by Field, Mark
But having no right to command her to slay isn’t the same as having no interest. As Cordy puts it, “Last time around, Angel barely laid a hand on Buffy. He was *way* more interested in killing her friends.” While this is arguable, there’s some truth to it. Angelus did try to kill Willow in Innocence and Xander in BB&B. Cordy was never at any real risk, but her point stands. The best we can say for Buffy-as-Slayer is that she was taking upon herself a responsibility similar to that which she took when she was unable to kill Angelus in Innocence. The blood of any future deaths would be on her. It’s hardly surprising that those at risk might take a dim view of that without further evidence (which we get later on when Angel saves Willow from Mrs. Post).
Now let’s look at it purely as a matter of friendship. I think we can see Xander’s Lie still working its poison here. From Buffy’s perspective, Xander and Willow wanted her to kill Angel in Becoming. She had no reason to think they’d react any differently now – Xander’s and Cordelia’s statements in Dead Man’s Party confirmed this – and in fact Xander’s reaction here was exactly what she could have expected. She justifiably fears that she’ll lose her friends if she does tell them.
Buffy’s always had the propensity to keep things to herself rather than share her feelings with others. I can personally sympathize with that, and the circumstances of Angel’s return as she sees them certainly reinforce that characteristic. The problem for her is that she needs her friends for her own survival sometimes, and for her emotional stability most of the time, and telling them the truth is one way she gets their help and keeps their friendship. She recognizes this in her conversation with Faith at the end:
“Faith: *I'm* on my side, (nods) and that's enough.
Buffy: (shakes her head) Not always.”
Note that all of this implicitly assumes that Buffy is “the Slayer”, implying that there’s only one. That’s how Buffy sees herself, the presence of Faith notwithstanding. Buffy’s own view of herself, therefore, will inevitably generate tension with Faith and add to Faith’s sense of isolation.
The parallel case of Xander and Willow hiding their own relationship reinforces the problematic nature of concealment. We see Buffy’s guilt reflected in the way Willow, her metaphorical spirit, reacts to kissing Xander in the library. Willow concealed her behavior because she knew it was wrong. Similarly, concealing Angel’s return from Willow and Xander simply reinforced the implication that he was evil. Buffy knew this at some level; in Homecoming she told Angel that Giles and the others “wouldn't understand that you're... better.” It made Buffy and Angel look guilty even if they weren’t; we see this assumption at the heart of the confrontation in the library and Giles said it plainly: “You must've known it was wrong seeing Angel or you wouldn't have hidden it from all of us.” This inherent problem with concealment will have a major consequence later in the season.
Buffy perhaps rightly thought she had no good option when it came to Xander and Willow, but her relations with Xander and Willow aren’t the only ones at issue.
Buffy’s bigger problem is with Giles. Unlike Willow and Xander, he has an actual right to be involved in her decisions. He’s her Watcher. Angelus killed Jenny. While we never actually saw her learn that Angelus tortured Giles, we should assume she did because he “reminds” her of that fact after the confrontation in the library. Moreover, Giles was not involved in Xander’s Lie, nor in the confrontations of Dead Man’s Party. Her failure to tell him is utterly inexcusable under these circumstances. It’s hard to disagree with Giles when he tells her “You should have told me he was alive. You didn't. You have no respect for me, or the job I perform.” Harsh but true, and Buffy knows it. Buffy may have demonstrated the ability to behave like an adult in Band Candy, but she completely blew it here.
Now let’s flip sides and consider Xander’s comments and actions. Xander also takes an essentialist view of Angel, but he reverses the essential feature. For Xander the critical fact is that Angel is a vampire. He’s had this attitude from the beginning: “At the end of the day, I pretty much think you're a vampire.” (Prophecy Girl.) For Xander, it appears that the soul is not much more than a trigger guard on a weapon, capable of being removed at any time.
By Xander’s lights, then, the soul doesn’t, indeed can’t, change Angel’s essential nature. He remains a vampire. Buffy should slay him on sight. As Faith puts it, “You're confused, Twinkie. (smiles ironically) Let me clear you up. (points at Angel) Vampire. (points at herself) Slayer. (points at Angel again) Dead vampire.”
Xander therefore sees himself as justified in “judge shopping” when he urges Faith to slay Angel. The problem here might be obvious from my use of the term “judge hopping”. In the legal world, this term refers to a lawyer or client who doesn’t like the ruling by one judge so tries to get a “better” ruling from another. For obvious reasons, this isn’t allowed.
It won’t do to argue that Faith is a Slayer and should get to make her own independent decision whether to slay Angel. There are three massive problems with this. First, even if we accept Xander’s view of Angel, as I’ve done here for purposes of argument, the situation is very complicated. Faith doesn’t know any of the background, and Xander doesn’t tell her. What he’s doing here is asking a judge to decide at the same time that he’s withholding key facts. That amounts to judicial (attempted) murder.
Second, by sending Faith after Angel, Xander pitted Slayer against Slayer, in a potentially disastrous fight. Though they escaped the fight without mutual physical injury, Xander’s conduct drove a wedge between the two Slayers which may have future consequences (and see below). Buffy was possibly wrong to conceal the facts from Faith, Willow and Xander, but Xander’s behavior made it much more difficult for Buffy to make things right with Faith.
Third, by talking to Faith on his own he bypassed Giles. If Buffy was wrong in failing to consult Giles about Angel’s return, then it’s impossible to excuse Xander for going behind Giles’ back. And note that by lying to Faith, Xander actually enabled the real villain to seize the glove and try to do what he only feared from Angel: to kill them all.
Xander’s fundamental problem is that he wants to be the General but he’s not. It’s that attitude which led to his Lie in Becoming 2. In both cases, Buffy and Giles – the ones in charge – rejected his position and he tried to subvert their decision.
That wasn’t Xander’s only fault in this episode. The other was his personal attack on Buffy in the library. He never even attempted to learn the facts because he’d prejudged the case. He wasn’t making a rational argument about the danger Angel posed so much as he was self-righteously criticizing Buffy for her failure to do her duty as the Slayer: “I think you're harboring a vicious killer.”; “For Angel to go psycho again the next time you give him a happy?” [a truly vile comment in light of the facts]; “you just fell on his lips” [like Xander “just fell on (Willow’s) lips”]; “Like you did last time with Ms. Calendar”; “leave us to clean up the mess” [except for the part where he did little but lie to her and she’s the one who had to send Angel to Hell].
Xander simply assumed his view of the world rather than actually discuss it, and then used it as a club to beat Buffy over the head. I consider Buffy’s willingness to accept his quasi-apology – not “I’m sorry”, but “I leaned toward the postal” – as a remarkable demonstration of her character.
That leaves us to consider Faith’s actions. In one sense, she’s the flip side of Xander. Just as Xander failed to tell Faith the information she needed to make a decision about Angel, Faith herself recklessly headed out to slay him without even attempting to find out. Even though Xander did tell her, rather contemptuously, that “Buffy says he’s clean”, Faith didn’t stop to think: “Yeah, well, I say we can't afford to find out. I say I deal with this problem right now. I say I slay.” Reckless and irresponsible, still worse for her cavalier attitude towards Giles when she and Xander find him unconscious in the library.
It’s also the c
ase that Faith feels isolated from the rest of the gang, which may have contributed to her response to Xander. It’s hard to identify any external ground for her sense of isolation prior to this episode. In Faith, Hope and Trick, Xander and Willow were so intrigued by her that Buffy was jealous, and in Beauty and the Beasts, Homecoming and the beginning of this episode the two slayers worked together quite well. We might suspect a lingering sense of inadequacy from the incident with Kakistos, reinforced here by Mrs. Post. Perhaps she also felt diminished by the fact that Buffy killed Lagos where she had failed.
All this was undoubtedly present, but the biggest single factor must be the fact that Buffy shut her out regarding Angel and concealed his return, reinforced by Faith’s exclusion from the meeting (with Mrs. Post twisting the knife). As I pointed out in FH&T, Buffy tends to think of herself as “the” Slayer even in the rather unavoidable presence of Faith. This has to affect Faith’s sense that she doesn’t belong (h/t executrix). In truth, there were good reasons for not telling Faith about Angel from the perspective of the SG, but from Faith’s viewpoint it’s understandable that she’d feel left out. Xander’s failure to tell her the whole story, which caused her to rush out in a bad cause, certainly didn’t help her sense of confidence either. And her trust issues were substantially exacerbated by Mrs. Post.
Learning that Buffy also hid the truth from everyone else ought to make Faith feel less isolated, but of course those others have a longer background with Buffy and can more easily move past the issue. Still, Buffy did come over to apologize and Faith didn’t accept it; she’s still alienated and we’ll see consequences from that in the future.
Revelations was the 7th episode of S3. The 7th episode of S1 was Angel, the 7th of S2 was Lie to Me. I’m just sayin’…. I’ll add that the New Testament Book of Revelations did not have that name because it revealed events in the past which had been concealed. No, it was a prophecy – it revealed events yet to come.
Trivia notes: (1) The episode opens with Dingoes finishing a song, the last line of which is “you know I’d never lie”. (2) Tragedy masks – what Buffy said everyone was wearing in the library – were worn by actors in ancient Greece to depict the character portrayed by the actor. (3) Faith’s description of Buffy as “Twinkie” is gay slang meaning an effeminate man. Her use of this term is very suggestive in light of Buffy’s joke in the teaser about going out with Faith. There are lots of Fuffy shippers among BtVS fans.
Lover’s Walk
Lovers Walk is one of my personal favorite episodes. It has the return of Spike, no longer a metaphor, but a chaotic force as he blows into and out of town and tears the masks of deception off of Buffy, Willow, and Xander. He’s great in every scene: with Joyce in the kitchen; his “love’s bitch” speech; with Willow in the factory. The episode also has possibly my favorite scene with the Mayor and it has the PEZ witch.
But while it’s incredibly funny, the episode has a real bite to it. Xander and Willow get caught, er, “fluking”, and the repercussions are going to be with us for a while. Willow’s would-be attempt at “de-lusting” shows that she’s unwilling to do the hard work of dealing with her emotions. The spell was doubly wrong: she shouldn’t be using the dark arts for such purposes; and she didn’t have Xander’s consent to perform magic on him, a particularly egregious omission given his experience in BB&B. I think the point is to contrast her with Buffy, who does, with an assist from Spike, reach an understanding about her own desire and manages to control herself without any supernatural aid.
Spike’s words to Buffy and Angel obviously had an impact, but the opposite of the one we might expect. Instead of embracing Spike’s view of love, Buffy seemed to fear it and take it as something to avoid. Perhaps we can see the reason for this by comparing Spike’s view of love with that of Mr. Platt in Beauty and the Beasts:
“Spike: (faces them) You're *not* friends. You'll never be friends. You'll be in love till it kills you both. You'll fight, and you'll shag, and you'll hate each other till it makes you quiver, but you'll never be friends. (points at his temple) Love isn't brains, children, it's blood... (clasps his chest) blood screaming inside you to work its will…. *I* may be love's bitch, but at least *I'm* man enough to admit it.”
“Mr. Platt: Look, lots of people lose themselves in love. It's, it's no shame. They write songs about it. The hitch is, you can't stay lost. Sooner or later, you... you have to get back to yourself. … If you can't... (inhales) Well, love becomes your master, and you're just its dog.”
The dialogue in Lovers Walk doesn’t reference Mr. Platt’s view, but we heard it just four episodes ago and Buffy surely remembers it. If Platt was right, Spike’s words aren’t a paean to love, they’re a big red warning light. Buffy may or may not want that kind of love (see below), but she’s mature enough to recognize that she can’t have it with Angel.
There’s another point worth noting about the speech. This is a paradigm case of the problem inherent in attributing the views of a character to the author. Spike’s view may or may not be true; it may or may not be that of Joss Whedon. But we can’t take his words as true in principle or even as true for Buffy and Angel, any more than we can the diametrically opposite view of Mr. Platt. All we really can know is that his words express how Spike himself sees love.
In S2 I made a big deal out of the fact that Xander and Cordy were a parallel relationship for Buffy/Angel, so I should note here that Cordy turns away from Xander in the scene immediately preceding the one in which Buffy tells Angel that she’s not going to see him anymore.
Trivia notes: (1) Spike knocked over the Sunnydale sign just as he did in School Hard. (2) “Cletus the slack-jawed yokel” is Cletus Spuckler, a character from The Simpsons. (3) The book Angel was reading by the fire is La Nausée by Jean-Paul Sartre, which I mentioned in my post on Lie to Me. In the DVD commentary for the Firefly episode Objects in Space, Joss says that La Nausée is the most important book he’s ever read. In my view, we’ll see the results of Angel’s reading in the episodes through Gingerbread. (4) Weird Science – Buffy’s description of Willow’s failed love spell – was a 1985 film by John Hughes. (5) Charisma Carpenter actually suffered an accident very similar to the one which befell Cordelia in this episode. (6) The words we heard at the funeral while Buffy and Willow were talking are from the Wisdom of Solomon 1:14-15. (7) Buffy’s demand that Angel tell her he doesn’t love her echoes the same demand by James to Grace in IOHEFY. (8) The version of “My Way” which Spike sang at the end is by Gary Oldman for the movie Sid & Nancy.
The Wish
On the surface, The Wish is a very entertaining episode with important things to say about the characters. The problem is that if you look at it a bit more closely, it suffers from a couple of significant flaws which lurk below the surface: (1) the episode leaves us believing that none of the characters actually learned any of those important things; and (2) the WishVerse creates major continuity problems. I’m going to explain below the existence of these two problems and offer a metaphorical reading which (mostly?) solves them, but first I need to talk about it just from our perspective as viewers.
The most important thing I have to say about The Wish is this: don’t let the apparent focus on Cordelia cause you to miss what I consider to be the most important point of the episode. The real point is not about Cordy, it’s about Buffy: what would she have been like if she’d never come to Sunnydale? Dead inside is the answer. That’s the Buffy we see in the WishVerse: a hardened killer with no emotional attachments. It’s the fate Buffy warned Faith against at the end of Revelations.
The teaser clues us in to this purpose:
“Xander: So how come Faith was a no-show? I thought mucus-y demons were her favorites.
Buffy: Couldn't reach her... again. She hasn't been hanging out much.
Xander: I detect worry.
Buffy: A little bit. Slaying's a rough gig. Too much alone time isn't healthy. Stuff gets pent up.”
Buffy’s worried about Faith’s iso
lation, so we see the impact of isolation in the remainder of the episode. The cause of WishVerseBuffy’s emotional deadening is that by never coming to Sunnydale she never gained her friends and Watcher. How does Buffy deal with the terrible things that happen in her life? “I have you guys”, as she says to Xander and Willow in the teaser. WishVerseBuffy tells us about Buffy, it tells us about Faith, and – what sets the episode apart – it uses Cordelia to tell us these things because it tells us about her in the surface plotline. Three birds, one stone.
The reason why the episode is told through the eyes of Cordelia at this point in time is that she’s a metaphor for Faith and Buffy because she feels that she has no friends. That makes her feel dead inside, which is one reason why she dies less than half way through her own wish. The episode accomplishes this in a very clever way, namely by putting us in Cordelia’s point of view in order to tell us about Buffy/Faith. That allows us to learn something about Cordy at the same time we’re learning about Buffy/Faith.
Ok, now let me return to the problematic aspects of The Wish. I said it above, but I’ll repeat it here: The “message” problem is that it doesn’t appear that there is one within the confines of the episode. We, the audience, learn important things from the events we see in the WishVerse, but the reversal of the wish, combined with Cordy’s reaction at the end, make it seem that she didn’t learn anything (and, of course, no other character could have either). This is, to say the least, unsatisfying.
I also mentioned continuity problems. The “continuity” objection to the alternate reality as we see it is that it’s impossible for Cordy to be there. The reason is that the Master must have risen at the Harvest because Buffy wasn’t there to stop it. When we saw the Harvest, Luke was busy devouring everyone in sight until Buffy interrupted him. And this is the key: the one he was about to drain when Buffy showed up was Cordelia herself. She would have died then.