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that-shamrock-vibe · 4 years ago

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Movie Review: The New Mutants (Spoilers)

Spoiler Warning: I am posting this review the week following the movie first airing in the U.K, so if you haven’t yet seen The New Mutants do not read on until you have.

General Reaction:

A three year delay for the final instalment of a twenty-year franchise, was it ultimately worth it? Well as an X-Men fanatic I am always going to say yes, it wasn’t a swan song or a wrap up to the X-Men Cinematic Universe, far from as it was originally pitched as the start of a trilogy and does sew the seeds for that. However, while Dark Phoenix did feel like a sombre instalment not only for that “First Class” timeline but also the team movies as a whole, this had an air of sadness to it because this is the last time I will see anything X-Men related on the big screen for who knows how long.

In that sense, this was an emotional movie for me, more than just the fact that the emotion of fear is a running theme through the movie. However, in terms of my actual enjoyment of the movie, it was a very good movie for what it was.

When your very final movie is effectively an origin movie then there’s always going to be that sense of incompleteness, and what this movie teases both for these characters and who is the big bad behind all of this, it’s really frustrating to know it’s over before it truly starts.

With that in mind, The New Mutants is very slow to get started as there’s a lot of exposition and because it feels like it’s own branch of the X-Men Cinematic Franchise, similar to Deadpool, there is a level of “Beginner’s Guide to Mutants 101″ at play here with the explanation of what a Mutant is and when a young or “New Mutant” first discovers their powers that, to give this movie credit, I have never truly seen explored properly outside of the comics other than a quick explanation from Storm to Jubilee in the first episode of X-Men: The Animated Series.

It’s also disappointing to know that unlike X-Men: The Last Stand or Dark Phoenix, there isn’t a sense of finality for these characters as we have just been introduced to them. Outside of Sunspot who has briefly appeared in X-Men: Days of Future Past, this is the first cinematic appearance for all of these characters. The X-Men are briefly mentioned and Professor X is alluded to quite cleverly but every character outside of Sunspot is debuting here and to know they’re never going to be seen in this continuity again with a chance to develop is very sad.

In terms of the “horror” aspects of this movie I have to say this is very comic-book horror as in how Blade in the late 90s was horror. If you know the jump scares in this movie are coming then there are no jump scares, so basically if you’ve seen the trailers you know the jump scares.

As a horror movie, it felt very much like It-lite in terms of the theme of bringing nightmares into reality, only without the hard R-rating of the blood and gore because outside of one maybe two scenes there is nothing truly horrific to look at here.

There’s also a great parallel to the Gentlemen from Buffy the Vampire Slayer shown from their episode in this movie and the Smiley Men who are Illyana’s nightmare brought to life. They’re creepy like them but they’re not as sinister as them...and that is a great choice of wording considering who the big bad behind the scenes of this movie is.

As an X-Men movie, which is what this is as the New Mutants in the comics are basically younger versions of the X-Men, as I say the first half of this movie isn’t that power heavy but is about introducing and establishing this team, the second half/last third on the other hand is power heavy. Not exactly Days of Future Past or Apocalypse heavy but still heavy for the powers this group of Mutants have.

Overall generally as both an X-Men movie and a comic-book movie, this was really a great movie particularly for the first new movie I have seen since lockdown.

Characters:

So this breakdown will be easy as there’s only really six characters to talk about but I’m going to make it a seven-character breakdown as the looming presence in the shadows of this movie deserves their own section.

Illyana Rasputin:

Alright so it is somewhat difficult to say if Illyana is my favourite or if Rahne is my favourite but I ultimately landed on Illyana for first as Anya Taylor-Joy is really in the spotlight the entire way through this movie. Every time she’s in a scene she commands the attention, and all five of the New Mutants have solo scenes so for Illyana to stand out the most, this is why she is #1 for me.

I’m not entirely sure where this movie takes place in terms of the overall X-Men timeline...but considering it’s supposedly in the revised timeline and Colossus is a member of the X-Men in the late noughties/early 2010s, I imagine this is either around the same time or can even be modern day (2017 or 2020).

Anya Taylor-Joy is as suited to the role of Magik as Channing Tatum would have been as Gambit in my opinion. Not only does she have a reasonable Russian accent but she just simply looks like how Magik looks in the comics.

I loved the rebel teen angst she had all the way through from when we first meet her to the very end, not only is it fitting for the movie but in my opinion it’s fitting for the character. This is a girl that literally goes through some resemblance of hell and is effectively a serial killer so of course she is going to have this icy dark exterior.

In terms of powers, I am slightly disappointed she never fully armoured up, it was always just her left arm that she had armoured complete with Soulsword, whereas in the comics her main look is her entire body. I guess the argument could be made the majority of it is simply a uniform and her arm is the only part armoured but I would have liked to have at least seen her crown.

But Magik’s powers for me here are an interesting combination of Zatanna and Nightcrawler which is a very good combination. The scene where she first appears through limbo fighting the Smiley Men was very impressive.

I would have also enjoyed it if we had spent more time in Limbo, given that we always saw cameo flashes of it whenever she manifested a portal, but we never actually had a full scene of her in her “special place”.

Not being too familiar with the comics however, I am almost completely unaware of Lockheed as a character. My only prior knowledge is his appearance in Pryde of the X-Men as a pest and I have to say I much prefer him here. The animation of both Lockheed and the Demon Bear were stellar.

As I say, I feel we have only just scratched the surface with where this version of Magik could go. I doubt very much Kevin Feige would bring Anya Taylor-Joy back if/when he does bring the character into the MCU because he doesn’t like playing with used toys but if ever there was an exception I would hope it would be her.

Rahne Sinclair:

It is slightly obvious to think of when Maisie Williams was filming for this movie as her hair, unless it’s a wig, is in that “Arry” phase of her Game of Thrones tenure.

Because of the current entertainment climate and the non-starting stance this movie finds itself released in, I think the lesbian romance between Rahne and Dani is going to go unnoticed. But considering this is the first major LGBT romance in a comic-book property I feel this movie will be cheated out of that representation in favour of what is to eventually come from Marvel.

Outside of the romance, I feel Rahne’s story rooted in her religion and mutation was fantastic. I love me some werewolf action and I feel I saw enough actual wolf to satisfy Rahne spending most of her time in “halfway form” as the character has been known to do in the comics.

The fact her nightmare was that religious leader branding her as a werewolf and thereby a monster, not only was it believable given her character but also the parallels to devout religious views on homosexuality were subtle but there.

I do feel the character spent way too much time screaming towards the end of the movie. This girl is a werewolf but spent most of the final battle as the screaming protector of her unconscious lover, I mean she was I guess helpful in waking Dani back up but never truly let rip like I feel the character could have.

I’m not entirely sure if Williams has any Scottish heritage about her but the slipping in and out of the accent was slightly distracting at times. When she was able to be loud the accent was often broken but in her quieter moments or longer dialogue scenes you could hear it.

I do appreciate keeping the nationality of the character from the comics, considering the mess they made of Banshee and Moira MacTaggert, and I do understand having an at the time name talent like Maisie Williams in the role, but there are surely Scottish actresses out there and the casting pool wasn’t exactly high for this movie.

Dani:

The main character in this movie, or focal character I guess as it’s an ensemble movie, is either Illyana or Dani, but because we start with Dani and are introduced to the other characters through Dani I guess she is the focal character.

Again, I give credit to the movie for keeping the nationality of the characters from the comics, but while Anya Taylor-Joy and Maisie Williams border on appropriation as they are not Russian or Scottish themselves, although Anya is of Scottish Argentine descent, Blu Hunt is at least Native-American as Dani is. I think they come from different tribes but I don’t think people are going to focus too much on that technicality.

Similarly to all these characters I don’t really know much about Dani so have no frame of reference to compare her to. I remember she appeared in one episode of X-Men: Evolution and I know her powers involve dreams, which similarly to the majority of the characters in this movie lends itself beautifully to a horror movie, but that’s about it.

I felt her relationship with Rahne was genuine and her own “survivors guilt” over being the only member of her family still alive after the Demon Bear attack was well explained.

I just didn’t understand why it was decided that Reyes had to kill Dani because of the severity of her powers, maybe it was the unpredictability of her powers because their limitations are literally the power of imagination, but I thought Reyes was responsible for sorting out those capable of being killers...surely the power to bring nightmares to life as many times as it takes to kill the person qualifies?

With the Demon Bear being tamed at the end of the movie, I kind of don’t see anywhere for Dani to go if they did continue, she still has the power to solidify nightmares, and I guess she can always call on the Demon Bear, but unlike Rahne or Magik I do not see any further development for her.

Sam:

Sam Guthrie aka Cannonball was an interesting one for me as I knew the character and I knew the actor, but hadn’t properly seen either one fully explored before. I have not watched Stranger Things so do not really know Charlie Heaton’s acting potential...but what I do know is he is from Yorkshire and cannot really do a Kentucky accent.

As for the character of Cannonball, I thought that early scene of him strapping himself to that weight while zooming through the air to either test himself or hurt himself was really well realised. There wasn’t enough of him going full cannonball throughout the movie, mostly it just came across as a sort of super speed which in a way I guess it is but projecting that force-field while he is zooming about is what makes the power set unique.

Similarly to Dani he had guilt over his nightmare which was him causing a mining accident which killed his co-workers and dad, but unlike Dani who never really developed the thought of it being her fault for her family’s death because of her conjuring the Demon Bear, Sam did at least hold a lot of guilt over what had happened...despite his nightmare being probably the weakest as the main effect it had was totalling a washing machine.

I also didn’t understand the back-to-back scenes of Sam suggesting he was meant to be in the hospital and felt he had to be there, but then in the next scene him trying to walk out saying he doesn’t belong there. Maybe it was the editing but it just seemed like a complete 180 from scenes that were literally back-to-back.

Roberto:

As I said this is Sunspot’s second cinematic appearance and I guess in the revised timeline he has gone from being portrayed by Mexican actor Adan Canto to now Brazilian actor Henry Zaga.

I didn’t feel the boys in this movie had that much to do, with both Sam and Berto it did feel like them simply coming to terms with their powers. I did like how both had that fear of hurting people and both had to learn I guess to push past that fear.

With Berto’s fear though, I do feel his power first manifesting in conjunction to him reaching sexual maturity was very well explored, because of course the combination of testosterone and becoming a living solar flare are not exactly two things anyone wants to mix. So when the result is burning your girlfriend to a crisp it is going to shake you.

Outside of his powers though there wasn’t a lot to the character and it is hard to remember a good line that he or Sam had that weren’t douchey, but for what we got he was a good character.

Reyes:

Wow this woman deserved to be eaten by the Demon Bear, which by the way I found almost as humorous as Katie McGrath being carried away by a pterodactyl in Jurassic World.

But yes, this doctor was the “villain” of the movie as she was the agent of the big bad Essex Corporation in charge of determining the new mutants’ powers and whether or not they’re worth progressing to their facility.

Outside of that I didn’t really think much of her as a character, she wasn’t a sympathetic character, she wasn’t believing to be doing this for the benefit of these young mutants, she was simply following orders.

It’s a deviance from the comics where Reyes is a hero and member of the X-Men, whereas here she is far from it.

Alice Braga is also regionally appropriately cast as she is Brazilian whereas the character is Puerto Rican, although whenever she spoke I kept thinking about Gal Gadot a lot, even looks wise there are similarities.

Sinister:

Now let’s talk about the looming big bad who I imagine would have been the major big bad of this supposed trilogy. Despite the new mutants believing the facility to be owned and run by the X-Men, it is in fact run by the Essex Corporation...Essex as in Dr. Nathaniel Essex, a biologist obsessed with evolution who became the Mutate supervillain Mister Sinister.

I want to see Mister Sinister in a live-action movie so badly it’s unreal, they’ve done Apocalypse so why they can’t do Sinister I don’t know.

This isn’t the first time Sinister has been alluded to as the Essex Corporation was in an end credits scene of X-Men: Apocalypse that acquired samples of Wolverine’s blood presumably to create X-23, but because those events took place in the 80s and these events take place in somewhat modern day it’s hard to correlate the two.

Obviously we are no longer going to get X-Men movies in this universe and continuity, but with the seeds being sown for Sinister more than once now, the baton has been laid down for Feige to finally bring this villain to life.

Reccomendation:

If like me you are more or less interested in just completing the twenty-year franchise because you love these characters and any interpretation of them then this is the movie for you. However, don’t expect wall to wall action, and I would recommend not getting too attached to these characters. It’s too late for me with Illyana I already love her and already feel Anya Taylor-Joy has set a high bar for whoever plays Magik next.

But for me personally, this franchise has been my favourite movie franchise and my favourite property. Even the bad movies I can at least find something good about them regardless of if the overall movies have been good or not. But just to reiterate, I do feel this is one of the good movies.

In a ranking of the 13 movies (not counting Once Upon a Deadpool), this ranks somewhere between #6-8 for me.

Overall I rate the movie a solid 8/10, by no means the best or a perfect X-Men movie but by no means one of the worst. The movie benefits from new characters (aside from Sunspot) but suffers due to the inevitability of this being the definitive end for the current franchise.

So what did you guys think? Post your comments and check out more Movie Reviews as well as other posts.

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buffyannesummrs · 4 years ago

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this is objectively the worst thing i’ve ever posted on my blog askdjhakskl but can we talk about how the deancas confession was like...insanely similar to spike’s speech to buffy in s7 ‘touched.’ like....

“Because the one thing I want, it’s something I know I can’t have”

“I'm not asking you for anything. When I say I love you, it's not because I want you. Or because I can't have you. It has nothing to do with me.”

“Ever since we met, ever since I pulled you out of Hell, knowing you has changed me. Because you cared, I cared.”

“A hundred plus years. And there's only one thing I've ever been sure of: you.”

"Everything you have ever done, the good and the bad, you have done for love ... that is who you are. You're the most caring man on Earth. You are the most selfless loving human being I will ever know ... I love you."

“I love what you are. What you do. How you try... I've seen your kindness, and your strength. I've seen the best and the worst of you. And I understand, with perfect clarity, exactly what you are... you're a hell of a woman. You're the one, Buffy.”

okay clowning meta time:

just in terms of the monologues themselves, the obvious parallels with the themes of selfless love, love that is not about possession but about “just being” as cas said, understanding that person fully and loving them wholly because of it. the freedom that comes with selfless love, the peace of being. bly manor: “people do, don’t they? mix up love and possession?” like all of s6 spike is him trying to possess buffy, to “have” her love, and the toxic path that leads him down. he is only able to find peace through obtaining his soul for her and loving her selflessly. cas (who is a much better person than spike LOL) having his whole arc being about discovering freedom through love...but then never being able to achieve happiness because he thought he could never have it without having that love returned. only experiencing that happiness in accepting the freedom of just existing in that love, the freedom in expressing it.

and the other parallel of both of them finding freedom through that love... spike obtaining his soul because of and for buffy, and being freed from his demon. cas achieving literally the only free will that exists in the universe because of and for his love for dean.

and then the whole other aspect of knowing and being known, seeing and being seen... it’s very powerful to me that both of these confessions (again, because they’re free and selfless!) focus so much on the other person and what the confessor sees in them. and both of them explain how they love the other not in spite of their flaws, but including them. because of them too. “everything you have done, the good and the bad, you have done for love.” and “i’ve seen the best and the worst of you, and i know with perfect clarity exactly what you are ... you’re a hell of a woman.” like fuck! they see that person completely, they know that person better than anyone else, and love them wholly for it. the atonement scene “don’t you know?” “yes i know exactly.” just playing on a loop in my brain!

which brings me to where these confessions take place in the narrative...

both of these confessions take place in the penultimate episode before not just the season finale, but the series finale as well. it’s a narrative-structure-tale-as-old-as-time: the darkness before the victory. the hero has fallen to their lowest point, hope is lost, there is no way to defeat what they’re up against. then: they receive the hope and strength they need to fight again.

for buffy, all of season 7 she struggles with what it means to be a leader, from the separateness of being the slayer. she becomes increasingly isolated from her friends and family, eventually completely losing their trust and falling to her lowest point. spike’s speech is her catalyst, it allows her to regain her faith in herself and gives her the strength she needed to launch her into the victory of the season. as buffy says to him the next day: “This may actually help me fight my war. This might be the key to everything. And the reason I'm holding it is because of you. Because of the strength that you gave me last night.” narratively, spike’s speech is the catalyst of inner strength that raises the hero from the despair before victory.

and, although we have not yet seen the end of supernatural, i am going to say with confidence that cas’ speech will function exactly the same way. all season, there has been a huge emphasis on how dean has struggled with his anger. all series long, dean has struggled with his self-worth, his inability to express his own wants, his self-sacrificing, his anger. i will say now that this speech is going to be the catalyst that frees him from this cycle: hearing this person who knows him, completely, who loves him, fully, refute his own self-conception, and tell him no, you are driven by love not anger - this is going to free dean and narratively be the catalyst that brings him from his lowest point and launches him into victory. and of course narratively, losing cas is what brings dean to his lowest point so narratively he will have to be brought back for the final victory.

so there you have it folks! ultimate clowning hours here at buffyannesummrs dot tumblr dot com :-)

#i am going to tag this earnestly look away #spn #supernatural #spn meta #btvs #buffy the vampire slayer #btvs meta #charlie if you're reading this....i am so sorry

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thesublemon · 4 years ago

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Dead Things, Part 2

This is the long-delayed continuation of my analysis of the intratextual parallels in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Dead Things.” I made some edits and added a section to that first part, so you might want to revisit it before reading the rest. In this half I’ll be discussing: (1) the issues of personhood and self-possession that the parallels to Faith bring up during the alley beating scene, (2) the context being used to frame Buffy turning herself in as a pseudo-suicidal act, (3) how the episode’s takes on identity and romantic love expand on the takes in the earlier seasons, and (4) why this sort of parallelism is interesting and valuable. More discussion of the episode’s themes around moral responsibility, agency, and identity is threaded throughout.

[Warnings: (1) This post assumes knowledge of the episode and show. (2) I discuss pretty much everything that happens in season six, which means there will be references to rape/assault. In addition to all the other unpleasant things that happen that season that one might not want to read about. (3) It’s about 11,000 words long.]

Part Three: Personhood and Possession

Buffy beating Spike in the alley is arguably the climax of the episode. So it’s significant that in the build-up to that moment, the episode establishes multiple parallels between Spike and Faith, and culminates in a parallel between Buffy and Faith. These are probably the most obvious references that the episode makes, the ones the average audience member is most likely to pick up on, and are therefore worth looking at in detail.

10. “Where’d they find her?”

Faith failing to dump the body in Consequences:

NEWS ANCHOR: We go now live to our field reporter, who is standing by at the waterfront with this breaking news about the murder that has shocked the Mayor and residents of Sunnydale.

FIELD REPORTER: Fishermen discovered the body today, the victim of a brutal stabbing.

Spike failing to dump the body in Dead Things:

COP #1: Where’d they find her?

COP #2: The river. She washed up half a mile from the cemetery.

What’s important about the parallels between Spike and Faith is, in my opinion, not just that the characters parallel each other on a meta level, but also the fact that what Spike does and says reminds Buffy of Faith. As we’ll see further on, Buffy’s attitudes towards Spike in this scene can be clearly read as her attitudes towards (and fears about) herself, which is also a role that Faith--as her season-three shadow self--once played. He reminds her of the tactics that Faith used to excuse her behavior and escape her moral responsibility. Like Faith, Spike attempts to cover up the death. Also like Faith, he expresses zero emotional conflict about it. Here’s what Faith said to Buffy when Buffy confronted her at the end of Bad Girls:

FAITH: Okay, this is the last time we're gonna have this conversation, and we're not even having it now, you understand me? There is no body. I took it, weighted it, and dumped it. The body doesn't exist.

BUFFY: (shocked) Getting rid of the evidence doesn't make the problem go away.

FAITH: It does for me.

BUFFY: Faith, you don't get it. You killed a man.

FAITH: No, you don't get it. (smiles) I don't care!

It’s a pretty chilling moment, both for Buffy and the viewer. It’s actually a bit like the moment that Warren kills Katrina. Faith has not yet descended into murder and betrayal, but that scene is when we realize that her bad-girl, devil-may-care attitude might actually go much further than we expected. So of course it would disturb Buffy that Spike plainly and firmly says that hiding the body was “what [he] had to do” and that it “doesn’t matter now.” His cool “Show them what?” is very similar to Faith’s “There is no body.” Both negate the existence of the problem--that a person died--which means, if you look at it a certain way, that they’re negating the dead person entirely. They’re not simply objectifying the person by calling them “a body”, they’re denying that the person existed or mattered at all.

The Dead Things scene is complicated, because on the one hand Buffy is right that these kinds of problems can’t necessarily be papered over, and given that both bodies are easily discovered, one can probably assume the show agrees with her. It’s also true that Spike’s lack of emotion about either Katrina’s death or personhood is almost certainly mean to reflect his inherent moral deficiencies (ie, soullessness). He was thinking of protecting Buffy just as Faith was thinking of protecting herself, rather than about what was “right.”

But it’s also obvious that Buffy too is trying to paper over something. If Spike and Faith were negating the personhood of Katrina and Allan Finch, then we might say that Buffy, by ignoring her own problems, is negating herself. An idea that’s backed up by the very self-abnegating language she uses when she beats Spike up--more on that in a bit. But just as Spike and Faith failed to truly hide the bodies, Buffy’s own problems will soon rise to the surface.

11. “How many have you saved?”

Faith in Consequences:

FAITH: I missed the mark last night and I’m sorry about the guy. I really am! But it happens! Anyway, how many people do you think we’ve saved by now, thousands? And didn’t you stop the world from ending? Because in my book, that puts you and me in the plus column.

Spike in Dead Things:

SPIKE: Why are you doing this to yourself?

BUFFY: A girl is dead because of me.

SPIKE: And how many people are alive because of you? How many have you saved? One dead girl doesn’t tip the scale.

Once again, Faith and Spike are both advocates of a position that is not necessarily wrong, but also doesn’t demonstrate care for the moral value of the individual. Once again, Faith is trying to get herself morally off the hook, whereas Spike wants to help Buffy but lacks the ability to intuit moral distinctions. Yet both of them end up in the same place.

In general, Buffy the Vampire Slayer has never been a big fan of consequentialism. It seems to believe that actions can be absolutely moral or immoral, and that choice and intent matters for assessing that (im)morality. On the question of “chip versus soul,” for example, the show comes down decidedly on the side that Spike not killing people is morally meaningless given that it isn’t his decision. Giles’s moments of ruthless pragmatism are treated as just that: ruthless. When Giles kills Ben in The Gift, he describes it as an action not worthy of a hero. No matter how many people Ben’s death probably saves, Giles killing him is still treated as an inherently immoral act.

So Spike and Faith’s position is “wrong” according to both Buffy and Buffy’s moral philosophies, because it suggests that actions don’t have absolute, inherent morality. If Buffy accepted Spike and Faith’s argument, then she’d be in the moral black even if she had killed Katrina deliberately. Moreover, because their position values relative outcomes, then saving 80 out of 100 people from a burning building would potentially be morally acceptable even if saving all 100 people had been possible. So when I say that their position “ignores the moral value of the individual” I mean that it (a) underplays the relevance of an individual’s particular moral choices, and (b) doesn’t treat people as worth morally caring about for their own sake. In other words, it undervalues personhood on two separate counts.

(Whether or not this is a good or coherent position on the part of the show, is something else entirely. One which I’ll leave actual moral philosophers to argue over. I’m only trying to articulate what I think the show thinks.)

What’s really interesting about this moment though, is the way it subverts the show’s own tendencies towards moral absolutism. As in the previous section, one could argue that Buffy, for all her goodness, is nonetheless undervaluing her own personhood. She is taking issue with Spike and Faith’s avoidant, overly-quantified relativism while failing to consider that punishing herself for something accidental is not a good outcome because she herself is a person. Not only that, but punishing herself would have consequences for all of the people she’s responsible for, which means she’s undervaluing them at the expense of overvaluing Katrina. So even though Spike’s position may be “incorrect”, Buffy is not clearly correct either, the way she was in Consequences. In fact, she is using Spike’s wrongness to justify her own flawed moral logic. She isn’t simply “valuing” Katrina, but also following an impulse to self-destruct. She’s taking refuge in absolutism in order to avoid responsibility and moral decision-making.

12. “That’s my girl”

Faith in Consequences:

FAITH: See, you need me to toe the line because you’re afraid you’ll go over it, aren’t you, B? You can’t handle watching me living my own way, having a blast, because it tempts you! You know it could be you!

Buffy punches her.

FAITH: There’s my girl.

BUFFY: No. I’m not gonna do this.

Spike in Dead Things:

BUFFY: You can’t understand why this is killing me, can you?

SPIKE: Why don’t you explain it?

She punches him. He takes it.

SPIKE: Come on, that’s it, put it on me. Put it all on me. (She kicks him) That’s my girl.

BUFFY: I am not your girl!

Bonus: The Mayor in 3x17 Enemies:

MAYOR WILKINS: Wonderful, wonderful. We don't want a replacement Slayer anytime soon. They can't all turn out like my girl Faith.

Bonus: Angel in 3x17 Enemies:

ANGEL: You still my girl?

BUFFY: Always.

Neither the Buffy and Angel scene nor the Mayor and Faith scene have the same structure as the Consequences and Dead Things scenes, but Enemies and Consequences happen in such close proximity and “my girl” is such a particular phrase, that I’m immediately inclined to try to link them. “My girl” is possessive, of course. It usually has romantic undertones, but doesn’t necessarily have to. It could also, as the Mayor demonstrates, be used by a fond and encouraging parent.

Looking at this on the page, it would be easy to read that exchange between Buffy and Angel as romantic. I suppose it is on some level. But I’ve always found something sad about it, particularly in the context of the Mayor/Faith dynamic. Just before the scene between Buffy and Angel, here’s what the Mayor says to Faith:

WILKINS: Well, you win some, you lose some. From where I'm sitting, it's batting average that counts. So you lost some friends.

FAITH: I wouldn't exactly call them friends.

WILKINS: Well, what are you worried about? Chin up! You don't see me looking disappointed. Heck, no. You know why? Because I know you'll always have me, Faith. I'm the best, the most important friend you'll ever have.

In other words, the Mayor’s promises of “always” are intended to keep Faith away from connections with others. Similarly, most of the Buffy/Angel arc in season three is about how they’re hanging onto something that cannot work, and it’s keeping them from developing as individuals. So the fact that Buffy and Angel echo the Mayor by using both “my girl” and “always,” seems to indicate that we’re meant to find the sentiments troubling as much as we’re meant to potentially find them romantic. Neither Buffy nor Angel are being strictly manipulative the way the Mayor is, but the idea that Buffy would think she “belongs” to Angel, even when she’s trying to get some distance from him, nonetheless comes off as an attitude that is meant to be seen as being dubiously good for her, and that she must ultimately outgrow.

In light of those scenes, I think it’s worth thinking of “my girl” in terms of self-ownership. When Buffy resists Faith, it’s after two episodes of Faith first emphasizing her and Buffy’s shared Slayerness, and later their (supposedly) shared guilt. As she says: “You know it could be you.” In other words, Faith repeatedly attempts to define Buffy’s identity for her, by claiming they’re of a kind. Similarly, Spike has suggested multiple times throughout season six that Buffy, as he says in Dead Things, belongs “in the shadows...with [him].” In Life Serial he tells her that she’s “a creature of the darkness, like [him]” and in Doublemeat Palace he baits her by asking her what kind of demon she is. In other words, he emphasizes Buffy’s (supposedly) dark and demonic nature in order to suggest that they belong together. In both cases, Spike and Faith’s assertions can in turn be read as metaphors for Buffy’s own fears that her nature as a Slayer is to be what Spike and Faith say it is, and that she does not feel in control of her identity.

Spike and Faith even phrase their seduction the same way. In Bad Girls, Faith says multiple variants of “Tell me you don’t get off on this” to Buffy, which Spike echoes in the Dead Things balcony scene, when he says “Tell me you don’t love getting away with this.” Both, in other words, suggest that Buffy not only has dark or selfish impulses like Spike and Faith do, but that she actively derives sexually-coded pleasure from them. Which, as we saw in the dream sequence’s blurry combination of sex and violence, is something that Buffy has anxiety about.

So in both cases, when Buffy resists the “my girl” claim, she is resisting the other person’s pattern of attempting to define her identity. Their pattern of attempting to “own” or be the authority of her identity. Faith and Spike call Buffy “my girl” the moment she behaves violently, because it’s in their interests for Buffy to think of herself as violent--for her to feel more connected to them than to her righteous convictions. (Even if, in Spike’s case, he potentially thinks he’s doing something helpful--“Put it all on me”.) Just as the Mayor was trying to get Faith to feel more connected to him than to her friends, or Buffy and Angel were acting more connected to each other than to themselves. Still--because Spike and Faith are Buffy’s shadow-selves, her denials are not just about her resisting external influences. She’s also, even mostly, resisting the genuine, internal temptation that both characters represent.

But yet again, the moral situation in Dead Things is different and more complicated than it was in Consequences, and yet again, Buffy fails to understand that. In season three, the Mayor uses his leadership and authority to pursue his demonic agenda, and Faith uses her physical abilities to hurt other people. They’re relevant but pretty morally clear-cut foils in a season about Buffy growing into her own power and authority. It’s easy to say that Buffy should not be tempted to behave the same way.

But in season six, the problem is that Buffy is afraid of power. Spike is a temptation to Buffy, but the temptation isn’t about Buffy becoming an evil murderer, or even becoming the kind of person who would hide that she killed someone. Buffy is not particularly tempted to become a “creature of the darkness.” But she is tempted to believe that she is one. She’s tempted to isolate herself, and to hate herself, and to punish herself. She’s tempted to give herself a reason to not participate in the world. As a vampire, Spike is not immoral so much as amoral, someone that needs things like chips and love to tell him what to do because he can’t form his own moral identity. So the fact that Spike is Buffy’s shadow doesn’t mean that she’s tempted to become a monster. It means that she’s tempted to become a void. A “dead thing.”

In the leadup to Buffy attacking Spike, Spike (unlike Faith) doesn’t actually make any comments about who Buffy is, or whether she’s “wrong”. Instead, he tries to tell her she shouldn’t punish herself, and asks her to explain why she’s doing what she’s doing. Only that’s exactly what Buffy cannot tolerate in that moment. She cannot tolerate feeling like her identity is open-ended, or like she needs to defend her moral convictions, or like she might not deserve to be punished. But she also can’t tolerate the reminder that she’s been letting Spike define her, because she doesn’t like what he’s been defining her as. She doesn’t want to be her own girl, but she also can’t let herself be his. And this conflict pushes her to the breaking point.

13. “You’re nothing!”

Faith-in-Buffy beating up Buffy-in-Faith in 4x16 Who Are You?:

FAITH: Shut up! Do you think I’m afraid of you!? You’re nothing! Disgusting! Murderous bitch! You’re nothing! You’re disgusting!

Buffy beating up Spike in Dead Things:

BUFFY: I am not your girl! You don’t…have a soul! There is nothing good or clean in you. You are dead inside! You can’t feel anything real! I could never…be your girl.

In both scenes, Buffy and Faith are each clearly beating up the other person as a proxy for beating themselves. Both, as mentioned, use self-abnegating language. Faith describes herself as “nothing” and Buffy describes Spike (herself) as “dead inside,” with “nothing good or clean” in him (her). The parallel is made even more obvious by the fact that in both scenes it’s Buffy’s face delivering the beating.

What I’ve always liked about Who Are You? is the way it comments on Faith’s season three role as Buffy’s foil and pseudo-doppelganger. In season three, Faith was introduced to throw Buffy’s identity into relief. To make her conscious, even possessive, of her identity in ways she’d never been before. It was all very literary at the time, but the problem is, a real person can’t be a doppelganger or a foil. In real life, seeing yourself as a reflection or extension of someone else just means that you’re afraid or unable to create your own identity. Which is what Who Are You? makes explicit. The episode turns Faith from an abstract foil figure into a fully-fledged character who literally steals Buffy’s identity, and is shown to have a tenuous grasp on what kind of person she wants to be. It strips her of all the external things she once used to define herself--the Mayor, her body, being the anti-Buffy--and leaves her as “nothing”.

Without an external identity, Faith is forced to realize just how weak her internal sense of self is. How she’s failed to cultivate a self, because she doesn’t like herself (the irony of simultaneously hating and not having a self is perfectly illustrated by the way Faith switches between “You’re nothing” and “You’re disgusting”). How she maybe does yearn to have a self, but only knows how to steal one, not create one. The beating scene is the climax of the episode because it marks the moment in which Faith’s passive, figurative self-destruction is transformed into active, literal self-destruction. It is, ironically, one of Faith’s first true expressions of self, which is symbolically represented by the fact that she is returned to her own body in the middle of it.

But if Who Are You? was about Faith realizing how little self she has, then Dead Things is about Buffy realizing how much self she has. In Who Are You? Faith role-plays heroism in an attempt to dismiss it as silly and/or secretly egoistic and corruptible. But ends up disturbed by the taste of purpose and selfhood that it actually gives her. Whereas in Dead Things Buffy role-plays...not evil, but perhaps abjection. Powerlessness. And is disturbed to realize that she has power and selfhood after all. She spends the episode thinking she’s like Faith because she killed someone, when she’s actually acting like Faith by thinking of herself as “bad” and letting other people define her.

I’d argue that the point of the Dead Things scene is that it confronts Buffy with physical, violent evidence of her emotional state. She is forced to see evidence of the fact that she has feelings, and that her feelings affect people, including herself. She is forced to see her desire for self-destruction in full bloody technicolor. It echoes the opening scene, in which Spike and Buffy talk about the sex they just had, and it’s all unusually companionable right up until Spike tells her that he’s “never been with such an animal.”

BUFFY: (disturbed) I'm not an animal. 

SPIKE: You wanna see the bite marks?

 BUFFY: (looking away) You know, it's late, I-I should get home before Dawn goes to sleep.

In other words, Spike offers to show Buffy evidence of what she’s just been doing, evidence of her violence and desire, and she immediately wants to leave. She doesn’t want to see it. She hasn’t wanted to look at what she’s been doing with Spike at any point during their relationship. Just before they kiss for the first time, Buffy says “this isn’t real.” In Doublemeat Palace Buffy doesn’t look at him as they have sex behind the restaurant. In Gone Buffy only lets herself sleep with him once she’s invisible. At the beginning of Dead Things they’re shown swept “under the rug” together. Spike says it himself: after they have sex, she’ll usually “kick [him] in the head, and run out.”

The joke is, throughout the entire episode, Buffy has been trying to externalize her emotions. She’s been trying to externalize her desire to be punished. She sees Katrina as evidence of her wrongness, and jumps at the opportunity to be locked up for it. Not only that, but throughout her relationship with Spike, she’s been trying to “feel.” The line before they kiss is actually “This isn’t real / but I just wanna feel,” and she describes her encounters with Spike as “the only time [she feels] anything.” Moreover, for all that Spike insists that Buffy belongs “in the dark,” he also repeatedly suggests that she needs to “go on living,” “let [her]self live already,” stop punishing herself, etc. In other words, Buffy’s relationship with Spike is not just about her being self-destructive; it’s about her being caught between the desire to be alive, or to enjoy being alive, and the desire to be dead.

So when Buffy beats Spike bloody, she finally externalizes her emotions. She finally sees the bite marks. She finally has proof that she feels, and is not dead. Only it’s exactly in the way she didn’t want, so once again she runs away.

Part Four: Suicide and Self-Destruction

While Buffy’s attack on Spike is implicitly self-destructive, thanks to its parallel with Faith’s implicitly self-destructive scene, the lead-up to that attack has a few other very important parallels that also suggest that Buffy is in a self-destructive, even suicidal mindset.

14. “Dawnie, I have to”

Buffy in 5x22 The Gift, about to sacrifice herself:

DAWN: Buffy...no.

BUFFY: Dawnie, I have to.

DAWN: No!

Buffy in 6x02 Bargaining, Part 2, on the tower she sacrificed herself on:

DAWN: (in flashback) Buffy...no.

BUFFY: (in present) Dawnie, I have to.

DAWN: Buffy?

Buffy in Dead Things:

BUFFY: There's something I have to do. I have to tell what I did. I have to go to the police.

DAWN: The police?

BUFFY: Dawnie, I have to.

Bonus: Buffy’s final monologue in The Gift:

BUFFY: (voiceover) I love you. I will always love you. But this is the work that I have to do.

Bonus: Buffy to Dawn, earlier in the Dead Things conversation:

BUFFY: I know I haven't been everything I should be...everything Mom was. But I love you. I always will.

Buffy’s final scene with Dawn in The Gift shares a lot of language with her conversation with Dawn in Dead Things. There’s the “Dawnie, I have to” repetition. But Buffy also says things that sound a lot like “I love you. I will always love you” and “But this is the work that I have to do.” The implication of these similarities is twofold. First, it suggests that Buffy is in a mindset of righteous self-sacrifice. Second, it suggests that that sacrifice is pseudo-suicidal in nature. Dawn’s tearful claims that Buffy “wants to go away again” and was “happier where [she was],” make a lot more sense from a character perspective when you understand that the scene is calling back to the last times that Buffy killed or almost killed herself. Of course Dawn would think that the same thing is happening all over again.

Symbolically speaking, Dawn represents the idea of “life” in season six. On the tower in Bargaining, it’s Dawn (life) that calls Buffy back from the edge. As Buffy sinks deeper into her depression, it’s Dawn (life) that she neglects. In The Gift Buffy describes Dawn as “a part of me” and in Grave she says to Giles that when she crawled out of her grave she left “a part of me” behind. Grave then ends with Buffy taking Dawn with her out of a hole in the middle of a graveyard. Because she has finally found that part of herself again: the part that wants to be alive. With all of that in mind, it’s no coincidence that almost every time that Buffy is about to do something literally or metaphorically suicidal, it is framed in terms of Buffy abandoning Dawn. Because suicide is an “abandonment” of life.

But unlike The Gift, Dead Things does not frame Buffy’s self-sacrificial impulse in a positive light. In The Gift, Buffy sacrificing herself is a heroic moment because it’s her beating the pressures that have been telling her to sacrifice her values and kill her sister. In a season that is all about Buffy and the other characters feeling helpless in the face of mortality, Buffy killing herself is her, in a weird way, taking ownership of her mortality. Buffy is not portrayed as abandoning life in a bad way; she is allowing life (Dawn) to go on. Whereas in Dead Things, her “sacrifice” is not enabling anything. And because it does not enable anything, it is simply an act of self-destruction. One that Buffy is using her heroic nature--consciously or unconsciously--to justify.

15. “You’re not really here anyway”

Dawn in 6x02 Bargaining, Part 2:

DAWN: Buffy. You...you...you're really here.

Dawn hugs Buffy.

DAWN: (crying) You're alive, and you're home. You're home.

Dawn in Dead Things:

DAWN: You're never here. You can't even stand to be around me. 

BUFFY: That is not true.

 DAWN: You don't want to be here with me. You didn't want to come back. I know that. You were happier where you were. (crying) You want to go away again.

 BUFFY: Dawn... 

DAWN: Then go! You're not really here anyway.

To continue the discussion of Dawn-as-life, there’s another parallel happening during the conversation between Buffy and Dawn. Throughout the first half of the season, there are multiple shots of Buffy being hugged by someone and staring past them with a blank, unengaged expression. The first of those shots happens at the end of Bargaining, Part 2. Dawn hugs Buffy in relief, and tearfully says that Buffy is “really here”, but Buffy’s distant, haunted expression suggests that she may have been resurrected, but is not actually “really there”. If you think of Dawn as “life”, then the fact that Buffy is unable to participate in their emotional moment means that she’s not able to participate in life either. She still feels dead. At the end of After Life, Buffy shares another disconnected hug with Dawn. She is clearly trying to participate during that hug, but it nonetheless rings emotionally false. The scene calls back to an early moment from Bargaining, Part 1, in which the Buffybot dresses femininely, makes Dawn lunch, and hugs her. The implication being that Buffy in After Life is putting on a Buffybot-like act, behaving like a mechanical object, in order to make the people around her feel better. She is acting like something not-alive.

So when Dawn hugs Buffy in Dead Things, and Buffy stares emptily over Dawn’s shoulder, it is part of this pattern. Dawn thinks that she’s comforting her sister, but Buffy has already checked out. She’s chosen to pursue a kind of death, and this leaves her disconnected from Dawn. But this time Dawn picks up on it. In contrast to her dialogue in Bargaining, Part 2, Dawn now says that Buffy “[isn’t] really here anyway.” She’s been so absent from her own life that she may as well be dead again.

But Dead Things is Buffy’s low point, not the end of the story. Over the course of the rest of the season, she becomes gradually more emotionally engaged and committed to Dawn’s well-being. When Buffy and Dawn finally hug again in Grave, Buffy is right there with her sister. Her grip is intense, and her face is full of emotion. Her gaze points downwards instead of distractedly away. In Dead Things Dawn says “you don’t want to be here with me,” but in Grave Buffy says:

Things have really sucked lately, but it's all gonna change. And I wanna be there when it does. I want to see my friends happy again. And I want to see you grow up. The woman you're gonna become. Because she's gonna be beautiful.

In other words, Buffy’s desire to “be there” with Dawn is directly tied to her desire to live in general. The fact that Buffy is now fully present with Dawn means that she has finally worked her way to once more being fully present in life.

16. “Just let me go”

Buffy and Angel in 3x10 Amends

Buffy and Spike in Dead Things

The parallels between the Dead Things alley scene and the conversation between Buffy and Angel on the bluff in Amends are numerous, though they don’t share any exact dialogue. In Dead Things, Spike plays the role of Buffy, the desperate lover trying to use that love to convince the other to rise above their guilt, and Buffy plays the role of Angel, the guilty soul that has been tricked by the villain into feeling their guilt more acutely. Both Buffy and Angel are ambiguously responsible for the crimes that they are supposedly feeling guilty about--Buffy because Katrina’s death was, as far as she knows, an accident, and Angel because he didn’t have a soul. But their guilt over those crimes goes along with guilt about sexual and romantic desire that they do feel responsible for. Whether or not they should, of course. Angel is afraid that his desire for Buffy will cause him to lose his soul and become a monster again. Meanwhile Buffy is afraid that her desire for Spike means that she is somehow like (or complicit in the actions of) a soulless being. Angel speaking about “taking comfort” in Buffy is similar to Buffy saying that being with Spike is the only time she “feels anything.” It’s also potentially relevant that both Buffy and Angel are coping with having been brought back to life. Much of Angel’s guilt in Amends centers around his fear that he was only brought back from hell to be the tool of an evil force. And much of Buffy’s guilt in Dead Things is centered on her fear that she has been brought back “wrong.”

Both Spike and Buffy speak of wishing that they didn’t love their counterparts so much (“I wish that I wished you dead,” “You think I haven’t tried not to?”). Both Buffy and Spike try to forcibly prevent them from falling on their own swords. Both fail. Buffy and Angel only relent in their pursuit of self-destruction when divine snow and chance exoneration intervene. The basic message is the same in both episodes, that true moral responsibility means not giving up even when you want to. But in keeping with the rest of the episode, Dead Things adds new layers of complexity to that previously-established theme. In Amends, Buffy tries to talk Angel down by emphasizing that he has to keep fighting in the face of his guilt, and is pretty clearly acting as the voice of the author. Whereas Spike tries to talk Buffy down by using Faith’s Consequences logic and emphasizing the ways that Buffy isn’t actually guilty. He’s the voice of what both Buffy and the audience are used to thinking of as bad-guy logic. And yet he isn’t necessarily wrong. But Buffy can’t even consider that, because it doesn’t conform to the moral narratives that she’s familiar with--the narratives of Consequences and Amends. Where Amends has a romantic, Christmas-episode aesthetic, Dead Things is almost nauseating in its darkness. There is something fittingly “dead” about it. This complete lack of romance, moodwise, echoes the ambiguity that Dead Things introduces to the show’s formerly clear-cut morality. It is not obvious which choice--Buffy turning herself in, or not turning herself in--is actually the morally responsible, non-self-destructive one. Neither Buffy nor Spike are obviously speaking the author’s beliefs and telling the audience the lesson that they should come away with. Instead, the audience is left as adrift as Buffy is.

Part Five: Love and Identity

17. “I love you.” “No, you don’t.”

Buffy and Spike in Dead Things:

BUFFY: I have to do this. Just let me go.

SPIKE: I can’t. I love you.

BUFFY: No, you don’t.

Buffy and Spike in 7x22 Chosen:

SPIKE: I mean it! I gotta do this.

Buffy laces her fingers with his, and their hands burst into flames.

BUFFY: I love you.

SPIKE: No you don’t. But thanks for saying it.

In both scenes, the text leaves it ambiguous as to who is actually right. In both scenes, who is right is sort of beside the point. In Dead Things, the “I love you” exchange immediately precedes Buffy’s beatdown. When Buffy says “No, you don’t” it’s in the context of her own self-loathing, of her belief that she herself “can’t feel anything real.” She may genuinely believe that Spike doesn’t love her, for some definition of love, but what’s important is the fact that she feels the need to throw it in both of their faces. The point is that in order to treat both him and herself badly, she has to tell herself that neither of them have real feelings, that both of them are “dead things.” She even goes so far as to insist that Spike “try harder” not to love her. She wants to escape moral culpability by believing that neither of them have moral value.

What’s interesting about the Dead Things exchange is the way it suggests that both Buffy and Spike think that romantic love is somehow ennobling. Something human and good. Spike mentions love to excuse and exalt his behavior, to explain why he can’t let Buffy make a choice she considers morally important. Meanwhile Buffy mentions love to imply that neither of them are living up to what love is supposed to be. How neither of them are human nor good. She is not lovable, and he cannot love.

Both of them, in other words, are using the ideal of love to escape responsibility in different ways. Similar to how Willow and Warren used “love” to justify their actions towards Tara and Katrina.

(Note that Tara brings up love again at the very end of the episode. She asks whether Buffy loves Spike, and states with a sort of straightforward sincerity that Spike “does love” Buffy. And this mention of love is part of the immediate leadup to Buffy’s emotional breakdown. The fact that Tara sees them both as capable of love in such an uncomplicated way is arguably the final piece of Buffy being unable to hide behind any external “wrongness.” By attempting to be comforting, Tara accidentally takes away Buffy’s last means of escape.)

Chosen, by contrast, I believe is meant to show that both Buffy and Spike are finally able to take responsibility in the ways they once avoided. It is Spike’s last scene on the show, one of the last scenes of the show, period, and it is therefore natural to read it as a resolution of (parts of) Spike and Buffy’s arcs. Spike’s “No you don’t” makes it clear that his self-sacrifice is not a romantic gesture, or at least not selfishly so, and is therefore free of suspect motives. He doesn’t need to make his behavior look good, doesn’t need to couch it in love, because he’s doing something bigger than himself that he considers important. His echo of Buffy’s “I have to do this” (“I gotta do this”) shows that he now understands the instinct to self-sacrifice that so baffled him when he didn’t have a soul. Buffy, in turn, honors both her own feelings and the sincerity of Spike’s actions. By stating that she loves him, Buffy is in some sense affirming that they are both “live things”. People who can love and be loved. People who can feel. People who can do good.

18. “I didn’t come back wrong?”

Buffy and Spike in 6x03 After Life

Buffy and Tara in Dead Things

I can’t prove that this was on purpose, though I’m fairly sure it was. Regardless, I found it notable that both After Life and Dead Things feature a two-shot with Buffy in her living room, and that in the Dead Things scene Buffy has not only switched places with Spike, she’s now the one in black. Both scenes also feature a similar little pas de deux (pictured), in which the characters look down, contemplating Buffy’s situation, and then look up to meet each other’s eyes.

I like the idea that this is calling back to After Life for a couple different reasons. Firstly, After Life is the episode that introduces the idea that Buffy “came back wrong.” Spike even uses that exact phrase:

SPIKE: Listen. I've figured it out. Maybe you haven't, but I have. Willow knew there was a chance that [Buffy]'d come back wrong.

Throughout After Life, characters fret that something’s wrong with Buffy. Anya thinks that Buffy’s “broken” and Tara wonders if Buffy’s “not right, or-or maybe like, dangerous?” They worry at how distracted and emotionally flat she is. Willow muses that when Angel came back from hell in season three, “Buffy said...he was wild. Like an animal.” It makes sense that Buffy would recoil when Spike calls her an “animal” at the beginning of Dead Things, just on the principle that it’s a word that makes her sound less than human. But that line takes on extra significance when you see it in the context of Willow’s After Life dialogue. “Animal,” “broken”, “dangerous”, “not right”, “wrong”: these are the words that have dogged Buffy since the moment she returned.

But ultimately, the Scoobies are eager to believe that Buffy’s fine. It’s Buffy herself that ends up most preoccupied about whether or not she “came back wrong.” Since she came back, she’s been miserable and disconnected from life. She began her sexual relationship with Spike the night he gleefully announced that his chip no longer registered her as human (“You came back wrong”), and the show implies that she’s been banking on that knowledge to explain her behavior to herself ever since. So by revisiting the immediate aftermath of Buffy’s resurrection, Dead Things is pointedly reframing the narrative of the season thus far. Both for the viewer, and for Buffy herself. It encourages one to go back to that moment in After Life and then replay the whole season with the understanding that everything Buffy did and said was her acting of her own volition, and with her full humanity. It’s a “twist” but not in a cheap, or even particularly shocking way. It’s a twist that’s central to the story of self-responsibility that the season and episode is telling.

Buffy sitting in Spike’s place is also a choice that’s rich with meaning. Season six spends a lot of time creating parallels between Buffy and Spike, and that process begins in After Life. Towards the beginning of After Life, Spike notices that Buffy must have “clawed her way out of a coffin” because he’d “done it [him]self.” In the scene pictured above he tends to her bloody knuckles, and then later in the episode he punches a wall and is shown with bloody knuckles as well.

In general, the season up until Dead Things leans hard into the idea that both Buffy and Spike, as resurrected/reanimated beings, are “dead” or have an understanding of “deadness.” It would take forever to list all of the references to Buffy or Spike being not-alive in Once More, With Feeling alone (“I just want to be / Alive”, “Since I’m only dead to you,” “Whisper in a dead man’s ear”, “So one of us is living,” etc). They have many scenes where they’re alone together, often in dark, chthonic places like crypts and basements, and Buffy tells him things that she doesn’t tell anyone else. In the opening shot of Dead Things, we see a literal casket next to Spike’s unused bed, a bit of scene-setting that tells us we should still see his crypt as a place of death, however domesticated.

That underground imagery has another connotation too. One of the biggest motifs associated with Spike and Buffy is the idea that Spike is “beneath” Buffy. He is frequently shown in a supplicating position, looking up at her while she looks down at him. We see it in Fool For Love (“Where does it lead you?”), The Gift (“I know you’ll never love me”), After Life (“Her hands”), and Once More, With Feeling (“You know / You’ve got a willing slave”). We’ll see it again in season seven, in Touched (“You’re a hell of a woman”) and the significantly-titled Beneath You. Compare the eye-lines of these two-shots from Fool For Love and Touched to After Life:

So it’s meaningful that season six features imagery of Buffy “being brought to Spike’s level”. In After Life she descends her house stairs towards him, a mirror image of the way she ascended them away from him in The Gift. In Once More, With Feeling she falls into an open grave with him, and in Smashed they fall into a basement while consummating their long-standing sexual tension. Many of their assignations take place in the lower-level of Spike’s crypt, including the one at the beginning of Dead Things. So there is a kind of full-circle finality, imagistically speaking, to seeing Buffy in Spike’s place, and later in a position of supplication (see 17).

The simplest reading of the reversal is that Buffy has reached her lowest point. I think it’s the intended reading too. But understanding what Buffy’s “lowest point” means depends on understanding what it means for Spike to be Buffy’s shadow. Because again, it’s not about him being a monster, it’s about him being a “dead thing.” The season would not spend so much time telling us that Buffy feels “dead” otherwise. It’s about Buffy seeing herself as evil and wrong, and using that self-image to avoid her problems and check out of life. It’s about her potentially ending up doing immoral things because of that avoidance. Instead of embracing her agency, Buffy flat-out begs for Tara’s moral authority (“Tell me that I’m wrong”) the way that Spike has relied upon the moral authority of his chip or “what Buffy would want.”

But there’s also a more hopeful reading. When Buffy and Spike meet each other’s eyes in the After Life scene, the show suggests that the two of them are now on the same level, or could be on the same level. Instead of Buffy looking down at Spike and Spike looking up at Buffy, the two of them look equally at each other, and the camera looks equally at both of them. The framing of the shot is intimately close, an early indication both of where their relationship will go, and perhaps also the isolation of it. With that in mind, there is arguably something hopeful in the idea that however low Buffy feels in Dead Things, she is still on a level with Tara, someone who is unambiguously alive. The reversal also means that Buffy is now looking to a figure of life instead of to a figure of death. Lastly, the pulled-out framing of the shot speaks to the way that Buffy and the viewer are now seeing things as they are. Buffy now has full knowledge of the fact that she did not “come back wrong” in any meaningful sense. She has explored “death” in its entirety, and has nowhere left to go but towards life.

19. “Please don’t forgive me”

Faith in Angel 1x18 Five By Five:

ANGEL: I'm not gonna make it easy for you.

Faith throws herself against Angel.

FAITH: I'm evil! I'm bad! I'm evil! Do you hear me? I'm bad! Angel, I'm bad! (sobbing) I'm ba-ad. Do you hear me? I'm bad! I'm bad! I'm bad. Please. Angel, please, just do it. (still sobbing) Angel please, just do it. Just do it. Just kill me. Just kill me.

Angel wraps his arms around her, and they sink to their knees.

Willow in 6x10 Wrecked:

BUFFY: Get up.

WILLOW: I screwed it up, everything, Tara...

BUFFY: Yeah, you know what, you did screw up, okay? You could have killed [Dawn]! You almost did!

WILLOW: (crying) I know! I know! I can't stop, Buffy! I tried and I can't.

BUFFY: You can.

WILLOW: I can't! I can't, I ju...god, I need help. Please! (sobbing) Please help me, please.

Buffy in Dead Things:

TARA: I-It's okay if you [love Spike]. He's done a lot of good, and, and he does love you. A-and Buffy, it's okay if you don't. You're going through a really hard time, and you're...

BUFFY: What? Using him? What's okay about that?

TARA: It's not that simple.

BUFFY: It is! It's wrong. I'm wrong. Tell me that I'm wrong, please…(starts to cry) Please don't forgive me, please... (sobbing) Please don't...

She slides to the floor and puts her head in Tara's lap.

BUFFY: (sobbing) Please don't forgive me...

Despite the superficial similarities between these scenes, I’m most interested in the differences between the nature of each character’s crisis. There’s something telling in the implications of “Please kill me” versus “Please help me” versus “Please don’t forgive me.” What each character is begging for speaks to the problem they don’t want to do the hard work of solving for themselves.

In Faith’s case, the thing she doesn’t want to do is the hard work of atonement. In the Who Are You? beating scene (which aired not long before Five By Five, if you’re not up on the Buffy/Angel chronology) Faith, as discussed, describes herself as “nothing.” It therefore makes perfect sense that she’d beg to be killed, as being killed would in some sense mean permanently becoming “nothing.” If Angel killed Faith, not only would Faith not have to live with the weight of everything she’d done, she wouldn’t have to become anything better either.

In Willow’s case, the thing she’s avoiding is emotional self-management. Willow has long had a problem with looking for the easy way out of emotionally difficult situations. In Lovers Walk, she tries to perform a “delusting spell” so that she and Xander will stop cheating. In Wild At Heart she tries to perform a revenge spell on Oz and Veruca, and in Something Blue she attempts to magic her heartbreak away. Not to mention how she handles her fights with Tara in season six. When she says that she “can’t stop” and “needs help” Willow may sincerely want to get better, but she’s also repeating her pattern of feeling like she can’t reign in her emotions or behaviors herself, and instead needs something or someone else to do it for her.

In Buffy’s case, the thing she’s struggling with is seeing herself as fully human. She cannot square her image of herself with the reality of how she’s been feeling since she came back. If Buffy were to forgive herself for her basic humanity, she would have to acknowledge that she is human in the first place. And therefore fallible and capable of feelings she doesn’t want to have, but also not consigned by her nature to be any particular way, morally speaking, the way a soulless vampire is. She would have to ask herself the question of whether she’d actually done something that needed forgiving. She would have to be her own moral authority. She would have to accept the possibility that she’s capable of feeling and doing better, and doesn’t inherently deserve to suffer.

But in all three cases, what looks like a moral crisis is actually more of a crisis of identity and agency. All three characters have been making decisions based on a certain image of themselves, and using it to not think about their behavior. They’re terrified by the prospect that that image was never based on any kind of objective, unchangeable truth. They are terrified by the prospect that they can define their identities themselves.

20. “Do you trust me?”

Spike to Buffy:

SPIKE: Do you trust me?

BUFFY: Never.

Buffy to Katrina in the dream sequence:

BUFFY: Do you trust me?

Bonus: Willow and Giles in 6x04 Flooded:

GILES: Do you have any idea what you've done? The forces you've harnessed, the lines you've crossed?

WILLOW: I thought you'd be impressed, or-or something.

GILES: Oh, don't worry, you've made a very deep impression. Of everyone here, you were the one I trusted most to respect the forces of nature.

WILLOW: Are you saying you don't trust me?

Bonus: Dawn’s theft revealed in 6x14 Older and Far Away:

BUFFY: Oh.

DAWN: Buffy...

ANYA: How are we supposed to trust you, Dawn? I mean, you...you say you didn't put us here, but look at this stuff! How are we supposed to believe you?

Bonus: Anya practicing her wedding vows in 6x16 Hell’s Bells:

ANYA: 'However, I do entrust you with...' (hears the others chuckling) What? Is something funny?

TARA: No, n-nothing, sweetie, just, just keep still. (smiling at Willow)

ANYA: Okay. Blah, blah, blah, misogynistic. Blah, blah, 'I do however entrust you...um, with my heart. Take care of my heart, won't you please? Take care of it because, it's all that I have. And, if you let me, I'll take care of your heart too.'

Willow and Tara look meaningfully at each other.

Bonus: Buffy and Spike in 6x19 Seeing Red:

SPIKE: Why do you keep lying to yourself?

BUFFY: How many times--(she composes herself). I have feelings for you. I do. But it's not love. I could never trust you enough for it to be love.

SPIKE: Trust is for old marrieds, Buffy. Great love is wild and passionate and dangerous. It burns and consumes.

BUFFY: Until there's nothing left. Love like that doesn't last.

Bonus: Buffy and Angel in 2x01 When She Was Bad:

ANGEL: Why are you riding me?

BUFFY: Because I don't trust you. You're a vampire. Oh I'm sorry, was that an offensive term? Should I say 'undead American'?

ANGEL: You have to trust someone. You can't do this alone.

BUFFY: I trust me.

Bonus: Buffy and Angel in 2x07 Lie To Me:

ANGEL: Do you love me?

BUFFY: What?

ANGEL: Do you?

She takes a moment to consider her answer.

BUFFY: I love you. I don't know if I trust you.

ANGEL: Maybe you shouldn't do either.

Circling back to the very beginning of the episode now. I’ve saved this parallel for last because I think it’s a good summation of why Dead Things is so important to the season.

There are a lot of references to trust throughout season six. In fact there are so many references to it and they all seem so relevant, that it was hard to pick what to include here. The natural connection to make would be to Seeing Red, given that that episode features Spike’s catastrophic failure to live up to Buffy’s trust. And I have obviously included the dialogue from that episode. But Seeing Red is so controversial, and rape is such a thorny topic, that I think it can obscure how much groundwork the season lays around the concept of trust in general. The Spike and Buffy relationship, while crucial, is still just one part of it.

Willow’s trustworthiness, for example, is questioned throughout the season. First by Giles and later by Tara (“Wish I could trust / that it was just this once”) and the rest of the Scoobies. Just as Spike ends up justifying Buffy’s lack of trust, Willow ends up justifying everyone else’s lack of trust. She keeps on abusing magic even after Giles reprimands her, she violates Buffy and Tara’s memories even after she says she won’t use magic, and of course there’s eventually the Dark Willow arc, in which she uses her power to deliberately hurt everyone around her. Even Xander and Dawn aren’t exempt from discussion of trust in season six, despite the fact that they play a relatively minor role in it. In Hell’s Bells Xander betrays the trust Anya wants to put in him by leaving her at the altar. Dawn betrays the trust she wants the adults to put in her by stealing.

And of course Buffy, as the title character around whom all these trust issues revolve, isn’t exempt either. When Giles leaves her in Tabula Rasa, he phrases it as a matter of Buffy needing to trust herself:

GILES: I've taught you all I can about being a slayer, and your mother taught you what you needed to know about life. You...you're not gonna trust that until you're forced to stand alone.

Buffy’s lack of trust towards Spike is thus framed extremely early in the season as a reflection of her lack of trust toward herself. But more on this shortly.

I see the season six preoccupation with trust as an extension of its preoccupation with agency, consent and violation, especially among intimate partners. Because the thing is, if being an adult means being responsible for creating your own life and identity, then that means that every other person can create their own life and identity as well. They can make their own choices. Which also means that they might choose to hurt you, or do something you don’t want. It means that if you want to open yourself to the vulnerability of loving someone, while also accepting that you cannot control or be responsible for their behavior, then the only option you have is to trust them. Love is vulnerable because you have to trust them.

Which also implies that those who haven’t formed their own moral identity are inherently untrustworthy, especially in love. Spike is the most obvious representation of this. Of course Buffy wouldn’t trust Spike, of course everyone expresses distrust towards Spike throughout the season. Not just because he’s personally tried to kill them on multiple occasions, but because he has no independent moral self. In Smashed the story makes a point of showing how Spike behaves when he thinks his chip is no longer active, and is stinging from Buffy’s assertion that he’s an “evil, disgusting thing”: he attempts to bite someone. He’s not of one mind about biting the person, he appears to be talking himself into it, but he still attempts to bite them. Yet in Tabula Rasa we see how Spike behaves when he has no memory of being a vampire: he thinks he’s a hero.

SPIKE: I'm a hero really. I mean, to be cast such an ugly lot in life and then to rise above it. To seek out better, nobler things. It's inspirational, isn't it? And the two of us...natural enemies, thrown together to stand against the forces of darkness. Utter trust.

In other words, Spike’s moral identity is extremely unstable. It’s based on external notions of how he thinks he should behave, whether that’s as someone “dangerous”, “evil”, “a killer” or as “a good guy, on a mission of redemption.” And “unstable” is basically the definition of untrustworthy.

(There are many other cases of Spike being unreliable or fluctuating between different moral responses over the course of season six. See his “First I’ll kill her / then I’ll save her” lines in Once More, With Feeling, his promise to Buffy that “I don’t hurt you” just an episode before Seeing Red, him saying he can be a man in Smashed before going off to bite someone, him saying “trust me” in Dead Things before hiding Katrina’s body. Et cetera.)

While none of the other characters are soulless vampires, their identities are also in a state of flux. I’d argue that one of the points season six tries to make is that people in this stage of life, or maturity, are prone to hurting other people because they don’t know who they are yet. Xander proves he cannot be “entrusted with” Anya’s heart because he still thinks he’s going to end up like his parents. Willow hurts Tara because she’s insecure in her sense of power and usefulness. Xander deals with the vulnerability of love by giving up, and Willow deals with the vulnerability of love by taking away her partner’s agency. They ruin their romantic relationships either because they lack faith in their own identity, or because they’re threatened by the other person’s, or both.

So when Buffy echoes Spike by saying “Do you trust me?” the writing isn’t just suggesting that Buffy sees herself as the dominant partner. It’s suggesting that Buffy sees herself as an untrustworthy figure like Spike. It also implies that by ceding her agency to him, she is making herself as untrustworthy as him. But not “untrustworthy” in a general sense--untrustworthy in the sense that her identity, especially her moral identity, is unstable. Buffy letting Spike cuff her right after she says she would “never” trust him, is a very Spike-like kind of unreliability. Throughout their relationship, Buffy constantly says that she wants nothing more to do with Spike, before proceeding to...have things to do with him. The ambiguous consent that characterizes their sex life (“Don’t” “Stop me”) echoes Buffy’s own ambiguous feelings about who she is and what she wants.

Of course, Buffy eventually works past that. She draws a hard line in As You Were, and sticks to it. In turn, I’d argue that one of the points that Seeing Red tries to make is that Spike is not capable of doing this. This is why the bathroom scene brings up trust so explicitly, and why Spike is not in vamp-face at any point during it. Because his assault is not about him being a bloodthirsty monster. In the context of the season, monstrousness is not what being soulless means, and the purpose of the scene, among other things, is to reach a crisis point that convinces Spike that he needs a soul. Or more metaphorically, to be an apotheosis of the season’s dysfunctions. Instead, the scene is about the fact that he cannot see moral lines, or keep to them, even when it concerns the woman that he claims to love. He goes to Buffy intending to apologize, but ends up trespassing every single one of her boundaries. And it is this precise kind of inconsistency that makes him “untrustworthy”. He’s even inconsistent about the value of trust in the first place, considering that he asks to be trusted in Dead Things, but dismisses trust in Seeing Red. The point is that he may not be a monster, but he “can’t be a man” either. No matter how often he wears the face of one. He cannot grow in the way that Buffy was able to grow. Buffy’s untrustworthiness was a phase, but for Spike it is his nature. In turn, the fact that Spike ultimately chooses to change his nature, to commit to an identity by getting a soul, acts as a metaphor for Buffy’s own commitment to live by the end of the season.

(Whether that scene was the right way to accomplish this is a question that so many other people have tried to answer, that I’m not going to bother to address it. Whether it was wrong or right or right-but-badly-executed, there is nonetheless plenty that can be analyzed about it.)

Spike, as the soulless vampiric id of the show, is an exaggeration of being untrustworthy. But he was not the show’s first vampire exaggeration of untrustworthiness. The connection between love and trust that season six is so obsessed with has its origins in the season two relationship between Buffy and Angel. In season two, the show attempted to puncture the romance of the “mysterious older man” by having Angel lose his soul after he and Buffy sleep together. In both When She Was Bad and Lie To Me, Buffy suggests that Angel’s vampiric nature makes him untrustworthy, but that she loves him in spite of it. This ends disastrously, and no doubt is meant to inform her insistence that she cannot trust Spike enough to love him. Whereas Spike, as I discussed in the very first section, is still stuck in that Romantic season two mindset, in which passion is enough for love. The fact that Buffy has this association between passionate but untrusting relationships and pain, is one way of showing that her relationship with Spike is something that she’s using to hurt herself. But Spike, as a vampire, for whom “love and death and sex and pain” is “all the same damn thing”, cannot fully understand that this is what Buffy is doing. Nor can he fully understand that pain or a lack of trust is a bad thing. His statement that “You always hurt the one you love” echoes previous lines of his like “Love hurts, baby” in The Harsh Light of Day. Spike does not internalize that this association between love and pain is not desirable, until he attempts to combine passion with violence in a way that violates trust so badly that even he can tell it’s unromantic.

The line “Do you trust me?” may or may not have been meant to specifically echo Angel’s “Do you love me?” in Lie To Me, or Tara’s “Do you love him?” at the end of the episode, but evoking trust at all, particularly in the context of love and sex, is again, a way of showing that Buffy is doing something she knows to be painful and ill-advised. She is in a place of deep confusion. It’s yet another complicated update on the show’s early-season morality. In season two, the onus of trust was entirely on Angel’s shoulders and the point was the tragedy of needing to let go of teenage notions of romance, and less poetically--to beware of the dark side of men. But for all that season six makes a bogeyman of rapacious male sexuality, it also has its female protagonists make serious mistakes. Buffy in season six fears she’s become like the male vampires she’s so often called untrustworthy in the context of romance. Thus when she ultimately chooses to become trustworthy, to trust herself, it’s a decision that has weight because she was faced with the alternative.

End thoughts

Buffy is a good example of the kind of improvised narrative that I was discussing in a recent post. I’m aware that the writers of the show were making many things up as they went. Season six in particular I believe was one of the most improvised seasons, and that they were figuring out the specifics of the character arcs as the season went on. I’m aware that it’s quite possible that some of the connections I’ve made here weren’t intentional, or not to the degree of depth that I’ve ascribed to them. But at the same time, the undeniable intratextuality on display, to whatever degree of intentionality, is exactly how I’d expect a work that was improvising with a sense of Johnstone-type reincorporation to look. I have no idea whether the writers had planned out any of the details of season six back when they were writing the high school seasons. But that sort of planning isn’t necessary for a work to have meaning. Instead, Dead Things--and the rest of the season--has an attunement to what came before. It treats its own canon the way that another work might treat a broader cultural canon--as something to play with, and draw from, and which it expects its audience to have common knowledge of.

And because the show is so willing to integrate, and then reintegrate, both the images and themes it’s already established, you’re left with a feeling that the work has a continuity of idea, not just character or plot. Dead Things is able to present a complicated take on moral responsibility because it can build on, and respond to, the takes the show has explored already. Images like Buffy secluding herself on the Bronze balcony become a kind of anaphoric shorthand. This sort of self-referentiality works particularly well in season six, because the season’s themes are so bound up in the transition from childhood and adolescence to adulthood. When season six complicates the simpler morality of the earlier seasons, it echoes the way that growing up leads to seeing the world in a more morally complicated light. When the protagonists make mistakes that parallel the actions of “bad” characters, it echoes the way that growing up means becoming fully morally responsible for oneself. Which means being held accountable in ways one wouldn’t have been when one was younger, and accepting that one can have things in common with villains.

The parallelism also fits with the season’s more meta themes that I discussed in my post on season six as a “post-myth” work. In particular, parallelism enables self-reflexivity. By comparing itself against itself, the show is able to criticize--or at least reframe--its own creative choices. Willow going off the deep end reframes her earlier-season moments of thoughtlessness as concerning foreshadowing instead of charming mistakes. Tabula Rasa and Dead Things reframe the sort of mind control that was played for comedy in episodes like Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered as something not quite so funny or easily forgivable. Spike’s increasingly harmful behavior reframes his charismatic roguishness as something to be more seriously questioned. Buffy’s season-long depression reframes her one-episode depressions in Anne and When She Was Bad as perhaps too-easily-resolved TV psychology. The parallels give these choices a self-conscious depth that they wouldn’t have if the writing simply attempted to make things “dark” in a way that had no connection to what came before.

Buffy is certainly a flawed show, writing-wise. It at times mixes metaphors and can be bizarrely morally and tonally inconsistent. But at its best, like in episodes like Dead Things, the seasons-long layering of imagery and theme result in TV with a truly unusual and masterful density of meaning.

#posts: art #tv: buffy #this is ludicrously long #but i hope someone out there enjoys it!

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remythologise · 4 years ago

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Am I the only one who's super uncomfortable with the implications from the last two episodes? So Cas comes out and is immediately sent to superhell and then in the next episode his family who in earlier seasons would do absolutely anything to bring him back now all of a sudden (after he's come out) decide to not bring him back (despite having the ability) and allow him to suffer forever. I don't believe the writers are intentionally trying to be homophobic but...

Dude absolutely everything about the episode has shitty implications, not just Castiel. Let me bring in another anon ask onto this one too so I can address them together:

Apologies if you’re tired of talking about it, but I frankly can’t stop thinking about how they even fucked up Michael’s story. Michael’s whole “found family” arc and his relationship with Adam and him coming to terms with the shittyness of his family and realising that he’s not bound by the part God has ordered him to play. All those things, all those things that are such core themes of the show and that parallel the other main characters, and they burned it all to the ground (plus Michael fucking dies anyway). Like, they really did that, they really just trashed literally everything they claimed their show was about.

It is absolutely remarkable how this show managed to make me physically ill in the course of 42 minutes, by the simple act of bad writing. Let’s go character by character and where they currently stand in the show, in order of Most Upsetting to Least Upsetting:

1. Castiel - his love is currently unreciprocated in canon text, he has spent his entire life serving Dean and loving him and thinking of himself as a ‘tool’. Self-hating, self-doubting, self-sacrificial but loving until the end. Tells other characters in 15.18 that they aren’t tools, and that they deserve love. Does not get this told back. Has been sent to eternal suffering (according to the text about the Empty) because he admitted his gay love. If you rewatch the show, it is literally painful to have him on screen because of how tragic his character is DESPITE how fucking generous and loving a character it is. I can’t even put into words how upset it makes me.

2. Jack - his entire life is being a tool for the Winchesters and the world, and doubting he is really loved by them. At the end of the narrative, he is indeed just a tool used to prop up the world, and never allowed to simply be a kid. He goes out without Dean ever really resolving that talk where he goes ‘thanks for doing this so Sam and I could be free’ and ‘you’re not really family’. It’s so fucking bad. WHY didn’t they do a Buffy style thing here with Buffy’s sister, where it was about how the narrative was setting him up to be a weapon and plot device but he/The Winchesters reject that? He was just a fucking kid. The only reason he is not above Cas on how painful it is to rewatch his character is Castiel has more fucking screentime, and at least Jack is not eternally suffering. He did have some good times as their child... if nowhere near enough. It makes me physically sick to think of how Jack was just a plot device, in the end, and not allowed to be a kid. I thought that was the point of 15.17 Unity. Oh, and - COMPLETELY FORGETS ABOUT HIS LOVE FOR HIS DAD, CASTIEL. His most important relationship in the show done dirty. Christ. His farewell speech was appallingly written. They have so many opportunities to make this ep meaningful and create a lasting impression on viewers and the lasting impression I have is bile.

3. Dean - spends the whole episode grieving Cas and wanting him back then just suddenly forgets he exists and moves on as soon as it’s possible to revive him. Is totally fine and relatively unemotional about sacrificing his son, and seems pretty happy he and Sam made it out despite Cas and Jack metaphorically sacrificing themselves. Everything we have learned to say about ‘family don’t end in blood’ is textually erased and everything about the Winchesters sacrificing themselves has been rendered to lie on Cas and Jack’s shoulders instead. It’s like... Man. Rewatching the show, he is an abusive asshole to the man in love with him, doesn’t really care about the son that adores him, and is happy sacrificing others for he and Sam to be happy. I now hate this show.

4. Sam - same as Dean except maybe, AT A STRETCH, we can imagine he called Eileen offscreen. Both Sam and Dean do not check in on their friends. This was like. The ultimate bi!bro win, in the most upsetting way possible where they make it clear Sam and Dean only care about each other. In a way that totally undermines the previous episodes and even parts of THIS episode. Not to mention the Winchester ethos of saving their found family and Cas and Jack not just being temporary tools to them. At least on rewatch he’s not abusive to his love interest and son though! But I have no fondness for him now.

5. Michael & Lucifer - everything the anon said. It’s like the back half of the ep wanted to screw us even on this. Jake Abel’s incredible acting deserved better. There was also no narrative reason for it, and the flashbacks to explain the ‘plot twist’ were so fucking bad. Fuck, even LUCIFER got done dirty - both of the characters regressing to try and win their dad’s approval. There was no need for this, it made no sense, and it did nothing even in terms of contrast to Sam and Dean.

6. Chuck - his ending was fine on a relative scale to this mess but the editing was so bad dude it made the whole scene laugh out loud funny. Like embarrassingly bad shit. You know what saved this? Castiel, of course, and Dean telling Chuck that he isn’t who he thinks he is. Even the scenes with the boys standing up to Chuck were just so ... embarrassing and poorly shot.

Also like, most upsettingly, as a whole - Supernatural. All fifteen years of show canon and characters and fan investment. Nothing sums this up more than the montage, which by the way guys, the editors got really emotional over and thought was good. So please don’t say that was intentionally bad. It was just so fucking bad, like random scenes and a song that didn’t work. Really upsetting capstone to the series that was not only poorly made as a mockery of what greatness Supernatural once achieved, but undermined every part of the emotional found family narrative, the Winchesters trying to save the ones they love, and just made the characters point blank unlikeable. I cannot believe one episode soured the whole show for me, but it really did. Barring a fix-it miracle on 20, I don’t think that can be undone.

#ask #anonymous #spn spoilers #supernatural spoilers #like .... I don't want to talk about it anymore but I'm also like.#I don't know how not to care about this show that defined me and who I am for ten years #I don't know how not to care about these characters #I hope the finale fixes at least some of this. it's the only hope we have left

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impalementation · 4 years ago

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hope ur doing well :) i wanted to drop in and say that i just realized in i only have eyes for you not only is it obviously paralleling buffy&angel, it also unintentionally sort of parallels buffy&spike’s eventual s6 relationship? except buffy is grace and spike is james. james shooting grace and the AR in seeing red are similar awful acts (not trying to defend the AR here, ofc). (1/2)

(2/2) but both james and spike are immediately horrified at what they’ve done, and seek redemption – spike by getting his soul, and james by killing himself, and are eventually forgiven by the one they love. and of course it’s in i only have eyes for you that giles says that to forgive is an act of compassion, not done because people deserve it but because they need it. just thought that was interesting, especially knowing it wasn’t planned.

putting under a cut for anyone that doesn’t want to read about seeing red.

yeah, there’s definitely a similarity there! i actually wouldn’t be surprised if the bathroom scene in seeing red was meant to be seen in light of i only have eyes for you since marti noxon was responsible for both. (based on that morning after conversation between buffy and spike in wrecked, we know she’s more than capable of making subtle callbacks to her previous episodes). it’s possibly also significant that seeing red and i only have eyes for you are both the 19th episode of their respective seasons. but whether or not the parallel was intended, i think the show in general is very preoccupied with the bad choices people make in the name of passion and/or romance. it’s just a very recurring theme. one character wants something romantic from another, cannot have it, and is tempted to behave badly as a result, and has to learn how to deal with it. it’s one of the reasons that the show is so fraught with scenes that involve breaches of consent (for better or for worse).

if i were to compare seeing red and i only have eyes for you though, i’d read seeing red as an update on it rather than a direct parallel. as a subset of the way i read season six as an update on season two in general. in i only have eyes for you, i see the point as being more about buffy forgiving herself than grace forgiving james. at that point in the season, buffy feels incredibly guilty over the fact that she accidentally unleashed angelus, and that she’s going to have to kill angel as well. she feels like she’s killed her lover in the heat of passion, even if that wasn’t her intent. there’s also the problem of the fact that because she can’t forgive herself, can’t let angel go, can’t get his forgiveness, more people are dying. just as more people keep dying because james can’t let go. i think the season presents this sort of desperate, covetous, Romantic passion as sympathetic (since the point is for buffy to forgive herself), but still ultimately a sign of immaturity (since it results in death).

with this in mind, i think the similarities between the bathroom scene and the grace/james scene (if intentional) are meant to highlight the fact that spike is still stuck in that place of covetous immaturity. note the similarity between “tell me you don’t love me” and “let yourself love me.” i think it’s trying to show that because he doesn’t have a soul, he isn’t capable of transcending that form of love. in contrast to buffy, who does have a soul, and who was able to grow out of that kind of love--or at least is aware that she should. the “great love is wild, and passionate and dangerous. it burns and consumes.” / “until there’s nothing left” exchange summarizes that divide pretty neatly. buffy throwing spike off is both her definitive rejection of that mindset, and the wake-up call for spike. i also see it as a rejection of the romance of suffering in general, considering (a) that her relationship with spike was one of her instruments of suffering, and (b) how unsexy, ie unromanticized, the scene is. in comparison to how their moments of ambiguous consent earlier in the season were shot in a more sexualized way.

the fact that the bathroom scene is not about forgiveness but about emotional immaturity changes the fallout. because the point of season six is that the characters aren’t teenagers anymore. they don’t need to have their teenage passions forgiven. they need to grow the hell up. they need to take responsibility for their own moral agency. (note that in season two, angel losing his soul was an accident, while in season six things go wrong because the characters make actively bad choices--ie use their agency badly). so instead of buffy forgiving spike and that being enough, spike needs to take responsibility first. and instead just turning to self-destruction, spike has to demonstrate his remorse by actually changing himself (“can’t say sorry. can’t use forgive me. all i can say is, buffy: i’ve changed”). the id needs to grow up and only then can it be trusted or loved. buffy does end up extending compassion towards spike in season seven (though i don’t think she uses the word “forgiveness”), so the show doesn’t walk back on that, but there’s an added emphasis on the need for ongoing responsibility on the part of the perpetrator. not that spike is a perfect bastion of responsibility or anything, but he does clearly try. basically, even though the arcs are similar, they have different points of emphasis because i only have eyes for you is more about the teenage experience and seeing red and its fallout is more about the adult experience. yeah, you need forgive yourself (or sometimes forgive others) to snap out of a toxic loop. but also sometimes you need to own up and make a change.

this is all off the cuff theorizing though. i could definitely be giving the writers too much credit, and if other people have different reads i’d be interested to hear them! i do think it’s spot on to notice a parallel though.

#doing better thanks!#though still trying keep away for the most part #s2 #s6 #spike

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qsdblogging · 4 years ago

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Why It Makes Sense: The Whedonverse Theory

When people say Joss Whedon, my first thought has always been Buffy the Vampire Slayer (followed by Angel, obviously), Firefly (and Serenity), and The Cabin in the Woods. After those, it’s up in the air if I remember his input as director of the 2012 film, The Avengers. But, that one isn’t included in this theory.

Growing up on Whedon’s creations (courtesy of my dad), I got invested in the stories he told.

Now, this theory (for me, at least) surfaced in 2015 and I liked the idea of it. It’s summarized in a format through pictures, the year, and what happen during that year to follow the timeline of this theory.

If you aren’t aware of it, continue on reading, or if you are and just want to see if a fresh pair of eyes has anything new to offer in regards to a fan-favored theory, continue on.

But, fair warning, this is going to include spoilers if you haven’t watched any of the listed shows and movies.

This theory essentially starts off with Whedon’s works: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, as it is it’s spin-off series. As it takes places the earliest amongst the bunch, in the late 1990’s and early 2000's.

Buffy’s lore is the main focus of the thoery as the biggest point of all refers to active Slayers (and the Potentials, before they were activated for the most part). In the last season of Buffy, they round up any Potentials and in the final fight, get their Slayer abilities activated to turn the tide of the fight in their favor.

It broke the tradition (AKA, the magic behind it all) that the Slayer line followed. One died, a new emerged with the powers and got thrust into a world they didn’t, most likely, know about with a giant burden to bare.

Buffy, having died twice and come back both times, kept her abilities and instead of one Slayer, there were two. First, Kendra, who later got killed after meeting Buffy. When Kendra died, as she was the current activated Slayer, Faith emerged. So, when Buffy died the second time around while still being a Slayer, it didn’t cause another to emerge as she wasn’t the latest activated. Make sense?

But a while later, after all the Slayers were activated, Angel ran into his own amount of issues that had been piling up in Los Angeles.

During Angel’s final season, which is just around a year later after Buffy’s show came to a close, Wolf Ram and Heart defeated and destroyed the Circle of the Black Thorn. This causes a lot of destruction in the process and Angel’s series finale ends with those left standing ready to die fighting whatever is coming their way (including a dragon, apparently).

According to the theory, this event esstentially kickstarts the awakening of the Senior Partners. Hoping to appease them and prevent an apocalypse, The Initiative, a group Buffy deals with during her fourth season, began to give sacrifices.

That leads us to the events of The Cabin in the Woods, which takes place in 2012, barely even a decade after the events of Buffy and Angel.

A ragtag group of misfits who think they’re just taking a small trip to Curt’s cousin’s (who may or may not exist) cabin in the woods. Once there, find a few odd things and a lot of weird and strange items littering the basement of the cabin.

It’s a suspenseful scene to watch, as you get the feeling it’s what is going to make things go sideways for the group and eventually, as everyone is playing with their own chosen objects, Dana reads from a notebook and doesn’t realize the consequences the group will face from doing so.

The Buckner family, an undead redneck family, attacks the group later on in the night.

In the Initiative, who is watching everything go down on the cameras, is hoping it’ll work out for the best as they are the last chance of appeasing the Senior Partners. All of their other locations have failed in their tasks for the year of sacrificing a group.

The group members who are left, in efforts to save themselves, try leaving and run into a wall. Literally. As the movie goes on, you learn that this branch of the organization follows the five person sacrifice that most horror and thriller films seem to follow.

The Whore dies first, followed by the Jock, then the Brains. The Fool is assumed dead this time around, but we learn that this movie’s fool isn’t quite dead. The last death, the Virgin, is optional as long as she (or he) is the last to go.

Dana, the coined Virgin, is saved by Marty, the presumed dead fool. He brings her to what he found to be an elevator that the Buckner Family had crawled out of. They find themselves amongst many other elevator cages, filled with monsters and creatures alike.

It’s Dana that realizes they picked their own fate down in the basement.

Eventually those in the Initiative find the cage the two are in and try to bring them around to kill them (but, Marty has to go first). However, the two are a force to be reckoned with as they take advantage of the severed arm of a Buckner member attacking the guard and find their way into the control station for the cages.

They press a button that releases all of the creatures and monsters in their cages on the security team sent after the two remaining sacrifices. After a while of bloodshed, the two make their way around the base in hopes of finding a way out.

Along their way, they find themselves in the sacrifice room, where the Director at the time, meets them. A lot of arguing and explanations, followed by a betrayal here and there, ultimately ends with Dana and Marty saying screw it all and refusing to finish the sacrifice as the Director planned.

With sacrifices unfinished, the movie ends with the Senior Partners being unleased on the world.

But of course, that didn’t mean there was no way the Initiative ever planned for something like this, right?

Well, the Initiative planned for something like this to possibily happen because you always need to plan for the worst.

Some of humanity manages to escape the destruction on Earth that was and formed the Alliance (with heavy influences from the Initiative, we should assume).

Which brings us to the events of Firefly and Serenity.

Hundreds of years have passed before a child is born. You wouldn’t think anything of it, children are born all the time. However, the remaining remnants of the Initiative inside of the Alliance recognize her for what she is.

A Slayer. Or, at least, a Potential.

River Tam is lured into a school that is meant to challenge her intellect, but according to the theory, the experiments they held on River were attempts to trigger her Slayer abilities.

After her brother, Simon, manages to get her out after a letter in code telling him they were hurting her, the two find themselves on Serenity, a Firefly class spaceship run by essentially, space cowboys. Now, a string of events in the first episode lead to the crew deciding to go on the run and reluctantly keeping Simon and River on board.

But, as the two siblings stay on for longer then Mal had planned and originally wanted them on for, attachments are formed and the need to do the right thing takes over.

The first, and only, season of Firefly gets cut short (and aired out of order, but that’s a whole other thing) and there’s a lot of loose ends that didn’t get tied up.

With one last chance to tie things up, Whedon puts out Serenity, the movie surrounding the crew’s adventure on figuring out what exactly River knew that the Alliance didn’t want her to know.

Originally, River and Simon were meant to leave the crew in the beginning of the film, but some things lead to another and a few extra details are revealed. The crew was made well aware of River’s uncanny ability to shoot a gun without even looking at her targets, but watching her fight and take down multiple people bigger than her was a strange occurence, I’m sure.

It’s the first moment you see her supposed Slayer abilities.

By the end of the movie, things are revealed, some deaths happen to beloved characters, River has finally tapped into her Potential and is an active Slayer, and you get an explanation of who and what exactly Reavers are.

But, for this theory, it’s been mentioned that maybe the Reavers are simply Vampires who managed to get aboard the escape from Earth after the rise of the Senior Partners, and driven to extremes in order to survive in space themselves.

A Slayer had been born again, restarting the Slayer cycle, and there was a chance that things could go back to how they used to be.

Not sure how it would happen, but the basics of the theory make sense. Obviously there are specifics that are harder to include and most likely make sense of in regards to all of this, but in the grand gist of it all, it makes sense.

It’s a fun little theory that can connect multiple works made by one person.

Now, obviously this wasn’t a shortened version of the theory. And there have been some portions of the theory put into question, especially in regards to some of Whedon’s other works.

Dollhouse, Fray as a character in the comics, and The Avengers.

Personally, I don’t include the Avengers in this. It’s Marvel and Whedon was the director of the film for it, but I don’t see it fitting in with this particular theory in any way. People have included it (mostly S.H.I.E.L.D being with the Initiative became, but it just doesn’t make any sense to me given Marvel as it’s own identity), but I prefer not to.

As for Dollhouse, I never actually watched the show. My dad did, but I was too young at the time to be allowed to watch it and I was just never interested in it. Maybe one day I’ll get around to it, but this meant I had to do a little bit of digging to understand this a bit more.

For most of the takes on this theory that have mention the show, mention it may just take place in the parallel universe. They, as in parallel universes, were confirmed to exist in Buffy, Angel, and the comics that continue after them, it’s a plausible theory.

This also means that this theory could follow a majority of the canon information from the shows, films, and comics mentioned, before dividing into it’s own events. It simply means that some things that were difficult to explain in specifics may just be different in this theory’s parallel universe.

So, Dollhouse could take place in the same universe, but events could have differed greatly by universe. We don’t know for sure.

That, in all, also explains the comic series by Whedon surrounding Melaka Fray, a Slayer from a future timeline where things are a little post-apocalyptic on Earth. Monsters run amock and eventually, Fray emerges. Now, it could mean there’s a parallel world where the Avengers and Buffy take place in the same world, but I still don’t like that idea, so I ignore it.

Parallel universes are just a lot of fun to imagine, and in worlds like these, could mean a lot in the grand scheme of it all.

#pop culture #whedonverse #joss whedon #buffy the vampire slayer #angel #the cabin in the woods #firefly #serenity #parallel universes #qsdblogging #qsdbloggingpopculture #findingqsd

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oveliagirlhaditright · 2 years ago

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I keep meaning to make a post about my opinion on the Buffy novel "Revenant," but then things keep happening to get in the way of my attempt.

I'm going to try and do so now.

I'm not gonna lie: this isn't one I probably would have chosen to buy on my own, just going off the description of it (I got it in a box of Buffy books that I got from Ebay for a good a deal, which is where I've gotten a lot of the ones that I've been reviewing lately). But after reading it, I'm definitely glad that I own it now. After reading "Revenant," it's pretty high on my list of Buffy tie-in novels: partly because this book did a great job of pretty much ending every chapter on a cliffhanger, so that you wanted to keep reading to know what happened next. LOL. I also feel like every chapter was a nice length. Not too long, not too short. There have been times in some of the Buffy books, where I felt like a chapter could have been split into two or something.

But I really enjoyed learning so much about the Chinese culture in this one, and that was definitely one of my favorite things about it for sure.

And in some ways, this book kind of reminded me of the Unseen Trilogy, but a better version of it? (Because I've spoken before about how parts of the Unseen Trilogy kind of bored me.) One, with the parallel of Willow trying to help a friend, who is at the center of things. And two, with gangs being involved with both books' plots. I guess maybe I like this book better than "Unseen," in some ways, because it's not drawn out. Maybe I just feel like things went on for too long in that trilogy? I don't know. -shrugs-

And as the huge Bangel fan that I am, I can't get over how Buffy and Angel spent pretty much every scene together in here<3

Willow was really wonderful here (and despite me having just ragged on the Unseen Trilogy, I do like that in both this novel and that saga, we get to see her being a really supportive friend to these side characters, in helping them out). And we get some really cute Ozillow moments, that I should probably share on here.

And I like that this story apparently takes place when Cordelia's dad is starting to get in trouble for having cheated on his taxes. And though a part of Cordy doesn't want to be around the Scoobies after her breakup with Xander, she also does not want to be at home right now and decides to do research with Giles to avoid all that drama. It was a really good missing moment to have in this book, I thought. And I felt for Cordy there.

I feel like the only thing I really didn't like about the novel was some of the stuff with Xander. 1. That it felt like he kept getting into fights non-stop (and of course winning them, or just getting out of the situation and surviving). And I could maybe handle something like that with Buffy, but with Xander? I can't suspend my disbelief as much. 2. The major thing was that he falls in love with this Chinese spirit. And, I mean... On one hand I guess I can get why that worked and was maybe needed for the plot. And this was after he and Cordy broke up, so I guess he might be on the rebound. But I just didn't like this, because it's another girl who just happens to fall in love with Xander. And I sort of felt like they were trying to make us feel bad that Xander was single, when it was really his fault that he is, since he cheated on Cordy! And I just couldn't help feeling they could have come up with a better storyline for him. IDK.

But all that being said, I thoroughly enjoyed Revenant:D

Edit: I've realized that I never really say much about Giles in these Buffy book reviews that I do. And I think that's because, for the most part... he's just Giles in them (at least in the ones that I've read thus far). And Giles is wonderful. I love him. Don't get me wrong. But so far I haven't really had anything to really say about him from these stories that you wouldn't get from the show (except maybe about a few of his love interests. But then I really have no desire to talk about them, either, because you also know they're going to be short-lived, since they're not in the show), if that makes any sense at all. Though maybe that will change. I'm kind of hoping it will!

#buffy the vampire slayer #buffy tie-in novel #buffy book #revenant #long post

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27emailsicantsend · 5 years ago

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Andi Mack Appreciation Week: #7 Favorite Episode(s)

1. Hammer Time

I LOVED this episode and watched it probably 10 times after it aired. Of course, the best part of it was Muffy. I have never cried of happiness watching any episode of a show as much as I did this this one. I don’t know if it was because of the stupid hiatus after the trash we call episode 3x13 or because I had been waiting for Marty to come back for so long or because of how freaking romantic the end of the episode is... but it really spoke to me in a way no other episode really ever has. This was also one of the best episodes to show that Buffy has a soft side to those that can get through to her. It showed how perfectly Marty understood her because he was able to break down that wall she builds up. The parallel to them racing and crossing the finish line together being symbolic of them being end game was so well done. They weren’t each other’s competition anymore. They weren’t at odds from their fight when Marty left and it was them constantly being against each other. Time has finally aligned itself so they could be together and this episode was proof of that.

I also loved that Amber found a healthy outlet for her anger. I think that Amber had some anger issues because of her parents and she took out her anger on others by being a bully. When she was able to meet with Cyrus and his parents she was able to find healthy outlets for that anger, including the break away place. And this in turn helped CeCe to get her anger out with everything she had bottled up because I think CeCe took her anger and stress out on others too. She used tactics like the silent treatment and glaring to get Bex to listen to her, which weren’t appropriate. I was happy to see her find something else more beneficial for her anger.

2. Head Over Heels

The irony that this is my runner up to my favorite episode is crazy because of the Muffy parallels. In this episode, when Marty gets frustrated he leaves. It showed that he didn’t know how to get down Buffy’s walls and for whatever reason (she didn’t like him, she did but wasn’t ready for a relationship, etc.), Buffy couldn’t open up totally to Marty yet. She got soft with him and opened up before which meant she was comfortable, but the timing wasn’t right. The fact that both of them went through hard things (Buffy moving, Marty’s crazy ex) during the time they were apart, helped them be ready for when they actually could build each other up and really get through to each other in Hammer Time. Instead of walking away, Marty took Buffy and walked with her. A nice parallel that he was going to stay when things got hard, rather than before. (They also were running during both of these scenes so there’s some irony as well haha). Of course I loved seeing Marty and Buffy on a date and how cute they were, but this scene was important to me. I also appreciated the song choice they used when Buffy was watching Marty in the hall. The acting during all of their scenes was really well done to portray, friendship, interest, and heartbreak for multiple reasons. They really had a way of SHOWING the audience their story, without having to say much. It made Marty leaving in that episode 10x harder for me, but I think that’s because it was so easy to see their chemistry on screen. I could feel their emotions and that’s when you know the acting is good.

I also appreciated Jonah and Andi’s storyline. I think it was good for younger audience members to see that sometimes when people say they are fine, they actually aren’t. Jonah pushed Andi off, but she finally got through to him. While I don’t think she needed to ask if he was mad so much because that could have come off as clingy, I do think that it showed that people might cover up how they actually feel so it’s important to be sensitive if you feel like something is off with someone. And I also liked that they showed Andi falling and laughing, rather than getting upset and embarrassed. It was a nice way to teach younger audience members that it isn’t what happens to you, but rather how you respond to it that makes a situation.

Might I also add that, in general, I really liked the title to this episode too? A lot of these episodes have play on words for the title, but I appreciate that it could represent falling like Andi and Jonah literally did or “fallen” for someone more than expected- like Marty for Buffy. It was just a clever title and I appreciate it!

Lastly, I want to give a brief shout out to Bex’s and Cyrus’ storyline in this episode. I really appreciated the scene when Bex had to confront Cy about his script not being very good. (I want to add real quick that the cinematography on this scene was so pretty. It felt like it came straight from a movie). But Cy is just a stress ball, so of course he wanted his entire life figured out. Her words were reassuring for any of us that we still have time and most of us don’t have our life figured out. I’m 24 and still feel completely lost but that is ok because I’m young and can try new things, make mistakes, and learn. I don’t think we ever totally figure out our purpose until we die, but we get a really good gist of it from the accomplishments we make in the meantime.

Honorable Mentions: One in a Minyan, Were We Ever?, We Were Here, Best Suprise Ever, For the Last Time, Crime Scene: Andi Shack!, Cyrus’ Bash-Mitzvah! (1&2), The New Girls, I Got Your Number

^can you tell I like this show? 😂😂

#andi mack appreciation week #andi mack #muffy #marty from the party #buffy driscoll #cyrus goodman #bex mack #amber kippen #cece mack #jonah beck #jandi #am #save andi mack #renew andi mack

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ifeveristoday · 5 years ago

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team Slow Burn/Burn it All Down

“Real monsters don’t announce themselves or present opportunities. Not here. They enter your head, your heart, tear at you from within.” -- Angel, Hellmouth #2

Are we talking about the demons underground or the demon walking around with Angel’s face?

Hellmouth leans heavy on foreshadowing and having unspoken/underlining meanings that differ from the actual words on the page. It continues using elements from Egyptian and Roman/Greek mythos but the main draw of this issue - and I’m assuming the rest of the series, is the reluctant partnership of Buffy and Angel. I don’t agree with the criticism that taking Buffy and Angel away from their respective apocalypses ruins the flow of the overall arcs. It’s a vast story to tell and the pace of the reboots (which is something I have criticized) makes it difficult to include in the main storylines without sacrificing important character development. There are just so many characters, especially in Sunnydale. Jordie’s writing excels at the character and emotional beats rather than plots, and while we have had some great strides in Willow, Xander and Jenny’s personal journeys, there remains some distance from the namesake characters, which I feel like it was intentional to get to the place that Hellmouth occupies.

Love it or hate it, the Buffy and Angel relationship is a huge part of both of their stories and character developments and we’ve had inklings of how Buffy is going to change/possibly wreck Angel’s life in Angel, but he’s remained a shadowy figure in Buffy’s story. Hellmouth changes all of that while retaining some of the original canon’s flaws/trademarks but also poking gentle fun at them.

Spoilers from Hellmouth #2 below the cut.

Buffy and Angel are slightly different from their canon selves - Angel is independent of Buffy’s journey at the very beginning and already has his purpose set in Los Angeles. Buffy is a newly minted Slayer, living with her secret for a whole three weeks before wacky Slayer hijinks puts her in the path of Willow and Xander. Their initial meeting/relationship is reminiscent of the very early episodes of Season 1 Buffy - with a reasonable amount of wariness on Buffy’s part and Angel’s dry/slightly cocky attitude with a 2019 update of their anxieties. There’s also a flip in roles as Angel asks Buffy how she’s feeling and what she wants to do in the future at the start. It’s just the feeling of a connection with no romantic overtones.

The comic recognizes the fucked-upness of Buffy being a child and fighting the forces of evil and sympathizing with her via the character of Jenny. While there is an obligatory nod to Buffy’s desire to be normal, it also makes a point of isolating her from the Scoobies and her frustration at knowing how to be the best Slayer she can be. Giles tells her that he’s to direct her, but not tell her explicitly what she has to do sounds an awful like parents preparing their children for adulthood. There is no handbook. While Buffy is welcomed into Willow and Xander’s circle (and that’s another flip - it is Willow who reaches out to Buffy first and invites her into being social), they’re very much a unit while Buffy sort of floats between their friendship. But I feel due to them being so young, it’s easy to claim best friendship, because - the intensity of feelings and hormones.

This makes Buffy’s character kind of harder to read, and less sunshiney than her OG counterpart. But it’s a shared facade - TV Buffy just hid it better underneath girliness and bouncy hair, while Boom! Buffy is focused, for better or worse to her duty. This is a Buffy that hasn’t quit Slaying before, who gets slightly conflicted guidance from her Watcher and who needs Willow and Xander more than they possibly need her to be a connection to being sixteen. Everyone has their own stuff to deal with.

Hellmouth gives Buffy the spotlight and also drops her into an immediate partnership with Angel. It very pointedly is not a romance - they both get on each others nerves actually, and it inspires A+ bantering while revealing the most of each character so far. Buffy’s venting to Angel (Buffy #8/Hellmouth #1) implies that she’s worried about her friendships and failure to connect, that she’d rather tell a complete stranger this than confide in her friends/Watcher.

Angel listening and not judging shows an immediate empathy for her - and his actions during Hellmouth show a more vulnerable/less closed off Angel. He doesn’t occupy the same caretaker vibe he has with Fred and Gunn that he does with Buffy, namely because Buffy refuses it. She calls him out on trying to be the mysterious weight of the world Loner who takes on all of the responsibilities.

Angel quickly realizes he just can’t be That Guy with Buffy, and it makes his character hilariously resigned/looser in response. He warns her about dangers in the Hellmouth but accepts Buffy’s way is different from his, but that doesn’t make it wrong. He’s willing to admit he might have been wrong about demons being upfront when the slithery shapeshifter demon confronts them - and Buffy’s snarky response “Cool, cool. Won’t rub that in.” lightens the tense moment.

Notably, Angel is the one that gets injured/dragged by the demons while Buffy runs to save him. The fighting sequences are highlighted and Buffy’s scenes, in particular, are very smooth and highlights her Slayer grace. They fight beautifully together and despite their prickly banter, feel a shared responsibility to each other’s well being. Their separate confrontations with the shapeshifter shows their fears - Buffy ‘abandoning’ her family and friends and failing to protect them, Angel seeing the ghosts of the people he’s failed to save. Buffy reacts strongly to how her family and friends need her, while Angel angrily tells the shifter to stay out of his head and that it doesn’t know anything about him. Circling back to Buffy saying she doesn’t know what she wants, the Ominous voice implies Angel doesn’t really know what he’s doing and who he is.

Ah, vague accusations of something evil and upsetting, how I haven’t missed you.

After Angel demands to know who’s blood is needed for the further escalation of Evil Plan, and the Voice doesn’t reply, he immediately realizes Buffy is in danger and runs to find her.

Buffy’s still fighting the shifter and it mentions she could put an end to her family and friends’ suffering with her sacrifice - namely, that her blood will save the world.

While Buffy logically knows that the shifter isn’t her mom (because of course, the shifter would take on the form of Joyce), this emotional blackmail breaks her out of the illusion and she kicks it’s ass. Almost punching out Angel in the process.

Angel is less emotional about his ordeal and Buffy lets him have it again, telling him that it's unfair that she’s the only one being vulnerable - “I opened up because we need to work together, and you haven’t said a thing.”

Instead of being defensive and defaulting to Sir Mopes a Lot - Angel sincerely apologizes and tells her that his fears were also centered around his friends and him not being able to save them in time.

And it’s Buffy’s turn to reassure him/pass on wisdom - she realizes that the Hellmouth wants to separate them to make them weaker and that Angel deserves a little more empathy from her.

THEY’RE COMMUNICATING THEIR FRUSTRATIONS AND CONCERNS WITH EACH OTHER, Y’ALL.

Angel does have a moment of saying, “Silent suffering is more my cup of tea,” and Buffy’s quick response of “And how’s that working for you?” showcase their differences/similarities nicely. Angel despite making friends doesn’t tell them what he’s thinking because he’s used to being alone, Buffy with her very loud opinions isolates herself (un)intentionally because she’s new to Slaying and being a teenager at the same time. They can’t talk to the people who care for them--- but they can talk to each other.

When they face hurdles, they take turns reassuring/pointing out the Obvious Evil, and then a tiny moment - Angel adds onto Buffy’s observation of not getting surrounded by the demon horde by saying, “Just like Thermopylae.”

As with each issue of the Boom!verse, when names I don’t recognize I obviously google them - and Thermopylae is a reference to both the battle of Thermopylae (think the 300 comic and uh, history) and the “Hot Gates,” and is the cavernous entrance to Hades.

Is my theory/wish that there’s going to be Persephone/Hades parallels and Eurydice/Orpheus vibes in this story going to play out? God, I hope so.

Anyway, back to the moment - when they inevitably get surrounded by the demon hordes, Buffy remarks, “Well, there goes thermometer.”

The. Classic. Buffy. Malapropism.

My heart.

Angel gets slashed in the fight, and Buffy worries about him, but there’s a bigger problem -

narrated by the Voice - “Are you sure everything is as it seems? You’ve been wrong before.”

“Blood is spilled...vessels are filled...every pretender killed.”

Shot to Drusilla as Prometheus in chains, spouting some of the worst “Dru-esque” dialogue I’ve read. Sorry Jordie, this is up there with the clunky faux Whedonisms of the early issues.

So Dru isn’t the major Big Bad, but rather the unseen Voice, who we, of course, don’t know.

Is she ultimate sacrifice, the vessel (after all she is of Angel’s bloodline) and oh, Angel Still Hasn’t Told Buffy He’s A Vampire which...

Boo.

All of the voice overs hint that the confession when it happens is going to cause Buffy Big Mad - after all, Angel knows more about her than she does of him, AGAIN.

The art and coloring is stunning as ever in this issue - Carlini really knows how to draw action sequences, and the varying light/color schemes really make the sense of Buffy and Angel descending into the Hellmouth feel vivid and real.

tl;dr I loved this issue and each issue the stakes definitely seem higher. The bantering and a slow reveal of their personalities are also excellent. The foreshadowing/double meanings of the dialogues.

The stuff I don’t like - the Dru dialog at the end, Angel being secretive about his Vampire self.

#hellmouth #thoughts and reactions #reactions and reviews #my review #buffy comics #angel comics #boom! studios #boom! verse #disaster grumpy bats #the ballad of buffy and angel #buffy summers #angel

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travllingbunny · 5 years ago

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The 100 rewatch: 4x11 The Other Side

Now that I’m finally on my vacation and have the time to write these posts, I need to catch up. I actually rewatched up to 5x04, so now I need to go over 7 episodes so I could continue my rewatch of season 5.

Season 4 is one of my favorite seasons of The 100 mostly because of its last 3 episodes, which are all among my all-time favorites episodes of the show. While I still think that 2x16 is the show’s strongest finale, season 4 has the strongest finish with 3 amazing episodes in a row. It helps that this is both the stage of the season when we’re past the plotlines about Grounder politics and religion – never my favorite part of the show, though it was better done in season 4 than in season 3 – and where the focus was on what made season 4 so good: human drama and conflict between people and within people’s minds and souls, in the face of the end of the world and an enemy that cannot be defeated: climate change in its most extreme version.

One of the three storylines in 4x11 is the tense standoff about who will be in the bunker and survive, which turns the main characters against each other, including Clarke against Bellamy, but where none of the sides are villainous and everyone has good reasons for what they are doing. The show prides itself on grey morality, but it doesn’t always get it right – this is one of the times it does.

But while that storyline is the usual story of people fighting for survival (for themselves, their loved ones, whoever they consider “their people” – since the morally right goal of saving everyone is impossible), the other two plots are about people who have decided that they don’t want to survive, or who are struggling to decide whether they want to live or not.

It’s also the episode remembered for the first death of a main character who was a part of the original cast at the start of season 1 since episode 2x08. It’s one of the saddest deaths on The 100, but also one of those that felt most unavoidable.

“See you on the other side” is one of those repetitive catchphrases on The 100 that has changed its meaning so much over time Jasper said it several times – I remember that he said it in The Pilot, just about to cross the river (just before he got speared and nearly died), in 3x13 just before drinking the potion that Luna’s people gave him and others so they would lose consciousness before they take them to their oil rig – and he tells it to Monty as he is about to die.

This story of PTSD was done much better than whatever the show was doing with Finn. There is a parallel between Jasper and Octavia in how damaged they were after to the deaths of their first real love, but while Octavia mostly directed her grief outward into violence and, for a while, murder (an with a dash of death wish), Jasper was only verbally aggressive to others – and more so in season 3 than in season 4 – but his psychological state mostly manifested in his loss of a will for survival.

This storyline is very controversial, from the fans who started hating Jasper and calling him annoying – because the show was honest about the fact that depressed people are not always pleasant to be around – to people who were upset that the story didn’t get an uplifting outcome with Jasper overcoming his problems. But it wouldn’t be realistic if everyone in the show overcome their traumas. In reality, some people just break and stay broken. And I think it’s important to show that, too. It doesn’t make the story hopeless and nihilistic, because, at the same time – and in this very episode – we also get stories of people – Harper, Raven - who do manage to overcome trauma and decide to live.

I’m still glad that the show didn’t go with their original idea – Jasper shooting himself in the season 3 finale, right after he wrote his suicide letter. Not just because his death would have been overshadowed by other deaths that season, and because it would’ve made season 3 way too dark, but also because, in a way, his season 4 arc and suicide was less bleak, odd as that may sound. Season 3 Jasper was focused on his pain, anger and despair, while season 4 Jasper was reconciled with the idea he would die, and focused on going out having some fun before his death.

I also think it would be very unrealistic if, in the face of such bleak future – probable death of radiation or years of possibly awful life stuck in a bunker – at least some people wouldn’t make the decision to live out the rest of the days with an end-of-the-world party and go out in their own time, at their own choice and in a more pleasant way, such as overdosing of drug-like tea. And knowing how things turn out in the rest of season 4 – and that most of them would probably be condemned to death of radiation, anyway – and how horrible the life in the bunker ended up being (and that it took the lives of almost 400 out of the 1200 people), I can’t really say that those who stayed behind in Arkadia and committed suicide made a wrong choice, even if it’s not a choice I would make.

Jasper’s death scene, his last moments with Monty, is beautiful and heartbreaking. But I still didn’t cry during that scene in this rewatch, which surprised me. Then I was even more surprised when the tears only came later when Monty found out that Harper was alive and she told him she loved him, which she had tried to deny before, because she wanted Monty to leave her and not risk his life for her. I think it’s because, for tears, you need some kind of catharsis, a relief, and there is nothing like that in Jasper’s death scene. It’s like watching the Buffy episode The Body – similar to dealing with deaths of people close to you in real life, where you’re just frozen and you’re not getting any kind of closure or seeing any kind of meaning. Monty keeps fighting and trying to stop Jasper from killing himself even after it is already too late, or getting angry that he can’t do anything about it anymore. because it’s not in Monty’s nature to give up hope. And that’s why he doesn’t even say “I love you” when Jasper asks him to, until it is too late and Jasper cannot hear it anymore, because to say it would mean to accept his death.

Monty has lost so much at this point – having to kill his mother twice, now losing his best friend who was like a brother to him, that the moment when he thinks that Harper is dead (seeing a dead body of a blonde woman, who turns out to be Bree), and then realizes that Harper is alive was such a big relief both because of Harper and because Monty has managed to save someone he loves, and his arc is not all grief and darkness.

Oh, the times when Raven used to be really a main character and had a great arc about struggling with her pain, disability, and (temporary) loss of mental functions! (I love season 6 and it may end up as my favorite season, but it pretty much made Raven a side character and didn’t do her too many favors.) Though the Raven episode most often compared to 6x07 Nevermind is 3x11 Nevermore (because of the similar title and same writer), Raven’s story in 4x11 actually is more similar to Clarke’s story in 6x07: it’s an internal struggle where she is deciding whether she wants to live, and where she talks to dead characters, who are actually embodiments of parts of her own mind, pulling her in different directions and fighting for her soul. Here they are “Becca”, tempting Raven to die, because a part of her doesn’t believe she can still be the brilliant mind who solves all the problems – and “Sinclair”, who helps Raven find hope and fight to live, and come up with a solution how to heal her brain. She does it by basically “rebooting” herself through temporary “death” – which is similar to how Gabriel brought back Clarke in 6x10. Considering the fact that Sinclair is just a product of Raven’s mind, it’s a bit funny when he tells Raven that she shouldn’t compare herself to Da Vinci and Mozart etc. because she’s better than all of them – but I guess Raven is imagining Sinclair as giving her huge amounts of praise in order to give her faith in herself. He was always the mentor/friend who gave her a chance to work as a mechanic on the Ark and believed in her even when she didn’t believe in herself.

The bunker drama

I wasn’t happy with the way 4x10 put Clarke is a pseudo-antagonist role, by focusing on the Conclave (an incredibly stupid way to resolve the question of survival of the human race) with Octavia as the hero, and making the viewers forget what the situation was when Clarke made her decision. Add to that that she is pitted against Bellamy, and that she is siding with Jaha, and you have all the ingredients for the fandom to see Clarke as a villain. But in fact, her decision made most sense in the circumstances – not only was Octavia realistically unlikely to win, but the most likely outcome was that Luna would win and doom the entire human race to die. But this episode corrects that and explains her reasons – and that they are different from Jaha’s. Once that the news comes that Octavia has won and decided to share the bunker – which was Clarke’s suggestion that all the Grounder leaders ignored in 4x09 – the situation changes completely, and it’s obvious that Clarke, who already didn’t feel good about what she was doing, started having doubts, while Jaha was very sure that what they were doing was right, and insisted that it’s all about saving their people.

Clarke, on the other hand, thinks that Skaikru need to be in the bunker because they are the only ones who can operate machines that ensure such things as air and water in the bunker, so they’re essential for the survival of the human race. Which is true. But sharing the bunker would also solve that. However, at that point, no one is sure if Grounders already know about them stealing the bunker and if they will start killing all of the Skaikru. Bellamy has faith that Octavia can stop it, but not everyone does.

Of course, even if Clarke had good reasons to steal the bunker, the whole thing with kidnapping Bellamy and keeping him there against his will, chained, while he was desperate to save his sister, was another messed up thing to do, and Clarke clearly didn’t feel good about that, either. It’s the understandable why she did it, to save his life, but I’ve never been OK with the “kidnapping/imprisoning you for your own good” thing, whether it was Lexa kidnapping Clarke and keeping her prisoner for a week in Polis, Bellamy handcuffing Clarke to make her prisoner in Arkadia, or Clarke keeping Bellamy chained up.

That said, I’m not sure how certain Clarke was sure that keeping the bunker closed was the right thing to do, either, because when she was explaining her reasons to Niylah, she seemed to really be talking to herself and trying to convince herself, and Niylah was just a sounding board. That relationship always consisted of Niylah being Clarke’s friend who was there to comfort her when she needed some human touch but wasn’t able to turn to anyone she had stronger emotions for – and while they had sex a couple of times in the past, this time Clarke just needed someone to lie beside her and put an arm around her, but when she talked about the reasons, she had her back to Niylah and not even looking at her, but looking somewhere into the distance.

The relationship between Clarke and Jaha is a pretty interesting one, and I wish it had been explored more, but they did do some of it here. He was a close family friend she grew up with, almost an uncle figure, then he became the symbol of everything she hated, the person who executed her father and imprisoned her for a year. Earlier on in season 4, she was still calling him out on what he did to Jake, but then, having to do things like make the list, she started thinking that she was turning into Jaha. In this episode, even though Clarke was the one who came up with the idea to steal the bunker, Jaha was the one who was confident about what they were doing and acted like he was in charge (prompting Bellamy to make the good observation “I don’t remember the election that made you the chancellor again”) convincing the uncertain Clarke that their path was right. It reminded me a bit of the dynamic between Pike and Bellamy in S3.

This whole situation was pretty complicated: on one hand, Clarke was telling herself that she was saving the human race by saving “her people”, but if everything was resolved without bloodshed, sharing the bunker would mean letting more people potentially survive, because the bunker had the capacity of holding 1200 people, while there were just a little over 400 Sky people. So, one could argue that the “big picture” favored opening the bunker ASAP. For Jaha, it was all about “saving our people”. But what does “my people/our people” mean? Everyone defines that according to how they feel. Jaha sees it as the collective of people from the Ark that he feels responsible for – but 1) it’s not like the lives of people from the Ark are inherently more important than the lives of people known as Grounders, and 2) some of those “our people” were not even in the bunker. Kane, Octavia, Raven, Monty would be left to die, among others. On the personal level, who is more “your person” than your lover or child or sibling, or close friend? But Jaha has always had a rather tribalistic vision and cared more as his people as a collective, than the individual people in that group. Kane was the closest thing to a friend Jaha had at this point, but he was OK with leaving him to die. But it was obvious that Bellamy would never agree to leaving Octavia to die, and Abby would never agree to leave Kane. And if Bellamy or Abby were outside the bunker, I’m 100% sure Clarke wouldn’t agree to leave them to die, either. However, after his wife’s and son’s death, Jaha didn’t have anyone he loved so much that he couldn’t sacrifice them. And since he kind of sacrificed his son to the “big picture” – by putting him at risk of death (which kept haunting him), I think that Jaha doubled down on his belief in his messianic role to save the Arker,s and that he had kind of convinced himself everyone else should be able to sacrifice their loved ones to that.

Which is why he didn’t see it coming when Abby stuck a syringe in him and knock him out, to go and help Bellamy go and open the bunker door. I remember that I saw that coming the first time I watched it and even guessed Abby’s reply to Jaha saying that he’s sorry about Kane’s inevitable death: “He was a good man”. – “He still is”. Jaha was also wrong to bring up Jake, because I think that Abby’s guilt over betraying Jake (which led to Jaha executing him – which she did not anticipate) only made her more determined to do differently this time and save Kane and not betray him. Oh, the time when Abby doing things to save Kane was something you could root for and that didn’t cross the line into creepy, misguided and deeply morally wrong!

This is one of the very few times in the show where Abby and Bellamy had significant interactions – even working together. And they managed to fool Murphy.

I love the fact that Bellamy made himself look self-destructive, by injuring himself while chained, only because he had a plan how to get out and open the door.

This is one of the two or three times in seasons 3-4 when Bellamy tells Murphy that he has no idea what it’s like to love someone, and Murphy has to keep explaining that he’s wrong and referencing his love for Emori.

Being focused on the big picture and trying to save the human race, as Clarke was doing throughout season 4, made her have to repress her feelings and almost severed her human connections (e.g. leaving some of her best friends out of the list, stealing the bunker even though some of the were outside and she was leaving them to die). She’s never been more “Head” than in season 4, because she believed she really had to be. But Bellamy was always her one soft spot where her ability to repress emotions for the ‘greater good’ would hit a brick wall. Bellamy (and Octavia, probably because of him) had to be on the list, not because of any objective reasons (which doesn’t mean that Bellamy isn’t very valuable for his leadership qualities, but that wasn’t why she put him there), even when she was leaving out a genius like Monty. We’ll never know if she could have stayed strong if ALIE had tortured/threatened to kill Bellamy (because the show hinted he was her biggest ‘weakness’ but never allowed that to happen), but she did let hundreds of people die in bombing mostly to protect him, she gave up 50 spots for her people to survive, when Roan blackmailed her by threatening to kill Bellamy, which Roan knew would work because threatening to kill Bellamy got Clarke in season 3 to give up fighting and let him take her to what she thought would be her death at Nia’s hands, and now, she was convinced that she was ensuring the survival of human race by not opening the bunker, but she still couldn’t bring herself to shoot him. But even the fact she thought she could do it shows how out of touch with her emotions she was at that point: Girl, I could have told you there’s no way you would be able to.

I’ve always thought – after seeing how the next two episodes of season 4 went (and then the next two seasons confirmed that) – that the moment when Clarke couldn’t shoot Bellamy and ended up crying, was the moment when she finally faced up to how she feels about him, and that she’s been aware of her feelings ever since. (Even if you disagree on that, there is no way you could spend 6 years on her own, radioing him every day, without realizing exactly what you feel.)

In 4x10, Bellamy was worrying that he wasn’t able to tell his sister that he loves her. When Bellamy and Octavia reunite and hug, Bellamy tells her “I love you so much” – which is the first time we’ve ever seen him say “I love you” to someone. To date, Octavia is the only person he’s said it to on-screen.

Octavia exiles Echo – pulling the “I said your people will get to survive, not you” trick, and considering all her experiences with Echo up to that point. I don’t blame her at all. She correctly guesses that Echo won’t tell the other Grounders (other than Indra, who is playing along) that Skaikru stole the bunker, since she will still die anyway. Echo indeed turned out to be more concerned with survival than revenge.

Timeline: The episode starts two days before Praimfaya, and ends exactly a day before Praimfaya

Body Count: 11 Arkers who killed themselves, including Jasper, Bree, another Delinquent, and Riley.

At least 60 Delinquents have died (4 in season 4), while 40 are still alive. But not for long.

Rating: 10/10

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