Buffy Rewatch: Week 37

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

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

This week’s Angel episodes are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Thank you, Elizabeth!

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

6.04 Flooded
6.05 Life Serial
6.06 All the Way

And on Angel, we’ll watch:

3.4 Carpe Noctem
3.5 Fredless
3.6 Billy

See you then!

Buffy Rewatch Week 37: Spoiler Forum

And here is our spoiler forum, where we can discuss the events of Angel and Buffy without fear of spoiling anyone watching for the first time.

Previously... on Buffy the Vampire Slayer

In our discussions on The Gift, a few people have been asking about the "previously on Buffy" segment that aired at the beginning of the season 5 finale (which isn't immediately on the S5 DVD, but instead is a hidden easter egg). I remember being completely blown away at the way they snapped through seasons 1 to 5 in a series of flashes. Someone's thankfully posted on YouTube, so here it is for Marebabe and all the other first-time viewers who didn't get to see it when it aired:

September 11

September 11 will be that defining moment in our generation where everyone will remember where they were when they first heard the news. I discovered the news late. When the first plane hit the first tower at 8:46 a.m., I was sitting in a film at the Toronto International Film Festival that had started at 8:45 (our earliest of the festival that year, where we were seeing 30 films in one week). The film was called Khaled, and it was a beautifully told but horrific story about a boy whose mother dies, and, knowing that he'll be taken away and put into foster care, he shoves the body under the bed and begins lying to people about his mother's wellbeing, buying cans and cans of room spray to try to cover the smell. It was devastating... but nothing compared to what had really been happening in the world while we were watching it.

As we emerged from the movie, the first thing we noticed was how quiet the streets of Toronto were. We walked up University Ave. in Toronto and turned left on Bloor. There were barely any cars, and NO people on the streets. "Wow, there must be a LOT of people in movies right!" we marvelled as we walked along. We stopped in a McDonalds to use the bathroom and there was no one inside, and the people behind the counter were all huddled in a corner talking quietly. Weird. Then we went back out onto the street and walked to the Intercontinental Hotel, where I was meeting a friend of mine who is a prominent film critic in Toronto. He probably doesn't remember this, but he was the one who broke the news to me. I knocked on his hotel room door (where he was conducting interviews, and the cameras were all set up inside) and wandered in. He and the crew were standing in front of televisions and their faces were ashen. Standing with them was the guy they'd just been interviewing: Ryan Gosling. He wasn't yet a major star (after he left I said, "Wasn't that the guy from Breaker High?" a terrible show about students on a cruise ship that preceded The Suite Life on Deck, and my friend Richard said, "He's in town promoting an amazing film called True Believer. He's going to be a big star.") but he was a very polite guy who smiled and shook hands and then slipped out of the room as soon as it was apparent Sue and I didn't know what was happening. "So why is it like a ghost town around here?" I said, and Richard looked at me, "Oh wow, you haven't heard?" and immediately proceeded to fill us in. One plane. Another plane. The Pentagon.

I stood there in a moment of shock. The Pentagon. As he said those words I thought, "Oh my god... we're at war." And as soon as that thought was out of my head it was immediately taken over by another one, "Someone out there knew this was going to happen. Someone woke up this morning knowing this was going to happen. Someone planned this." I don't know why that was my all-pervading thought, but it's all I could think of.

Sue and I left, and I felt like I was in a fog. I wasn't a big cellphone user at the time (even now I'm crap at keeping the ringer turned on) but at some point around lunch, I realized my husband had been trying to call me. The world was in a panic in that moment, and he was calling to suggest maybe I come home and we drive out of the city, since there were immediately rumours surrounding every large city that it was going to be the next one to be hit.

We went to a place on Bloor Street for lunch. I still remember what I ordered: chicken quesadillas. As we were waiting for our order to come, we looked up at the televisions above the bar area in the restaurant, all which were tuned to CNN. And that's when I saw for the first time the footage of people jumping out of the buildings. At that moment, CNN was just keeping the cameras rolling constantly, and didn't have time to edit the footage. So not only were they showing people jumping, we could see the bodies hitting the ground. It was the most hideous thing I've ever seen on television.

I didn't eat my chicken quesadillas.

Our next film wasn't until 4pm, so we wandered aimlessly, alternately thinking we should just go home and deciding to stay since we'd spent the money on the tickets. But when we arrived at the theatre, we saw the sign that the movies for the rest of the day had been cancelled. Actors, writers, directors and producers had spent the day on phones to loved ones or trying to book flights out of the city.

I remember looking up and watching the skies for almost an hour, marvelling at the fact there were no planes in the sky. I remember taking the subway home and everyone reading an evening edition of the paper -- in an age where there were no evening editions of the paper.

And I remember the feeling that everything had changed. I was fortunate that I didn't know anyone who could have been in peril, but my heart went out to those who did. And it still does. September 11 changed everything, and it's a date that no one who experienced it will ever forget.

Buffy Lives...

As a little in-between extra on the ongoing Buffy Rewatch, I wanted to give first-time viewers a taste of what it was like back in September 2001 (exactly 10 years ago) right before season 6 was set to start. In the weeks leading up to Buffy's season 6 debut on UPN, a curious poster began cropping up throughout Los Angeles -- on billboards, on the sides of busses, and in magazines. From there, it began spreading to the rest of the country. And it was amazing.

Retro Music Thursdays: The Pixies

After my first post here, I immediately started getting requests to talk about The Pixies (mostly because y'all know my immense love for them already). I was trying to remember the first time I heard them, but I think it was when my then-boyfriend, now-husband got a tape of Come On Pilgrim and Surfer Rosa from a friend of his and came over to play "I've Been Tired" for me. "I wanna be a singer like Lou Reed," "I LIKE Lou Reed," she said...

Great stuff. But it was when I heard Doolittle that I immediately fell in love with them, and then I think I liked Bossanova even more. I think the first time I saw the Pixies was in late 1991 in the same week I saw Tin Machine and someone else... we lived in London Ontario and had to drive two hours to Toronto every time we wanted to see a gig all through high school, and there were some weeks where we were traveling there two and three times a week (it still boggles my mind that my parents were OK with that...) Black Francis, as he was then known before he became Frank Black (though his real name is Charles), is notoriously quiet on stage. He does his thing, he sings his songs, but it's Kim Deal who does all the talking.

Oh Kim Deal. The other "Kim" love of my life after Kim Gordon. Again, the one I watch through every set every time I see them. I remember going to see them at the Concert Hall in Toronto (now the home of CTV, I believe) and during their set one of their amps blew. And I don't mean it stopped working, I mean it BLEW UP, loudly. You've never seen Charles move as quickly as he did then. He just turned and RAN, and I don't think I've ever seen the man do more than a slow saunter before or after that. Things were dealt with and they returned to the stage fairly quickly and continued their set, but I still remember my husband and I in stitches watching it (after our own hearts started beating again... it was LOUD). But to his credit, I think he caught a shock off his mike, so that couldn't have been fun for him. Let's just say he wasn't in the best mood for the rest of the show (and that's saying something about this usually sullen frontman).

Live, The Pixies can't be beat. Frank's vocals are spot-on (even when screaming... I've always been in awe of the fact that he still has such a powerful voice after all these years of stripping it raw through screaming). Kim Deal is the audience favourite. Joey Santiago rarely looks up, but he's always brilliant, and David Lovering stays in the background playing drums, only coming to the fore to sing "La La Love You" (a song I hate). The audiences who have been going to see them for years all know the signs for "This Monkey's Gone to Heaven" -- you hold up one hand with five fingers for "If man is five," then both hands with one fully extended, and one finger on the other hand extended for "Then the devil is six," and hands way up in the air, two fingers extended on the other hand, screaming and jumping up and down for "Then GOD is SEVEN!"

Doolittle remains the best album to watch them perform live, though most of the best stuff is packed at the front end of the record. I remember one time seeing them open for U2 on the first leg of the Achtung Baby tour, and the band looked absolutely miserable on stage and it was the worst time I'd seen them. Later they said U2 barely acknowledged their existence, but the real problem was within. A few months later, the Pixies had broken up.

But in 2004, they reformed, and they've probably made more money on the reunion tours than they ever did before. Seeing them in November 2004 was my first concert after my first baby had been born. She was three months old at the time, and I remember clutching a cellphone throughout the show, while being in euphoria that I was finally seeing the Pixies again. I've seen them a few times since then, and they never, ever let me down. A documentary came out a few years ago called Loud Quiet Loud (a description that sums up pretty much every Pixies song) and it showed what was really happening behind the scenes, and was fascinating.

It's tough picking just one song, because usually whatever Pixies song I happen to be listening to at the time is my favourite. But if someone said to me, "Quick, name your favourite Pixies song," I think I'd always answer the same way: Debaser. Inspired by Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel's surrealist film, "Un Chien Andalou," it's Frank at his screaming best, Kim with her perfect girlie voice, a great opening bass line, out-of-tune guitars, and a hook that you just can't get out of your head.

Buffy Rewatch Week 36

5.20 Spiral
5.21 The Weight of the World
5.22 The Gift

Follow along in Bite Me!, pp. 273-277.

This week’s Angel episodes are:

2.20 Over the Rainbow
2.21 Through the Looking Glass
2.22 There’s No Place Like Plrtz Glrb

Follow along in Once Bitten, pp. 190-196.

Before I get on to Buffy, I have to say, “Numfar! Do the dance of joy!!” Seriously… best moment in the entire Whedonverse. Ever. As I explain in my book, the writers came up with an idea in the writer’s room about a guy doing a dance that continues on in the background while the dialogue happens in the foreground. Joss Whedon got up and began doing a crazy dance that was along the lines of Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks, and the other writers were laughing so hard they convinced Joss to play the part himself. So… Numfar is Joss. And he is HILARIOUS. I wish he’d made other cameos in his work.

But over to sadder times.

This week we come to end of my second favourite season after season 2, and once again (as with the end of season 2), I’m bawling my eyes out. I still remember the edge-of-your-seat suspense these episodes created when watching them live (you newcomers have the bonus of watching one right after the other… it took THREE WEEKS for us to see them all!)

This is the week where Buffy’s life finally gets to be too much. Everyone keeps looking at Buffy to come up with the decisions and answers, and Dawn doesn’t do much to help herself (like seriously, Dawn, Glory has just figured out you’re the Key and you run for half a minute and are so out of breath you need Buffy to CARRY you? What are you, three?!) and instead just does her part by screaming, “BUFFFFAAAAAYYYYYY!!!” as often as she possibly can.

Meanwhile the dude from Prison Break is heading up the rejects from the Renaissance Faire, and the Scoobies hit the road to try to escape. We’ve seen Buffy and the Scoobs react to impending doom in many ways, but so far running away hasn’t been one of them. But at this point, she doesn’t know what else to do. In hindsight, knowing what people probably already know about BtVS coming up (even if this is a first watch for them) they probably figured Giles would pull through, but I’ll admit, watching it live, I was convinced Giles was going to die. Buffy thinks so, too.

As I mentioned last week, this time through, season 5 is affecting me in a way it never did before. And I think a lot of that is, as Tanya Cochran outlines below, because I’m identifying with it so much more than I did before. In the last year or so, there have been many times where I’ve felt much like Buffy has – you fix one thing and another one is on top of it, and it just never stops coming. You can’t keep on top of everything and eventually you crumple. In “Spiral,” Buffy comes to that point. She’s tried to save Dawn for most of a year, while dealing with her mother’s sickness and death and Dawn’s impetuousness and friends pulling her in various directions and Giles trying to hone her talents, and it just gets to be too much. And in the end, life becomes too overwhelming and she

just


stops.

“The Weight of the World” is a fascinating episode in that we go into Buffy’s mind and, much like Joss did with “Restless,” he shows the complicated world of the subconscious. We see Dean Butler reprise his role as Hank Summers (showing he was on hand to play him for the funeral scene, but the writers wanted to convey that Hank is an absentee father, which plays into Buffy becoming a mom to Dawn more coherently) and we see that part of Buffy that’s a little girl, wanting to shirk her responsibility and just let other people take care of her. Part of her still needs that.

But Willow does her magic, and Buffy comes back out of it, just in time. Poor Buffy… my heart aches for her in this episode. She NEEDS the world to slow down a bit, she needs to take a breather, but she can’t because the world needs her. A Slayer’s work is never done… unless she dies, of course.

The only thing I don’t get about this episode, however, is why Spike keeps bringing things back around to Ben. Do you think maybe Ben has some connection to Glory?

And this brings us to “The Gift.” I used to watch that beginning and think Buffy was being unfair and not looking at the big picture – Dawn’s death would actually save the world by preventing the big whole from opening. If only Buffy would listen to Giles. But this time watching it, I’m a mother.

BUFFY: She's more than [a sister]. She's me. The monks made her out of me. I hold her ... and I feel closer to her than ... It's not just the memories they built. It's physical. Dawn ... is a part of me. The only part that I-

You tell ’em, Buffy. If the entire universe was going to be sucked into a giant black abyss and that could only be stopped by me tossing my daughter into it, then I guess the world would be sucked into that giant abyss, and I’d be pulled in with it, holding tightly onto my girl. Any mother can attest to the fact that a child is a part of you, and you feel an actual physical pain if something is wrong with them. Buffy feels that, and feels a mother’s love for her sister.

The one moment I want to talk about that isn’t covered below is what Giles does under the tower. I think that scene is absolutely brilliant. Giles is the adult in the group, the one who can step outside of his emotions and do what needs to be done. He knows Buffy is physically strong but can’t kill in cold blood. He, on the other hand, can. And the brilliance of this intense scene is HOW he does it. We’ve seen in the past that when things get rough, when Giles becomes flustered, he whips off his glasses to give someone a what-for. But in this case, he does the opposite. He calmly, coldly, takes his glasses out of his pocket and puts them on, as if to suggest he knows EXACTLY what he’s doing, and will do it with clear eyes. He means to kill another human being to save the world. That he does it with one bare hand shows that just as Angel is always battling a demon inside him, just as Glory hates the shred of humanity in her that keeps her from killing Buffy, just as Willow is trying to control a desire for darker magicks, and just as Spike is trying to bury the Big Bad so people will treat him like a man, The Ripper is lying just below the surface of Giles. We all have something dark within us… and for some people, it comes out more clearly than in others.

One production note: when the episode first aired, the WB aired a screen at the very end that thanked Buffy for its five years (this was where the show made the move to UPN; the story is all outlined in my book) and made it sound like it really WAS the end. It was a strange move, much like ABC running footage of rusted-out fuselage footage at the end of Lost, leading fans to the wrong conclusions about what it meant. Several fans thought the stories of it moving to UPN were wrong, and Buffy wasn’t only merely dead, she was most sincerely dead. They were wrong.

I will let the next two contributors talk about the ending of “The Gift,” but I just want to say I think it’s gorgeous and perfect. Many fans have told me over the years that they wish the series had ended there, and in Joss’s original vision, it did. He had a five-year arc planned out for Buffy, and it ended here. But I think of so many of the upcoming episodes that we would have done without – including the stunning conclusion to season 6 – and I’m glad it didn’t end here. But it’s beautiful and poignant and set to some of Christophe Beck’s best work. (If you’re a newcomer and loved the music as Buffy jumped, it’s included on the “Once More With Feeling” soundtrack.)

And if you can keep a dry eye when the camera closes in on Spike breaking down in tears, YOU HAVE NO SOUL.

OK, our first contributor is, once again, the wonderful Tanya Cochran, who has been covering so much of this Rewatch for me throughout the summer! Take it away, Tanya:

“’It just keeps coming’: Empathizing with Buffy”
Tanya R. Cochran

In “Spiral,” Buffy uses four words to summarize what her life has been like recently: “It just keeps coming.” I feel the exhaustion in her voice, and I empathize—deeply. A Big Bad who seems all-powerful, a broken intimate relationship, a violated and damaged friend, and a profound familial loss. It just keeps coming.

In these last few episodes of the season, Buffy puts up the best fight anyone could ask her to put up. At moments, she’s got the resolve we all cheer for: she swears that everyone is going to make it; Glory won’t win, even if the Scoobies simply outrun her. They will prevail, together. But that doesn’t happen. Instead, Glory snatches Dawn and Buffy slips into a catatonic state, an understandable retreat from all that keeps coming, that just won’t stop.

“I just wanted it over. This is . . . all of this . . . it’s too much for me. If Glory wins, then Dawn dies. And I would grieve. People would feel sorry for me. But it would be over. And I imagined what a relief it would be,” Buffy admits inside her head in “The Weight of the World.” Yet later, fully engaged in the fight again, at the suggestion that the only way to defeat Glory is to kill Dawn, our resolved Buffy reappears: no way! Dawn is innocent; Dawn didn’t ask for this. As exhausted as she is, Buffy will stand in the way of all that keeps coming. In fact, she will give herself over to it.

Watched as a trio, “Spiral,” “The Weight of the World,” and “The Gift” hurl us toward destruction only to make us feel what Buffy herself seems to feel, what Rhonda Wilcox in Why Buffy Matters describes as “both pain and ecstasy” (41). The pain of leaving loved ones behind, the ecstasy of letting the weight of the world go. The pain of confusion about what her life really means, the ecstasy of finally figuring that out. The pain and ecstasy of self-sacrifice, the death of “just a girl” who’s “a hero, you see. Not like us,” as Giles tells Ben.

But she is like us. That’s why we love her. That’s why we feel what she feels.

Lately I’ve been reading a lot about narrative and cognition or “the brain on story.” That reading has helped me understand better than ever why Buffy matters to me, moves me, and betters me every time I (re)watch it: Buffy’s (fantasy) world is just as real and complex as mine (see Mar and Oatley). Sometimes, life just keeps coming. Sometimes, I just want it to stop. Sometimes, I just want to stop.

We hate to see Buffy let go of this life. Yet we love her for doing so. How can we not be grateful for her gift? As we watch, we, too, know pain and ecstasy: of losing Buffy yet letting her rest. After all, she saved the world—this world—a lot.

Works Cited
Mar, Raymond A., and Keith Oatley. “The Function of Fiction is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 3.3 (2008): 173-192. Print.
Wilcox, Rhonda. Why Buffy Matters: The Art of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. New York: Tauris, 2005. Print.

Thank you, Tanya! And next up is novelist Robert Wiersema, who joins us a second time after his first outing, covering season 3’s “Amends.”

"Our choices are given weight and meaning by the things that we sacrifice"
-- Bruce Springsteen

Buffy Anne Summers
1981-2001

Beloved Sister
Devoted Friend

She saved the world
A lot


Before I start -- or in lieu of starting, perhaps -- I would just like to point out my absolute folly, as far as this Buffy Re-Watch project goes.

Last fall, when I was invited to participate in the project, I threw my hat into the ring for two episodes, Amends and The Gift. I figured -- perhaps unreasonably -- that those were the two episodes about which I had the most to say (completely aside from the fact that the two episodes are in my personal Top Ten).

The folly is this: one of the reasons I thought I had so much to say about these episodes is the fact that they elicit such a primal emotional response (read: great heaving sobs). That response, though, clouds a completely rational exploration of the episodes, and not just because it's difficult to type while weeping.

The thing is? Rationality is overrated.

When I wrote about Amends, I wrote at length about miracles, with a sub-theme of sacrifice. Not coincidentally, in considering The Gift, I'll be looking at the nature of sacrifice, with a sub-theme of the miraculous.

Funny how that works, isn't it?

But that's why I wanted to write about Amends and The Gift: to my mind, they're opposite sides of the same coin, not only reckoning with the same concerns, but both touching, in a way that the series only rarely did, the Divine (as distinct from the magical).

For me, The Gift is an exploration, an exegesis, of sacrifice; in order to appreciate its depths, though, one has to go back to Amends (and further, to Becoming).

The pivotal moment of Amends comes when Angel, on a hillside overlooking Sunnydale early Christmas morning, waits for the sun to rise and destroy him. His belief is that the world is a better, safer place without him in it (there’s a certain validity to this conclusion). The Powers That Be have other plans for the vampire-with-a-soul, though, and snow begins to fall on Sunnydale for the first and likely only time, blocking out the sun and saving Angel's not-life.

The pivotal moment in The Gift comes late in the episode, when Buffy realizes there's only one way for her to save the world, one last time, and she whispers her last words to Dawn before leaping into the widening portal. Her sacrifice closes the portal and saves the world.

Two sacrifices: one foiled, one successful.

In Amends, Angel's planned sacrifice is ego-driven. In attempting to save the world from himself, he recognizes his humanity as his tragic flaw, and what the world needs to be protected from: "It's not the demon in me that needs killing," he tells Buffy. "It's the man." In accepting his humanity, the peril of his selfishness, his sacrifice is at once an embrace of the self, and a wholly selfless act (or intention, at the very least).

That dichotomy, that tension, between self-full-ness and selflessness is even more significant in Buffy’s sacrifice. The Gift marks the culmination of the one of the series' pivotal themes: the tension between Buffy as human being and her role as the Slayer. (This sense of culmination is one reason why, in darker moments -- ie, fifteen minutes into Doublemeat Palace -- I tell myself that Buffy ended at the close of season five, the following two seasons but a dream. Generally, I get over that feeling pretty quickly.) The role has traditionally subsumed those who bear the Slayer mantle. They lose a fundamental part of their humanity in the process of becoming the Slayer, and this loss, this subsumation by the role, is encouraged by the Watcher's Council, and by millennia of precedent.

Buffy has, from the very beginning, fought this loss. She has friends, family, lovers, a support system and a link to life and relationships which stands opposed to the Slayer's traditional distance. "You're just a girl," says the boy she rescues in the tease. "That's what I keep saying," she replies, sadly. So it has always been.

If we go back to Becoming, the finale of Season Two, one can see just how deeply this tension runs. In the final confrontation between Buffy and Angelus (a scene referenced in this episode), he mocks her with how he has stripped everything away from her. “No weapons... no friends... no hope. Take all that away and what's left?” Angelus taunts. Buffy replies, coldly, certainly, “Me.” She proceeds to kill Angel to prevent the rising of Acathla, despite the last-minute return of his soul. It's a beautiful, heart-rending moment, but it's pure Slayer. Buffy is forced to deny her humanity, her love, her desire in order to save the world.

With her sacrifice in The Gift, though, the two opposing forces reconcile themselves, if only for a moment, and it comes after Buffy has made it very clear that she is willing – nay, eager – to turn her back on her role as a Slayer if harm should come to Dawn. It is as if death is the only way the two worlds, the two opposing forces, can ever reach a balance. In sacrificing herself, Buffy is both Slayer (selfless, giving everything to save the world) and human (self-full, sacrificing herself so Dawn doesn't have to sacrifice herself). Make no mistake, though – the willingness doesn’t come easily.

That moment of balance, though, is only part of why the scene works, both at narrative and emotional levels. The other significant aspect is the willingness of the sacrifice Buffy makes.

That willingness is key to the nature of sacrifice, a fact that is often overlooked. Christ wasn't, after all, dragged kicking and screaming to Calvary; he went willingly to his death (one wonders if the decline of the old gods might have been due to the forced nature of the sacrifices to them). His death, to quote a phrase, was his gift…

One sees a similar example in Guy Gavriel Kay's The Fionavar Tapestry (spoilers for the book ahead, highlight white space ahead to read it): Paul, a young man from our world, is drawn into Fionavar with several friends, each of whom has, it becomes clear, a destiny. Paul sacrifices himself willingly, and with his tears brings the world back to life. It's a sequence that destroys me every time I read it, and the echoes of it I bring to The Gift, lend the episode an additional power for me.

The idea of willing sacrifice was clearly on the minds of the writers of the last few episodes of season five.

One sees the idea in The Weight of the World, when Ben, after initially helping her escape, returns Dawn to Glory, despite knowing that he could save her. In helping her, he would have lost himself; this was a sacrifice he was, ultimately, unwilling to make.

Similarly, many of the other characters make sacrifices of their own in The Gift. Anya, for example, is willing to risk everything in this apocalypse owing to her love for Xander, rather than cutting and running in the face of danger as she has always done before. Spike sacrifices his desire for Buffy and accepts the reality of her not loving him, thanking her for her treatment of him and defending Dawn to the death, simply because he "made a promise to a lady". Giles sacrifices an aspect of his humanity, embracing his own internal darkness for the good of the world in his cold-blooded murder of Ben, to prevent Glory's return.

Most significantly, Buffy has to stop Dawn from sacrificing herself at the top of the tower. Knowing that the end of the world will be stopped only when her blood stops flowing, Dawn accepts her responsibility, and goes willingly to her death, only to be stopped by her sister.

At a narrative level, the emotional power of these sacrifices comes in the willingness with which they are entered into, and the result is a series of beautiful, haunting grace notes against the epic storytelling.

Taking a step back, however, it is in the willingness that the power of sacrifice comes overall. To give all, to volunteer to give all, is the most powerful choice one can make. It is the force of the willingness, not the sacrifice itself, which creates miracles (which brings me, parenthesis-wise, to this: Buffy's sacrifice makes limited sense at a rational level, given what we know of the world she inhabits. Her sacrifice shouldn't stop the breaking down of the walls; only Dawn's death should stop that. Sure, the writers attempt to ret-con the whole idea (the monks made Dawn of Buffy, so it IS her blood, dammit!), but was anyone convinced? No? Me neither. So, as in Amends, we're back to the miraculous. I'm fine with that).

I'm not just talking about large-scale, world-saving miracles. That willingness to sacrifice everything, to give oneself over to something greater, is present in our lives every day. Becoming a parent comes with it a sacrifice of what has come before (birth begetting a rebirth). Love of any sort requires a willing surrender to a force greater than the individual.

We feel the resonances of our smaller sacrifices when we witness acts of greater sacrifice, their force and our weakness. As human beings, we're not hard-wired for acts of unconditional selflessness on a grand scale, and our experience of our personal sacrifices reminds us of this natural smallness when faced with such outsize, heroic acts. Buffy leaping into the portal, and its underlying reasons -- to save the world, to save a loved one -- makes us ache with yearning to be better, to be stronger, to be braver, to be... bigger.

The knowledge that we never will be (and really, thankfully so) cracks something open in us. Our path to the divine, our apotheosis, will be slower, less sure; to be reminded that there is another way is to be reminded of our own search, its value, its significance, its scale.

Buffy tells Angel that she loves him, and asks him to close his eyes.

Angel waits for the sun, and he and Buffy feel the feathery brush of snow on their faces.

Buffy faces the leap into her own destiny, and in her last moments her thoughts are with the world, with her friends, and with her sister.

And at home we gasp, we breathe. We break.

And in being reminded of our smallness, we come away somehow greater.

"The hardest thing in this world...is to live in it. Be brave. Live. For me."



Man, I’m tearing up again just reading that. Thank you, Robert!

Next week: We move on to season 6. The REST of us had to wait an entire summer, but you guys? Just a few days. Awesome. If you thought “The Gift” took people to a dark place, wait’ll you see what’s in store for our favourite Scoobies next. Yikes. Our host next week is the wonderful Elizabeth Rambo!

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

On Angel, we move into season 3 (my second favourite season of the series, alongside season 5):

3.1 Heartthrob
3.2 That Vision-Thing
3.3 That Old Gang of Mine

Buffy Rewatch Week 36: Spoiler Forum

Once again, here is the place where you can chat openly about Buffy and Angel episodes without fear of spoiling anyone. The thing that stuck out for me the most in these episodes is the fact that once again, Willow is called upon again and again to step up and use her magic to protect everyone. Buffy says to Willow that's she's the most powerful one of the group and her magic will help save them (something that will be echoed in the series finale) but notice how many times they ask her to use that magic to help them out, and yet when Willow becomes addicted to it in the rather ham-fisted season 6 metaphor coming up, they'll all blame her and tell her to be magicks-free. While I agree things get out of control (raising the dead? After what happened in Forever?) I've always felt bad for Willow that the Scoobs helped set her up to become addicted, but turn on her when it happens.

Doctor Who: Season 3

I’ve been in a Doctor Who frame of mind, and not just because of my new woolen TARDIS… wait, I haven’t told you about it?! Last weekend was Fan Expo, and aside from getting to meet a lot of amazing people and reconnect with friends who I seem to see every year at cons (which is more than I see non-con friends, I’m sad to say), I finally met the delightful Christina Boulard, who owns TresBellesKnits, where she sells her lovely knitted creations. And… she gave me my very own tiny knitted Dalek!!! This is me with Christina (in her gorgeous and very long Tom Baker scarf) and the one I shall call Dalek Wool (he's from the Cult of Knitros)



And here he is in close-up…



Seriously, how amazing is that?! I love it. And if you love it, too, head on over to Christina’s site and choose one of your own! Her general shop is here and the page for the Daleks is here.

Thank you again, Christina!

But as I was saying, I’ve had DW on my mind, not just because of Dalek Wool but because I’m continuing to work on ECW’s upcoming Doctor Who book with authors Graeme Burk and Robert Smith?, which has been a lot of fun. And so I figured I should get around to posting this, which I wrote about three months ago. ;)

I liked season 3 a lot, and bombed through it in about three nights. Overall there were parts where Tennant was at his best, and I liked Martha a lot. Smart, beautiful, assertive… and some of my favourite episodes of the series are in S3. This is the season where Tennant becomes the Emo Doctor, where his pining after Rose makes him unable to pay any attention to the companion in front of him, and where her need to be something more to him becomes the very definition of UNREQUITED. So while I wasn’t thrilled by the Doctor/companion pairing, I actually loved what that coupling did for their characters and how it developed the Doctor so much.

But thank god for season 4’s Donna Noble, who will come along and smack him back into reality.

And speaking of which, we get our first taste of her in the Christmas special, “The Runaway Bride,” where she is hilarious and awesome. I didn’t love the episode overall, but it was exciting and fast-paced and Catherine Tate is brilliant.

Smith and Jones was next, and it was a great season opener, although I didn’t think it was a memorable episode overall. I did love when the camera panned back and you saw that beautiful scene of the hospital alone on the moon… gorgeous. And of course the “Go Fro Schmo Toe Poe Woe Moe” rhinoceros aliens were menacing and kinda funny.

The Shakespeare Code was interesting, but I found it a little complicated and was wondering how young kids could have been following this one. Also, for the Classic Series fans, has Shakespeare appeared before? I had an image of Shakespeare in my head and thought it was maybe something I was remembering from childhood on Doctor Who before I realized wait, I think that was an episode of the Twilight Zone. ;)

Gridlock has people perpetually stuck in cars, and as the episode was happening I was thinking, “This is a little strange…” but the longer it went, the more I liked it. By the end of the ep, I thought it was rather stellar. It’s frightening and clearly a comment on our wasteful world and the love we have of our cars. The guy from Father Ted is in it, and Martha is eventually kidnapped by Annie from Being Human (before Annie became a ghost, of course). Great cast, amazing look at the various aliens in their cars, and wonderful and highly original premise.

I know I should probably cower and prepare for people to throw things at me, but I found the Dalek two-parter to be a little boring. I loved the idea that the Empire State building actually looks a bit like a Dalek (ha!) and it has a few good lines (“Yet again that’s a no with the kidding” was a very Joss Whedon-sounding line) but this two-parter was draggy for me. I watched them with my son, actually, so now he thinks Doctor Who consists of the Doctor, the TARDIS, Daleks, and man-pigs. And for the most part, he’s correct! Good thing he’s not old enough to realize this is the least successful Dalek outing so far…

And maybe I was just in a mood this night or something, but I thought The Lazarus Experiment and 42 were also middling episodes… am I becoming hard to please?

No, because next up was Human Nature (with Viserys from Game of Thrones as the baddie!) and The Family of Blood. “Mother of mine…” “Son of mine…” BRILLIANT episodes, both of them, I adored these ones. But again, I noticed that the Doctor has two hearts, yet rarely uses either one of them, at least for romantic love. CAN he fall in love or does he choose not to, knowing that he simply can’t connect to anyone in that manner? Poor Martha. She’s rather doomed.

And then… Blink.



Holy. CRAP.

Everyone had told me about this episode, starting at 2010 Polaris when this woman came in a stellar costume of one of the Blink angels, and when I said, “What is that supposed to be,” I had collective gasps around me and “You mean you haven’t seen BLINK?!” said in utter shock. Geek cred gone momentarily.

But wow, was it worth it. I’ve discussed this episode with Mark Askwish at Space a lot, and both of us agree that where Hush is the Buffy episode you can show to non-Buffy fans as a way to get them to start watching the show, Blink is that episode for Doctor Who. It’s rather standalone, it allows you to get into the DW universe without having to know everything that came before it, and it’s frickin’ TERRIFYING. OK, so maybe it give a false impression that DW is more frightening than it actually is, but wow, WHAT storytelling. I want to bow down before Steven Moffat (also the guy who brought us the “Are you my mummy?” episodes in season 1) and thank him for being a genius. THIS is officially the first episode of Doctor Who that I watched between fingers. I’ve now seen it three times. In the scene where Sally is chatting with that guy (Lawrence?) and they keep turning away and the one angel is closer and closer, I was actually moaning in fear and finally dropped my head into my hands and said to my husband, “Just tell me when the angels are GONE!” But then I looked up again, because I just couldn’t look away. Even scarier than Hush.

What an episode. And to think, it’s the Doctor-lite episode of the season.

And really, from “Human Nature” onwards season 3 ROCKS. Utopia with the always masterful Derek Jacobi… having Captain Jack back.



The Sound of Drums (John Simm from Life on Mars is the Master!! I LOVE HIM), and Last of the Time Lords are wonderful episodes. The SFX on tiny old little Doctor in the cage is amazing… and creepy. It's like the Doctor's own Mini Me, if Mini Me were actually him, shrivelled into a tiny apple-head doll that moved. I wish that had gone on forever, I absolutely adored those scenes. The tension between the Doctor and the Master is wonderful, while at the same time the Doctor is so desperate to hold onto him no matter what he does because he’s the only other Time Lord left. The end of this season is devastating.

And good-bye Martha. I felt like you didn’t really have a chance, but the actress who plays her was SO good, and don’t get me wrong – the Doctor/companion pairing wasn’t done badly, it was actually done brilliantly, and just felt like the right thing to have done following Rose. The rebound companion was always doomed to fail as she was shadowed in the memory of Rose, and the way the show explored that was fantastic.

What a season… we get the Jack Shephard of Doctors, who tries to fix things and is always so sad. But he never becomes entirely emo; he cackles too much for that. Oh season 4… how will I be able to say goodbye to this Doctor? I’ll just think about how much I love season 3 some more.

Retro Music Thursdays: Sonic Youth

My husband's family are what you would call in the tech community "early adopters." They were the first people on their street to have a VHS player, so for years, when everyone else waited until VHS players were a little smaller and far cheaper, his parents had this giant silver thing with the top-loading thing where you'd stick the tape and it would get jammed half the time. When the rest of the world was standing up and changing channels, they had an enormous box that connected to the TV via a cord with these push-buttons on it: a remote control via Fred Flintstone. They paid 10 times what we now pay for a DVD player and CD player, but they had it before anyone.

So it should have come as no surprise when I was a teenager and beginning to date their son that they would get a satellite dish. And I don't mean the ones you have now that are the size of dinner plates that attach to your house. No... have you seen the movie Contact? Where they have those multi-storey satellite dishes at the VLA sites listening for alien life forms? They had one like that put in... only it was black. But it was about the same size as their house and took up most of the backyard.

So, my husband got this wicked program called 120 Minutes on a little channel called MTV that was from down in the U S of A. We became addicted to that show, where they'd play the best music from the alternative/underground/college/indie/whatever you want to call it scene. It was the place where I first heard Smells Like Teen Spirit and Creep. It was also the first time I heard Kool Thing by Sonic Youth.

Now, other people got into Sonic Youth way earlier than I did, and see Daydream Nation as THE album the hipster Sonic Youth fans should be listening to. But for me, it's Goo. It was my first Sonic Youth experience and it will always be my favourite.

Here was this super-cool blonde chick with a smoky off-key voice, wearing silver pants and dancing around with a cat while these other manic guys jumped around in the background. She didn't smile, and you wouldn't want to mess with her. I wanted to BE her. I quickly found out the lady was Kim Gordon, her husband was Thurston Moore (the guitarist) and she was 39 years old. That seemed really old at the time, but she was super hot. I'm still not as old as she was in this video, but god, what I'd give for that body. She plays a giant bass guitar that practically dwarfs her on stage, but in the million-plus times I've seen Sonic Youth since then, I can't take my eyes off her. (This will be an onrunning trope throughout these Thursdays, by the way... I generally want to be with someone in the band, or I just want to be someone in the band. Or both.)

Years later, I had all the Sonic Youth albums and we went to see them open for Neil Young. (As I once opened a review I wrote in a college newspaper, "If Neil Young is the godfather of grunge, Sonic Youth is its communal family.") The audience was filled with aging hippies in fringed suede jackets, long hair and headbands. And then there was the group of us. I think it was four of us at the time, sitting way in the back of the arena, and when SY hit the stage, we hit the floor, dancing and singing and shouting, "TOM VIOLENCE!!" between every song. When Thurston finally said, "This next song is called Tom Violence," we went out of our minds, and the hippies around us continued to stare at the weirdo group of kids dancing and screaming behind them, as they politely clapped for the band with out-of-tune guitars and wished their set was over.

After that, I was at one of those shows EVERYONE says they were at now. It was at a place called the Music Hall in Toronto, which held about 500 people but there was this promoter who shall remain nameless who infamously oversold the place, doubling its capacity. Rumour had it members of Catherine Wheel and some other Britpop band who were in town at the time were turned away. Red Kross was opening, and I remember sitting way up in the top balcony, dripping with sweat because there were SO many people in there, not enough air, as the people beside us smoked so much grass I was completely high by the end of the set. Sonic Youth hit the stage, and after four songs they walked off. We sat there, perplexed. Then Thurston ran back on, grabbed the mike and said, "The pigs are shutting us down! Hide your drugs!" and the people beside us tossed the bag of weed under the seat and ran out of there as fast as they could (to this day the memory makes me giggle). We left, completely pissed that we'd driven two hours and couldn't get our money back because some money-grubbing promoter (who is now one of the most successful concert promoters in the world -- he organizes Coachella) double-booked the place and now I couldn't see the band I'd come to see. We walked outside and the place was crawling with cops. As my boyfriend (now husband) and I walked back to our car, we had this strange feeling of being followed and turned around, and a cruiser was following us down the sidewalk. I kid you not (and that's not the pot talking). It's become one of the most infamous concerts in 1990s Toronto concert history, and so while I missed the show, I was glad to have been there.

But back to my original reason for loving Sonic Youth: Kool Thing. I listened to this song for months on my Walkman on the way to school, and it also contributed to my hearing loss.

Hunger Games trailer

OMG YES!!! If you haven't read The Hunger Games trilogy yet, I can't recommend it highly enough. I even have my husband reading them now, and he devoured the first book. (Then said, "I can't believe that was a Y/A book...") I cannot wait for this film. And yes, I've been on board with Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss from Day One.

Buffy Rewatch Week 35

5.17 Forever
5.18 Intervention
5.19 Tough Love

Follow along in Bite Me!, pp. 268-273.

This week’s Angel episodes are:
2.17 Disharmony
2.18 Dead End
2.19 Belonging

Follow along in Once Bitten, pp. 185-190.

I was just saying on my Facebook page the other day that from “The Body” onwards, every episode in season 5 makes me cry. This week my guest host will be covering “Intervention,” so I’ll talk more about “Forever” and “Tough Love.”

As I mention in Bite Me, “Forever” is a modern take a short story called “The Monkey’s Paw,” where a family is given a monkey’s paw and told it will grant them three wishes, but that the wishes will come with consequences. The father wishes for money, and the next day his son is killed and the factory compensates the family with money. The mother grabs the paw and wishes for her son to come back, and they hear this lumbering, dragging sound at the door and then a long, loud knock. The mother rushes to the door to embrace her son and the father, realizing that whatever has come back is NOT the son, grabs the paw and wishes for the son to go away, and when she throws the door open, he’s gone.

The end of this episode is very similar, but there’s a lot of other material leading up to it that take us nicely from “The Body” to the rest of the season. First, there’s the mention of why Hank Summers is absent. It wasn’t because the actor was unavailable (as you’ll soon see) but because they simply didn’t feel like he was needed in the story. For the entire season, we’ve seen the Summers women band together to take on the world, and now with the mother gone, Buffy has become the mother. But poor Buffy doesn’t know how to BE a mom. So she’s bossy on the one hand, dismissive on the other, and is so caught up in trying to do everything the proper, adult way, she forgets she has a little sister who’s going through her own pain, who stands at the funeral without any close friends by her side, who is suddenly feeling like she’s even younger because her sister isn’t acting like her sister, but a mother. I used to watch this episode and think, “Oh god, Dawn, GROW UP” but curiously, I didn’t feel like that this time. She doesn’t have a say. She used to be Buffy’s equal – they’re sisters, after all, even if Dawn acts 10 years younger than she is – and now she’s not allowed to have any say at all. They talk to her like she’s a little kid, and don’t help Dawn through her grief by talking to her the same way they all talk to Buffy.

I’d entirely forgotten that Angel showed up at the gravesite until he walked up to Buffy in this episode. What a surprise! (And a great surprise, even if it’s my tenth time watching this episode, because when I originally saw it, the WB had released a bunch of PR bumpf saying Boreanaz would be making an appearance, so while it didn’t come as a surprise then, it was nice for it to be one now!) I loved seeing them together again, and the quiet comfort he brings to her. It brought tears to my eyes.

This episode is the first sign that Willow’s about to go down a dark path, as we saw even more in “Tough Love” this week. Willow’s magic is getting out of control, and her misguided decision to “help” Dawn by showing her the book that will allow her to use a faulty spell to bring back some horrible creature that isn’t really her mom was disappointing, but Willow just saw a lost soul and tried to give her some comfort using the very thing that brings HER comfort. Spike does the same thing, helping out Dawnie because he thinks it’ll help the “little bit.”

And I hope no one missed that beautiful, quiet scene where we see Giles listening to Cream’s “Tale of Brave Ulysses.” I’ve always loved that moment immensely. This is the same song he and Joyce had listened to when she was in her Juice Newton clothes and he was dressed as Ripper in “Band Candy,” as they lay on his floor chomping on gum and smoking and acting like teenagers. Now Joyce is gone, and while Giles is stepping up as the parental figure for both Buffy and Dawn now that they’re orphaned in a way, we realize in this one painful moment that he’s missing Joyce terribly, too. They slept together – twice – and clearly connected on a level both physical and emotional. While “Band Candy” is something that was done under a spell, and never led to an actual relationship between the two of them, they helped raise Buffy together, and there must be a part of him that is hurting now that she’s gone.

But it’s Buffy’s speech at the very end that is the real beauty of this episode. Dawn pushes things too far, and despite my growing sympathy for her, when she told Buffy that she didn’t even care about Joyce being dead and Buffy slapped her I yelled, “Good for YOU, Buffy!!” I wanted to slap her. Dawn is, of course, speaking from a place of intense pain and frustration, but Buffy voices something very similar to what Suzanne Kingshott was talking about in her post last week about her father. Buffy HAD to be wrapped up in the funeral arrangements and dealing with Dawn and trying to put her life back together, because just as Sue pointed out is normal post-funeral, it’s only when you stop doing all the arranging that you realize that person is really gone, and the only way to go on with your life is without them. Buffy is broken, and has been trying to avoid the inevitable by keeping busy, something Buffy’s always done.

The writing in that speech is SO GOOD, though, because it speaks to something more general and something that most adults have experienced. People need people to take care of them. Even if you’re grown up and have kids, you have friends and family to lean on, but then THOSE friends and family also need to lean on you, and at some point there is often a blow-out where two people realize they’ve been so wrapped up in their own problems they simply didn’t have the energy left to deal with anyone else’s. This is the moment where Dawn learns a major lesson. Becoming an adult is discovering that maybe you need to deal with things on your own, that just because big sister Buffy isn’t there to hold your hand every step of the way doesn’t mean she doesn’t care about you or the situation or doesn’t love you, it’s just that she’s so overwhelmed with her own problems that she needed to deal with them first. It’s like when that in-flight video tells you to put on your own oxygen mask before you affix your child’s. You’re not going to be much good to them if you can’t breathe, so take care of yourself first, and then take care of them. Buffy needs to heal a bit before she can be of any use to Dawn, but Dawn was simply too young to realize that. Only when Dawn realized that Buffy was feeling as much pain as she was does she dissolve into her sister’s arms, and they use EACH OTHER to lean on, falling to the floor. It’s a gorgeous moment, and immediately after Buffy has tried to tell Dawn that what she’s done is bring back something that’s not her mom, she hears the knock. And it’s not Dawn who rushes to the door, squeaking out “Mommy?” in a little girl voice . . . it’s Buffy. The roles are reversed, and Buffy becomes the little girl who needs her mommy so that she can stop being the parent and go back to being just a big sister again. Dawn steps up and becomes the caretaker, destroying the photo and taking care of her sister, so by the time Buffy gets to the door, her mother is gone and she won’t have to deal with whatever thing is standing on the other side of it. It’s an extraordinary moment. I still remember the terror with which I watched this episode the first time, certain that we’d have to see some version of Zombie Joyce and I remember partly covering my eyes because I just didn’t want to see it. Luckily, Joss didn’t either, and he finished this episode the only way it could be finished.

But, I will admit, this season is the only one where I constantly long for a second theme song… if only they had a backup theme song for sad, quiet openings, so we don’t see Buffy finding Joyce dead on the couch and then cutting to Nerf Herder. Or Buffy opening the door at the end of “Forever” and realizing her mom is gone – REALLY, TRULY gone – and then… cutting to Nerf Herder. (Speaking of music, though, I adore the music that plays during Joyce’s funeral.)

“Intervention” comes next, and I won’t say too much about it other than to say it’s a fantastic episode and Giles doing the hokey pokey is one of my all-time favourite things on the series. Anthony Stewart Head is hilarious as the exasperated Watcher, hopping into the circle, hopping back out, and then shaking his gourd, clearly aware of the fact that he looks like a Grade A Loser. Buffy snidely remarking, “And that’s what it’s all about” has always made me laugh out loud, and this viewing was no exception. Again to comment on the music, I like the reuse of the music from “Restless” when Buffy is out in the wilderness. Meanwhile, back at home, Willow’s magic is continuing to become troublesome, Dawn’s becoming a klepto, and Buffy’s friends are becoming boneheads. I guess Joyce’s death is having a huge effect on all of them. (I mean, come ON, how could they not have noticed the Buffy Bot was speaking like Anya?!)

I can’t go to the next episode without mentioning that the humans are not the only ones who change with Joyce’s death; Spike, too, becomes a much deeper and richer character, as if he realizes his little crush is nothing compared to the anguish Buffy is going through, and he steps back from mooning over to Buffy and begins to truly care about her. He’s always had a soft spot for Dawn, but the beating he takes in this episode shows that he didn’t need a gypsy curse to have a soul.

“Tough Love,” much like “Forever,” has some absolutely stellar writing in it, again because it can apply to our lives in so many ways. I found this episode especially difficult to watch simply because I’d gone through so much of what happens in it over the past few years. When you get to a certain age (in my case, 29… cough, cough), life can become overwhelming at times. Kids, a job, books to write, TV shows to watch, books to read, aging family members needing help, not-so-aging family members needing your time, friends going through difficult periods… it can all be a bit much. And just when you put out one fire, there’s another one. You try to put in some extra work, and your kids think you don’t give them enough time. So you focus on them, and family says you’re not calling or emailing them often enough. So you try doing that and your job needs you to be more focused. So you do that and try to give your kids enough time and make sure you’re not neglecting family or friends… and then suddenly the house looks like a hurricane has run through it and you’ve forgotten to fill out that permission form for the kids’ field trip and the cats have no water in their dish and there’s nothing but a jar of Cheez Whiz in the fridge. And you have no idea how that got there because you didn’t buy it.

But hey, that’s life. And we deal with it, and find the joys in it. But again, as with the end of “Forever,” people get so hung up on little things that are bothering them that they forget to step back and try to see it from another angle. Willow is upset with Tara being “knowledge girl,” while Tara is worried about Willow’s use of magic. Willow lashes out at her, when Tara didn’t quite mean what she said, and Willow didn’t mean what she said. Buffy is being told by Giles to put her foot down with Dawn, be unmoving, and keep that girl studying or she’ll lose her to foster care. Willow tries to convince Buffy to let Dawn be Dawn, not knowing what Buffy has just been told by Giles, and Buffy is caught in the middle of a friend whose feelings are hurt, a sister who’s starting to resent her, and a Watcher/father figure who is telling her to work harder.

It’s only when something truly tragic happens that all of these petty day-to-day things screech to a sudden halt and the Scoobs all come together again. We can all have our differences and think no one is paying attention to us and our brother just looked at us funny so we’ll stop talking to her and our best friend won’t answer phone calls so she must be angry about something… but when something big happens, all those things just fall away. Willow will do anything for Tara, and even through her madness Tara is completely attached to Willow and looks at her with loopy love. Dawn quiets down and is there for Willow as well, and Buffy holds Willow’s hand and reassures her it will be okay, and Willow looks at Buffy as the best friend who is her rock. It’s a wonderful moment when they all come together again, and again, that comes straight from real life. For no matter how much you can’t see eye to eye with your spouse/friend/sibling/parent/loved one, no matter how many times you argue or are angry at them (or they at you), when it comes down to the crunch, you’ll do anything for them and you don’t want to see them hurt.

In this episode we get the first glimpse of Dark Willow, and to avoid spoilers I’ll say nothing more, other than to mention that Willow is beginning her descent along a dark path, and it’ll take more than love and applesauce to find her way back.

Glory knows that Dawn is the Key now. And it’s up to the Scoobs to surround Dawn and make sure nothing can happen to her.


Okay, now it’s time for this week’s guest host!! And… what’s better than one Nikki? TWO Nikkis! That’s right, folks, it’s Nikki Fuller (who posts on Facebook as Nikki Faith; you may have seen her posting on my wall a couple of times). Nikki is a college English teacher in California, if my memory serves (correct me if I’m wrong, Nikki!) She’s currently working on her PhD in Mythological Studies with an emphasis on Depth Psychology (how awesome does that sound?!) and she wrote her Master’s thesis on Buffy and got THE MAN HIMSELF, Joss Whedon, to sign it when she met him at Comic Con in 2007 (squeeeeee!) She said when she met him he told her he was amazed by all the attention that scholars were giving him and his work. I think he would think this Rewatch is pretty awesome, don’t you? ;)

I loved chatting with Nikki online and when I heard she’d given a paper on “The Body” at PCA this past April, I sent her a note and asked if she would be interested in participating (she did her MASTER’S on Buffy! Have I mentioned that yet?) and she was very interested. Nikki blogs here, and she tweets here, so go and follow her! She’s written some fantastic stuff.

And one of those fantastic stuffs is this week’s Rewatch piece. Take it away, Nikki!

Death is Your Gift
by Nikki Fuller

Throughout my academic career, I have focused on Buffy as a modern mythology. There will never be one simple definition for myth because it is so truly expansive, but a couple things are clear. Firstly, mythology, in the strictest sense, is not a synonym for a falsehood. Secondly, to paraphrase my great instructor Christine Downing, myths are stories about things that matter a lot. Truly, they are stories of the human condition. And this is why, fourteen years after its original debut, we are still discussing our favorite vampire slayer. Buffy beautifully depicts the human condition and grants viewers with an arena to discuss and evaluate the most meaningful events in their lives. Encountering death is certainly one of them.

Two critical, life-altering events take place for Buffy when Joyce dies: not only does Buffy lose her mother, but she simultaneously transforms from the role of sister to the role of mother. “Forever” begins to show the difficulty of this transformative time for Buffy. In her conversation with Angel, Buffy reveals what is really the most difficult task: the day after the funeral when normal life is supposed to restart. As I discussed in a paper I presented at the American Pop Culture conference earlier this year on Buffy ’s season five, our modern American funerary rituals do not grant us the time needed to effectively manage the loss of loved ones. The process of the funeral and the return to “normal” daily life is rushed. Buffy is clearly experiencing this. As “Forever” continues, we also see Buffy failing in her new mothering role: Dawn feels no support from Buffy, and she reacts by performing a very dangerous spell. When “Intervention” begins, it is understandable that Buffy would feel that she is emotionally cut off from those around her. Her proposal is to take time off from slaying, but Giles has a better solution: a quest.

“Intervention,” which is greatly about grief and death, includes key elements that are often present in mythology: quest, ritual, sacred space, and spirit guide. At the beginning of this episode, Buffy is in dire need of a ritual, which is partly what the spirit quest provides for slayers. Rituals aid us in moving forward, often into the unknown. As a motherless mother in grief, Buffy needs to both cope with her loss and move into her new role. By taking Buffy on this spirit quest, Giles is providing her with the ground work to do all of this. It will not, of course, happen instantaneously or be easy, but he is essentially initiating her into her new role. The initial ritual Giles performs, albeit similar to the Hokey Pokey, is also representative of Buffy’s new role. While he is temporarily releasing his guardianship of Buffy, she is assuming full guardianship of Dawn.

I will side-step from Buffy’s quest for a moment to emphasize that this entire episode focuses on the roles everyone plays. Even the programming of the Buffy Bot points to the roles The Scoobies have in Buffy’s life: best friend Willow, carpenter Xander, money-loving Anya. (Side-note: I love the pure glee on Anya’s face when the Buffy Bot asks how her money is). We even get a special look at the role Spike plays. Though Buffy’s gut reaction is to kill him before Glory can get a word out of him, he proves his role and dedication in protecting Dawn and Buffy, even if he was inclined to model a sex toy after the latter. (Who says love is perfect?)

After Giles performs his ritual, Buffy must continue alone, as is often the case with a quest. Giles cannot go with her; indeed, he does not even know the specific location of the sacred site. A guide must lead Buffy, for “men are not free to choose the sacred site . . . they only seek for it and find it by the help of mysterious signs” (Eliade 28). Buffy’s guide appears to her in the form of a mountain lion. According to the philosopher Macrobius, “lions are emblematic of the earth” (qtd. in Cooper 98). Since the Earth “is the universal archetype of . . . sustenance,” (Cooper 59) the lion symbolizes that this spiritual quest is going to provide Buffy with the nourishment she needs to move forward with her life and cope with her loss. (Whedon and his team of writers masterfully utilize symbols throughout the series. One does not have to consciously identify symbols to feel their impact for they resonate in the collective unconscious, to use the term of psychologist Carl Jung.) Furthermore, Buffy is now in the very desert she encountered in her dream with the First Slayer in season four, the season where the Scoobies emotionally detached from each other as they all sought their post-high school identities. Since this is ultimately a coming of age show, it is important to see Buffy progressing, continuously re-defining herself and adapting her roles as daughter, sister, lover, Slayer, student, and friend.

Though Buffy has always slain vampires and other monsters, season five has made death a new reality for her. We started to see this in “Fool for Love” when Buffy is stabbed with her own stake and asks Spike to tell her what it takes to kill a slayer. Although she herself died in the season one finale, she did move past that experience rather quickly. Because she was still a young teenage girl, I think it was easy for her to revert to the typical feeling of invincibility that teenagers often maintain, despite her dangerous calling. In season five, however, as a grown woman with more responsibilities and a more mature outlook, the reality of her own mortality is unsettling. Buffy’s injury, her mother’s death, and Glory’s threat against Dawn’s life all force Buffy to face death in a new way. She needs to reconcile herself with this harsh aspect of life.


Ultimately, Buffy encounters the spirit guide in the significant form of the First Slayer, reminding Buffy who she is and what her ultimate role is. Buffy originally receives some comfort about one of her concerns: she’s not hardened; she’s full of love. And love will lead her to her gift! This sounds so beautiful . . . but, wait, death is her gift?? This message is certainly unclear and unsettling to our grief stricken Slayer.

To avoid spoilers, I can say no more, so I will leave you with a quote to contemplate: “Death is a paradox – it can be understood as both a changeless state and transforming process, as a definitive end or harbinger of new beginnings and rebirth” (Grillo 20).

Works Cited
Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion . Florida: Harcourt, 1967.

Cooper, J.C. “Earth.” An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols . London: Thames & Hudson, 1978.

Cooper, J.C. “Lion.” An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols . London: Thames & Hudson, 1978.

Grillo, Laura S. “‘Rambu Solo’: the Toradja Cult of the Dead and Embodied Imagination.” Varieties of Mythic Experience: Essays on Religion, Psyche and Culture . Einsiedeln: Daimon-Verlag, 2008. Print.

Thank you, Nikki!

Next week: We come to the end of this marvelous season with an incredible triptych of episodes, along with co-hosts Robert Wiersema and Tanya Cochran:

5.20 Spiral
5.21 The Weight of the World
5.22 The Gift

On Angel, we come to the end of season 2 in a WONDERFUL trio of Wizard of Oz-named eps, and all I can say is, prepare yourself for season 3, the best Angel season to this point. (And for all of you new viewers who wonder why Whedon fans always say, “Numfar, do the dance of joy!” you’re about to find out.)

2.20 Over the Rainbow
2.21 Through the Looking Glass (hey, wasn’t there another TV show that recently used that title?)
2.22 There’s No Place Like Plrtz Glrb

Buffy Rewatch Week 35: Spoiler Forum

And here is your place to talk about this week's episodes spoiler-free. It was harder this week than ever to avoid being spoilery, but there were so many things I wanted to mention. Can't wait for people to get to next week's Angel eps now that they've seen the first of the bunch, and I somehow avoided saying that BUFFY'S death is the gift. Urgh...

Fandom Showdown!

Many of you who were at Fan Expo on the weekend and came by the ECW Press booth filled out a form where you could choose between your faves in fandom. (It was part of a draw we were having to win a prize pack of books.) The results are in, and posted on the ECW site. Here are the evil choices, and I've bolded the winners:

Khal Drogo vs. Conan

Ben Linus vs. Cancerman

Spike vs. Eric Northman

The Salvatore Brothers vs. the Winchesters

Cylons vs. Daleks (just barely)

Pacey Witter vs. Peter Bishop (our Josh Jackson showdown)

Bella Swan vs. Katniss Everdeen

But now that the in-person voting has closed, we've opened it up to online voting! And... certain faves (*cough*Spike*cough*) are suddenly falling behind. I say we rally and get that voting up. And come on, Ben Linus!! I mean, I know I actually worked with Bill Davis on his memoir and I love the guy, but... Ben Linus. Benry. The guy is ace.

So let's get out there and vote!! Go here to see the actual results of the in-person poll and to vote. Once you've voted in the category, the online results will pop up so you can see how your faves are faring. ;)

Fall TV: Person of Interest

I've been meaning to do a post on what I'll be watching this fall, but since that has yet to happen I'll just break them out individually. Wild horses won't be able to keep me away from JJ Abrams' new "Person of Interest," starring Ben Linus Michael Emerson. At a recent fan con, when asked who their favourite Lost character was, many of the people in the room of the Lost panel (moderated by our very own Rebecca Thompson!) said Ben Linus.

Here's an interesting interview I found with Michael Emerson and the LA Times, where he talks about the spectre of Ben Linus that always hangs over him. I was interested in his reaction to people who are demanding answers:

"Sometimes I wanted to pat people on the head and say, 'You know the thing you want me to give you is actually the thing you don't want me to give you, right? If I could explicate the entire mystery of the show, what would be the use of that?' " he said. "I was surprised so many people were willing to trade the joy of the present for some intangible answer."

You tell em, Benry.

When Person of Interest begins in the fall, I'm pleased to say I'll be blogging on it with Chris Doran, aka "humanebean," one of my favourite commentators during our long Lost years together on here. He's always had great insight, and I'm looking forward to sharing this little blogging stage with him. The show is slated to begin September 22, so watch this space for our reactions to it! In the meantime, here's a teaser trailer that CBS has put out on the show. Try to pick out all of the Lost moments from it. ;)

Fringe: Coming Soon...

Fringe comes back on September 23. And... there's that infamous Lost number. And it's the day after the anniversary of the crash. (When will I EVER get past these numbers?!) The teaser's out, and it's making me very excited. Notice the Lost number that gets turned on its side in this one. (Stop it stop it stop it! God, I'm turning into Leonard Simms...) Can't wait!

Retro Music Thursdays: The Mission

So, I've decided to introduce a new element to my blog as we head into the fall and a whole whack of new TV: retro music Thursdays.

Remember when retro was the music your parents listened to? When it was poodle skirts and 60s surf music on the radio. "And now, on today's best retro hits, it's Jan and Dean!"

And do you remember that first time when you walked into a "Retro Mondays" night at your favourite club... and it was the music that was playing when you were in university? Wait... Blur? The Smiths? U2? Sonic Youth??? THIS is RETRO?!

Just a couple of nights ago, I was standing in a hotel elevator in Niagara Falls and these three girls got on the elevator, all in skanky clothes and heavily perfumed, going out clubbin'. They looked like they had maybe just come of drinking age (or would be carrying really good IDs that night) and they were reading aloud the acts that were coming to the casino from a poster inside the door. And then they said, "Dana Carvey? Who's Dana Carvey? Should it be Dana Harvey? I think it's Harvey. Wait... is that a man? Why is he called Dana?" And I felt my heart sink. Most every North American who is my age knows who Dana Carvey is... but I'm that other generation now. Now there's a generation of kids going to clubs that hasn't got a clue who he is. Was he terribly important to me? Of course not. The Church Lady was funny once and then it was stupid, and he tended to be too over the top and never made it outside of SNL, really. (But man, his Garth was inspired, wasn't it?) It was just a little sad to me that I now have references that are lost on other adults.

Whatever. I'm embracing the fact that my music is now retro, and I'm gonna damn well celebrate it. So every Thursday we're going to listen to the songs that, well, didn't make the whole world sing, but they made me sing and shaped who I am. And I"ll include a little anecdote as to why.

Let's start big: The Mission. Just a couple of weeks ago I was doing the final editorial flip through a book that will soon be out from my publisher, called Encyclopedia Gothica, the A-Z of all things Goth. And I marvelled that so much of my life has been shaped by Goth. The music I listen to has been inspired by it, the movies and TV and books I love the most are closer to Goth than really anything else, and even the colours of my clothes lean to black, although I never went for the all-out Goth uniform. I wanted to, but never jumped in. Instead i just hung out with a bunch of other Goths who did and lived vicariously through their black fingernails, red lips and very white skin.

The Mission were one of my favourite bands. Wayne Hussey and his hat and sunglasses, their giant orchestral songs. I wanted to have Hussey's children. I loved Sisters of Mercy, too (Hey now, hey now now... sing this corrosion to me...) but they simply weren't The Mission. I finally saw The Mission at Massey Hall in 1990 and had seats way up in the nosebleeds, but it was still an awe-inspiring show. The opening act? The Wonder Stuff. I didn't know them before then, but they became gods to me. Don't worry, they'll show up in a couple of weeks. But first, "Tower of Strength," horse and all. (I always thought this video was a bit bonkers.) Oh, the hearing loss I've endured because of this song on terribly high volume in headphones. (Don't be fooled by the shortened single version; the extended one is the only one that matters...)