quick synopsis in one of my books first (to get all the Violas and Olivias straight) and she found that one a little confusing, but was laughing when I was adding in my own facial expressions and "Wait... what?!" asides when one twin kept getting mistaken for the other one. She liked that one a lot, too, and was happy that it actually ended on an up note. I told her they were written by the same man, 500 years ago, and his name was Shakespeare. The next night was King Lear (complete with a gruesome retelling of Gloucester getting his eyes gouged out... one of my favourite moments in English literature), and by the end of that one she first said, "Wow, that Shakespeare guy was a pretty good writer!" But then added, "But can't he come up with more happy endings??"
Next up: The Tempest. I have the Waterhouse picture of Miranda standing on the shore of the island watching the shipwreck, and it hangs above my bed, so my daughter's used to seeing it. I used that to point out what Miranda looked like, and the tempest the Prospero whips up. At the end of the story I told her it was probably my favourite (although that changes by the minute) and she said she wasn't sure she liked it as much. I told her I felt bad for Caliban and that many scholars debate him more than anything else in the play. She asked why; after all, wasn't he a bad person? I said no, he lived on that island, along came Prospero and he enslaved both him and Ariel, and it's not Caliban's fault that his mother wasn't a nice person. So that sparked a discussion about native rights and I think I might have slipped some Lost/Others talk in there.
Last night was Midsummer Night's Dream. She laughed out loud in many parts, especially when I was braying like Bottom and pretending to be Titania, professing my undying love to an ass. At the end she said, "I think that one was a little silly, Mummy." She also thought it was short, and wanted something else. So I shook things up and told her the story of Mill on the Floss, as best I could remember it. FINALLY... a use for that English education!
Tonight was Hamlet. Whew. THAT was a doozy. First, I have to admit that I didn't read Hamlet until I took my Masters. Seriously... I had a Renaissance course and a Shakespeare course in my undergrad and my prof didn't teach Hamlet in either one of them (same guy). So it wasn't until I took Shakespeare at U of T that I finally read the damn thing. So it hasn't been as ingrained in my psyche as the other books. So I skimmed through it last night and remembered a lot of it, settled in on her bed and began the story. I made sure to really jazz up Ophelia's madness, and at one point was attempting a reenactment of it, walking around the room while gazing at the ceiling and saying loopy things, pretending to weave flowers in her hair. She giggled and I laughed but explained that poor Ophelia had lost her mind from grief and confusion. My daughter didn't quite know what that meant, but then I walked Ophelia outside and pretended to drop flowers into a stream, and then decided I'd like to float in the stream just like the flowers. But Ophelia couldn't swim, and floated down the stream and under the water... my daughter's eyes widened and then her lip began to quiver. "Is she dead?" "Yes... she's dead." "Is anyone else going to die in this one, Mummy?" "Um..."
By the end of it I'd pretended to die by poisoning as Gertrude, I thrust my sword into Laertes as Hamlet and then pretended to be Laertes and begged forgiveness and then gakked my way into death, then I poured poison down Claudius's throat, then had him die, then almost died as Hamlet, then almost drank poison as Horatio, then stopped Horatio from doing it and finally died as Hamlet, flopped onto the end of her bed. She applauded... AND... scene.
"Wait... that's IT?" she said. Sigh.
Then she asked me if Ophelia killed herself and why? I said I'm not sure if she killed herself on purpose, or if she got into the stream driven by her madness and died accidentally. I told her that's a big question that surrounds the book, to be honest, and I felt like I was having a proper little literary discussion with her. She said she believes it was an accident, and I agreed with her.
I'm really enjoying this! And she'll be well versed in Shakespeare before she's out of grade 1. This morning I was in the kitchen and said, "Howl! Howl! Howl!" and then looked at her and said, "What's that from?" "King Lear," she said without pause. ;)
Tomorrow is Macbeth. If anyone knows of a good "Shakespeare for Kids" book, please let me know!
My son isn't as interested in this. He's more interested in discovering music at this point, so tonight was a Beatles night. I was washing dishes and began singing "Helter Skelter" and he looked at me and said, "WHAT are you singing?" I stared back and said, "Oh COME ON" and rushed over and popped in the White Album. Next thing it was a crazed dance-a-thon in our living room.
Oh, and earlier today I gave him a cinnamon heart. He'd never had one before. This was pretty much his exact reaction:
This week’s episodes (only two… I gave you a break!) indicate the point where the series begins to turn to the far more serious and heartbreaking. Just as Buffy was weirded out around Angel when he prematurely fangulated in front of her, now Jenny is weirded out around Giles and backs away as he moves to her at the end of “The Dark Age.” “Lie to Me” is an episode where Ford (yes, that was Max from Roswell before he was Max), a boy who is dying of brain cancer, decides he wants immortality at any cost, not realizing the personal cost would be enormous. While Buffy tries to stop him, this isn’t her usual, “You don’t get it… these people are BAD” speech, because in doing so she discovers that he’s dying, and she’s heartbroken over it. The end of the episode has always made me cry (though, sadly, there will be another graveyard scene featuring Buffy and Giles later this season that will make me cry much harder) because of the beauty and simplicity of it. Giles lies to Buffy, but it does nothing to ease her pain because she knows it’s untrue. Think of the final episode of Angel, where Illyria lies to Wesley and what that lie does for him. He can momentarily convince himself that she’s telling the truth, but not so for Buffy and Giles in this scene.
One of the lies is that the good guys are stalwart and true, but as Buffy discovers in “The Dark Age,” Giles, the good guy, isn’t what he seems, and he’s made terrible mistakes in his past. We discover that Ripper was in fact his nickname when he was a daredevil in university and managed to raise a demon that has now killed several of his friends. This knowledge will begin to change the way people begin to look at each other on the show. If you can’t trust Giles, who can you trust?
These two episodes also go a long way in elaborating on the vampire lore in the Buffyverse; in “Lie to Me,” we see the tension between what the goth romantics believe to be true and the monstrous reality they don’t anticipate, and in “The Dark Age” we get a visual on the demon living inside Angel, who is at war with the souled man in there.
Highlights: • Drusilla’s nails are divine. I’ve always wanted to have mine done like that: either black or deep wine colour with white tips. But alas, I keep my nails short. ;) • Willow’s delayed reaction to what “I Touch Myself” was really about. Hannigan has perfect comic timing throughout “Lie to Me.” • Willow is SO CUTE when Angel comes to see her: “If I say something you really don’t want to hear, do you promise not to bite me?” • Angel saying he spends the day honing his brooding skills. That is SUCH a Joss line. • Xander: “Yeah, I gotta go with Dead Boy on this one.” Angel: “Will you stop calling me that?!” • The Angel lookalike walking by Angel as he complains about the clichéd clothes the vampire-lovers are wearing. Ha! • Giles: “What? And miss the nitro-burning funny cars?” • Spike: “I’ve known you for two minutes and I can’t stand you. I don’t really feature you living forever.” • Xander: “Angel was in your bedroom?” Willow: “Ours is a forbidden love.” • The graveyard scene with Buffy and Giles. So beautiful:
Giles: What do you want me to say? Buffy: Lie to me. Giles: Yes, it’s terribly simple. The good guys are always stalwart and true, the bad guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats, and, uh, we always defeat them and save the day. No one ever dies, and everybody lives happily ever after. Buffy: Liar.
• “The Dark Age”: Buffy to Xander: “You got a bit of schlub on your shoe there.” • Jenny: “All right guys, the first thing we’re going to do is… Buffy!” Xander: “Huh? Did I fall asleep already?” LOL!! • I love how Ethan’s always a punching bag… he’s such a wiener. • Cordy stepping up with her big grin, wanting to help. • “Don’t be sorry, be Giles.” This line is wonderful; at this point, just as Buffy realized in the previous episode that life gets complicated, she’s asking him just to be the same old guy she’s always known and not to change, but that’s not realistic. • Willow to Cordy and Xander: “If you two aren’t with me 110% then get the hell out of my library!”
Did You Notice?: • Despite how many times I’ve watched this show, I’ve never noticed how often Buffy seemed jealous of Angel in these early eps. We haven’t actually seen them out on a “date” date, and yet she’s always freaking out whenever she sees him talking to Cordy or Dru or anyone but her. Hm. • Willow has a balcony off her room: I’m pretty sure in future episodes when we do catch glimpses of the rest of Willow’s house that it’s rather upper-middle-class, so I guess it’s safe to assume her parents have money. Interesting that Cordy hasn’t glommed onto her as a result. • “Dark Age”: Eyghon says, “Be seeing you,” which is the same note that Ethan left Giles in “Halloween” (and, again, is a Prisoner reference). • With Giles out of the picture, this is the first time we see Willow really take control and come up with a brilliant plan, one that may even best what Giles would have done. The scene of Angel grabbing the demon is amazing. • One of the new viewers mentioned last week that they really enjoy the Mutant Enemy man, that little guy who says, “Grr, Argh,” at the end. I just wanted to point out that that’s actually Joss Whedon’s voice doing that. ;)
Our guest commentator this week is Cynthea Masson, someone I met at – you guessed it – Slayage! We were actually at the first one together and I didn’t meet her there other than to congratulate her – at the end of the conference she’d won the Mr. Pointy award for best paper. I’d missed her paper (I was in another panel at the time) and so I emailed her after the conference to ask if it would be possible to read it, and we struck up a friendship through email. Turns out she and I grew up pretty close to each other geographically, and one of my co-workers was a friend of hers in high school! Talk about small world… I was very excited to see her at the most recent Slayage, and after the conference she joined us at Universal Studios, as I posted here when I showed y’all a pic of Cynthea and I sopping wet after the wicked Popeye ride.
Dr. Cynthea Masson teaches medieval literature and composition at Vancouver Island University (British Columbia). Her recent Whedon publications include “‘Evil’s Spreading Sir…And It’s Not Just Over There’: Nazism in Buffy and Angel” (Monsters in the Mirror: Representations of Nazism in Post-War Popular Culture, Ed. Maartje Abbenhuis and Sara Buttsworth, 2010) and “‘It’s a Thing We Do’: Crying with Buffy and Angel” (On the Verge of Tears: Why the Movies, Television, Music, and Literature Make Us Cry, Ed. David Lavery and Michele Byers, 2010). Her fiction includes The Elijah Tree (Rebel Satori, 2009), a novel that combines theories of medieval mysticism with contemporary issues of faith and sexuality.
Take it away, Cynthea!
“What? Whating a What?”: Truth and Lies in “Lie to Me” and “The Dark Age”
Cynthea Masson
“Lie to Me” and “The Dark Age” illustrate an essential and overarching message of the entire Buffyverse: life is decisively not “terribly simple,” “the good guys” are not consistently “stalwart and true,” and “the bad guys” most certainly cannot be “easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats” (“Lie to Me”). Without spoilers, let me say that one of my favourite aspects of both Buffy and Angel is that some good guys turn bad and some bad guys turn good (and then the bad turn good again and the good turn bad again, and so on and so on). In Buffy, we learn to expect the unexpected precisely because Whedon and company continually work in figurative shades of grey. “The Dark Age” provides us with a glimpse of this technique when revelations about “good guy” Giles reveal a demon-summoning past that works against our expectations of him. Notably, in both “The Dark Age” and “Lie to Me,” Buffy must face an unexpected revelation about someone she thought she knew—both Giles and Ford harbour a “dark secret” (to borrow a phrase Buffy uses about herself in “Lie to Me”). In “good guy” vs. “bad guy” ethics, the difference between Giles and Ford hinges neither on their respective demonic associations nor on the unethical lies they tell regarding those associations, but on the choices they make (or refuse to make), in the end, to do good. Thus, alongside shades of grey, these episodes illustrate another fundamental tenant of the Buffyverse: the power of choice. “You have a choice,” Buffy says to Ford, despite the rationale he has provided for his unethical actions. “You don’t have a good choice, but you have a choice” (“Lie to Me”).
In “Lie to Me,” one site at which the “good guy” / “bad guy” dichotomy collapses is around the practice of lying. When Buffy confronts Ford on his lack of ethics, calling him “a lying scumbag,” he replies, “Everybody lies.” Given the array of lies expressed in “Lie to Me,” Ford’s retort may well be one of the episode’s prevailing truths: with the best or worst of intentions, with positive or negative results, both the apparent “good guys” and the apparent “bad guys” lie. Buffy lies habitually as she attempts to keep her slayer status a secret from people, including Ford. Angel lies to Buffy regarding Drusilla—eventually compelling Buffy to rebuke, “Don’t lie to me.” Willow, albeit by omission, lies to Buffy regarding her investigation of Ford—“You want me to lie to her?” she asks Angel. Ford blatantly lies to Buffy when he claims to have killed a vampire who, alive and well (so to speak), later appears at the school library. Ford also lies to Buffy about his true intentions in Sunnydale and, moreover, to his group of vampire-wannabes about the full extent of his plan. Meanwhile, lies of another sort influence people’s perceptions: thus, to Chanterelle, vampires are “the lonely ones”; she labels Xander’s more accurate description of vampires (“the nasty, pointy, bitey ones”) a “misconception.” Similarly, Giles believes the lie that Drusilla “was killed by an angry mob in Prague,” when, as we know, she currently resides in Sunnydale. In other words, in “Lie to Me,” virtually everyone—good or bad, for better or worse—is caught up in a lie of one sort or another.
Yet despite the profusion and, at times, apparent necessity or relative comfort of lies, truth prevails; thus, by the end of this episode, each of the lies noted in the previous paragraph has been replaced (again, for better or worse) by a respective truth. In the process, “Lie to Me” asks us to consider not only the ethics of lying but also the ethical complications of telling the truth. Is the revelation of truth necessarily good? Is truth necessary when pursuing what Richardson and Rabb call “virtue ethics” (see The Existential Joss Whedon, page 52)? When Buffy transparently lies that her vampire-slaying ruckus in the alley was merely cats fighting, Ford matter-of-factly responds, “Oh, I thought you were just slaying a vampire.” “What?” says Buffy. “Whating a what?” Having had her truth exposed by someone else, Buffy is initially flustered. “You don’t have to lie,” Ford insists. Relieved, Buffy later admits to Willow, “I don’t have to constantly worry he’s going to find out my dark secret.” Of course, Ford’s knowledge of Buffy’s truth is the very thing that incites Ford to develop (and lie about) his own “dark secret” plan. When Buffy learns from Angel that Ford is “not what he seems,” she accuses “the people [she] trusts” of being part of a “conspiracy.” Momentarily, she is unable (or, perhaps, unwilling) to distinguish truth from lies. “Virtue ethics,” it seems to me, involve not merely telling truth or lies but telling the difference between them, recognizing the intentions behind them, and making ethical choices accordingly. (One might recall here Wesley’s words in Angel’s “Not Fade Away”: “The first lesson a watcher learns is to separate truth from illusion—because in the world of magics, it's the hardest thing to do.”) “Virtue ethics” also involve the choices we make when the lies we have told or accepted are replaced by difficult truths. Buffy chooses to believe her friends and to demand that Ford make an ethical choice. (Of course, Ford makes an unethical choice, and he pays the consequences.) “Some lies are necessary. […] Sometimes the truth is worse,” asserts Angel. “I can take it. I can take the truth,” replies Buffy. Yet, as “Lie to Me” illustrates, taking the truth sometimes takes slayer strength.
“The Dark Age,” like “Lie to Me,” also portrays the complicated relationships among truth, lies, and choice. This episode brings to light a hitherto hidden aspect of Giles: his rebellious youth, complete with the practice of demon summoning. Thus the Giles that Buffy, Willow, Xander, and even Jenny know—the “fuddy-duddy” whose “diapers were tweed”—is suddenly revealed to have an unexpected and unethical past. Years earlier, instead of the tweed and books for which he is known by Buffy and others (including us), Giles sported leather, an electric guitar, and a tattoo. For Buffy, Giles’s uncharacteristic behaviour in this episode is precisely not Giles or, as she succinctly puts it, “very anti-Giles.” Xander conjectures, “Nobody can be wound as straight and narrow as Giles without a dark side erupting.” However, what the episode reveals is that the “dark side” of Giles preceded the “straight and narrow”; thus, the “straight and narrow” Giles is, arguably, a chosen construction meant to repress or replace the aptly named “Ripper” of his youth. To protect his “straight and narrow” identity, Giles lies repeatedly in this episode—not only to the police but also to Buffy. What we might ask, especially in the wake of “Lie to Me,” is whether Giles has been lying to Buffy for years by concealing his less-than-reputable past. Are friends obligated to reveal their “dark secrets” to each other? We might alternatively ask whether the “straight and narrow” Giles is a lie and, furthermore, whether Giles has been lying not only to Buffy but also to himself. Will the real Rupert Giles please stand up? “So,” Giles says aloud to his reflection in the mirror, “you’re back.” In this moment, does Giles refer to the demon Eyghon or to “Ripper”? Either way, Giles must now face a former truth he had tried, but clearly failed, to suppress. “Don’t be sorry,” Buffy later demands of him. “Be Giles.” Thus Buffy requests that Giles continue to be the man she knows and trusts. Only when Buffy confirms his current self as a truth—be Giles—can Giles admit the truth of his past to her and, consequently, move ahead (with a little help from his friends) to fight his demon(s).
The early scene in “The Dark Age” in which Buffy, Willow, and Xander discuss Giles’s fondness for school is later countered by Giles’s own admission about “studying history at Oxford and…the occult by night”: “I hated it. The tedious grind of study, the overwhelming pressure of my destiny.” Another truth is thus revealed: Giles and Buffy have more in common than they might have previously believed. Everyone makes mistakes, but mistakes—even demonic mistakes—are not necessarily apocalyptic; this, perhaps, is a lesson Buffy must learn. By the end of the episode, Giles is the subject of admiration: “I don’t see how Giles does it,” says Willow. Buffy responds, “I don’t think he has a choice.” But, of course, he did have a choice, and he chose to abandon the arguably unethical practices of his youth to pursue his responsibilities as a Watcher. “I never wanted you to see that side of me,” Giles says to Buffy. “I’m not going to lie to you,” she replies. “It was scary.” What Buffy affirmed to Angel in “Lie to Me,” she illustrates with Giles in “The Dark Age”: that is, despite the difficulties she may face in the process, Buffy—slayer of the vampyres—most certainly “can take the truth.”
WORKS CITED Richardson, Michael J. and J. Douglas Rabb. The Existential Joss Whedon: Evil and Human Freedom in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly and Serenity. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2007.
Next Week: 2.9 What's My Line? Part 1 2.10 What's My Line? Part 2 2.11 Ted
Aptitude tests, bad accents, and... a bunch of malarkey. With co-host Evan Munday. You're in for a very fun treat with this one. ;)
And welcome to this week's spoiler post, where you can post comments of a spoilery nature without worry of any first-timers seeing what you write. Please check above and read this week's post, with commentary by Cynthea Masson, before posting below. I don't have much to add in the way of spoiler material, but the further we get into season 2, the more I find myself seeing clues of Willow's future confidence and power, Buffy's vulnerability, Giles losing his stuffiness, Angel drifting away, and Spike coming more to the forefront. I find myself looking for clues of future awesomeness, and they really are there all along. Interesting for me that where Buffy is freaked out by Angel's fanginess, and Jenny backs away when Giles walks to her at the end of "The Dark Age," on the contrary, when Willow discovers Oz is a werewolf she just shrugs and goes along with it. Reason #4,031 why I love Willow.
Nikki’s Spoilery Bits: • I often wondered why Angel put up with such childish mind games from Buffy… it’s not like he’s still a kid inside, although maybe older men like this sort of thing (heehee). Watch how in Angel he’s far more mature and actually acts his age, and has no time for games of any kind. • Just as Eyghon fights against the demon in Angel, so is the soul at constant war with the demon, a war where so far the souled man is winning and keeping itself on the surface, but Angel needs to keep it in check to prevent the demon part from surfacing. We know that in Surprise, the souled portion of him will lose the fight for a while. • This is the first time we see Chez Giles. The layout will change later (there are no steps coming directly down to it, and the desk and couches will be in different places). The first time we see Giles’s house he wakes up in bed in a panic. All I could think of is seeing that same bed, with a dead Jenny on it, covered in rose petals, and what a devastating scene we have coming up. I’m anticipating and dreading it all at once.
Today on Valentine's Day I wanted to share one of my favourite songs from the past few years. The first time I heard it, I immediately thought of the BtVS episode we watched last week, "Inca Mummy Girl," although there's a gender reversal in this one. Bittersweet, lovely, and devastating. Listen closely, and I hope you love it as much as I do. This is storytelling through song at its best.
First of all, thanks for all the very kind comments about my daughter's Very Dramatic performance of "I've Got a Theory." I've got many more videos where that one came from... maybe one day I'll post some of them. :)
And here we are… we’ve finally reached that moment in the Great Buffy Rewatch that I’ve been looking forward to — the week where it starts to get really good. By week 9 (the March 1 week) it’ll go from really good to spectacular, but for those first-timers out there, I hope you loved “Halloween” as much as I did. What a glorious episode.
Now, it was preceded, of course, by the unfortunately named “Inca Mummy Girl” and “Reptile Boy,” both episodes that had that monster-of-the-week feel — the first drawing a parallel between Buffy sacrificing her life for the good of mankind and a similar sacrificial virgin thousands of years earlier who was killed for the good of her people… and the second being a metaphor for how frat boys are a bunch of pigs who are ruled by a penis (that second one was a wee bit less subtle).
But Halloween is where everything turned. I squealed with delight when we saw the first moment of “Ripper,” and I hoped that the newbies sitting at home were thinking, “Wait… WHAT?” I would have loved to have seen your faces. Who is this Ripper? Wait til next week to find out more…
Highlights • Inca: Buffy: “Have you ever done an exchange program?” Xander: “My dad tried to send me to some Armenians once; does that count?” • “What he lacks in smarts he makes up for in lack of smarts.” • Giles: “You are the Chosen One.” Buffy: “Just once I’d like to be the overlooked one.” • OZ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! • Devon: “What does a girl have to do to impress you?” Oz: “Well, it involves a feather boa and the theme to A Summer Place.” • Xander to Buffy in her overalls: “And where are you from? The country of white trash?” • Willow’s Eskimo outfit (complete with spear!) has me giggling every time she’s on screen. Alyson Hannigan has never been cuter. From staring at the cheese to that befuddled and wide-eyed look on her face, it’s not just Oz who fell in love with her… he’ll have to fight me for her first. • Buffy to Giles: “One of these days you’ll have to get a grown-up car!” • Reptile Boy: I LOVED the Scoobs watching the Bollywood movies, and the fact that Willow could follow everything. I used to watch them all the time, even though I had no idea what was actually going on in any of them. • Cordy: “Oh Buffy, it’s like we’re sisters! With really different hair!” • Willow unleashing on Giles and Angel: “And YOU! You’re gonna live forever and you don’t have time for a cup of coffee??” These are the episodes where we begin to see Willow come into her own. • Willow: “Some guy’s attacking Buffy with a sword! Also there’s a really big snake!” • Halloween: Buffy: “Gee, I would love to sign up. But I recently developed carpal tunnel and can tragically no longer hold a flashlight.” • Two classic Cordy lines: First when she calls Angel a “Care Bear with fangs,” and then her line, “When it comes to dating, I’m the Slayer!” • Buffy fainting when she sees the monster. • "She couldn't have dressed up like Xena?" Haha!!! One of my all-time favourite lines (mostly because the first time I watched this episode, my Xena book — my first book — was still at the printer, and I was a massive fan of the show). • Giles's reaction when Willow walks through the wall. I backed that up and watched it a few times. Never ceases to slay me. • Buffy asking Angel if he has a musket, haha!! • Ripper beating the hell out of Ethan. YES! • Buffy to Spike: “Hi, honey. I’m home.” CLONK!
Did You Notice? • Inca: I’m only just noticing this now, but Buffy’s eyebrows have been tweezed to a fraction of their season 1 size. It’s completely changed her face. • Now, while I’m not out to demonize her, I must say that it’s when Joyce is embarrassing her daughter in front of other people that I don’t like her as much. I didn’t like her talking to this stranger in their house going on about how beautiful she was and why couldn’t she take her daughter out with her and teach her a thing or two? It just bugged me. • Reptile: Don’t you love how it took hours to do the investigation of the frat boys, the trial, and the conviction? Wow, the justice system moves swiftly in Sunnydale… and the victims don’t even have to be questioned by the police! • Halloween: Again, watch how Joss undermines the baddie at the beginning of the episode: The Big Bad is so menacing he can’t even remember to charge the batteries when they’re low for his all-important video. • When Oz tells Cordelia she’s like a great big cat (I don’t know why that line makes me laugh every time, but it does) look on the locker behind her, and you’ll see a big WP sticker. Rumour among the Buffy fans throughout the series was that the recurring WP sticker was short for “Willow Power.” • Ethan leaves a note for Ripper that says, “Be Seeing You,” a reference to the late 60s TV show, The Prisoner (a show often referenced on Lost.
And now it is my very happy pleasure to introduce you to Christopher Lockett. Despite him being an assistant professor at Memorial University in Newfoundland for the past five and a half years, I didn’t actually meet him at Slayage. Chris and I first met when we were both taking our Masters degree in English Lit at the University of Toronto. We were in the same Victorian Literature and Gender course and we both arrived early one day. As we sat outside the classroom on the bench, I made some comment to him about the class, he laughed and answered with a line from The Simpsons. I looked up, responded with another line from The Simpsons… and a long friendship was born predicated on pop culture, literature, Monty Python (any British humour, really), and Buffy. And Lost, and The Wire, and Deadwood… OK, on a lot of stuff. He went on to do his PhD at UWO (which is where I’d done my undergrad) and becoming a director of various Shakespearean plays before moving out to the Rock to become a prof. I went on to write companion guides to TV shows. Each of us was envious of the other’s job.
He is currently at work on a book on HBO’s vision of America (he wrote an essay on HBO's "Rome" that appears in the Journal of Film and Television that is pictured here), and writes a regular column at FlowTV.org as well as a personal blog, An Ontarian in Newfoundland. He vows to come to Ontario to visit me more often.
Read to the end of Chris’s excellent analysis of this week’s episodes (with a focus on Halloween, natch) for a fun vampire-themed activity on his blog! There are a few spoilers ahead, so be prepared for white, but I’ll repost the full spoiler-filled post on the spoiler forum below if you’d like to read it without the white space, and with one crucial picture (warning: it’s a spoiler if you haven’t watched Angel Season 2).
“Not-you is you … but not you.” By Christopher Lockett
Hello, all! It is a great pleasure and honour to be counted among Nikki’s band of luminaries and to take part in this collective re-examination of what is one of the best television shows of all time. It was often uneven, to be sure, and but was also the site of some utterly sublime episodes, deeply textured and nuanced characters, and one of the most innovative reimaginings of the vampite genre specifically and the gothic generally. I share the sentiments of some here (including Nikki) who mourn for the dilution of Joss’ brilliant vision by subsequent banal and toothless and inane sojourns into the vampire realm (I’m looking at you, Stephenie Meyer!).
That being said, I must confess that returning to early Buffy is a bit of an odd experience. There is an element, rewatching the early episodes, of datedness. When I first became a fan, the show was something of a revelation — basically, that a high school-based drama (that involved vampires, no less) could be so cheekily and unapologetically smart and well-written, not something that exactly proliferated on the tube at the time. The X-Files was one of its only contemporaries, really, at least in terms of possessing irreverent self-aware humour that at once set the show apart and tipped a wink to the viewers, even as it addressed pretty weighty themes and issues. Then came The West Wing, and then my inauguration into the HBO-centered “quality TV” revolution. I have in the past few years been working on a series of articles about HBO, and thus am frequently immersed in Deadwood or The Wire or The Sopranos. All of which means that when I return to early Buffy, I have an impossible standard in my head — it is not fair to measure Buffy by the yardstick of The Wire, for the simple reason that those series pioneering the unmapped territory of intelligent and indeed intellectual television back in the mid-late 90s didn’t have the freedom to do whatever the hell they wanted.
(As an aside: if I were a high-ranking producer at HBO or AMC or Showtime, I would be backing a Brinks truck up to Joss Whedon’s house, unlocking it, and leaving a note that said “Fuck Fox. Do whatever you like. We’ll air it.” Why hasn’t this happened?)
I was a late convert to the Whedonverse, only really getting into the show mid-season three (in my defense, I was in the early stages of my PhD and didn’t have cable at the time). When I had the opportunity to go back and watch the first two seasons from the beginning, the experience was a little incongruous: the show really did not, in my opinion, hit its stride until midway through season two, when it started to depart more confidently from the somewhat simplistic allegories of Monster=Adolescent Development. So when I saw the roster of episodes that Nikki posted, I leapt on these three because they do an excellent job of highlighting this transition. “Inca Mummy Girl” and “Reptile Boy,” as indicated by their very titles, exhibit the tendency toward allegorizing elements of teenage life by way of the supernatural, the former paralleling Buffy’s feelings of exclusion and difference with the titular Inca mummy girl, and the latter refiguring the sexual predations of frat boys on teenage girls with ritual sacrifice. Which is not to say that these are bad episodes, necessarily, though both harp a little overmuch on the theme of Buffy the put-upon slayer who really just wants some “normal” girl time. This theme is never far from the center of the Buffy narrative arc, but on returning to the earlier episodes one finds it repeated with rather tiresome frequency.
Conversely, “Halloween” is an episode that is thematically very complex and plays some interesting games with questions of identity and desire and the subjective self. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that we have Spike and Drusilla featured rather prominently, or that we are introduced to Giles’ erstwhile nemesis Ethan Rayne—having the conjunction of such villains with the identity-game of Halloween makes for all sorts of potential goodness, and Joss Whedon certainly rises to the challenge.
Basically, this is an episode that operates as a series of inversions: everyone (or most everyone) becomes the person they think they want to be, by way of Ethan Rayne’s spell that turns everyone into their costume. Buffy, possessed of the idea that Angel would be more into her if she were more like the aristocratic women of his youth, dresses as a noblewoman; Willow attempts to be sexy, but chickens out at the last moment and hides herself in a ghost costume; and Xander, who suffers the humiliation of being rescued from a bully by Buffy, dresses as a soldier. It’s worth noting that in this episode the triadic friendship of Buffy-Willow-Xander, so crucial to the series as a whole, is flipped, with Willow as the pivot point. Buffy becomes the helpless, fainting eighteenth-century damsel versus Xander’s no-nonsense hypercompetent soldier. It is Willow, of course, who figures out the source of the curse, in the process having to shed the obscuring shroud of her ghost costume and become (relatively) unselfconscious about her original, skimpy “costume” — which Buffy had harangued her to wear:
Buffy: It's just ... You're never gonna get noticed if you keep hiding! You're missing the whole point of Halloween. Willow: Free candy? Buffy: It's "come as you aren't" night! The perfect chance for a girl to get sexy and wild, with no repercussions. Willow: Oh, I don't get wild. Wild on me equals spaz.
Later on, Buffy describes Halloween as “the night that Not-You is you … but not you.” Which really works as a neat summary of this episode’s theme: personal identity is put into play in truly elemental fashion by Ethan Rayne’s curse: all three of the series’ best friends become the “not-you” they are all chasing at the start of the episode, with varying results.
Xander’s transformation is the most straightforward. Though in season four he deliberately dresses as James Bond on Halloween in case they all get transformed into their costumes, he does pretty well in this episode (and it stands him in good stead in episode 2.14, when he liberates a rocket launcher from the local army base). His quasi-helplessness at the beginning of the episode, when Buffy has to rescue him from a bully, is salved by his transformation into a soldier while Buffy herself shrieks and runs from cars, and in her simpering state sees him as a better protector than Angel. To a certain extent, this episode presages Xander's future role in the Scoobies, best summed up when Buffy defends his role to the Watcher’s Council in season five as having logged more “field time” than any of the watchers. Xander whispers to Willow that that is “Riley speak,” but really it reflects the role he discovers in this episode, as Buffy’s loyal soldier.
Willow’s transformation anticipates her evolution into a sexual being. Though this is not actually realized until the consummation of her relationship with Oz in the finale of season three, it does mark a break from her (undeserved!) status to date as Buffy’s frumpy friend. There is an essay to be written on Willow’s sexual development (actually, I’m probably showing my ignorance here — it occurs to me that there are probably several), especially taking into consideration the Anya-based alternative reality in which she and Xander are vampires. But here for the first time we see Willow as possessing sexual agency, even if she does not herself — capped at the end of the episode with Oz noticing her as she crosses the street in front of his van, having shucked her obscuring ghost costume.
And yet in Willow’s un-substantial being, there is a troubling of her sexualized ensemble, as she is not afforded the choice of covering up with her costume, but must walk about in the outfit she ultimately did not want to display. Her choice at the end of the episode to leave the ghost costume behind is an empowering choice — but one she did not have previously.
Finally, Buffy’s desire to embody an archaic femininity is ironically almost catastrophic, allowing Spike to very nearly bag his third slayer. But I say “ironic,” because we see the original of the model for her “noblewoman,” sketched in the Watcher Diary she and Willow filch from Giles’ office, appear some time later in Angel 2.07.
[go to the spoiler forum below to see the photo that should be posted here]
As has been remarked here previously, Darla’s later return and her narrative significance on Angel makes her brief appearance in season one of Buffy both pregnant and poignant. I cannot of course know if the figure sketched in the Watcher Diary was intended to be Darla, but the fact that her first encounter with Angel in flashback on Angel so perfectly matches the image Buffy tries to replicate speaks at the very least to a very shrewd writer/director (good on ya, Tim Minear!). Further, it means that we retrospectively look at Buffy’s desire to emulate the aesthetic of a woman she imagines Angel would be interested in with a somewhat more critical eye. At the end of the episode, Angel dismisses the noblewomen of his youth, saying “They were just incredibly dull. Simpering morons, the lot of them. I always wished I could meet someone ... exciting. Interesting.” Let’s take a moment and think about that, shall we? Starting with the fact that we now know Angel was a working class Irish lout who wouldn’t have gotten within three city blocks of an actual noblewoman (so perhaps this description he offers Buffy is from his experiences as a vampire?). More importantly, this seems a bit of Angel protesting too much: seeing as how his pre-vamp Irish lout found someone exciting and interesting in the person of Darla. Hence, Buffy’s desire in this episode to embody an aristocratic femininity based on her perusal of the Watcher Diary in the hopes that it would “interest” Angel is actually quite astute, if for all the wrong reasons. And I suppose that’s a good thing: it would have been a very different episode if Ethan Rayne’s curse had turned her not into a “simpering moron,” but Darla.
In an episode all about identity, the most surprising, and satisfying moment is our realization that Giles isn’t quite the buttoned-down stuffed shirt we have thus far seen. “Halloween” is the first episode in which we first meet the Ripper, Giles’ younger self, the occult-obsessed badass conjured here by Ethan Rayne. On watching this episode again, I felt a twinge of regret that he sends Willow away as soon as he sees Rayne—though we meet the Ripper here, it will be some time before Buffy &co. come to appreciate his badass side. But really, that makes his epic beat-down of Ethan even more priceless. While we see his young charges realizing (ambivalently) the identities they desire, we see Giles confronted with the one he has tried so hard to leave behind him.
By way of conclusion … I am grateful for the excuse to return to these early episodes of Buffy. It is easy to forget how innovative Joss’ vision was—and how smart many of the episodes of this series (and his others) are. Halloween, some theorists might be inclined to tell us, is all about drag. About the performance of identity. What I love about the Whedonverse is how it takes that complex of desire and grafts the transformative magic of fantasy on it.
***
Thank you, Chris! And I wanted to add that if you go here on Christopher’s blog, you’ll find the vampire cage matches, which began last summer, and then halted at a very crucial moment…
Here, in Chris’s words, is how it began: "The cage matches started when I took a bunch of my students out for drinks after the exam, and they took turns ripping into Twilight. I speculated on who would win in a fight between Edward Cullen and Spike (the answer is obvious), and one of them said "Hey, you should write that!" At the time, an online SF magazine was staging fantasy cage matches to the death between the heroes of SF and fantasy novels, so I borrowed that model and did it with vampires. It stalled at the semifinals for various reasons, and so has been on hiatus for some time ... but I've been wanted to finish it off for a while, and this seems like a great time to kick start it again!"
So, who would win in a cage match between Spike and Angel, or Eric Northman and Blade? (Please let’s get Spike and Eric in a cage together… with me included?) Go here to join in the fun and vote.
Next week: The lovely and talented Cynthea Masson writes about Lie to Me and The Dark Age. And Ripper is back…
As always, this is the place where you can post spoilery comments about this week's episodes. Please go to the post above this one if you've come here directly, and read many more insights (I just post the purely spoilery ones here).
Nikki’s Spoilery Bits: • Willow’s playing with a stuffed frog, but later we’ll find out she had a very dire frog fear; I wouldn’t think she’d be playing with a toy frog like that if she was terrified of the thing (you won’t see me playing with an African Zuni doll!!) • Willow and Oz are my favourite couple on the show (even though I really do love Tara) and so I’m so excited to see him for the first time this week. • Reptile Boy: And now I’ll begin to defend my Bangel-ness. See, Buffy can sense when he’s there, but she can’t sense Spike. He’s just problematic to her later, and she only turns to him for cold comfort. Being with Spike makes her feel guilty and dirty, but being with Angel gives her comfort and happiness, even if it almost kills her. Maybe I’m just a romantic, but that’s why I always preferred her with Angel. (Even though, as I’ve said, I prefer Spike of the two vampires.) • Willow is SO angry that Buffy lies to Giles in Reptile Boy, and Buffy says no, she just didn’t fill him in on everything. Watch how later Willow will keep a few little things – like, oh, bringing Buffy back from the dead – from Giles in much the same way. • This one’s for the Glee fans: How many people think the Dave character on Glee (the closeted football player who bullies Kurt while secretly wanting him) has his precursor in Larry? The moment I saw the guy on Glee I thought, “Hey, that’s just Larry all over again!” As with Dave, Larry will be Xander’s bully and we’ll find out he’s coming over all macho and muscle because he’s secretly gay. Joss makes it seem less tragic, but the seeds for Dave’s character are still here. • I liked the black cat superimposed over Willow’s face as she looked through the window, and the suggestiveness we can see now, whether or not she was intended to be the Wiccan at that time. • In the Watcher’s Diaries, they look at the girl in the entry for 1775, and Willow says Angel would have been 18, and still alive. Um… nope. They change Angel’s age by the end of season 2, and we’ll see him get turned in 1753. • Ethan says, “Showtime!” the same way that Sweet says it in Once More, With Feeling.
And here once again is Chris's piece, this time with the spoilery bits not whited out, and an interesting comparison photo with season 2 of Angel.
“Not-you is you … but not you.” By Christopher Lockett
Hello, all! It is a great pleasure and honour to be counted among Nikki’s band of luminaries and to take part in this collective re-examination of what is one of the best television shows of all time. It was often uneven, to be sure, and but was also the site of some utterly sublime episodes, deeply textured and nuanced characters, and one of the most innovative reimaginings of the vampite genre specifically and the gothic generally. I share the sentiments of some here (including Nikki) who mourn for the dilution of Joss’ brilliant vision by subsequent banal and toothless and inane sojourns into the vampire realm (I’m looking at you, Stephanie Meyer!).
That being said, I must confess that returning to early Buffy is a bit of an odd experience. There is an element, rewatching the early episodes, of datedness. When I first became a fan, the show was something of a revelation—basically, that a high school-based drama (that involved vampires, no less) could be so cheekily and unapologetically smart and well-written, not something that exactly proliferated on the tube at the time. The X-Files was one of its only contemporaries, really, at least in terms of possessing irreverent self-aware humour that at once set the show apart and tipped a wink to the viewers, even as it addressed pretty weighty themes and issues. Then came The West Wing, and then my inauguration into the HBO-centered “quality TV” revolution. I have in the past few years been working on a series of articles about HBO, and thus am frequently immersed in Deadwood or The Wire or The Sopranos. All of which means that when I return to early Buffy, I have an impossible standard in my head—it is not fair to measure Buffy by the yardstick of The Wire, for the simple reason that those series pioneering the unmapped territory of intelligent and indeed intellectual television back in the mid-late 90s didn’t have the freedom to do whatever the hell they wanted.
(As an aside: if I were a high-ranking producer at HBO or AMC or Showtime, I would be backing a Brinks truck up to Joss Whedon’s house, unlocking it, and leaving a note that said “Fuck Fox. Do whatever you like. We’ll air it.” Why hasn’t this happened?)
I was a late convert to the Whedonverse, only really getting into the show mid-season three (in my defense, I was in the early stages of my PhD and didn’t have cable at the time). When I had the opportunity to go back and watch the first two seasons from the beginning, the experience was a little incongruous: the show really did not, in my opinion, hit its stride until midway through season two, when it started to depart more confidently from the somewhat simplistic allegories of Monster=Adolescent Development. So when I saw the roster of episodes that Nikki posted, I leapt on these three because they do an excellent job of highlighting this transition. “Inca Mummy Girl” and “Reptile Boy,” as indicated by their very titles, exhibit the tendency toward allegorizing elements of teenage life by way of the supernatural, the former paralleling Buffy’s feelings of exclusion and difference with the titular Inca mummy girl, and the latter refiguring the sexual predations of frat boys on teenage girls with ritual sacrifice. Which is not to say that these are bad episodes, necessarily, though both harp a little overmuch on the theme of Buffy the put-upon slayer who really just wants some “normal” girl time. This theme is never far from the center of the Buffy narrative arc, but on returning to the earlier episodes one finds it repeated with rather tiresome frequency.
Conversely, “Halloween” is an episode that is thematically very complex and plays some interesting games with questions of identity and desire and the subjective self. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that we have Spike and Drusilla featured rather prominently, or that we are introduced to Giles’ erstwhile nemesis Ethan Rayne—having the conjunction of such villains with the identity-game of Halloween makes for all sorts of potential goodness, and Joss Whedon certainly rises to the challenge.
Basically, this is an episode that operates as a series of inversions: everyone (or most everyone) becomes the person they think they want to be, by way of Ethan Rayne’s spell that turns everyone into their costume. Buffy, possessed of the idea that Angel would be more into her if she were more like the aristocratic women of his youth, dresses as a noblewoman; Willow attempts to be sexy, but chickens out at the last moment and hides herself in a ghost costume; and Xander, who suffers the humiliation of being rescued from a bully by Buffy, dresses as a soldier. It’s worth noting that in this episode the triadic friendship of Buffy-Willow-Xander, so crucial to the series as a whole, is flipped, with Willow as the pivot point. Buffy becomes the helpless, fainting eighteenth-century damsel versus Xander’s no-nonsense hypercompetent soldier. It is Willow, of course, who figures out the source of the curse, in the process having to shed the obscuring shroud of her ghost costume and become (relatively) unselfconscious about her original, skimpy “costume”—which Buffy had harangued her to wear:
Buffy: It's just ... You're never gonna get noticed if you keep hiding! You're missing the whole point of Halloween. Willow: Free candy? Buffy: It's "come as you aren't" night! The perfect chance for a girl to get sexy and wild, with no repercussions. Willow: Oh, I don't get wild. Wild on me equals spaz.
Later on, Buffy describes Halloween as “the night that Not-You is you … but not you.” Which really works as a neat summary of this episode’s theme: personal identity is put into play in truly elemental fashion by Ethan Rayne’s curse: all three of the series’ best friends become the “not-you” they are all chasing at the start of the episode, with varying results.
Xander’s transformation is the most straightforward. Though in season four he deliberately dresses as James Bond on Halloween in case they all get transformed into their costumes, he does pretty well in this episode (and it stands him in good stead in episode 2.14, when he liberates a rocket launcher from the local army base). His quasi-helplessness at the beginning of the episode, when Buffy has to rescue him from a bully, is salved by his transformation into a soldier while Buffy herself shrieks and runs from cars, and in her simpering state sees him as a better protector than Angel. To a certain extent, this episode presages his future role in the Scoobies, best summed up when Buffy defends his role to the Watcher’s Council in season five as having logged more “field time” than any of the watchers. Xander whispers to Willow that that is “Riley speak,” but really it reflects the role he discovers in this episode, as Buffy’s loyal soldier.
Willow’s transformation anticipates her evolution into a sexual being. Though this is not actually realized until the consummation of her relationship with Oz in the finale of season three, it does mark a break from her (undeserved!) status to date as Buffy’s frumpy friend. There is an essay to be written on Willow’s sexual development (actually, I’m probably showing my ignorance here—it occurs to me that there are probably several), especially taking into consideration the Anya-based alternative reality in which she and Xander are vampires. But here for the first time we see Willow as possessing sexual agency, even if she does not herself—capped at the end of the episode with Oz noticing her as she crosses the street in front of his van, having shucked her obscuring ghost costume.
And yet in Willow’s un-substantial being, there is a troubling of her sexualized ensemble, as she is not afforded the choice of covering up with her costume, but must walk about in the outfit she ultimately did not want to display. Her choice at the end of the episode to leave the ghost costume behind is an empowering choice—but one she did not have previously.
Finally, Buffy’s desire to embody an archaic femininity is ironically almost catastrophic, allowing Spike to very nearly bag his third slayer. But I say “ironic,” because we see the original of the model for her “noblewoman,” sketched in the Watcher Diary she and Willow filch from Giles’ office, appear some time later in Angel 2.07.
As has been remarked here previously, Darla’s later return and her narrative significance on Angel makes her brief appearance in season one of Buffy both pregnant and poignant. I cannot of course know if the figure sketched in the Watcher Diary was intended to be Darla, but the fact that her first encounter with Angel in flashback on Angel so perfectly matches the image Buffy tries to replicate speaks at the very least to a very shrewd writer/director (good on ya, Tim Minear!). Further, it means that we retrospectively look at Buffy’s desire to emulate the aesthetic of a woman she imagines Angel would be interested in with a somewhat more critical eye. At the end of the episode, Angel dismisses the noblewomen of his youth, saying “They were just incredibly dull. Simpering morons, the lot of them. I always wished I could meet someone ... exciting. Interesting.” Let’s take a moment and think about that, shall we? Starting with the fact that we now know Angel was a working class Irish lout who wouldn’t have gotten within three city blocks of an actual noblewoman (so perhaps this description he offers Buffy is from his experiences as a vampire?). More importantly, this seems a bit of Angel protesting too much: seeing as how his pre-vamp Irish lout found someone exciting and interesting in the person of Darla. Hence, Buffy’s desire in this episode to embody an aristocratic femininity based on her perusal of the Watcher Diary in the hopes that it would “interest” Angel is actually quite astute, if for all the wrong reasons. And I suppose that’s a good thing: it would have been a very different episode if Ethan Rayne’s curse had turned her not into a “simpering moron,” but Darla.
In an episode all about identity, the most surprising, and satisfying moment is our realization that Giles isn’t quite the buttoned-down stuffed shirt we have thus far seen. “Halloween” is the first episode in which we first meet the Ripper, Giles’ younger self, the occult-obsessed badass conjured here by Ethan Rayne. On watching this episode again, I felt a twinge of regret that he sends Willow away as soon as he sees Rayne—though we meet the Ripper here, it will be some time before Buffy &co. come to appreciate his badass side. But really, that makes his epic beat-down of Ethan even more priceless. While we see his young charges realizing (ambivalently) the identities they desire, we see Giles confronted with the one he has tried so hard to leave behind him.
By way of conclusion … I am grateful for the excuse to return to these early episodes of Buffy. It is easy to forget how innovative Joss’ vision was—and how smart many of the episodes of this series (and his others) are. Halloween, some theorists might be inclined to tell us, is all about drag. About the performance of identity. What I love about the Whedonverse is how it takes that complex of desire and grafts the transformative magic of fantasy on it.
Mostly, I write about television, and with this being the home of the Great Buffy Rewatch of 2011, a lot of that television is Joss Whedon-related (when it's not about Lost). Stick around if you love Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, Sherlock, Lost, BtVS, Doctor Who, or anything on HBO.
I've published companion guides to Xena, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Alias, and Lost through ECW Press, and my latest book is "Finding Lost — Season Six: The Unofficial Guide." Currently, I love Revenge, Community, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead... actually, pretty much everything on HBO or AMC.
Welcome to the home of the Great Buffy Rewatch of 2011, where every Tuesday night we convened to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer from season 1 to the end. I was joined by over 25 guest commentators and Buffy scholars who helped me lead you through the watch, offering non-spoilery discussion for the new watchers as well as spoiler-filled discussions for the rewatchers. The entire Rewatch can be found in the archives here, listed by week and contributor. Go here for the full 2011 schedule, and here to see the list of amazing contributors. And be sure to pick up my book, Bite Me, a complete episode by episode guide to the series!
My best friend Sue is coming down this weekend so we can watch the Oscars together with a few people on Sunday. Before I had kids, she and I would put on THE most elaborate Oscar parties you could imagine. We’d have close to 40 people, all crammed in a room (or various rooms on various TVs) and throwing snark at the show we were all watching. We’d run a pool -- $5 at the door and you filled out a ballot, and the one with the most points at the end of the night won (one year the pot was $175). I was a movie hound at the time, and made it my mission to see every single film nominated in a major category – writing, acting, directing, picture, or music. I found it clouded my judgement; you’d become passionate about a certain film that was nominated even though only you and three other people ever watched it, and you’d vote for that person to win even though they didn’t have a chance. The people who saw none of the films usually did the best, because they just listened to the pundits on TV in the days leading up to it.
