#honestly they should have sent her to kill angelus it would have solved all their problems

[5bi5]

Kendra with a sword

[coraniaid]

Not an original thought on my part but I really do still hate the end of Doppelgangland (by which I mean, specifically, the Scooby Gang's decision to send vampire!Willow back to her own dimension where both she and they believe she will be free to kill and torture people as much as she likes again). The more you think about it the more completely it undermines anything else the show is trying to say this season if not the whole premise of the show itself. I honestly think it's one of the worst writing decisions the show ever made.

I often see people comparing the scene in Bad Girls where Faith doesn't listen to Buffy and kills Allan Finch with the scene in this episode where Buffy does listen to Willow and doesn't kill her vampire alter ego. And I think this parallel probably is fully intentional, only ... what is it trying to say? To paraphrase Kendra: she's a vampire, she should die. That has consistently been the rule the show iived by up to this point (at least for soulless vampires). Xander didn't have a choice to spare vampire!Jesse, even though Jesse was his friend. Buffy promised to -- and did -- kill vampire!Ford, even though Ford was her friend and was going to die if he wasn't turned. Buffy patrols cemetaries every night killing vampires as they rise from their graves, before they've killed anyone, just because they will otherwise go on to hurt people. Buffy sent Angel to hell even though she was in love with him. But suddenly it's wrong to kill a vampire that looks like -- but isn't -- one of Buffy's friends? Even one that we know has killed and tortured people? Even one that was actively trying to do that at the time Buffy was about to stake her? How does this square with anything else in the show's history?

The episode doesn't suggest vampire!Willow's reformed in any way. It doesn't give her a soul or a chip in her head or even have her promise really hard not to hurt anyone else. On the contrary, she repeatedly tells everyone who will listen how much she enjoys hurting people and how she's going to keep doing it because it's fun. The Scooby Gang have to intervene to stop her carrying out a massacre at the Bronze in their world, in which vampire!Willow kills at least one person. And then they let her go anyway!

It's like if Season 2 had 'solved' the Angelus problem by just persuading Angelus to go and kill people in a different town than Sunnydale, one Buffy wouldn't ever visit. Or if Season 4's Doomed had ended with the gang cheerfully working toegether to have the Iniiative chip removed from Spike because he seemed sad about not being able to kill people anymore, and then had them gather at the airport to wave him off and wish him luck eating people in South America. It makes no sense at all.

And yes, we see that vampire!Willow is killed instantly on returning to her original timeline, so what the Scoobies did didn't actually get anyone human hurt. But, crucially, they didn't know that would happen when they made the decision and in fact they never learn it did. It simply cannot factor into the morality of their actions. As far as any of them ever know they let a monster free to kill and inflict misery on hundreds of people, because ... what? She looked like Willow, so she deserved "a chance"? (To do what, Willow? Increase her bodycount?) Because it's "the way it should be"? (In the dimension that ... according to the rules of the show, shouldn't even exist and was only created by an evil demon?) And then we go right back to the main plot of the season, where ... oh, yes, Faith's refusual to accept personal responsibility for the results of her actions is a sign that she has crossed a serious moral boundary. Right. No obvious hypocrisy on our heroes' part there then.

Genuinely, how does any of this make any sense at all?