What can be learned from Buffy?

This still isn't the rest of Faith's character arc—I'm stalling on re-reading that section of the book and taking notes. I just wanted to make this comment—

I'm watching through the show again (starting from season 3), and it suddenly hit me tonight—

it's just like Star Trek and The Twilight Zone. ​

The original Star Trek I mean, when it was silly and fun and goofy and all about ideas, and had a low budget so they just had actors play everything with some silly makeup. The makeup is a lot better on Buffy—it's more like the later Star Trek shows in that regard. But Buffy (the show) is goofy and silly and all about ideas, and for the most part every monster or robot or what-have-you is played by actors in makeup. I'm on season 5 now, an episode where a robot shows up who is just a girl—no special makeup or costume or anything.. You just know she's a robot because people say she is and the way she talks and moves. The episode doesn't really work, because you're supposed to feel sorry for her, but for that to happen you'd need to believe she actually has feelings, and that doesn't come across at all. I'm re-watching it now with a commentrary track by the writer, and she said Joss didn't feel like the whole thing worked, for the reason I just mentioned. Season 5 in fact for the most part is a very weak season after two really strong ones (the beginning of the end really, from here it's mostly downhill with a few standout episodes). By this point Joss had his hands full with the spinoff show Angel, and was spending all his spare time on the songs and script for the musical episode, coming up later in the season.

So they were trying to do the thing from all the Star Trek shows (the ones I've seen anyway), where it's supposed to be so ironic, because all the robots (and androids, and holograms, and Borgs, and half-Vulcans etc) turn out to be more human than most of the crew members (especially the ones in the followup shows—again, the ones I've seen anyway). But they screwed up, because she actually seemed totally robotic. I think the problem was they didn't want her to be just like Anya, who is also in the episode, and is semi-robotic. So they went more robotic (I was thinking "She's more Anya than Anya"—an ironic take on the motto from Bladerunner: "More Human Than Human").

But yeah, my only point was that Buffy (the show) is a later version of those 60's shows that worked with ideas in low-budget format, and that included silliness, humor, and lots of fun and frivolity, and didn't take themselves too seriously. But Buffy does manage to get powerfully dramatic when that's called for, more than I remember Star Trek or The Twilight Zone being.

An additional note—

All the silliness, humor, whimsey, and obviously fake alien/monster makeup works together to create an environment where they could do just about anything. In many ways it's like a stage play with over-the-top humor and obviously fake costumes etc. It helps the audience suspend disbelief farther than in a more realistic show. I've always said humor is like alcohol—as you add it in, you can get away with more and more. Up to a point, where it all falls apart suddenly.

This is the point that I think I failed to make in the previous post, that hopefully makes it make sense.

And then, immediately after the silly robot-girl episode, you get this.



Gut-wrenching. Sarah Michelle is incredible, she just rips your heart out and throws it on the floor. And every choice is executed perfectly, including that there's no music in the entire episode. This one was written and directed by Joss, and he gave it his full attention this time. Joyce's death impacts the whole rest of the season, as such a powerful event actually does in real life. Things don't just reset in the next episode.

And Joss showed us not only Joyce's could-have-been (to increase tragedy), but Buffy's and everyone else's as well. No, not could-have-been, their should-have-been.

Another incredible scene:



Ok, enough stalling. I'll get back to the book and work up the rest of Faith's character arc next.

I lied. I have to post this—



It includes the whole 'could-have-been' I was talking about, for the entire group. You can't hear it of course, but you get the idea. It's once again a flashback (like it was the moment Anya got a sword through her chest) to a sweet, wonderful moment when the whole group was together, including Buffy's mom, and everything was perfect.

God, what an amazing, one-of-a-kind show. There's never been anything else like it.

Lasting consequences of the death of Buffy's mom

Watching my way through season 6. Now that I understand the theme of the show is developing maturity, Joyce's death (Buffy's mom) becomes one of the most pivotal events in the entire show. It forced Buffy to grow up too fast. Joss and the writing team seem to really understand the necessity of suffering in growth. It's the most harrowing incidents, the ones that leave lasting scars, that force us to let go of some of our bad (immature) habits and hopefully develop better ones.

And suddenly I understand why at the beginning of season 5 Buffy's little sister Dawn was introduced and retconned in as if she had always been there. Buffy never had a little sister, but suddenly at the beginning of season 5 she does, and it's as if she always did. And what's more, though viewers are utterly baffled, all the characters seem to have known and loved Dawn all along. This is some genius level trolling. What it is really is the next, and totally next-level, unannounced dream sequence. I mean, it isn't a dream—there really suddenly is a younger sister named Dawn, but she was created and inserted into Buffy's family and group of friends, complete with false memories all around ala Bladerunner. It's a magic spell treated like the series of ever-bigger, ever-bolder unannounced dreams and fantasies Buffy (the show) has become famous for. An unannounced spell that changed the world while we weren't looking, in between seasons. Very dreamlike.

Buffy's infamous unannounced dream sequences
This is one of the more fun and interesting things about the show. They're very adept at inserting a scene that seems legit at first but that gradually becomes strange—even bizzare—until you realize it must be a dream or the POV character's (usually Buffy's) momentary fantasy. They started small in the beginning, but they did it so well, and the audience recieved it so well, that it became a fixture and they started pushing the boundaries. How long can it go on—how far can reality be bent or twisted before people realize it's another dream sequence?

In this case it went on for several episodes. I think it was like 6? We had been primed for it. In later seasons there had been some that went for like ten minutes before things got too out of hand. It had become a game—a test of their skill. The writers and directors were testing their abilities and finding no practical limits, so they decided to push farther. I think there might have been an entire episode that was an unannounced dream. I'd need to look into it, but that seems right. Oh that's right, it was an episode called Superstar, where a very minor geeky character named Jonathan did a spell that made him the coolest person in the world, admired by everyone, and a sort of super-spy who helped Buffy and was far better at the slaying than she was.

But all this is beside the point. The point is that

Dawn was introduced so that when Buffy's (and Dawn's) mom died, the pressure would be exponentially increased on Buffy.
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The sudden death was bad enough, but now, because there's a little sister in the picture, Buffy has to take over as a mother figure, and it's made clear that if she messes up Dawn will be taken away and put in a foster home. And even though Dawn was nothing but a bundle of energy until recently, she has become a real human being now, and is inextricably intertwined into the lives of all the main characters. She's new at being human, but she's completely human, and is bound by love to everyone. Hell, we've come to know and love Dawn already, over the course of the six episodes (or however many it was). So she's there to turn up the heat caused by Joyce's death. It really puts immense pressure on Buffy, who still needs to keep up with her slayer duties while also going to college and trying to find and hold down a job so she can start to pay all the bills. In season 5 her regular life (the one that doesn't involve demons, magic, or slaying vampires) becomes the 'big bad'—the thing that must be dealt with and has intense real-world consquences. This parallels what growing up is really like for all of us around that age. Many of us had been able to live like kids until the end of high school or somewhere thereabouts, but suddenly we had to get a job, and for many of us that required having a car which, even if it was a gift, required paying insurance and buying gas. So money becomes of prime importance. As does starting to take on responsibility and deal with pressures we never had before.

Buffy's character arc

Really the vampire/demon part of the show starts to become almost irrelevant now. Oh, they're still there, and still dangerous, but far from the main focus anymore. In fact most of the new demons and monsters are pretty silly now (starting in season 6). They seem cartoonish, and the real focus of the show is on Buffy's efforts to grow up rapidly. She tries several jobs and fails at each of them pretty quickly. And then, to make it all even worse, suddenly Giles (her mentor figure) announces that he's going back to England where he came from. So she no longer has adult leadership or anyone older to turn to for help making decisions.

She's devastated, all beginning that one moment when she walked in the house, all carefree and happy, and found her mother lying dead on the couch. She never really recovered from that. It was as if she went into shock that slowly abated, but the nightmare she fell into never did. It became her life, and she just had to try to live it every day despite the fact that she felt utterly inadequate. There's a repeated line that now becomes the motto of the show—

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In fact, it gets worse than all that. Season 5 ended with Buffy literally sacrificing herself to save her little sister and the world. She willingly died. Then at the beginning of season 5 her friend Willow (the witch, whose power has been growing by leaps and bounds) does a spell to bring her back. It works, but Buffy is strangely disconnected, detached emotionally from all her friends. I now realize this can be seen as the very natural result of what she's been through in the real world—the death of her mother mainly, and the mounting pressures of young adult life. The show works in such a way that if you remove the supernatural elements—demons, vampires, monsters, spells etc—it all still connects up. Those are really metaphors for the real-world things going on in her life.

Damn, how did I not see it like this before? I mean, I did know vampires etc were to some extent metaphors but I didn't realize anything like the full extent of it—the depth and breadth of it—or how fully integrated all these metaphors really are. And I never quite grasped that the main theme was growing up, and that her becoming the slayer symbolized it. Re-watching the show with that understanding brings out levels of insane genius I was completely unaware of. I suppose really the most powerful character arc in the show is Buffy's, when you consider all these things.

Dark Willow character arc

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While I'm talking character arcs for season 6, this is where Willow does her Dark Phoenix arc. And I can almost guarantee that's where it originated from—Joss is a self-confessed comic book junkie from way back. Plus, it being a weekly TV show, they did the thing where you steal ideas from movies, other shows, comic books, and whatever. You can literally be watching and say "Oh, this episode is based on Aliens (or a Star Trek episode, or in this case an extremely famous X Men arc). Frequently a single episode will mash up parts of many different influences.

Willow started as an almost painfully shy computer nerd (and in many ways the moral compass of the show) and has been becoming an increasingly powerful witch season by season. Magic has become an addiction for her, and she's started using her powers to 'help' her friends, without asking their permission or letting them know she's doing it. Like when she pulled Buffy out of what they all assumed was some hell-dimension, but Buffy was morose and detached for a long time afterwards and eventually revealed (in the musical episode Once More, with Feeling) that she had actually been in heaven, and that being brought back here felt like being in hell. But Willow didn't learn her lesson from that. Her lover Tara went through something horrific and Willow decided, without asking her, to make her feel better by doing a spell to make her forget it all. When Tara found out she was pissed, and Willow seemed not to understand why. But she promised to stop using magic for a week to prove that she isn't addicted, and that she can control herself with it. She broke that promise almost immediately, many times over, and has done things to random strangers against their will for her own amusement several times now. Example—merely for the crime of being fratboy-types she forced two guys at The Bronze to go-go dance in bikinins in cages, and changed other people's genders and costumes. It was played for laughs, but imagine if a man had forced two women into bikinis and made them dance in cages against their will. She's headed for really dark territory now, as her power grows exponentially and her ability and desire to control it evaporate, and then a man accidentally kills her lover Tara. That pushes her completely over the limit, her eyes turn opaque black, and she becomes Dark Willow (She's never actually called that, it's my name for this phase of her arc).

I'm wondering if any of this relates to Buffy, since Willow represents her spirit. Xander is her heart, Willow is her spirit, and Giles is her mind. Oh shit, and Giles has just left the country! Does that mean Buffy has lost her mind? Lol, kidding—not everything they do relates to her. But to an extent it could mean that, since this is where Buffy begins her totally irrational superpowered sexual affair with Spike, her enemy. Perhaps an addiction to him, to his new power over her? Because he just discovered that the computer chip embedded in his brain (that makes him suffer intense pain if he hurts a human being) doesn't stop him from attacking Buffy for some reason. She's the one person he can actually hurt. I guess that makes him a real bad boy to her now, and suddenly she's hot for him. I think it's all also a release from the stress of having to be Adult Buffy.

Bonus video clip:

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I just got confirmation that indeed Willow's magic addiction relates to Buffy's Spike addiction. They made it clear right at the beginning of the episode I'm watching. Buffy was explaining to her little sister that Willow 'has a problem,' and there was a quick flashback to the house-destroying super-sex she had with Spike last episode.

I'm sort of wondering too if the super-sex between Jessica Jones and Luke Cage was informed by this. Not necessarily, but I've noticed lots of other things in JJ that could be lifted straight from Buffy, in the same way the Buffy team lifted from so many sources. Buffy was a feminist icon and a female superhero, it would almost be required viewing for anybody wanting to make a show about Jessica Jones.

Just want to pop in and say my god, season 6 is pretty lame for the most part. Ridiculous situations (in fact it becomes a sitcom at times, with the three nerd guys somehow able to make impossible super-weapons like an invisibility ray, a freeze-ray, and a time-stopper, incredibly lifelike robots so realistic the Buffy-bot could easily be mistaken for the real Buffy even by her closest friends, etc). Even at its lowest, the show had never stooped anywhere near this level.

I strongly suspect Joss had almost no direct input on it by this point, except for maybe a very general overview and the occasional episode that maybe he wrote and/or directed. He had probably made Angel his main focus by now, and possibly was already developing his next show? Not sure. But Buffy seems to have been left in the hands of the writers, without proper adult supervision from Joss. The difference is plain to see (hear?) from the way they each do commentary tracks for episodes they wrote or directed. Joss can be a goofball, but briefly, and his main focus is on important deep-level stuff—the attention to detail that made the show amazing through seasons three and four (in particular), and whenever he took over an episode. Most of the other writers and directors talk mainly about silly nerd stuff, as if that's their main focus, and talk about the show almost as if they're viewers rather than the creators. Or at least a couple of them do, I might be being unfair to the rest.

Apparently after Joss, Jane Espenson consistenly wrote the next-best episodes. But I noticed one in season six with her name on it that was incredibly silly and almost didn't feel like it belonged in Buffy at all (the one where she worked at a fast food joint). Though I did pick up on some themes about the dangers of eating too much highly processed food and of brainwashing. The entire crew of the restaurant were brainwashed by training videos and endlessly-repeated mantras, and the free food they ate seemed to make them highly susceptible to it and put them into a zombie-trance (Buffy refused to eat any of it). And—what was the other part?

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Oh, Halfrek (a vengeance demon and old friend of Anya's) brainwashed her with some particularly nasty feminazi-type propaganda all about how horrible and useless men are, and that they all need to be destroyed or tortured forever in hell. This was a big part of what led Anya back to being a vengeance demon and to distrusting Xander, who she was about to marry (though he was definitely no prize as husband material, and had his own deep issues about the marriage). So it helped propel her along the tragic arc I already discussed a page or two back.

... And suddenly I see something—one of the tropes that get repeated in Buffy, possibly several times, but at least was used twice here in season six. Anya's venegeance-demon friend Halfrek and Willow's powerful witch-friend Amy play the same role in their character arcs. Both of them (Anya and Willow) are recovering addicts—Willow to magic and the power it gives her, and Anya to being a terrifying and destructive vengeance demon who destroys men, and their friends are still deeply entrenched in what they're trying to escape from, and pull them back into it. Some serious and highly tragic enabler vibes.

I think I'm done re-watching Buffy. I can't recall any more spectacular episodes after the musical, which I've already passed. But I will get back to reading the Buffy and philosophy book. Relating parts of the show to various philosophies really does make things interesting. Sometimes I think the authors are reaching quite a ways—in certain cases (like with Faith's character arc for instance) they may well have based it on some of Nietzche's ideas, but often it's more of a coincidence. And that doesn't invalidate the book. I don't think they're saying the writers specifically based anything on these philosophies, just that there's a good deal of similarity—that what Joss and company are doing with the show parallels the ideas some philosophers presented. It brings clarity to both the underlying concepts in the show and to the philosophies, which without context like this can be pretty dull to read about.

You are a potential slayer

After a few days I was bored and went back to watching. The rest of season six was pretty dismal, but season seven has a totally different feel to it—different from any other season in fact. Where six was a goofy comedy, seven is suffused with horror, and that's something that's been surprisingly missing until now. The cinematography is frequently very dark, in fact often the backgrounds are pitch black. The season has a nice creepy unsettling vibe to it, evident in the visuals and the sound track. And frequently Buffy looks really beat up, more so than we've seen her before, though her fighting spirit remains strong.

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One of the major trends of season seven is the potentials—potential slayers, who are gathering in Sunnydale from all over the world, drawn here because everything is coming to a head. Not only because the show is ending, but (story logic to support prior fact) because something is wrong with Buffy (the slayer) now. It's been wrong ever since she was brought back to life back in season five. Whatever it is (and I have no idea), it's why Spike was able to hurt her and only her, with a chip implanted in his head preventing him from harming humans (one of Asimov's Laws of Vampirics?). And now the Big Bad for this season—a vast and primordial power called The First (short for The First Evil) can sense that Buffy is somehow broken, and that creates a vulnerability that The First can exploit to bring massive cataclysm all over the world. So what we have here is end-times stuff. Seems like the appropriate way to send off the show.

I wasn't able to find video, but when the potential slayers all gathered at Buffy's house, she did a speech which I believe is where the idea comes from (as I mentioned long ago on this thread) that Buffy represents everybody—all the viewers. Here's the heart of the speech:

"I know you're all tired. Far away from home, anxious. But you're all special. Most people in this world have no idea why they're here, or what they want to do. You do. You have a mission—a reason for being here. You're not here by chance. You're here because you are the chosen ones."​

It's as if she's speaking to the viewing audience directly. Since the whole overarching metaphor of the show is about growing up, and since Buffy's battles against vampires and demons represent her overcoming specific obstacles to that, I believe this is what she's referring to here—not only to the potential slayers, but to the audience (those who are the right age anyway). 'You know what to do' means you're aware you must grow up, as difficult and painful as that is. And the reason viewers of Buffy are chosen—why they in particular have this mission to grow up? Because they've been subconsciously absorbing the lessons of the show all along, through the metaphors. At least I think Joss and the writers believe this (or at least they believe it makes a cool meta-textual device in a very meta-textual show).

Link it up with this speech:

"From now on, every girl in the world who might be a Slayer, will be a Slayer. Every girl who could have the power, will have the power."
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From a little later in the season. Of course this one only covers girls, but then the previous speech was aimed at girls too. Slayers are always girls for some reason (story logic. Feminism).

But it never felt like it was just a female empowerment thing (though it definitely was that). More like a human empowerment thing maybe. I related to Buffy, even though I'm a guy, in the same way I related to Lara Croft while playing Tomb Raider. Neither one made snide hateful speeches about men, or had to tear down the men around them in order to try to appropriate their power. Instead it was actually about women who were strong and independent, in the same way men have to be that in order to be considered men.

But then there's This...

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Here it's clear not everybody is chosen. I always kind of thought Xander represents the ordinary schlubs—us viewers who don't have special powers, yet still find ourselves up against demons and vampires now and then. He was a self-insert for Joss—a nerdy weird-talking doofus who represents the heart of the show (Buffy's heart) but never really escapes his loser-ness entirely, despite the occasional moment when he gets to shine.

Hey, I just realized the clue to Xander being a stand-in for Joss is in the names. Xander is short for Alexander, but it's not the standard short version for it. Just as Joss is short for Joseph, but is hardly the common short form either. I think he took it from the old way of abbreviating it—Jos. (with a period).

I think maybe it's an inconsistent theme though. At times maybe Buffy does represent you, the viewer, just as at times Xander represents Buffy's heart and Willow her spirit, while both of them also remain individual characters with their own personalities and challenges. I'll bet it's really hard to keep themes consistent throughout a long-running television show.

The Two Towers and The Avengers

I just watched the finale. Actually I'm going through it a second time listening to Joss' commentary track. He wrote and directed it (as he did I think all the season openers and closers).

Two things I want to point out that I noticed—he used a couple of his standard tricks in the episode that he also used in The Avengers, and also there's a strong The Two Towers vibe.

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Here we see Willow, sort-of revisiting her Dark Phoenix arc, only instead of her hair turing black it turns white, and her eyes don't become solid back orbs of evil. She's been laying off the magic for a long time now because of the addiction to it she's still in recovery from, but she had to go in one more time and work some powerful mojo to help save mankind from ultimate evil. I guess her soul is purified now, because she did her best impression of Ganldalf the White, returing from his battle against the Balrog. But that isn't the Two Towers thing I really want to mention. It comes very near the end of the final episode, in the massive battle against hordes of evil Ubervamps—in a huge cavern under Sunnydale:

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I wondered on seeing this which came first, this episode or The Two Towers. Ok, actually it was pretty clear, seeing both the White Willow thing and then the massive battle against endless hordes of computer-cloned identical enemies. Isn't that the way every Avengers movie ended? He took it from Peter Jackson's trilogy, used it in Buffy, and then again in the first Avengers, where it became enshrined as formula. I hardly needed it, but Joss confirmed in the commentary that he had indeed seen The Two Towers and learned about the CGI cloning effects used there.

But there was another thing he used in Buffy (several times) and in The Avengers, and that's—well, the best way I can get it across is by saying remember the scene on the Shield helicarrier where Loki used the Spear of Destiny to make all the Avengers argue and fight among themselves? This one, if you don't know what I'm talking about:

Well, that's unfortunate. You can click through and watch it on YouTube though
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The same idea is used several times throughout Buffy's run. Not with a Spear of Destiny, but the idea of the team arguing and falling apart. It's a pretty powerful device.