Buffy Rewatch: Week 37

6.01 Bargaining, Part 1
6.02 Bargaining, Part 2
6.03 After Life

Follow along in Bite Me!, pp. 277-281

This week’s Angel episodes are:

3.01 Heartthrob
3.02 That Vision-Thing
3.03 That Old Gang of Mine

Follow along in Once Bitten, pp. 197-202.

I’m very pleased that this week’s guest host is Elizabeth Rambo, because she’s the editor of a book exclusively on seasons 6 and 7 of BtVS called Buffy Goes Dark, and I always thought that was such a brilliant title: not only does the series itself “go dark” at the end of season 7 because it’s over, but Buffy herself certain goes dark in these final seasons. Exhibit A: This week’s episodes.

I posted this week about the Buffy Lives posters to try to recreate the anticipation that viewers felt back at the beginning of season 6. But in a very strange bit of timing, we’re actually only a couple of weeks away from the 10th anniversary of season 6 beginning. And today is a couple of days after a far more important 10th anniversary: September 11. That horrific day in world history changed everything, and one of the millions of things it changed was the way we watched the premiere of season 6. The show was darker, edgier, more violent, and people were finding September 11 significances throughout the season (despite the fact the episode had been filmed long before the events of September 11). I still remember the comments that followed the two-part premiere (both parts aired together): Willow is wearing a shirt with the #11 on it!! (To which someone from the show, it might have been Joss, replied that Xander’s shirt had a 13 and Dawn’s had a 9, and maybe they’d just gotten a deal on numbered shirts…) Everything is so dark and awful! A gang comes to town and acts like… terrorists!

But for me, even today, it’s that tower crashing down that conjures up September 11. I heard (this may or may not be true) that UPN had considered excising that scene from the episode so we wouldn’t see another tower come crashing down so soon after the Twin Towers had fallen. But they left it in.

I remember the fans reacting to the violence and graphic nature of this episode. The gang is extremely violent… we see a decomposed Buffy (that still makes my stomach turn)… Willow is tortured by the dark powers that be… and worst of all, Razor threatens to rape the women of the group in an extremely brutal way, suggesting that the men of their group have penises that will rip the girls apart from the inside. Good god…

But this is a new world. Not just in our world, but in Buffy’s fictional one. Season 5 ended Buffy’s childhood completely. From here on out the monsters and vampires and things that go bump are no longer metaphors for teenage angst or parents not understanding or the harshness of trying to see a future when you’re 16 – it’s about trying to make a living and watching life become difficult and responsibilities overwhelming you. It’s about life walloping you so hard you can’t believe you ever complained about anything before the age of 20. It’s proof that, as Buffy said, the hardest thing about this life is to live in it.

Buffy died, and she believed she was in Heaven. She was happy and comfortable and knew her job was complete, that she had fulfilled her Slayer destiny and had died saving the world. She wasn’t defeated, she was victorious, and her friends will go on and live their lives, and be happy because of what Buffy did.

But now she’s back. Ripped out of Heaven, as she puts it, by the people she loves. Of course, Willow thought she was saving her friend from a Hell dimension. Willow will resent Buffy for not thanking her for doing her such a great service; Dawn will resent Buffy because her sister is not overjoyed to be back with her. Buffy had finally found peace – but now she’s back, and just as the BuffyBot was drawn and quartered in the town square, Buffy is being ripped in many different directions, until she no longer knows what she wants. Dawn tells Buffy she needs Buffy to live.

Buffy is loved, immensely. Willow is willing to let horrible things happen to her to bring Buffy back. Dawn curls up with a recharging robot every night just to be close to her sister (that image broke my heart). Everyone has changed, and is different, more somber, more serious. Willow is much darker than we’ve ever seen her… the same girl who last season said, “Don’t hurt the horsies!” during the battle in “Spiral” now kills Bambi without blinking. Giles leaves town because he feels there’s nothing there for him without Buffy. (Sniff… at the time I remember seeing “Special Guest Star” at the beginning of the episode for him and was more upset that he was leaving the show than I was about Buffy dying.)

Of course, they miss one key thing in their plans: that Buffy will come back to life inside her coffin, and will have to claw her way to the surface just like a vampire. What a horrifying, terrifying moment that is, and the way it’s handled in the episode is brilliant. Of course, it’s Xander who figures it out (too late) and the looks on Buffy’s friends’ faces is beyond description.

Buffy won’t have long to recover before she’ll be back doing what she does best: taking care of everyone around her. It’s not about what Buffy wants or needs; it never has been. Buffy is back, and must return to a life of living it for others. In seasons 6 and 7, Buffy will go dark indeed.

Highlights:
• Spike. I just love that this guy stepped up and took Buffy’s responsibility onto his own shoulders. He helps the gang fight. He doesn’t complain when he’s asked to babysit Dawn. In fact, he’s a hell of a good babysitter. He misses Buffy terribly, and he feels responsible for the fact that he couldn’t save her. I remember when Buffy came back, all I cared about was seeing the look on his face when he saw her again.
• Spike asking if Giles’s life passed before his eyes, in one of the most oft-quoted lines in Buffydom: “Cuppa tea, cuppa tea, almost got shagged, cuppa tea?”
• Anya complaining that they can’t resurrect Buffy the following night: “Tomorrow? The Discovery Channel has monkey and our tape machine is all wonky!”
• Xander says, "Great googly moogly!" I now recognize that as the oft-repeated line from The Beast in the children's cartoon, "Maggie and the Ferocious Beast." I watched it this time and thought, "Gasp! Did the Beast's line originate from Xander?" But then I googled it, and it appears to be a line used in blues music, and was made popular by Frank Zappa. Which makes that children's cartoon way cooler than I thought it was before. ;)
• Anya saying the BuffyBot is the descendant of a toaster.
• Tara holding the little monster puppet and doing Joss’s “Grr… Argh…”
• The geek vampire wearing a Hanson shirt.
• The camera effects of Buffy’s distorted and fuzzy point of view. Beautiful.
• Even in the face of all the bad things that happen, Dawn saying, “The tower was built by crazy people and I don’t think it’s holding up very well” has always made me laugh.
• Xander to Willow: How long have you known your girlfriend is Tinkerbell?

And now let’s welcome Elizabeth Rambo back to the rewatch! Take it away, Elizabeth!


As you might guess, since I’m partly responsible for a book on Seasons Six and Seven, these are two of my favorites. I’m not going to detail every scene of these first three episodes, but just try to put them in their original 2001 context, and comment on how they set the stage for the remainder of Season Six. When one is watching or re-watching Buffy on DVD and can go straight from the heartbreaking ending of season five straight to season six, it may be hard to understand or recall what the first episodes of Season Six meant back in 2001. Buffy had died before, of course. Remember the end of Season One, “Prophecy Girl”? She’s revived by Xander and comes up saying, “I feel strong. I feel different. Let’s go!” The first episode of Season Two, “When She Was Bad,” reveals that she does have some residual post-traumatic stress, but Giles deals with it, and we’re all good. Buffy is emotionally devastated at the end of Season Two, leaves Sunnydale, and tries to leave her Slayer identity behind. As Season Three opens, she is Anne the waitress in LA, but a trip to a demon underworld reminds her that she is not “no one,” but “I’m Buffy. The Vampire Slayer,” able to save the hapless victims and smash the demons. Another episode in Sunnydale, “Dead Man’s Party,” wraps up her issues with her family and friends. One or two episodes for Buffy to reclaim her mojo, and then the season swings into action. Right?

Wrong. Joss Whedon, king of subverting expectations. King of “give the viewers what they need, not what they want.” (I can hear some of you still saying, “No, no, give us what we WANT.”) But in addition what some may see as perverse Joss-ness (or genius Joss-ness, you decide), there are some real differences between the beginning of Season Six and all previous seasons. The greatest difference in terms of narrative: Buffy has been dead for a little over four months—a “hundred-forty-seven days,” according to Spike, “longer,” according to Buffy (“After Life”). Even a Slayer doesn’t just bounce back after that, and Willow says as much. Of course, the Scoobies believe Buffy has been in a “hell dimension,” an experience more analogous to Angel’s after being sucked into the vortex of Acathla, and after the Powers That Be mysteriously returned him to Sunnydale it took at least four episodes for him to be fit for human society again. We get a hint that this is wrong when resurrected Buffy’s first words in “Bargaining,” at the top of the tower “built by [Glory’s] crazy people,” are to ask Dawn: “Is this Hell?” But when Buffy reveals (only to Spike) that her “afterlife” experience was not at all hellish, we should understand that this comeback will take more than three or four episodes:

I was happy. At peace. I knew that everyone I cared about was all right. I knew it. Time…didn't mean anything…nothing had form…but I was still me, you know? And I was warm…and I was loved…and I was finished. Complete. I don't understand about theology or dimensions, or…any of it, really…but I think I was in heaven. And now I'm not. I was torn out of there. Pulled out…by my friends. Everything here is…hard, and bright, and violent. Everything I feel, everything I touch…this is Hell. Just getting through the next moment, and the one after that…knowing what I've lost…. They can never know. Never. (“After Life”)

If every slayer comes with a death wish, it must be to reach this sense of being “finished. Complete.” Buffy has always been ambivalent about her calling, and as she tells Dawn, standing at the top of the rickety tower in “Bargaining,” “It was so…clear…on this spot. I remember…how…shiny…and clear everything was,” as she recalls saving Dawn and the world by sacrificing herself in “The Gift.” And now, she’s wondering if that was all for nothing.

Two other factors were different when Season Six was first broadcast:
1. New network. The show moved from the WB to UPN for the last two seasons. Whether this made a difference or not has been debated (for example, by Edwards and Haines in “Reality Bites: Buffy in the UPN Years,” Buffy Goes Dark). The show did become more controversial during Seasons Six and Seven, for many reasons. However, for some, this transition marked a definite change in mood and content. However, I’d say the narrative itself, along with the second external factor accounts for more of those changes.
2. September 11, 2001. Lynne Edwards, James South and I note in the Preface to Buffy Goes Dark:
The first episodes of Season Six premiered in October 2001, less than a month after the stunning September 11 terrorist attacks on New York City and the Pentagon. Although Joss Whedon had stated that plans for Buffy’s sixth season were mapped out as the fifth season ended [in May 2001], viewers may have been expecting their favorite show to provide an escape or antidote to the real world horror and devastation the daily news brought closer every day. (7-8)
I knew many people who started watching Buffy for the first time that fall, relying on the FX reruns to catch up with previous seasons and simultaneously watching Season Six.

When things change, people look for signs of the familiar. Season Six begins by sending numerous defamiliarizing signals that it’s going to be “the anti-Buffy,” as I call it in my essay in Buffy Goes Dark, which you shouldn’t read unless you want to be spoiled for the entire season. For example, the fact that the “power shot” of Buffy that ends the Season Six credit sequence is the BuffyBot, not Buffy (also see David Kociemba’s “‘Actually, it explains a lot’: Reading the Opening Title Sequences in Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, but beware of spoilers), and in “Bargaining,” the perky, feisty Buffy we’ve come to expect is also enacted by the BuffyBot. Kudos to Sarah Michelle Gellar for playing living dead (but not a zombie!) real Buffy and lifelike android Buffy so well. “That’ll put marzipan in your pie plate bingo!” is one of my favorite lines.

Among the other characters, the main thing that describes their interactions is withholding information or outright lying, even if it’s lying to spare one another’s feelings.

Giles doesn’t tell the gang he’s leaving, just leaves them a note, “trying to avoid a scene.” When the Scoobies manage to stage a farewell at the airport anyway, they try to keep it cheerful and “stiff-upper-lippy,” trying to reassure him that they’ll be all right without him, but after his plane takes off, Xander admits, “My face was getting sore from all that faux smiling.”

Willow doesn’t tell Tara the full extent of the sacrifice she’ll have to make for the resurrection spell, killing a faun, or if she tells Tara, she certainly doesn’t tell the others. We’ve seen Willow go dark before, when she took revenge on Glory for brain-sucking Tara. But I never thought I’d see her go do any of this stuff. No wonder she didn’t tell Giles.

Xander proposed to Anya at the end of Season Five; she thinks announcing their engagement will cheer everyone up, but he wants to keep the secret. Is Anya out of sync again, or is Xander ambivalent about the relationship?

Spike seems to be part of the team at the end of Season Five, and chases down vampires with them in the “Bargaining” teaser, as well as taking care of Dawn, but he is left completely out of the loop on the resurrection spell plans, although he’s clearly the one who understands Buffy’s ordeal best. Dawn, too, can’t be told the truth, even though the consequences of the resurrection spell immediately concern her.

The BuffyBot is also a lie, of course, and eventually that lie is exposed, starting a train of events that end with Buffy coming face to face with her dismembered robot torso, adding to her disorientation.

“After Life” seems to present the gruesome “consequences” Spike warns will result from Willow’s magic spell, the “thaumogenesis demon” that is swiftly dealt with, but Buffy’s effort to fulfill expectations continues the “lying” theme. When she makes Dawn’s lunch (another “normal” action), Dawn says “it'll be better now. Now that they can see you being happy. That's all they want.” And so Buffy tells the Scooby gang what they want to hear. But she tells Spike the truth. And there will be more consequences.


Thank you, Elizabeth!

Next week: Buffy discovers what it’s like to get a job, we meet three goofballs from the past, and Dawn is annoying. Must be Tuesday.

6.04 Flooded
6.05 Life Serial
6.06 All the Way

And on Angel, we’ll watch:

3.4 Carpe Noctem
3.5 Fredless
3.6 Billy

See you then!