Buffy Rewatch Week 11

2.18 Killed By Death
2.19 I Only Have Eyes for You
2.20 Go Fish

This is that difficult week of episodes that happens after the manic pace of last week’s (“Phases,” “BBB,” and “Passion”) and before the jaw-dropping awesomeness of the “Becoming” two-parter season finale next week. Our guest this week will look at what that means for these episodes within the arc of the season, so I won’t get into it much other than to say they’re rarely listed among the fan favourites.

But I have to say, I’ve never listed them as ones that were bad. It’s just their unfortunate juxtaposition – had the subject matter come before “Surprise” and “Innocence,” perhaps fans would have been kinder to them. On their own, I think they’re very good… and in the case of “I Only Have Eyes for You,” great.

“Killed by Death” has never been a fave of mine. It takes place away from familiar locations – the library, Buffy’s house – and is focused more on Buffy and her childhood problem more than the other characters. And coming on the heels of “Passion,” it was a disappointment when, following the shocking horror of Jenny’s death, Giles seemed to be puttering around the hospital and not openly grieving. But… that’s not really Giles. Yeah, he pulls a Lost Weekend when he thinks he’s effed up so badly people are going to be seriously hurt, but when the people HAVE been hurt and he can no longer help them, he buries himself in his duties to hide the pain he’s feeling.

When I checked my write-up for it that I put in Bite Me, it was the first entry where I disagreed with my much-younger self who wrote that, oh, a decade ago. In it I said if there’s some sort of metaphor here, I didn’t get it. But watching it now, I do get it. In the hospital, the children can see the horrors that the adults can’t. In the FOX show, Fringe, we discover that scientist Walter Bishop once ran tests on young children, giving them a particular drug that could heighten powers he believes we’re all born with, but as we get older certain parts of our brain become inactive and, effectively, kills off our potential. Similarly, these children still have eyes open to the nightmares and bogeymen, where the adults in their lives no longer believe in such fancies. This idea brings us back to one of the essential themes of the series – that Buffy might appear to be a “kid,” but she knows more and has seen more than most adults will ever see. She’s an old, wise mind in a young person’s body (this becomes more obvious in later seasons once she’s out of high school).

Some extra notes:
• One fun game you can play with this week’s trio of episodes is “Spot the Guest Character Who Went on to Bigger Things.” In this episode, we see Stanford from Sex and the City playing the security guard that Cordy tries to seduce.
• I see that Buffy’s borrowed Kendra’s silver Aladdin pants for her hospital sojourn.

When Buffy first aired, “Killed by Death” aired on March 3, and then the show went on a seven-week hiatus. When the show returned on April 28, many fans were swept up in the romance and wonder of “I Only Have Eyes for You.” I adored the ghost story, and when Buffy and Angelus stepped into the roles – and we saw Angel again for the first time in a long time. See, for us rewatching – even for the first-timers – it’s only been a couple of weeks since Angel went to the Dark Side. But at the time, he turned bad on January 20, and this is the first time in three months that we saw a glimmer of the old Angel again. So it had been a very loooooong time since we’d seen him, and it was glorious. I especially loved Buffy taking the man’s role, and Angel – who is often seen as the feminized side of Angelus – is the woman. It brings up the important idea of forgiveness, something the ghost needs to move on. If Buffy ever gets the souled Angel back, will she ever be able to forgive him for what his demony counterpart did?

Some extra notes:
• Apparently when Angel loses his soul and begins sporting the hot leather pants, Buffy switches to skintight… gold ones.
• John Hawkes!!! I’d completely forgotten he was in this episode. Sol Star from Deadwood, Lennon from Lost, and an Oscar nominee. Who’d have thunk the janitor from this episode would have gone on to such critical acclaim?
• Also, James, the 1950s ghost, is Henry from Ugly Betty; the teacher the janitor shoots when they’re possessed was Cousin Eddie’s wife in the Vacation films; Meredith Salinger was in several movies in the 80s and early 90s (I always think of her in that Jimmy Reardon movie with my teenage boyfriend, River Phoenix).
• The director of this episode is the son of actor James Whitmore.
• Snyder returns! I’d forgotten how much he looked like a rat.
• How odd that Jenny’s computer is back on her desk with all her lesson plans on it… didn’t we watch Angel burn it in Passion?
• Giles needing that ghost to be Jenny was heartbreaking. I still I get a catch in my throat when Willow looks at him and says, “Jenny could never be this mean!”
• Where’s Samuel Jackson when you need him? I’d love to see him walk into the school and say, “Why are there motherf***ing snakes in this motherf***ing cafeteria?!”
• Angel tells Buffy that he loved her with his last breath… and he’s telling the truth.
• Spike standing up from the wheelchair is one of the highlights of the season for me. He’s like the vampire John Locke!!

“Go Fish” is a much-maligned episode within the longstanding Buffy fandom, but I actually don’t mind it. I mean, it’s worth it for that scene where Xander enters in slow-mo in the Speedo. Comedy gold. (Joss Whedon always joked that Xander’s body was far too ripped to be nerdly, so he tried to show him shirtless as many times as possible as an in-joke.) And the scene where the fish creature jumps into the pool, and Cordy begins her long speech to it thinking it’s Xander is a very important moment in the development of her character. Even though she’s back with him post-Valentine’s Day, there’s still a sense of superiority she holds over him. “I’m better than you, you’re a nerd, and you should be happy that I’ve lowered myself to be with you.” But in this scene – even as she believes Xander’s been turned into a fish!! – she professes her true love for him, telling him she’ll stand by him and even get him extra bath toys (LOL!) I love this scene, and it’s where our sympathies truly begin to turn in Cordy’s favour.

Some extra notes:
• Xander: “It’s especially nippy. So say my nips.”
• Gage is played by Wentworth Miller, who starred on Prison Break.
• I honestly don’t buy the whole Willow-as-teacher thing. How does that work within the teacher’s union? How is a student teaching the class? What would that do to student-teacher politics? If Willow was harassed and disrespected by students before, wouldn’t they come down on her even harder now? Is there honestly not one single teacher in the area who could sub in for Jenny?? And even if this is a whole “Snyder keeping everything on the down-low” thing, I still don’t buy it. Aren’t her parents wondering why their daughter isn’t being paid? And if she IS being paid, how is that being worked out with the other teachers? “Oh, great… she’s had half a year of computer training but I guess she’s as qualified to teach high school as I am… after several years of university and practical training.” And yes… I understand the irony here that I have no problem with the swim team turning into sea creatures but I do have a problem with the practicality of Willow being a substitute teacher. ;)
• Buffy’s use of “from whence it came.”
• Jonathan ♥♥♥
• Buffy: There’s just something about the smell of chlorine on a guy. Oh baby.”
• Buffy on Xander’s worry he’ll turn into a fish: “Let’s not break out the tartar sauce just yet.” LOL!
• Xander correcting Cordy on the difference between the creature from the blue lagoon and the black: “The creature from the blue lagoon was Brooke Shields.”
• I love Buffy and Willow eating the popcorn while watching the swim team. Watch for the popcorn bucket to pop up again and again in weird moments.

This week I once again welcome Steve Halfyard for a small slice of cheese as she discusses the use of music in this week’s group of episodes:

You have to admire the way Beck’s music remembers and connects up ideas from earlier episodes. “I Only Have Eyes For You” brings in another little twist on the Love Theme for the two ghosts. We first here it in Buffy’s ‘dream’ about their moment together in the class room – it has the first three notes of the LT, but with an extra note added on the beginning and the end – the note at the start makes is a little bit discordant and gives it an extra yearning. It comes back again when the janitor and teacher are possessed; and then, when Buffy and Angel are possessed at the end, we get another version which is closer to the original LT, but still not quite right (for obvious narrative reasons – they aren’t quite Buffy and Angel at that point). Also, note the fragment of the Giles/ Jenny theme from “Passion” when Willow gives Giles Jenny’s necklace, and how it starts sneaking back in (in the oboe) when Giles hears the sound of the janitor and teacher fighting, thinks it may be Jenny’s ghost and rushes off to try and find her: but the full theme never quite arrives, because, of course, Jenny is not there.

***

Thanks, Steve! And now it’s my pleasure to introduce Ian Klein. Ian’s featured on my blog a few times in some of my anecdotes. I met him on a shuttle from the Little Rock airport to the Slayage conference in 2008, and my friend Sue and I began hanging out with him and Ryan, also from that shuttle. We all stayed in touch (and I got together with Ian in the interim when I was in NY on business) and at the last Slayage we did the conference first, and then went to Universal Studios, where we stayed in a huge suite in Holiday Inn and went on rollercoasters and rides and saw Harry Potter land and ate tons and tried this awesome Mexican place and had a blast. He’s brilliant. (And he’ll probably kill me for running that photo, but seriously… adorable, right? We saw this old car at Universal and I told him to pose, and you don’t have to ask him twice.)

Ian G. Klein earned his BA with Honors from the University of Washington. He is currently studying at Columbia University in pursuit of an MFA in Dramaturgy, which will be completed in Spring 2012. Ian first experienced the work of Joss Whedon when he started watching Buffy in anticipation of an assignment concerning fandom during his senior year of college. He has since become a charter associate member of The Whedon Studies Association and has presented papers at several academic conferences, including The Slayage Conference on the Whedonverses and meetings of the National Popular and American Culture Associations. His most recent publication was “'I Like My Scars': Claire Saunders and the Narrative of Flesh” in the SmartPop book, Inside Joss’s Dollhouse. You can read an interview with Ian here, and he blogs regularly here (and if you haven’t been checking out his site, please do: he’s been following our rewatch since January and doing his own weekly posts, which have been excellent!)

Without any further ado, please welcome the wonderful Ian Klein!

“A Little More Fallout”: Life After Trauma on the Hellmouth
Ian G. Klein

If there’s a task more daunting to me than writing about some of the most iconic episodes in the series like “Surprise,” “Innocence,” and “Passion,” it’s writing about the trio of episodes that rests between “Passion” and the epic two-parter “Becoming” that concludes the show’s second season. These three episodes are not unlike many other episodes of the series, especially from the first season. But placing episodes that signal a return to the quieter tone and content at this point in season 2 (which is so fraught with violence, grief and drastic character transformations) can seem like a step back on the part of the show’s progress both in season 2 and the series as a whole.

When I knew I would be writing about “Killed by Death,” “I Only Have Eyes For You,” and “Go Fish” I thought the only way to write about them would be as discrete units through the monster-of-the-week lens as I perceived these episodes to be based on my last complete viewing of the series in late 2007/early 2008. Even when I started watching these episodes I was still skeptical not only as to how they related to the compelling story arc they were housed between but as to how they related to each other. How could these episodes be so “ordinary” amidst such greatness?

As I finished this close rewatch, I realized this question was also the answer. These episodes serve as a kind of unholy trilogy of the ordinary in the midst of life’s greater conflicts. Just because your boyfriend dumps you, turns evil, and wreaks havoc on your city, doesn’t mean life gives you a break from the rest of the world’s troubles. Life goes on after trauma. Our bodies and minds continue to be affected through extended suffering. As Buffy later says in the season 2 finale, “Becoming, Part 2”, “It doesn’t stop. It never stops.” The Hellmouth doesn’t stop speaking.

I am currently an MFA candidate in Dramaturgy at Columbia University in my last semester of classes. If there’s one thing I won’t miss as a non-student, it’s my body’s tendency to break down the moment I turn in the last of what is often five final projects. For the last x number of years, getting sick or being overcome with fatigue happens like clockwork at the end of a semester. So what happens to Buffy immediately following the loss of her boyfriend’s soul and the death of Jenny Calendar caused by said soulless boyfriend? She gets sick.

In “Killed by Death,” Buffy’s mother, Joyce, tells Giles “Buffy’s been so down since [Jenny’s death] happened. I mean, she never gets sick.” Our bodies have a way of reminding us when it is time to slow down and relinquish some of our daily responsibilities in order to repair, not only physically but mentally. It might not normally occur for her or us as the audience to think that she would be stopped by something so mortal, so human, when she is so super-human.

Non-Slayers, a category that includes myself, tend to use this same logic for ourselves too. We often think we’re superhuman and this false perception of ourselves can be compounded by our ability to come out victorious on the other side of seemingly impossible tasks through sheer adrenaline. But life takes a toll and at some point the choice to remove ourselves from the world for a spell no longer is a choice. The Slayer, however, does not have the luxury of stopping being the Slayer. Sometimes the fight comes to you when you’re down and you have to fight back.

We have to keep living in a world of constant threats despite our internal afflictions. In Buffy, these threats are both literal and metaphorical. In our world, the demons we face don’t have horns, pointy teeth or fish heads, but it’s true that some of the forces we confront in our lives like trauma can’t be seen at all. In these three episodes, the unseen threat is represented by the fever in “Killed by Death,” poltergeists in “I Only Have Eyes for You” and internally driven metamorphoses in “Go Fish.” In this tripartite treatise on trauma, it’s not just Buffy who is affected. The recent tragic events in Sunnydale have also disturbed Giles, Xander, Willow, and even Cordelia in different ways. Nothing will be the same, but in their shared trauma, they come together stronger than ever. There is hope when it comes to recovery from trauma but not before it may take over both body and mind. In each of the episodes, someone must succumb to potentially life-threatening conditions in order to defeat a given threat. They must endure the trauma, even embrace it in order to overcome it.

In “Killed by Death” this takes place as Buffy willingly infects herself with the flu so that her perception is fundamentally altered and she can see Der Kindestod, the demon that sucked the life out of sick children. The effects of this selfless act are twofold. First, she reaffirms her identity as the Slayer as she tells Ryan, “We both know that there are real monsters. But there’s also real heroes that fight monsters and that’s me.” Second, she works out personal trauma not only by moving forward from the deeply affecting ordeal with Angel but an older trauma: being the sole witness to her cousin Celia’s brutal death at the hands of Der Kindestod. The moment Buffy kills Der Kindestod, she effectively deals with these two traumas. She avenges Celia’s death and by snapping his neck mirrors the manner in which Angel killed Jenny in the preceding episode, “Passion.” Her trauma caused by Angel, however, will take much more time and effort.

“I Only Have Eyes For You” sees Buffy physically and psychologically taken over by the spirit of forbidden love throughout the episode — more than just the final confrontation between she and Angel, who in a wonderful plot twist takes on the role of the female teacher in the pair of star-crossed lovers while Buffy takes on that of the spurned male student. Buffy is constantly afflicted by an outside force experiencing powerful, visceral, and vivid visions and Xander, Giles, Willow, and Cordelia also experience varying degrees of the school’s violent haunting. The poltergeists are not banished upon their first coordinated attempt. Like some illnesses, this haunting must consume its hosts and run its course before it will release its hold. This and the other two episodes discussed here are about the hurt that lingers as much as it is about new ills that befall us while we are beaten and broken. In order to defeat one evil, the hero must often live another. Even “under the spirit’s thrall” or yielding to a high-grade fever, there are still opportunities to process pain, recover and — as in this episode — to be forgiven.

These three episodes explore a wide spectrum of Buffy villains: the silly, the nightmarish, and the worst kind of villain of all: the one you love. In most viewer’s books, “Go Fish” would probably fall into this first category. The creatures, as Cordelia points out, bear a strong resemblance to the creature from the Blue Lagoon (which Xander corrects to “Black”) and the swim coach’s motivation for bringing about these transformations is no more involved than wanting to win the state championship. “Go Fish” is also the least related to the season’s primary throughline. Why does it matter? It matters because it is, as I suggested in the introduction: ordinary. In the wake of trauma life keeps happening. This is especially true of life on the Hellmouth. At Sunnydale High, members of the swim team turning into freakish fish monsters is life as usual. As with “Killed by Death” and “I Only Have Eyes For You” we see the trope of a character who submits himself to dangerous circumstances in order to conquer an unseen evil. By getting on the swim team and participating—though unwittingly—in the toxic “aromatherapy” of the steam room, Xander is affected internally. It is only after getting to that perilous and frightening place that progress can be made and the threat can be overcome. Sometimes that threat is one’s own pain.

In response to Giles’ erroneous theory that Jenny is the one haunting the school in “I Only Have Eyes For You”, Buffy remarks, “He misses her. He can’t think. Just a little more fallout from my love life.” If there were one word that could unify these episodes, it would be “fallout.” Buffy’s life and the lives of those around her have been shattered and they breathe in the resulting radioactive dust. Indeed, the nexus of their trauma is that of Angel and though the effects of his actions are not just Buffy’s burden, she bears the heaviest load.

It’s important to note that Angel as Angelus appears — albeit briefly — in each of these episodes. He illuminates the storytelling even as a background character. His appearance at the beginning of “Killed by Death” for example seems a bit superfluous and unnecessary and if this were any other episode, it would begin with any other vampire, but the choice to make it Buffy’s biggest vampire adversary at this point in the series reminds us that her wounds are still fresh and the healing process is far from over. In fact her wounds will deepen before the season is through. Angel’s reduced presence is also symbolic of Buffy’s resolve to regard him as a threat amongst many others across the landscape of the Hellmouth and another threat that needs to be defeated. In fact, these episodes are as much about recovery from trauma as much as they are about mentally preparing for the battle ahead. These three episodes allow Buffy a much-needed breath before the inevitable showdown.

After being attacked by Angel, Gage asks Buffy, “Was that the thing that killed Cameron?” “No,” she responds, “That was something else.” “Something else?” “Yeah unfortunately we have a lot of other something elses in this town.”

“Killed by Death”, “I Only Have Eyes For You”, and “Go Fish” are places where those “something elses” thrive — the somethings that simultaneously get in the way of life as we’d like it and force us to move forward with our lives as we reclaim our broken selves. There’s always something else and even if you’re the Slayer, you’ve never seen it all.

***

Thank you, Ian!

Next week: Becoming, Parts 1 & 2, brought to you by... me!! (They're possibly my favourite episodes of the series, so I laid my claim on them early.) We'll also have some music analysis from Janet/Steve, so I'm looking forward to that, too. :) Brace yourselves for season 2's backstory!

Buffy Rewatch Week 11: Spoiler Forum

As always, welcome to the spoiler portion of this week's rewatch, where you can openly talk about the episodes in the context of the whole series without worrying about spoiling anything for anyone. I don't have much to add here this week except to ask about Willow's interrogation of Jonathan: interesting how he think she's on to him and the "evil" that he perpetrated, but when she asks him outright if he'd conjured up something to turn the swim team into horrible creatures, he looks perplexed, and says he'd simply peed in the pool. He thought he'd done something terrible, but Willow showed him there was so much more he could have done. Could this have planted the seed in his head that the world really CAN accommodate evil geniuses? Could this have been the moment when the Troika was first formed in his head?

While I'm enjoying discussing this week's episode, I can't wait for Becoming. Squeee!!!

Today's Lost Challenge

I received possibly the most unique request via Facebook message today. One of my readers has asked for our help in naming her dogs. Since I don't know anything about official registration of dogs, I'll let her explain the conundrum to you:

I have two dogs (Shelties) I need help naming. They're the two boys in the litter I had (well, actually my Momma Dog, Madilyn had them) born in 2008, during Lost. The girls named themselves fairly easily ~ Possum, Zoey, and Lacey. But the boys, I just could not think of names for!

Until it struck me like a slap upside the head. They became Jack & Sawyer.

Now I need registered names. Actually, I've needed registered names for a long time, but I procrastinate. You know how they do that, right? You've seen TV dog shows, I imagine?

My kennel name is Dunvegan ~ a castle in Scotland in our family, and Shelties are Scottish, of course. So, as a for instance, their Dad is Dunvegan Reminiscence, and we call him Luke. Mom was Dunvegan After Midnight, and she was called Madilyn. (We lost her to cancer about a month ago.) Possum will be Dunvegan Midnight Skies, because of her coloring. Lacey will be Dunvegan Midnight Lace. (Zoey I don't have a name for yet, either.)

Do you think you & your fans would help me come up with Lost-themed registered names for the boys? All the best episode titles seem to be Desmond-related, like Flashes Before Your Eyes, or Through the Looking Glass. Any ideas for Jack & Sawyer-related names? I've thought & thought, and can't come up with anything suitable.

I've wanted to write & ask for your help for awhile now, but as I said, I procrastinate. :)

I hope you'll help me ~ it could be fun for people to think of names! :)

Best,
Tricia & the woofers
**

As I said to her when I wrote back, I would have gone with Desmond anyway (I know that comes as an utter SHOCK to all of you) and called him Dunvegan Midnight Constant. But Jack and Sawyer are tougher. As I told her, I think Dunvegan Midnight That's Why the Red Sox Will Never Win the Series is a little wordy. ;)

So whaddya think? Who wants to weigh in on some names?

Fringe... DUDE!

So as many of you know, our beloved Jorge was on Fringe last night. Sadly, just as a cameo (I try to remain spoiler-free on it, so I was hoping for a larger role, but hey, the cameo came right at the top and it was HILARIOUS) but it was so much fun to see one of our Lost peeps on a favourite TV show again. Now that Jorge, Terry O'Quinn, Michael Emerson, and Nestor Carbonell have all been confirmed for fall pilots, I'm thinking it'll be a bit of a Lostapalooza this fall, and I'm very happy for that!

But back to Fringe. Many people have asked me why I haven't been blogging on it. To be honest, it's simply a lack of time. Now that it's moved to Friday nights, I typically don't get to see it until later in the weekend, and since I try to stay off my computer for the weekend (the only evenings I really spend with my husband catching up) it means I wouldn't be able to blog on it until Monday, and by then it would be so out of date compared to the other blogs that would have had something up on Friday, it's not worth doing. (This is me on Saturday night, neglecting my husband.)

But that doesn't mean I'm not watching it. I'm watching it every week and loving it. Its complexities are getting deeper and deeper, I love the combination of the two universes, and I think Anna Torv's performance(s) this season has been extraordinary. She's had to play Olivia, and Faux-livia, and Olivia pretending to be Faux-livia and Faux-livia pretending to be Olivia, and each one has had its own subtle nuances that allowed us to know exactly what we were watching each week. And, as of the end of last night's episode (spoiler ahead!), which made me gasp out loud... she'll apparently be channelling William Bell. WHOA. I did not see that coming... And while she seemed to be doing her best Leonard Nimoy inflection, she didn't do it in an over-the-top kind of way.

John Noble has also been a joy to watch as Walter, grappling with the massive effects of what he did so many years ago. He's seen the effects his kidnapping has had on an entire world, and is desperate to halt the destruction before it moves into his own and takes away everything he has.

The two worlds continue to fascinate -- a couple of weeks ago, when Walternate refused to do any sort of testing on children, it was a wonderful moment where we realized that he, the person that Walter has demonized, actually draws a line where Walter wouldn't. Walter and Bell tested children all the time, tossing them back out into the world when they were done with them, not equipping them with any information or tools to deal with their new abilities.

I really enjoyed the previous episode, "Subject 13," and was surprised when I said so on my Facebook page and many people said they hated it. I suppose if I was watching this show as hardcore as I did Lost, I would probably have been annoyed by it. We already knew most of that stuff -- what Walter had done to Olivia and the other children at the "daycare," what he'd done with Peter and what that had done to both Bishop families... we knew about Olivia's evil stepfather and that she'll eventually shoot him. But a lot of this has been glossed over, and casual viewers may have missed it or forgotten about it, so watching it unfold in a dramatization of it was compelling. And at the end, when we realized Olivia was talking to Walternate and not Walter, was brilliant. She was the one who gave him the idea in the first place, and she has no idea what she did.

I adore this season of Fringe. Each year it just gets better than the one before it. My fingers are crossed that the show is as loved within the Fox executive offices as it is by the fans, and it can be saved into a fourth season.

Happy Buffyversary!

Fourteen years ago, on March 10, 1997, Buffy the Vampire Slayer aired for the first time. Talk about the little mid-season replacement that could! For all the rewatchers, it's been a long, wonderful road, and for the new viewers, better late than never! I'm glad we were able to turn you on to it. ;)

What I'm interested to hear in the comments is, what was the first episode you watched, and when? If you began watching midway through the series, did you immediately go back to the beginning and start over to catch up, or did you watch from that point on and only start over when you got to the end? Did you catch up years later on DVD? My first episode was I Robot, You Jane, and I didn't like it. So I quit, and then during the hiatus that followed Killed by Death I got caught up with the entire series, and watched it week after week from that point on. (That might explain why "I Only Have Eyes For You" is a favourite of mine -- it was the first one I watched live!)

Buffy Rewatch Week 10

2.15 Phases
2.16 Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered
2.17 Passion

We seem to be equally divided between first-time watchers and rewatchers on this Buffy Rewatch, which is amazing (I know I’m not alone in being excited to discover new Buffy recruits). In the beginning of this rewatch, I was writing more as if I were talking to longtime Buffy viewers, and now I find I’m gearing my weekly posts to the newbies (or n00bs, as we sometimes call them). To all the Lost viewers out there who’ve jumped on board this rewatch because they were curious to find out what I’ve been on about, you’ve probably noticed over the years how often I’ve remarked that I love Joss Whedon’s work because no one knows how to bring the pain quite like Joss... and make us love it.

And there’s no pain quite like the pain he brings in “Passion.”

“Phases” is a great episode (I’m eager to see how many people were completely shocked to discover Oz was a werewolf!) and finally gives Seth Green a starring role. And it gives us what might be my favourite Willow/Oz scene of the series:

Oz: So... Maybe it'd be best if I just... sorta...
Willow: What?
Oz: Well, you know, like, stayed out of your way for awhile.
Willow: I don't know. I'm kind of okay with you being *in* my way.
Oz: (stops and faces her) You mean, you'd still...
Willow: Well, I like you. You're nice and you're funny. And you don't smoke. Yeah, okay, werewolf, but that's not all the time. I mean, three days out of the month I'm not much fun to be around either.
Oz: You are quite the human.
Willow: (smiles) So, I'd still if you'd still.
Oz: I'd still. I'd very still.
Willow: Okay. No biting, though.
Oz: Agreed. [Willow walks away, smiling, and then suddenly runs back, kisses him on the lips, and hops away again, leaving Oz standing there, amused and bewildered.]
Oz: A werewolf in love.

This time around, I watched this scene with a silly grin on my fave the whole time, wiping away tears of joy. Oz and Willow give me a happy like nothing else on this show.

A few other things to note:
• Willow laying a verbal smackdown on Xander and Cordy, saying he should dial 1-800-I’m dating a skanky ho.”
• Xander suggesting the werewolf had last year’s almanac.
• The werewolf hunter in “Phases” will later play Sahjhan on Angel in season 3.
• Oz’s hilarious and insane phone conversation with his aunt: “Is Jordie a werewolf? Huh. And how long has this been going on?”
• Xander suggesting Oz will always be in the backyard burying their things.

“Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” gives a vehicle to Nicholas Brendon, allowing him to come to the fore. Joss loves the Xander-centric episodes… we’ve seen Teacher’s Pet, The Pack, and Inca Mummy Girl, and now this one. Generally the Xander eps are comic ones (though The Pack had a more sinister element to it) and the fan fave is The Zeppo, coming up in season 3, but this one ranks right up there. Yeah, it has a creep factor (Joyce!!) but the underlying joke is in the spell that Amy casts – notice she asks Diana to make Xander’s beloved fall in love with him… it’s as if every woman who comes after him in this episode is someone he’s crushed on or fantasized about in the past. And that makes the Joyce thing even funnier. (Perhaps Cordy is immune to the spell because unlike all the others, she’s the only one who’s really loved him back… although I would argue that Willow has always had real feelings for him, too.) One of my favourite moments of that episode is where Cordy goes to her locker and quickly slips the necklace off her neck, and looks like she really loves it and it means something to her. For all her big talk and bluster, I think she’s very lonely.

Other notes:
• How much do I love the Buffy rat cam!!!
• Giles saying seriously “We have to catch the Buffy rat.”
• I love how Xander puts up the bookshelf in front of the library door and then Buffy opens the door outward (it’s a true Big Lebowski moment). Interestingly, when he and Cordy are in the basement, they board up the door, even though it, also, opens outward.
• Did the Lost fans out there notice that the fights in the graveyard always seem to happen next to the Alpert mausoleum?

But the real star of the week is “Passion.” Back at the beginning of season 6, Space (the Canadian sci-fi network) began airing episodes of Buffy from Monday to Friday. A friend of mine who was working on a book with me at the time was watching the series for the first time, and at one point I made some sort of, “Ooh, wait’ll you see ‘Passion’” remark to him. He’s a film critic, and would often be out late during the week to watch the movies and then come home and write into the wee hours of the morning, filing the reviews for the various publications he worked for. While he was out, he’d record Buffy, then he’d come home and watch it, then write his reviews. The day after “Passion” aired he called me at work, and he sounded very strange. “Why didn’t you WARN me about this one?!” he said. He told me that he watched it, and when Giles went up the stairs, he felt like a knife had been thrust into his gut. He said he sobbed like a child for the rest of the episode, then turned off his television and just sat in the darkness, unable to move. He said he must have sat like that, alternately sobbing and staring at the wall, for a few hours. He got no sleep, barely filed his story on time, and was devastated. He said he’d never had an hour of television affect him like that. “Hm,” I said, “You might want to hold off on watching Becoming and The Body until the day after your stories are due.”

I’ve always loved this story. This was a guy in his fifties who had so identified with certain characters that the brutal death of one of them shattered him. “Passion” is that rare episode that I absolutely adore, and yet I’m writing this post the night before the rewatch (rather than a week before) because I just kept putting off watching it until I was emotionally ready. When you’ve seen it as many times as I have, there’s an anticipatory element to the second half of the episode that’s almost excruciating. When Giles comes home and finds the rose attached to his door, my whole body begins shivering and I can feel the tears coming. He walks in, sees the champagne, finds the note, glances up the stairs and a smirk comes over his face. He takes off his glasses, pats down his hair, and picks up the bottle. The whole time, we can hear “O soave fanciulla” from Puccini’s La Boheme, a gorgeous aria sung between a man and a woman in love:

Oh lovely girl, oh sweet face
bathed in the soft moonlight.
I see you in a dream
I'd dream forever!

Giles, too, will probably forever be seeing Jenny when he dreams, but what he finds at the top of the stairs is the stuff of nightmares. This time watching, as every time since that first wonderful/horrible moment where I first watched it, I could feel the lump rising in my throat the closer Giles got to the top, and as the bottle of champagne smashes to the ground, the tears began running down my cheeks.

But oh, it doesn’t stop there. No… then, just as Angelus loves to draw out the agony, so, too, do Joss and his writers just keep bringing it on. Angelus can’t just kill Jenny… he has to watch the reactions of those whom he’s hurt. Just as the episode opens with Angelus slipping quietly into Buffy’s room and watching her sleep (see, Edward? It’s FREAKIN’ CREEPY), now we see him lurking in the bushes, and watching Buffy as she picks up the phone, then slumps to the floor against the wall. Then Willow with her deep sobs falls into Joyce’s arms, while Angelus stands in the bushes, smiling and taking in the sweetness of what he’s watching. The fishkebab at the beginning of the episode is nothing compared to what Angelus does to them here. Giles, in his grief, storms down to the factory and in a zombie-like fury he tries to destroy Angel, but he doesn’t stand a chance, and Buffy knows it. She drags Giles outside and punches him in the face out of love and anger before kneeling down and they hold onto each other, a man destroyed and a girl who can’t live without him. (Cue second box of Kleenex.)

I mentioned back in “Lie to Me” that there would be another graveyard scene featuring Buffy and Giles that would be even sadder than the one next to Ford’s grave, and this is the one. You can hear the “Jenny theme” (more on that below) and if you listen closely, you’ll hear Anthony Stewart Head actually singing along with it in the non-diegetic music laid over the scene. It’s gorgeous. The Angelus voiceovers add an even darker element to the episode, from the one at the beginning:

Angelus: Passion. It lies in all of us. Sleeping... waiting... And though unwanted... unbidden... it will stir... open its jaws, and howl.

To the one at the end, spoken by Angelus, as we watch Giles slowly walk back into his apartment:

Angelus: It hurts sometimes more than we can bear. If we could live without passion, maybe we'd know some kind of peace. But we would be hollow. Empty rooms, shuttered and dank... Without passion, we'd be truly dead.

“Passion” is sublime, and demonstrates the heights and depths this show is capable of reaching. I hope you loved it as much as I do.

This week I’ve got a whole bunch of people who wanted to discuss these episodes with you. I thought about perhaps splitting this into two posts, but I think it's easier just to keep it all together. So sit back and join my three guest-hosts this week!

First up is our resident music expert Steve Halfyard who is back this week to give us a full analysis of the music in this week’s episodes. Last week someone asked on the boards what Steve meant by LT; she’s referring to the Love Theme, which you can listen to here:



It’s one of my favourite musical themes of any television show, and if you’re interested, you can get it as part of the BtVS score soundtrack here.

***

This week I’m official rather than forcing my cheese slices in where they’re not wanted [note from Nikki: they are always wanted, and welcome!!]. “Phases”, BBB (as I like to call it, much quicker) and “Passion” are three really interesting episodes to talk about from a musical perspective, so that is mostly what I’m going to do.

“Phases” is a great episode (actually, all three of these are fabulous – no Bad Eggs here!). “Phases” remembers previous episodes, develops character relationships, and sets up things for the future. Oh, and we find out that Oz is a werewolf (quite important); and Kane the werewolf hunter comes back in Angel as Sahjhan, a trans-dimensional demon (the actor, not Kane himself). So many fun things.

Alas, the music is not one of them, and that’s what makes this episode interesting as part of this group of three. It was scored by Shawn K. Clements & Sean Murray who scored a lot of episodes in season 2 and are, I’m sure, jolly capable chaps but they mostly write bog standard boring TV music (as we say in the UK – that’s not rude, by the way, it’s a corruption of the “Box standard” edition of Meccano you could buy here in the 1920s, rather than “Box deluxe”. Bit of UK trivia for you).

Now, the Seans are not all bad: they gave us the pretty, feminized version of the series theme tune for Buffy’s Dorothy Hamill moment in “What’s My Line?”, and they wrote some nicely creepy music for “Killed By Death” that ended up in the DVD menu music. But alas, this episode really shows up just how dull and lazy TV music can be. There is nothing remotely thematic at all (Oz is a werewolf: doesn’t that deserve something a bit distinctive?). Instead we are treated to a series of seemingly interminable drones: we have tense drones, scary drones, fill-in-the-silence drones and occasional bits of slightly limp action music; plus one decent piece of scary music when Teresa thinks she’s being chased by a werewolf and runs into Angelus. But oh, listen to the feebleness of the music when Teresa rises from the dead in the funeral home, fights Buffy and is staked by Xander. That staking is a really dramatic moment: and it becomes part of Xander/ Nicholas Brendon’s credit sequence for many seasons to come – but the music does absolutely nothing to underpin Xander doing something useful and effective (for a change). Lame. The closest the music gets to being interesting is the rather generic bit of lyrical piano and guitar for Oz and Willow being monosyllabically romantic at the end. Pah.

Anyway, the next two episodes seem to be trying very hard to make up for the musical mediocrity of “Phases”. Scored by the lovely Christophe Beck, right from the start BBB is in a different musical league. Compare the teaser here to the Teresa staking scene before. As Buffy fights the vampire, the music is gestural – it is written to her physical gestures, bringing out the sense of movement and action, but also the drama. There’s a fabulous musical climax leading up to the moment Buffy stakes the vampire; then a little bit of post-staking ambience as she and Xander talk. She tells him that slaying is more perilous than dating; he replies that she is obviously not dating Cordelia – and a lovely little musical sting (as we call it in the trade) comes in after he says it, like punctuation. It’s a tiny moment but it’s not lazy: Beck’s music actively engages with every movement and line and look and nuance of what’s going on in the show and helps structure the scene. And that’s why Mr Beck is relatively unusual in TV scoring, and why what he does lifts the show’s music out of the ordinary and into the innovative. Basically, he treats it like a film score (where you get maybe 10-12 weeks to write music for a 2 hour film) rather than a TV score (where you get a week to write music for a 40 minute show. Do the maths!). Another sequence later on takes this further: have a listen to the way Beck paces, stretches out and builds the tension throughout the scene where Buffy and Joyce are watching TV when a knock at the door precedes the delivery of flowers and the creepsome message “soon” – the whole scene is beautifully underpinned, and the music builds to an unfinished climax as the camera focuses on Buffy’s face at the end, really giving us a sense of the sick physical feeling she is experiencing as she understands that Angel is stalking her and threatening her. This whole scene is scored much more like it would be in a film rather than a TV episode.

Things Beck does in this episode also give some insight into his overall approach to scoring. We have episode specific themes (which are essentially restricted to a single episode, although even these do sometimes crop up in a later episode to remind us of something); cross-episode themes, which can go through whole seasons and even across seasons; and as a special category of that, we have love theme variations, reworkings of elements that belong to the love theme to say new things, not always about either Buffy or Angel, but always to do with love.

Episode-specific themes
• Xander’s “sad-and-lonely, nobody loves me” music, coming in at the end of the scene where Cordy dumps him and taking us through the transition to the next day at school. It comes back again when Giles sends him home in disgrace, and it starts, very briefly, when Xander thinks he’s being rejected again at the end, just before Cordy comes up trumps.
• Amy’s spell theme: say no more, it’ll be obvious.

Cross-episode themes
• Xander’s quirky theme (“everything’s going wrong” panic music) - pizzicato strings, tremolos and skittering violin melody; it’s fast and funny and actually had its first embryonic outing back in “School Hard” when Xander is rifling through Buffy’s bag looking for a stake and finds a tampon instead. Here, it finds its true form, and we get it in several other episodes too, most especially “The Zeppo” in season 3.

Love theme variations
Everything to do with love and/ or loss seems to turn into a Buffy/ Angel love theme variation. These variations take elements of the love theme, usually the first three notes with that big falling sixth and then the small step up.

• Giles and Jenny meeting in the corridor early in BBB and have a rather awkward conversation – it’s definitely the love theme but gone horribly wrong (go figure);
• Cordelia hiding her true feelings from Xander as she takes the locket off behind her locker door: almost like an inverted version, with the falling note at the start rising instead. Still very much in the same ‘area’ as the love theme;
• Cordelia near the end realising that the spell was meant for her, and that Xander loves her after all.
• Xander looking back through the library window as he realises that that the spell has affected Buffy too, and she does not love him at all.

Also, note the silence when Buffy, in the preceding library scene, suddenly ‘sees’ Xander; and then when Amy and later Jenny come on to him – the clue that this isn’t love is in the fact that there is no love-themey music. Also, got to love Buffy’s saxophone film noir moment when she comes back to the library wearing nothing but a raincoat. Buff, for the love of God, don't open that raincoat!

The popular music used in this episode is also doing new things: in the Bronze, we see Dingoes Ate My Baby (we’re hearing the band Four Star Mary!) performing their song “Pain” as Cordy dumps Xander; and when the spell has kicked in we get a crazy old 1970s funk number from the Average White Band for Xander’s slo-mo John Travolta-esque strut down the corridor. It’s funny because the music and the slo-mo are sending it up: think about how utterly sincere (and emotionally devastating) some of the other uses of pop songs are in this series (“Goodbye to You” at the end of Tabula Rasa, for example); or even “Pain” in this episode – it’s ‘real’ music, music that belongs to the characters, that they might (and do) listen to, the soundtrack of their lives as well as of the episode; and the lyrics underpin what the characters are feeling. But “Got the Love” is so retro, so old fashioned, so supremely uncool that it’s ridiculous – it is making fun of Xander because actually, none of these women really find him attractive, any more than they would find this music cool (although, have to say, I always found early Xander mightily cute).

“Passion” again has its own episode specific music, but the theme you may have missed is the Angelus motif – his own little musical signature, a motif (something very short) rather than a theme (a more extended idea). The main idea is a pair of falling notes, normally followed by a third note, and then a number of different ways of ending. For those who do notation, think of it as a C falling to a B, then a drop to a G sharp. We get it in pretty much every scene with Angelus present or just implied – every time we see one of those letters/ drawings, it’s played high up (creepy); then in the scene where he confronts Jenny in the classroom, it suddenly drops to be played really low down (danger!); and the two falling notes dominate the chase music as he pursues her through the school to her doom.

The more obvious and utterly lovely episode theme is another version of the love theme used for Giles and Jenny. It’s not the original theme, but it is so close that you can hear the Buffy/ Angel version theme lurking at the edges. When I talked about this in Florida last year, I attempted to demonstrate by singing the love theme whilst playing the “Passion” theme on the piano (9.30 in the morning, jetlagged, not very good!) but it can be done. Anyway, the allusion to the LT is a rather horrible clue that this is not going to end well; it sounds like it’s about love, but if we hear it as an aspect of the main LT, it is warning that there is going to be great loss. We get it several times in connection to both Giles and Jenny in the first twenty minutes, establishing that it is about their relationship; and then we hear it again when Buffy and Willow learn of Jenny’s death. It mirrors the journey of the original LT: starting out about love, becoming about loss. And then it brings the relationship between the two themes back round narratively to Buffy and her losses. We hear it when she rescues Giles from his attempt to avenge Jenny’s death, where it underpins her fear of losing him (“Were you trying to get yourself killed? You can’t leave me”); and it plays over the scene with Buffy and Giles at Jenny’s graveside and Buffy’s acceptance that her own love is irretrievably lost and she now has to kill the man she once loved. There’s a sense of the theme passing from Giles and Jenny back to Buffy and Angel: Firstly, we have Angel’s voice-over whilst we (in fact) hear Giles’s voice singing the theme (inarticulate with grief, there are no words but he physically inhabits the music that represents his love for Jenny); and then at the end of the episode, Buffy’s voice replaces Angel’s – their voices frame the theme, linking their passion to Giles and Jenny’s, Buffy’s loss to Giles’s loss.

It was a musically good decision to use a different version of the LT here (and in BBB) because Beck knows that he needs the big theme for the season finale (it’s not far off now) and he’s is an intelligent enough composer to know that you should never bludgeon your audience with a theme or it starts to lose its impact. So he’s saving it: tapping into its meanings but restricting the number of outright statements of it he makes in order to ensure maximum impact when he does use it. So even though we’ve only had one clear statement of the LT since “Innocence” (in “Passion”, in the scene just after Willow’s found the dead fish and Buffy talks about the Angel she has lost), the variations on it we have in BBB and “Passion” means that it’s constantly there, just below the surface, not letting us forget it.

***

I’m very pleased this week to introduce for the first time into the Rewatch the woman who is known throughout the world of Whedon Studies as the Mother of Buffy Studies, Rhonda Wilcox. I first met Rhonda at Slayage 3 in 2008 (shock) where I was a little nervous to meet her, having read both Fighting the Forces and Why Buffy Matters, but she was instantly accommodating and lovely (and we had a shared dislike of high-fives). I’m a big fan of her work -- Fighting the Forces is the book of essays she did with David Lavery (who was part of our second week on the rewatch) and Why Buffy Matters is an extended study of the art of Buffy, and a brilliant book if you want to check it out (please do!) She is a professor of English at Gordon College in Georgia and the president of the Whedon Studies Association.
She is the editor of Studies in Popular Culture and the coeditor of Slayage: The Journal of the Whedon Studies Association. Along with the two books mentioned, she is the editor with Tanya Cochran, of Investigating Firefly and Serenity: Science Fiction on the Frontier; and, with Sue Turnbull, of Investigating Veronica Mars, which just came out. And if you’re wondering why she didn’t focus on “Passion” in the essay below, it’s because she’ll be covering that episode in a much longer essay in an upcoming post on PopMatters http://www.popmatters.com/pm/special/section/spotlight-joss-whedon, which is hosting a special Joss Whedon spotlight all month long on their site. (It’s excellent, and I urge you all to check it out and find many of our contributors here on it! However, thar be spoilers, and they don’t white them out over there!) ;)

So without any further ado, please welcome Rhonda!

“I’d Very Still”: Love After “Innocence”
Rhonda V. Wilcox

One of the things I love best about Buffy is that the series does not end with coupling. At the end of the seven television seasons, it’s not all about who’s going to mate with whom; it’s about the larger journey of life — not just romantic love. Now those who know me might comment that that’s easy for me to say; I’ve been happily married for many years. But it’s important that the series places such a great emphasis on other values — standing on your own and (seemingly opposite but really not) friendship. Agape love is more important than eros in Buffy. But eros has its place, and one such place is this sequence of episodes. In the immediately preceding “Surprise” / “Innocence,” Buffy and Angel have made love and Angel is lost. But then, rather than turning to simple monster-fighting to get past the trauma, we have three more episodes about Scooby love lives: “Phases,” about Willow and Oz; “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” about Xander and Cordelia; and “Passion,” about Giles and Jenny — and, again, Buffy and Angel. These episodes are about both the death of love and the endurance of love.

In “Phases,” Willow finally gets smoochies; and it is satisfying that Oz is worthy of being smooched. Willow, the unpopular smart girl, was my emotional way into the show; she was the one I identified with first (later, I identified with Buffy and overwork). Given that Willow wasn’t getting Xander, it was very important that the person our smart girl got was cool. As many Buffy fans know, this was not the first pairing of Alyson Hannigan and Seth Green; Hannigan was the stepdaughter in My Stepmother Is an Alien, and tiny Alyson’s first date was tiny Seth. The two undeniably have on-screen chemistry. In addition, the Oz character is both a senior and the lead guitarist for a rock band, Dingoes Ate My Baby (the name cannot be said too often). But more importantly, Oz has internal qualities that make him worthy of Willow. We know he is intelligent; he and Willow were the only students recruited by the giant software company in “What’s My Line.” He also sees things others don’t. At the beginning of “Phases,” we find him staring at a cheerleading trophy; when Willow enters, he tells her its eyes follow him. Those of us who watched “Witch” (1.3) know that it encases the vengeful spirit of Amy’s mom — something not even Willow and the other Scoobies know. (This scene also prepared audiences for Amy’s return in “Bewitched.”) His attentiveness has already been displayed; in “Surprise,” when at Buffy’s birthday party Oz witnesses a vampire being staked and must be told of the magical dark side of Sunnydale, he does not react with the usual denial: “Actually, it explains a lot,” he says. He observes Willow’s feelings for Xander, too, and is willing to wait. And while he may sometimes seem the epitome of the laconic, he is nonetheless blessed with a crucial quality for strong characters in any Whedonverse: the ability to play with language. When Willow says hi, he responds, “Oh, that’s what I was gonna say.” Like other major Buffy players, he moves words to unusual places: When Willow says she enjoyed seeing a movie with him, he answers, “My time was also of the good.” And when Larry talks to him about getting “Buffy and Willow action,” he replies with a gentle riposte: “That’s great, Larry — you’ve really mastered the single-entendre.” His restraint here is another one of his fine qualities, qualities that let us feel good about his dating our Willow.

All this virtue is on display in a minefield of an episode: the episode after the cruelty of “Innocence.” And, indeed, “Phases” is full of anger at the male of the species. This is the episode in which Oz becomes a werewolf. After we’ve learned that a werewolf is on the loose but before we know it’s Oz, Giles describes the animalistic violence of the creature. “Your typical male,” says the emotionally wounded Buffy (Giles points out that it might be a female). Willow and Cordelia also complain about men, specifically about Xander and Oz: the former keeps talking about Willow and Buffy when he’s with Cordelia; the latter, apparently still waiting to be sure Xander is out of Willow’s system, has yet to kiss her. “What’s his problem?” asks Cordelia. “Oh, right, he’s a guy.” “Couple of guys,” agrees Willow. And later in the episode, when Oz has deserted Willow, Buffy asserts, “They grow body hair, they lose all ability to tell you what they really want.” Thus “Phases,” the werewolf episode, suggests that even the most intelligent, self-possessed, and restrained of young men has an animal inside. By the end of the episode, Willow claims some of that wildness too (and the longer the series goes, the truer we know that to be); but some anger seems right for the emotional arc of the series at this point. And in the end, we get past the anger. After Oz’s secret is discovered and he offers to leave her alone, Willow instead offers to stay: “I’d still if you’d still,” she says. “I’d very still,” he happily replies. She is indeed, as he says, “quite the human” — and she is the one who, right out there in the crowded sunshine, kisses him. Even after “Innocence,” love can still be sweet.

“Phases” is in part about shame and secrets — not just wolfish ones; it’s also the episode in which we learn Larry is gay (and I have always loved that his self-recognition allowed him to become a kinder person). “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” on the other hand, is about another important part of high school: public humiliation. In this episode, Cordelia loses status because of dating Xander; she turns her public humiliation into his when she dumps him at the Valentine’s Day dance. But by the end of the episode she publicly claims him, demonstrating that Cordelia has the character to make her worthy of Xander. (I’d say more, but I promised Nikki I’d stick to a thousand words.) In “Passion,” Jenny’s patience and intelligent determination result in her reconciliation with Giles—another case of love enduring. It is also, however, in dreadful parallel with Buffy and Angel, a case of the loss of love. It is one of the most beautiful and horrifying episodes of the series. Like “Innocence,” it makes us aware of the meaning of love through its loss. Thankfully, the episodes between — “Phases” and “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” — comfort us with the bravery of love.

***

And finally, on deck next is David Kociemba, who was previously on here in our season 1 finale week talking about “Nightmares,” “Invisible Girl,” and “Prophecy Girl.” Thanks for coming back, David!

Love in the Time of Angelus
David Kociemba

These three episodes are near and dear to my heart. I broke writer’s block of several years duration defending “Passion”. “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” is an early moment where Xander takes of the mantle of Emersonian comic heroism. This passage is from Emerson’s essay, Manners: “I have seen an individual, whose manners, though wholly within the conventions of elegant society, were never learned from there, but were original and commanding, and held out protection and prosperity; one who did not need the aid of a court-suit, but carried the holiday in his eye; who exhilarated the fancy by flinging wide the doors of new modes of existence; who shook off the captivity of etiquette, with happy, spirited bearing, good-natured and free as Robin Hood; yet with the port of an emperor,—if need be calm, serious, and fit to stand the gaze of millions.” Stanley Cavell writes about the screwball comedy roles of Cary Grant and Barbara Stanwyk in this light in Pursuits of Happiness. To me, it defines him in this episode, the first with Buffy shunted to the B storyline due to her commitment to appear on SNL. He’ll have a few more of these moments later in the series.

But “Phases” was the first episode I ever watched. I was at a friend's house studying with her for a midterm for a graduate school film studies course. She insisted that we take a break and watch an episode being aired that night. What enthralled me was that it validated one of my pet theories about the werewolf myth, which is that the werewolf investigates what would happen if men menstruated. (Once a month, on a cycle connected to the moon, the man's secondary sexual characteristics run wild and he experiences violent mood swings. See Ginger Snaps for an excellent take on the werewolf myth from the girl’s perspective.) The final exchange between Willow and Oz clinched the series for me, “I mean, three days out of the month I’m not much fun to be around either.” The series creators knew how to work on multiple layers of meaning at the same time and were aware of the multiple meanings that these myths carry. I was primed to be an active viewer because the first episode I saw had rewarded that behavior. (As a midseason replacement with low ratings airing prior to the arrival of YouTube, many viewers saw the series out of order in broadcast.)

One of the things that strikes me about these three episodes now is the enormous courage of the characters to dare to believe in love and fall hard for one another. Angelus proves that all lovers are dangerous, for we can lose ourselves in them and they can transform into strangers before our very eyes. Jennifer Cruisie wrote the best article on romance in the Whedon scholarship in Seven Seasons of Buffy. She writes:

“But there’s another dimension to Buffy’s love stories beyond the psychological accuracy, a dimension that makes them even deeper: the ever-present knowledge that while falling in love can be devastating, consummating that love can be lethal…. [L]ove in this world really is a matter of life and death…. In a world where any attempt to find connection results in pain and death, love is an unbelievable act of courage.”

Cordelia’s dares social death, Xander learns to give up the pornographic gaze, Willow busts a move and Giles suffers heartbreak. We find each other, against all odds. This impulse to form attachments defines humanity for Joss Whedon. In Dollhouse, repeated memory wipes aren’t enough to separate Echo, Sierra and Victor. This embrace of humanism as our greatest virtue gets it most direct expression n the Firefly episode, “Our Mrs. Reynolds”:

SAFFRON: Everybody plays each other. That’s all anybody ever does. We play parts.
MAL: You got all kinds of learnin’ and you made me look the fool without tryin’, and yet here I am with a gun to your head. That’s ‘cause I got people with me. People who trust each other, who do for each other, and ain’t always lookin’ for the advantage.

Mal rejects the postmodern understanding of the human condition as isolated performances of social roles in a context where power perverts every aspect of life in favor of the understanding, liberty and fellowship of old-fashioned humanism. Our love defines us.

Did You Notice?
…that Giles laughs at one of Xander’s jokes for once?
… how the tiresome Karofsky Glee storyline was handled with grace and humor a decade earlier with Larry here?
… why the love spell went awry? The incantation appeals to Diana, a virgin goddess who herself usurped the masculine role of the hunter. In a popular folk tale, Diana punished a hunter who spied on her while she was bathing. She transformed him into another object of desire by turning him into a hart to be hunted by his own hounds, which lust for his blood. Holding a lit candle in his lap, Xander sits on the floor within the painted red symbol of the female sex. And he’s stripped the waist, revealing muscular shoulders, arms and chest. Xander has made himself into a spectacle for the camera’s admiring gaze; he’s taken the place of the woman in the cinematic tradition. (Again.) This spell is designed to gain control over another person’s erotic desire, over their genitals. Had a heterosexual woman blown out a lit candle held in their lap, she would have demonstrated her control over the ritual’s symbol of male lust, the phallic candle. The logic of magic is that like attracts like and the part stands for the whole. So, the candle should attract its visual like, a penis. Xander’s symbolism is that of masturbation, a sexual conquest in the imagination rather than the real.
…that the men seem to be ensorcelled too? A few male peers gaze at him admiringly. The others react to him with intense anger, possibly repressing that sexual desire and redirecting it into aggression. Giles coldly berates him. Ordinarily unflappably cool, Oz is “left with the very strong urge to hit him.” Even Angelus admits to “feeling very close to [Xander] right now.” Oh, how I wish Larry had been in this episode.
… that force is okay for Willow? It’s not just Vamp Willow who’s excited by playing “Mistress of Pain”.
…that Angelus has the first voice-over of the series? (Or possibly the second, depending on how you read Anthony Stewart Head’s intoned intro.) For the first time, a villain has power of voiceover, enabling him to serve as the storyteller, the narrative guide. Angelus becomes the center to patterns of editing, rather than Buffy. It is his position that is adopted by the camera as viewers watch Buffy and Willow react to the death of Jenny Calendar. Angelus systematically rewrites the settings within the series, the rules of the series itself, and our relationship to the series. We invited him into our homes as much as Buffy, Willow and Giles did. The question will be whether we too will change the locks.
… what’s playing when Giles discovers Jenny? It’s La Vie Boheme: “Oh! Lovely Girl! Oh sweet face/bathed in the soft moonlight/I see you in the dream/I’ll dream forever.” It still makes me get a lump in my throat, even after seven years of teaching this episode.
… the lovely use of pools of light to edit within the frame when Angelus chases Jenny from one school building to another? This was the first time cinematographer Michael Gershman directed an episode for the series.
… that Giles never denies that he was trying to get himself killed? This pays off in the season finale.


Thank you, David!
Next week: One of my favourite people in the world, Ian Klein, joins me to discuss "Killed by Death," "I Only Have Eyes for You," and "Go Fish," the trio of episodes that will precede the series 2 finale!

Buffy Rewatch Week 10: Spoiler Forum

Welcome to this week's spoiler forum, where you can discuss anything regarding this week's episodes -- "Phases," "BBB," and "Becoming" without fear of spoiling any new viewers. I don't have too much to add, other than how difficult it was to find a YouTube clip for "Close Your Eyes" that didn't feature pictures overlaid with Buffy plunging a sword into Angel. Sheesh. I do like the symmetry between Passion and Becoming (probably why those are my favourite eps of season 2) and I'll be covering that in more detail in my season 2 writeup, but for now, we can chat about this week's episodes.

Music for a Monday

Two of my favourite acts, together on stage. I still remember flipping channels and stopping on this show years ago when it first aired, and suddenly this happened and my jaw dropped.

Buffy Rewatch Week 9

2.12 Bad Eggs
2.13 Surprise
2.14 Innocence

This is for the first-time watcher: Well? Was I right?! Did you get to "Innocence" and realize you are completely hooked and there’s no turning back?

This is the week I’ve been waiting for.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the rewatch, I’ve told many a first-time viewer that they just need to get to the middle of season 2 (i.e. the Surprise/Innocence duet) and they’ll know if Buffy is for them. I’ve only had one person ever get to the end of season 2 and go, “meh.” But that was my brother. And he gave up on Lost and thought season 2 of Breaking Bad was “just okay.” Let’s pretend he never watched Buffy. (Because seriously, when you see what’s in store for the season 2 finale, you’ll think he’s as crazy as I do. I love the guy, but we don't typically agree on TV stuff... except The Wire.)

Now, each week I’ve been preceding the guest commentary with my own thoughts, pulling out highlights and little things I want you to take note of in the episodes. But this week I have three other commentators (in the beginning it was going to be one guest a week, but then people started asking if they could double up with others, and so you’ll see on some of the weeks with popular episodes that we have a lot of people in one week... because basically I’m a pushover and just say yes to everyone!) I’d already written up my commentary for the week when I got the write-ups in from this week’s threesome, and I was surprised at how many similar things we pointed out. So I’ve condensed my section down to a few paragraphs, and that way we can get to the main event(s) without too much repetition.

Well, OK, there’s one thing that no one pointed out, and that’s... why the hell is Joyce drinking her cappuccino with a straw in the opening of “Surprise”?

(I haven’t brought this up much so far, but my comments that precede each guest are in addition to (and in some cases touching upon) what I’ve written in my companion guide, Bite Me. If you’re looking for more explanation of each episode from me, that’s where you’ll find it. I notice each week people in the comments pointing out omissions in what we’ve talked about, and most of those are covered in that book. I’ve got a lot to say about Angelus’s turn in Innocence, for example, that I won’t rehash here.)

Despite being one of the worst eps of season 2, in many ways, “Bad Eggs” really foreshadows the next two episodes (which is really the only thing it’s good for). When Lyle runs away, Buffy says, “Oh sure... they SAY they’ll call,” which foreshadows that Angel won’t even call the day after they have sex. The whole episode is an overblown metaphor for the sturm und drang of early parenthood, and features that scene where the teacher asks students what’s the worst thing that can happen when you have sex as a teenager. Of course, no one says, “Oh! Oh! Pick me! Um... when your boyfriend? He, like, totally turns into an evil, soulless vampire right after sex? When before he was TOTALLY awesome and passionate and sweet and amazing? Like, you know, Edward and stuff?” Notice when Buffy and Angel are snogging in the cemetery; you’ll see a tombstone that says, “In Loving Memory” behind them, as if to suggest the impending death of their relationship.

Of course, the episode does have a line I’ve used often: Xander: “Can I just say, gyeehhhhh...” Buffy: “I see your ‘gyeehhhhh’ and raise you a ‘nyaaah’...”

But... then there’s "Surprise" and "Innocence"... for everyone who’s been saying Boreanaz’s acting hasn’t exactly been compelling so far, you’re in for a treat with Angelus. This is where he truly comes to life, and you see the seeds of the guy he plays on Bones. Boreanaz is a very funny actor, and watching him being broody Angel isn’t nearly as fun as watching him as Angelus. He is DELICIOUS here. I’ve always believed the Angelus/Angel split is the roots of Stephan and Damon on The Vampire Diaries, with Stephan being the broody one (at least in the beginning) and Damon the feisty one. Ian Somerhalder takes what Boreanaz does on Buffy and cranks it way up, bringing even more fun to this idea of a vampire who LOVES what he does.

Ah, "Surprise" and "Innocence." From Drusilla and Buffy having the same birthday (ack!) to Spike’s annoyance with Angelus and watching him take over as the alpha vamp in the lair to Rasputina’s music playing at Dru’s birthday party, these two episodes are ace. I still remember watching the original broadcast on the WB, and it was when Buffy was moved to Tuesday nights from Monday – they made a big deal about it, and Surprise aired on Monday, and Innocence aired the following night, on Tuesday, introducing its new (and from that point on, permanent) time slot. One of the best things about these episodes (other than the emergence of Angelus, of course) is Drusilla. We thought she was creepy before? NOW look at her. She’s not weak, and she’s still as maniacal as ever. And much more dangerous. Holding her fingers to the studious vampire’s eyes and saying, “I’m gonna blow out the candles” has got to be one of my favourite lines in S2. Miss Edith still has a gag over her mouth, but now when Drusilla doesn’t get her way she’s louder and angrier and has a fit like a caffeinated toddler. I LOVE Juliet Landau in this role.

And then there’s Willow and Oz. First we get the banter where Oz says he’s going to ask her out and she says I’ll say yes, then she says no... my heart just melts with joy in that scene. And then when he says, “In my fantasy, when I’m kissing you, you’re kissing me.” Most romantic line ever on Buffy? Maybe. Oh how I ♥ these two. “Willow kissage.” Squeee!!!!

But Angelus. These episodes are most incredible for Angelus. From his low blows about Buffy’s sexual performance to the danger he exudes when he’s around her, everything you see in Innocence is a portent of what’s to come with this character. He’s evil, spiteful, soulless, and he’s got Buffy’s heart and knows exactly how to stomp on it. It’s one thing to kill vampires you don’t know; it’s quite another to kill your soulmate. Will Buffy be able to do it?

I do want to mention that superb scene at the end of Innocence that is one of my favourite throughout the series, and even moreso now that I’m a parent. The first time I saw “Innocence” and Joyce came rushing out with the little cupcake and the candle, I thought it was one of the sweetest parenting moments I’d seen on TV. And the concern on Joyce’s face is so real when she realizes something is terribly wrong with her daughter, but she doesn’t know how to penetrate Buffy’s sadness. Buffy’s final line, “I’ll just let it burn,” before she folds herself into her mother’s arms, is exquisite.

So let’s move on to this week’s guests! First up on deck is the wonderful Steve Halfyard! Many of you enjoyed the Cheeseman’s comments last week, so here she is again to discuss the music on this week’s episodes (by the way, I felt my heart ache when the Buffy/Angel theme was fully realized in these episodes... sigh...)

The Cheeseman Cometh!
Steve Halfyard
And so at last: the moment when the original music of Buffy really gets interesting, the moment when it leaps out of the mundane, run-of-the-mill, Oh-it’s-just-a-TV-show-let’s-just write-something-easy territory and into the far reaches of Wow! Buffy’s music has been on two really different planes up to this point: fantastic, innovative use of indie and unsigned bands playing in the Bronze; and music that for the most part has been fantastically ordinary coming through in the underscore. I’m not even going to mention season 1…

But Christophe Beck changes all this, pretty much single handed. The love theme has been lurking for a while: we heard the first, embryonic version of it way back in the music for “Some Assembly Required” – first when we watch Daryl the Zombie Quarterback, under the bleachers, looking at the guys playing the game, looking at the thing he loves most in the world and absolutely bereft at his loss; and something similar comes back at the end of the episode when Buffy and Angel talk about the potential problems of their relationship (more problematic things to do with love). We get embryo-love theme again (it’s not a theme yet, just a sort of general musical idea) quite earlier on in Ted in the scene where Buffy is tending to Angel’s wounds and moaning about "Ted"; and Angel finally shuts her up by getting her to kiss him. And then, suddenly, in “Surprise,” just a few minutes into the episode, once again Angel puts an end to Buffy’s babbling by kissing her and there we go, huge great gorgeous beautiful love theme. Couldn’t miss it if you tried: easily the most famous theme in all the Buffyverse. It has this one moment as a love theme, and then everything goes rapidly wrong and it becomes a theme as much about Buffy losing Angle as about her loving him. Such is life in Sunnydale.

There’s one other musical bit that I will point out now and say nothing more about, but I need you to remember it. About half way through the episode, we have the dream sequence where Buffy remembers her night of ill-advised passion with Angel. The music here is really quite different from the love theme. It has a really distinctive melody: the intervals are still big (as they are in the LT) but they’re actually bigger and more angular, less obviously lyrical (you trying singing it! much harder than the LT). This is part of what makes the cue unusually exotic; added to which there’s a non-Western wind instrument, a duduk, which is unlike anything we’ve heard in Beck’s scores before; and there’s a drum going like a heartbeat, making it all jolly physical. Anyway, listen and remember. There will be a test later (sometime in April!)

***

She’s not kidding, guys. There will totally be a test. Nikki’s midterm, “Have you been paying attention?” quiz. Ahem. Start boning up.

I have two new people this week, both Slayage folks and both absolutely brilliant. The first up is Stacey Abbott, who I’m happy to say I’m working with right now on an upcoming book on Supernatural. She and David Lavery have edited together 18 essays into a book called TV Goes to Hell, and I’m their editor on the project (and LOVING the show, by the way... loving it). I first saw her present a paper at Slayage 3 on Wesley from Angel (my favourite character in the Whedonverse), comparing his story arc to that of the boys on Supernatural. Stacey is one of the world’s foremost Angel experts, if not THE expert. She is is a Reader in Film and Television Studies at Roehampton University in London UK where she teaches World Cinema, Genre studies (including horror, rom-coms and musicals), and film language and analysis. She also teaches a class on the Modern Vampire where she gets to discuss her favourite vampire films and TV programs (so yes Buffy and Angel feature prominently). Previously a film snob, her research now focuses extensively on cult television and she has written on her favourite programs including Alias, Buffy, Dexter, Firefly, and Lost. She is the author of Angel: TV Milestone, the editor of Reading Angel: The TV Spin-off With a Soul and is currently co-writing a book on TV horror with fellow-Buffy scholar Lorna Jowett.

She’s also a Canadian who is living in the UK, which means… she spells words the same way I do! So please welcome… Stacey Abbott!

“Goodbye Sweetheart”: Buffy the Vampire Slayer Grows Up
Stacey Abbott

I would like to thank Nikki for inviting me to take part in the Buffy Rewatch. I was particularly pleased to be able to write about these episodes because when I am asked, and I’m often asked, what season of Buffy I think is the best, I usually respond that I think season three is the best (the series is consistently good from beginning to end) but season two is my favourite. Not I should add because of “Bad Eggs” but because of “Surprise”/“Innocence” or at least the narrative arc developed in these episodes. My first experience watching Buffy was during season two. The episode was “The Dark Age” – a strange first episode as its story is dependent upon knowing quite a bit about the show. Without knowing Giles, how can you appreciate the impact of his strange behaviour on Buffy or the revelation of his past as Ripper? If you’ve never seen Angel before, and don’t really know anything about the show’s conception of the vampire, let alone his story about the curse, how can you understand the ending? There was, however, enough there to make me go back to the beginning. From Buffy’s arrival in Sunnydale in “Welcome to the Hellmouth” I was hooked and by the time the Scooby gang is fully formed and pulling together to save the world in “Prophecy Girl”, I knew that this show was going to be great. But of course, once you’ve surrounded Buffy with a loyal team of “Slayerettes” what is there for the writing team to do….but pull them apart. And that is what season two is all about. Buffy and her friends face challenges and strains to their friendship in this season that rise far above the demon as metaphor for teenage problems narratives of season one. This is the season when they, and the show along with it, begin to grow up. Now not all of the episodes are great. Having made the transition from a twelve episode mid-season replacement to a full season of twenty-two episodes, it is not surprising that the show is somewhat uneven. While some episodes are genius others are functional and others are bad...but that is the nature of commercial serial television. Each episode can’t be genius or works of art but when they are, you appreciate them all the more. So this brings us to this week’s episodes.

“Bad Eggs”
Many people consider “Bad Eggs” to be the worst episode of the season. When looking at the list of episodes, it is definitely in my bottom two, along with “Go Fish”. But I’m not sure if I would say it is bad but rather it is weak. There are things I like about “Bad Eggs”. I enjoy that this is Buffy’s attempt at a science-fiction-style episode about mind-control and alien (or in this case demon) invasion with clear allusions to Robert A. Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters (1951), the classic SF/horror films Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986). I also like that the names of the vampire villains of the episode, the Gorch Brothers, are taken from Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969). The suggestion that after the blood bath that ends the film, Lyle and Tector Gorch became vampires is priceless, and means that I can never again watch the film in quite the same way. This film student-style joke appeals to me. [*Nikki here: I also wanted to mention that along with the Gorch brothers in that film, one of the vigilantes is named Angel, and another is Pike, which not only sounds a lot like Spike, but I believe there was a character in the original Buffy movie named Pike.] I like the fact that Willow is the one who seems to become the leader of the Bezoar (the demon laying the eggs)’s minions. Later, when she hits Buffy and calmly orders Buffy’s death, we see a hint of the Dark Willow to come. Also, Xander’s glib attitude to his parenting homework assignment wherein he not only boils his egg in order to avoid damaging it but then decides, when his snacks run out, that he will eat it serve as early evidence that Xander has a troubled family life.

The weakness of the episode is partly due to the fact that the Gorches are comic McGuffins and not the primary Big Bad of the episode, which is the Bezoar. But the Bezoar is an off screen villain, lacking personality. It is only briefly glimpsed through the cracks in the basement foundation and as a result we are denied access to Buffy’s final confrontation with it, making the ending fundamentally unsatisfying. Buffy’s fight to the death begins and ends too quickly to create a genuine sense of threat. The other reason that this episode seems weak is of course that it is situated between “What’s My Line Part 1 & 2”, and “Surprise”/“Innocence” in which Buffy is confronted by genuinely dangerous, and morally, and emotionally, complex villains. Here the threat to Buffy, both physically and emotionally, is palpable. But that is the nature of serial television. While “Bad Eggs” could have been better, you do need a monster of the week episode at this point in the season, if only so that the audience does not see what is coming next. The only clue to future events in the episode is that among all of the alien invasion hijinks, Buffy and Angel’s relationship seems to be escalating. But these moments in which they are repeatedly caught snogging…(too British?) …necking (not a good idea with a vampire)… ok…kissing seem sweet and innocent, lulling the audience into a sense of security before things get really serious.

“Surprise”/”Innocence”
“Surprise”, in classic Marti Noxon fashion, is a darkly disturbing episode about pain, sex and death masked behind the veneer of teen romance. The opening prophetic dream sequence in which Angel is murdered by Drusilla is quickly displaced by the episode’s seeming preoccupation with heating up the relationships of our teenage couples. This is first established by Buffy’s discussion about whether it is time for her and Angel to “seize the day” and take their relationship to the next stage, and then neatly contrasted with the innocence and humour of Willow’s encounter with Oz when he tells her that he is going to ask her out:

Oz: I’m gonna ask you to go out with me tomorrow night and I’m kinda nervous about it actually. It’s interesting.
Willow: Oh. Well if it helps at all, I’m gonna say yes.
Oz: Yeah, it helps. It creates a comfort zone. Do you want to go out with me tomorrow night?
Willow: Oh! I can’t.
Oz: Well, see, I like that you are unpredictable.

This scene [along with Willow’s gleeful line as she walks away from Oz: “I said date”] is one of a long list of touching moments between the two characters as their relationship evolves. Willow and Oz remind the audience that first love need not be all angst and torment as in Buffy and Angel’s passionate relationship. They are able to overcome their problems -- that is until season four -- and their first sexual encounter is a healthy and positive experience, albeit taking place just before a potential apocalypse (“Graduation Day Part 2”), standing in contrast with Buffy’s traumatic experience in “Innocence”. Similarly the heat of Angel and Buffy is innocently paralleled by Xander and Cordelia continuing to grope each other in the closet but without knowing how to classify their relationship or where it is leading. The grown-ups, however remind us that relationships are complicated things. While Jenny and Giles seem to be overcoming the strain on their relationship after Jenny’s possession in “Dark Ages”, the revelation of Jenny’s secret identity and hidden agenda tells us that their relationship faces trouble ahead. Finally, the return of Spike and Drusilla, as they plan both Drusilla’s coming out party and the end of the world, provides us with a model for a twisted love affair. The drive toward the sexual maturity of our characters is fraught with tension and potential disaster.

Linked to this theme, the return of Drusilla also introduces an interesting parallel between her and Buffy that prepares us for the devastating outcome of Buffy and Angel’s first, and only, sexual encounter (that is until the Angel episode “I Will Remember You” which also leads to pain and sacrifice this time for Angel). Drusilla repeatedly appears in Buffy’s dreams, and it is later revealed that she has been having similar dreams. Spike is throwing a party for Drusilla, celebrating her return to health, just like the Scooby Gang are planning a party for Buffy’s birthday. Drusilla tells Spike that her party will be the “best party ever…because it will be the last” and while Buffy’s party is not her last, it feels like it will be when it is disrupted by the revelation of Spike and Drusilla’s plans to destroy the world and the decision that Angel needs to leave Sunnydale in order to prevent them from completing their plan. This mirror effect helps us unravel Buffy’s dreams in which she sees Drusilla stake Angel through the heart for it is Buffy who will destroy Angel when she sleeps with him (or at least that is how she will come to see it) and also that she will be forced to stab him through the heart in order to save the world (“Becoming Part 2”). But more importantly, it prepares us for the fact that Angelus will seek to destroy Buffy with the same cruel approach he applied to Drusilla as he explained to Buffy in “Lie to Me”. All roads it seems are leading to the shocking moment that bridges “Surprise” and “Innocence” as Angel and Buffy’s post-coital sleep is disrupted when Angel wakes up with a blast of pain, and calls Buffy’s name before his soul is ripped from him.

When rewatching “Innocence” a number of things stand out. This is the episode where we really begin to see that David Boreanaz can act. While he broods very convincingly up to this point, as an actor he is given little to do except be an idealised romantic lead for Buffy. With the release of Angelus, Boreanaz clearly relishes his ability to play twisted humour alongside a darkly menacing performance. Angelus takes delectable pleasure in the pain he causes, and the series invites the audience to enjoy it along with him while also feeling Buffy’s pain – no small feat. Angelus is so much more fun to watch than Angel especially in his scenes with Drusilla and Spike. Written and directed by Joss Whedon, this episode introduces the perverse and delicious ménage-a-trois that defines their vampiric relationship. Well known for his preference for long takes, Whedon makes some of his best use of the long take to film the three vampires in the factory as they mock, tease and torment each other. At first these long takes show a twisted unity between the vampires but when Angelus and Drusilla are filmed leaving the wheel-chair bound Spike behind in the frame when they take the Judge to the mall to begin his Armageddon, we see a glimpse of the fracture to come in “Becoming Part 1 & 2”.

Whedon also includes a number of mirror images from the previous episode designed to offer a twisted reflection of Buffy and Angel/us. Just before they make love in “Surprise” Buffy and Angel are framed in an extreme and intimate close up, with Buffy on the left and Angel on the right, as they struggle against their desire for each other, while in “Innocence” they are framed in a mirror-image extreme close [with Angelus on the left and Buffy on the right] as Angel, now revealed as Angelus, kisses Buffy and tells her that “things are about to get very interesting”. Similarly, the early morning meeting between Buffy and Angel in his apartment after her first dream, in which Buffy reveals that she would like to see Angel “before bedtime”, is brutally mirrored in their post-coital encounter when Angel/us delivers some of his most painful dialogue (“You got a lot to learn about me kiddo. But I guess you proved that last night”), climaxing in his flippant “Love you too” as he leaves her behind (a line that usually results in an audible gasp from my students with one student, unable to control himself, bursting out with a very loud ‘bastard!’). Whedon’s directorial style begins to show the sophistication that will come to define such classic episodes of Buffy – “Restless” and “Hush” – and Angel –“Waiting in the Wings” and “Spin the Bottle”.

Another key observation from this viewing is that while Buffy and the Scooby Gang come to distinguish the ensouled Angel from his soulless alter ego by calling them Angel and Angelus respectively, in this episode, Angel continues to refer to himself as Angel. In fact when Drusilla hesitatingly calls him Angel when he arrives at the factory, he responds with ‘Hey baby I’m back’ and later when Jenny tells Willow that it isn’t Angel, his response is: “I am Angel…At last”. This fits well with the season one episode of Angel (‘Warzone’) in which Angel introduces himself to a group of gang-like vampires he wants to intimidate with: “The name’s Angelus”. The suggestion here, which is repeatedly reinforced in Angel, is that the line between Angel and Angelus is a blurred one and the clear distinction that Buffy likes to make between the two is created in order to make it easier for her to accept his loss and to eventually kill him. This transition in Angel introduces a moral ambiguity into the series and to Angel’s status as a reluctant vampire, an ambiguity that will become a central theme in Angel.

So Angel brings the fun to this episode and Buffy brings the pain. The confusion, guilt and loss she feels is never more tangibly portrayed then at the end of the episode in two scenes with parental figures Giles and Joyce. With Giles, Buffy expresses her guilt and shame for disappointing him through her actions but, in one of my favourite father/daughter scenes between the two, Giles refuses to admonish her or accept her guilt but instead acknowledges her growing maturity by offering her his love, support and respect. Later as Buffy and Joyce celebrate her birthday by watching an old Hollywood musical on TV, Buffy refuses to blow out her birthday candle, choosing to quietly watch it burn. Buffy gently resting her head on her mother’s shoulder and Joyce’s silent look, knowing something has happened but recognising that Buffy needs support and not questioning, speaks more to loss and the pain of growing up then all of the histrionics and speech-making that one would expect from the ‘very special’ TV episodes that Whedon abhorred. As the episode fades out on the song, ‘Goodbye Sweetheart’, emanating from the Summers’ television, Buffy the Vampire Slayer grows up as well.

***

Thank you, Stacey! Next up is Tanya Cochran, who is a founding board member and officer of the Whedon Studies Association (an organization devoted to the academic study of Joss Whedon and his associates). I referred to her in the Slayage 4 roundup last year as the one who did an amazing paper on fan-scholars (that would be me) versus scholar-fans (that’s most of the people I’m featuring on here) and how they could come together in harmony. This rewatch, I think, is a perfect way to put into practice what she suggested in her paper. Tanya’s publications include essays in the collections Televising Queer Women (Palgrave, 2008); Sith, Slayers, Stargates + Cyborgs: Modern Mythology in the New Millennium (Lang, 2009); and Buffy in the Classroom: Essays on Teaching the Vampire Slayer (McFarland, 2010), and she is co-editor with Rhonda V. Wilcox of Investigating Firefly and Serenity: Science Fiction on the Frontier (Tauris, 2008).

Please welcome Tanya!

Let It Burn: Buffy, Sex, Responsibility, and Consequences
Tanya R. Cochran

When I first signed on for the Buffy Rewatch, I didn’t know I’d have the privilege of writing about some of the most moving and noteworthy episodes of the series. (It’s kind of intimidating, because there’s way too much to write about. I’ll be leaving a lot of wonderful stuff out. [1]) “Surprise” and “Innocence” are those episodes many of us who evangelize for the series use to entice potential converts through the campiness of the first season. “If you just make it to ‘Surprise’ and ‘Innocence,’ you won’t stop watching,” we promise. I have secured many a new believer with such a testimony. I admit that I didn’t really care to write about “Bad Eggs,” which comes just before the dynamic duo, until I watched the three episodes in succession after having not watched them in many, many years. I saw connections I didn’t see before. That’s what re-watching provides, I suppose. And what struck me the most about the triptych was their profound cohesion.

“Bad Eggs” begins with one of only a few shots in the series of the Sunnydale mall. For all of Buffy’s stereotypical, consumerist, teenaged girl talk about shopping, we rarely actually see her there. But here we find her running errands and browsing with her mom. To save time, Joyce sends Buffy after a dress at Everyday Woman, a store Buffy declares might as well be called “Muumuus R Us” (one on my favorite lines in the episode). Of course, Buffy is distracted from this task by a vampire she attempts to dispatch in the arcade before he drains an unsuspecting adolescent girl. At this point in the series, the dialogue especially between Buffy and her mother oozes double meaning and irony. A brilliant such moment comes when Joyce chastises Buffy for not completing her assigned task: picking up her mother’s dress.

“A little responsibility, Buffy, that’s all I ask. Honestly, don’t you ever think about anything besides boys and clothes?”
“Saving the world from vampires.”
Long pause. Long stare. “Honestly, Buffy, I don’t know what goes on in your head.”

This opening sequence, particularly Joyce’s request for “a little responsibility,” sets the stage for one of the central themes of the episode, a theme that actually foreshadows “Surprise” and “Innocence”: with sex come consequences — for better or for worse. Or in this ’verse, for better and for worse. In typical Whedon fashion, we viewers are stoked with pleasure before having the flames of our fun reduced to an ember. In other words, there is a lot of kissing, grunting, and groaning going on in this episode — enough to make us giggle. Xander makes out with Cordelia in the broom closet. Buffy smooches Angel in the graveyard, in the park, at her bedroom window, . . . basically wherever and whenever she can.

With all of these youthful hormones raging, as the science teacher Mr. Whitmore explains, it is important for the high-schoolers to consider and hypothetically experience the consequences of acting on their urges. What better way to teach teenagers responsibility than to assign them raw eggs as offspringy homework?! (Yes, read that sentence with a sarcastic tone.) Yet part of my delight in this episode comes from the eggs themselves, simultaneously symbols of fragility and fertility, vulnerability and potential power.

At breakfast the following day, Buffy sets Eggbert — tucked into a basket, swaddled in a blanket — on the countertop. Joyce wonders, “Are you sure your egg is secure in that?” Buffy retorts, “Did I ask for backseat mommying?” The two might as well be talking about Buffy’s consideration of a proper prophylactic. But Buffy doesn’t have to worry about preventing pregnancy: Angel gently explains later that evening that he can’t give her a child the same way a human lover could. Protecting her “egg” isn’t the issue, unless that egg is actually her heart. But she doesn’t see that. “All I see is you. All I want is you,” she declares to Angel. Of course, she will have him, and he her. The two begin to kiss (yet again), and the camera pans right, sweeping across a tombstone that warns: “In Loving Memory.” Oh crap. Yep, get ready for pain.

“Bad Eggs” continues with lots of kissing and loads of irony: in the end, Buffy and Xander — the two teens who flirt the most with succumbing to their raging hormones — save the day because they are the only ones who escape “penetration,” and thus mind control, by the creepy crawlies that hatch from their demonized eggs. A confused and flustered Joyce, after herself being rescued, still grounds Buffy for not being responsible.

This theme of responsibility and consequences — not to be equated with each other — continues to play out in both “Surprise” and “Innocence.” Even in Whedon’s interview on the DVD extra for “Surprise,” he notes that Buffy and Angel’s romance leads to “appalling consequences.” He and his team knew from the start that this “classical star-crossed romance” would be difficult, but that difficulty, notes Whedon, “would be where all the fun was.” Of course, Whedon doesn’t mean “fun” as in fun. He means without Buffy and Angel’s relationship feeling authentic, emotionally resonating, who would care? No one. That’s the point.

In Whedon’s commentary for “Innocence,” he explains (as most of us know) that he created Buffy to be the blonde girl from the horror genre who doesn’t die early in the movie, the blonde who dies partly because she has had sex. Whedon says that though he didn’t want to perpetuate the message that premarital sex should be punished, he also didn’t want to send the message that sex doesn’t have costs. Then he straightforwardly admits, “I punish the shit out of [Buffy].” He just doesn’t kill her — again . . . or right now.

Obviously, (so I won’t make a list) “Surprise” is full of surprises — for the characters and for the audience. Just as obviously, “Innocence” is full of lost innocence(s) — for the characters and for the audience. Beyond these transparent titles, the way the episodes complement and complicate each other and foretell future episodes is simply stunning.

“Surprise” begins with a dream. Buffy and Joyce are in the kitchen. Echoing the tone of her question — “Are you sure your egg is secure in that?” — in “Bad Eggs,” Joyce asks, “Do you really think you’re ready, Buffy?” The plate in Joyce’s hands slips, falls, and shatters as it hits the floor. Then the dream places Buffy in the warehouse where she finds Drusilla holding Angel hostage. Dru taunts Buffy before raising her stake to dust Angel, the “sire” on much more than vampiric states of being. Look closely. Buffy and Dru wear the same full-length, white dress. Sarah Swain suggests that Dru “stands in as Buffy’s dark double,” a symbol of both unfettered desire and culpability in Angel’s un-souling [2]. Much more than the obvious symbol of white as purity and virginity that signals Dru as Buffy, this costuming and framing echoes Buffy’s encounter with the Master and anticipates a scene at the very end of the series when Buffy will make another life-altering decision that has “appalling consequences.” Before Dru’s stake falls, Angel extends his hand, and the camera focuses on his and Buffy’s fingers reaching for each other, another almost identical image used in the forthcoming season finale.

It seems that some of the impending consequences explored in “Surprise” and “Innocence” will have to do with brokenness, with separation. It is appropriate, then, that the villain in these episodes, the Judge, embodies the task of separating good from evil, of breaking forth Armageddon. As Cynthea Masson reminded us two weeks ago, accomplishing that separation is not so simple in the Buffyverse. Even Spike and Drusilla “stink of humanity,” says the Judge, because they love each other. It is also appropriate, then, that Buffy ultimately annihilates the Judge with a rocket launcher, literally and symbolically destroying unsophisticated beliefs, understandings, pronouncements. Herein lies the beauty of lasting stories, of Whedon’s every text: the narrative never insults its audience with simplistic formulas for living, for loving, for dying. Whedon is right: there is some “fun,” some significance — however painful — in that complexity.

Any viewer can feel Buffy’s pain as she anticipates Angel trekking around the globe to keep the Judge from being assembled and begs him not to go (the tragic emotional intensity of the dock scene reminds me of the poignant Angel episode “I Will Remember You”), as she awakes to an empty bed in Angel’s apartment, as she is humiliated by Angelus in that very same space later on, as she realizes what their love-making has brought about, as she must choose between love and duty, as she faces the shell of her lover now the vessel of her enemy, as she expresses her shame and guilt to Giles in the car at the end of “Innocence.” Yet the pain retains a touch of beauty, of the sublime because that pain is never completely senseless. Giles makes sure both Buffy and we know as much, even as he prepares her and us for the road (i.e., hero’s journey) ahead: “Do you want me to wag my finger at you and tell you you acted rashly? You did, and I can. But I know you loved him, and he has proven more than once that he loved you. You couldn’t have known what would happen. The coming months are going to be very hard — I suspect on all of us. But if you’re looking for guilt, Buffy, I’m not your man. All you will have from me is my support . . . and my respect.”

I imagine Whedon himself saying these words to the audience. The comedy and tragedy of living suggests, as Buffy reasons with Willow at the beginning of “Surprise,” we can act on our desires or not act. Either way, we can’t be completely sure of the outcomes, and guilt and shame don’t really help. What helps is family, support, and respect — people who will remain by your side as you deal with the consequences. Buffy regularly takes responsibility, as many of us do. But consequences rain down on the good and the evil — the good who are a little bit evil, the evil who are a little bit good. Consequences themselves are amoral. “And me? What was I supposed to be paying for,” Buffy begs of Ms. Calendar when Jenny explains the gypsy curse on Angelus. I think that’s one of Whedon’s many points: being (ir)responsible isn’t always bound to good or bad consequences. Actions simply have them. At the same time, we are not slaves to circumstances. Neither is Buffy. We have choices. So does she. And we can weather a whole lot. In his commentary, Whedon says that Buffy experiences in “Surprise” and “Innocence” the “baptism of adolescent fire.” A baptism purifies, which is why Whedon can go on to say that Buffy is still innocent. “You look the same to me,” Joyce counters when Buffy states that all she did for her birthday was get older.

This final scene—Buffy and Joyce on the couch chatting over a cupcake and an old film—made Whedon happier than the rocket launcher scene, he claims. It had “such sweetness . . . They leave me with the exact feeling I wanted to have at the end of this: of regret, of loss, of love.” We viewers feel the same. We love Buffy and Buffy because we all have experienced some sort of baptism by fire. And sometimes there seems like nothing to do about it except endure, sit still, wait. Even that response, though, is a choice.

“Well, go on. Make a wish,” Joyce prompts.

“I’ll just let it burn.”

NOTES
[1] For some thought-provoking scholarship on these episodes, start with Rhonda V. Wilcox’s Why Buffy Matters (Tauris, 2005), Gregory Stevenson’s Televised Morality (Hamilton, 2003), Diane DeKelb-Rittenhouse’s “Sex and the Single Vampire” in Fighting the Forces (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), and Melanie Wilson’s “Buffy’s Dream in ‘Surprise’” in Buffy Meets the Academy (McFarland, 2009). There are many other discussions worth reading, of course.
[2] See page 175 of Sarah Swain’s essay “Losing It: The Construction of Virginity in Buffy the Vampire Slayer” in Sexual Rhetoric in the Works of Joss Whedon edited by Erin B. Waggoner (McFarland, 2010).

***

Next week: Laughter, surprises, and big big pain. Just another week in the Whedonverse! Next week's guests will be David Kociemba, Rhonda Wilcox, and Steve Halfyard as we watch:

Phases
Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered
Passion

What an AWESOME week that will be.

Buffy Rewatch Week 9 Spoiler Forum

After the massive post above, I don't know what else is left to say! As always, here is the spoiler forum where everyone can talk about how this week's episodes paved the way for future ones. There are no n00bs on here, so we can talk freely.

Nikki’s Spoilery Bits
• During the dream sequence in the Bronze, Angel reaches out to Buffy the same way he reaches out to her when Buffy puts the sword through him in “Becoming Part 2.”
• “To kill this girl, you have to love her,” says Angel to Spike. This foreshadows that Spike will fall in love with her.
• The Judge’s comments about Spike having humanity in him is something fans often talk about with Spike – even before he’s re-ensouled at the end of Season 6, he seems to have more soul in him than Angel does. The way he cares for Dru and later loves Buffy, and the way he cares for “the little bit,” shows that Spike is a vampire who retains much of the caring William he used to be.
• Spike stays behind because the Apocalypse at the Mall isn’t exactly wheelchair accessible, but he’s also not on board with what they’re about to do. Spike wants to run Sunnydale, but he doesn’t want to destroy the world.