Buffy The Vampire Slayer Part 5: This Is Hell

 

 

Buffy The Vampire Slayer should have finished at the end of its fifth season.

OK, some might have seen this as something of a downer, given that it climaxed with the eponymous heroine sacrificing herself to save the world. But in its sixth season, everything basically goes to shit.

 

Buffy is dragged out of Heaven by her unwitting friends, then has to literally claw her way out of her grave. Giles leaves town. Xander jilts Anya at the altar. Willow gets addicted to magic in an extended metaphor for drug dependency. Buffy and Spike engage in a secret, self-destructive relationship. Tara dumps Willow. And then things get even worse...

There's nothing wrong, necessarily, with shows taking a darker direction. Arguably, there's even something admirable in the resurrection of Buffy being shown as difficult, painful and with unforeseen repercussions, rather than benefitting from some deus ex machina plot device that restores everything to the way it was by the end of Episode 1. Once again, Sarah Michelle Gellar gets to show her acting chops by portraying revenant Buffy as traumatised and catatonic in the opening couple of episodes.

One of the main problems, though, is that there is so much in Season 6 which is just plain unpleasant. Even before Charisma Carpenter and others went public with their allegations against Joss Whedon, rewatching the last two seasons of Buffy revealed a ramping up of mysogynystic content - always shown as wrong (if, on at least one dangerous occasion, redeemable), but cumulatively contributing to an unwelcome emphasis. I don't think ostensibly fantasy-based artforms should avoid real-world issues; quite the opposite. And a show that's pretty explicitly about female empowerment? Sure, there should be something pretty powerful about it taking on mysogyny.

But the tone is set in the second part of the opener Bargaining, when a demon biker crew, aiming to pillage Sunnydale having learnt of Buffy's death, confront the Scooby Gang. Not only does their leader, Razor, make an explicit rape threat. He then goes on to warn that his crew have "anatomical incompatabilities that tend to tear up little girls."

I'm no prude, but who the fuck let that line through? 

From the off, Buffy had always mixed good-natured snark, swashbuckling action, genuine emotion, character development and quick-witted comedy. But in season 6, the shifting tones finally started to jar against each other. Nowhere was this more evident than in this series' putative Big Bads. The alliance of Warren Mears (Season 5 robot-maker and manufacturer of the Buffybot), longstanding supporting character Jonathan Levinson and Andrew Wells (a new character, but brother of Tucker, the kid who sent demondogs to the prom in Season 3) initially seem to have been brought in as a comic counterpoint to the bleak heaviness of the season's first three episodes. They're geeks! They bicker! They are essentially rubbish at villainy! What larks!

 

However, as if tainted by the moral murkiness elsewhere, things take a turn. In the mid-season episode Dead Things, they create a doohickey which allows them to, er, turn women into sex slaves. Warren uses it on Katrina, his ex from the previous season - who regains control of her senses in time to point out that what they're planning on doing to her is rape. Jonathan and Andrew at least seem shocked by the realisation - though it's pretty fucking obvious - but Warren? Well, Warren kills her by hitting her over the head with a bottle.

This is the episode where it becomes clear that The Trio have gone from being proto-Big Bang Theory irritants to incels avant la lettre, a development which will belatedly give the season a direction which it had previously lacked. Prior to this, there are too many throwaway episodes of a type not seen for a few years, like the one where Dawn falls for a boy who's really a vampire or the one where Buffy gets a job at a burger bar and suspects there's something wrong with the food's special ingredient. There are, however, two really great done-in-ones which reverse the trend.

Once More, With Feeling is probably the single most famous Buffy episode. In some ways a counterpoint to Season 4's Hush, where the characters' voices were silenced, this time round a demon casts a spell which makes Sunnydale residents break into song (and dance!) and reveal their secrets. Before the successes of High School Musical or Glee, this was a high risk strategy, but it was also the one shining moment in Season 6 which recaptured the magic (no pun intended) of earlier efforts. Amber Benson, Emma Caulfield and Anthony Head are all particularly great, with the first-named's Under Your Spell a moving paean to her love for Willow. It's an important episode to the season's narrative, as secrets are revealed that will change the course of nearly every main character's lives, but it's also an impressive creative and technical achievement.

 

The other highlight is a more muted affair. In Normal Again, a demon injects Buffy with a drug that makes her hallucinate a different reality: one where she is a patient in a psychiatric hospital, the events of the last six years a figment of her imagination. As well as giving Gellar another interesting dual role, it allows for some pretty meta dialogue, particularly from the doctor treating her. Of Dawn, he says, "She was introduced last year. It didn't make a lot of sense though, did it?", while this season's rather underwhelming villains are addressed when he questions what this deceleration of threat level says about the state of Buffy's psyche. "You used to create these grand villains to battle against. And now what is it? Just ordinary students you went to high school with. No gods or monsters, just three pathetic little men... who like playing with toys." It's interesting to note the way that some of these statements acknowledge criticisms that the show's fanbase might have had of the ways things have turned out. Buffy eventually resists the idea that her Sunnydale life is a fantasy, but the final shot of the episode is of her as a catatonic mental patient, leaving the rather chilling possibility that nothing we've seen has been real. I mean, obviously it's not real, but... you know what I mean. Weirdly, the thing this all reminds me of the most is the alternative realities experienced by John Simm and Keeley Hawes in Life On Mars and Ashes To Ashes.

 

This episode is part of Buffy's principal story arc for the season, exploring her difficulties in dealing with her return to the living after an extended stay in what appears to have been a sort of Heaven. By contrast, life on earth is "hard, and bright, and violent. Everything I feel, everything I touch ... this is hell." Unwilling to let her friends know what their actions have done, it's Spike in whom she confides, ultimately leading to a sexual relationship which had almost certainly already been explored on turn-of-the-millennium fanfic forums. In many ways, it made sense. Spike had been a fan favourite who'd gradually become a key part of proceedings over the years, even demonstrating heroism and bravery, particularly in Season 5; Buffy had form with vampire lovin', and was feeling alienated from the rest of the Scooby Gang. And while the scene where their love-making literally makes a house collapse around them is kinda silly, there's also something undeniably sexy about their clandestine relationship. But then, in the episode Seeing Red, Spike attempts to rape Buffy. She manages to fight him off, and he leaves Sunnydale, but both his crime and Buffy's reaction to it are rather pushed aside due to events later in the episode.

We'll get back to that in due course, but first we need to talk about Willow and Tara. There's an argument that the former is the character with by far the most interesting development throughout the entire run of Buffy, from nervous, nerdy best friend to powerful witch while, with first Oz then Tara, being half of the show's two most believable (and sweetest) romantic couplings. In keeping with the darker tone of Season 6, however, the latter relationship is threatened by Willow's increasing use of, and dependency on, magic. If the drug addiction metaphors are laid on pretty thick, Alyson Hannigan does at least do a pretty good job of selling Willow's descent, as she argues with Giles, uses an amnesia spell on Tara, changes Amy back from a rat, gets in with a warlock and endangers Dawn. It seems like a redemptive arc though, and by the end of the episode Entropy, her and Tara seem to be back together. And then: Seeing Red.

But let's not sideline Tara here. Through Season 6, she becomes the heart of the Scooby Gang. She brings Willow back from the precipice of addiction. It's her who Buffy confides in about her relationship with Spike. With Giles back in London and Buffy's mother dead, she almost inhabits the role of the grown-up in the room. She also, by the by, has the best voice in Once More, With Feeling. Amber Benson's performance is brilliant, conveying Tara's sweet but occasionally steely core. And yet, the sense that she's undervalued by the show's creators persists. She doesn't even get her own spot on the opening credits. And then: Seeing Red.

Amber Benson is on the opening credits.

Much of the episode is the sort of standard fare established earlier in the season. The geeks get their hands on magic orbs which bestow the wearer with great strength. Later, Warren uses them to try and steal a load of cash from an armoured car. Jonathan secretly helps Buffy stop him; he and Andrew end up arrested, while Warren gets away. Whatever.

In the final scene of the episode, Warren shows up at Buffy's house, shooting at her and Xander outside before firing random shots in the air. One of these goes through the window where a recently-reconciled Willow and Tara are stood. So, which character do you reckon ends up dying?

The whole thing leaves a nasty taste, particularly coming on the back of Spike's attempted sexual assault of Buffy. Willow and Tara were probably the most visible lesbian couple on US TV at this point, but this turn of events reduces Tara to a victim, and is in danger of casting the vivid portrayal of their relationship as merely a means to an end, its violent end a catalyst to force this season to where it was going all along. For all that Warren Mears was a nasty, sociopathic piece of shit, him and his comedy mates were never really gonna be the Big Bad. The Big Bad was Willow Rosenberg.

 

The idea of the super-powered heroine turning to the dark side is one that found its most famous (and powerful) realisation in the Dark Phoenix Saga that played out in the X-Men comic for most of 1980. It's such an iconic part of X-Men lore that they had two goes at it in the movies, but neither could come close to the original's potency. Marvel themselves would reheat the idea for a story arc involving the Scarlet Witch nearly a decade later (which would also later feed into MCU storylines involving Wanda Maximoff). And speaking of witches...

Part of the success of the Dark Phoenix Saga was due to its slow build towards disaster, and it's clear that Willow's corruption through magic is something which had been patiently explored for some time in order to set up the end of Season 6. Alyson Hannigan had previously shown that she could do the dark side with her two performances as Vamp Willow in earlier seasons, but while those appearances were leavened by a certain humour, the Dark Willow that emerges as a result of Tara's death is terrifying. There's something kinda cool about the powerful way she stops the bus on which she believes Warren is fleeing town. But the torture scene when she finally catches up with him is one of the most hardcore of Buffy's entire run. Slowly forcing a bullet into him, sewing his mouth shut, then instantanteously flaying him (after declaring, "Bored now.") and setting him on fire. God knows Warren deserved his comeuppance, but this was tonally very different from anything else the show had previously shown, and all the more shocking by being delivered at the hands of one of its (previously) gentlest characters. In lieu of a wisecrack, Willow's last words before disappearing are "One down," demonstrating that her desire for vengeance isn't restricted to ringleader Warren. 

The penultimate episode, continuing that thought with its title "Two To Go", is therefore about the rest of the Scooby Gang attempting to protect the bumbling if not blameless Jonathan and Andrew before Willow makes with the flaying another couple times. There's a memorable exchange between Buffy and Willow, with the latter pointing out that the former hasn't exactly been loving the world lately: "I know you were happier when you were in the ground." Willow defeats Buffy in combat, and it becomes clear that she's now a world-threatening power. In some ways, though, the entire episode feels like a set-up for its conclusion; as Willow announces, "There's no one in the world who has the power to stop me now," she's hit by a powerful spell, as Giles unexpectedly emerges to declare, "I'd like to test that theory."

It turns out that some sort of British coven had (temporarily) granted Giles powers, having been alerted psychically to the dangers of Willow's black magic. Their faith in the big man isn't entirely repaid; while he does manage to subdue Willow, she soon gains telepathic control of Anya to escape, defeating Giles and - in a neat parallel to where Buffy started the season - casts her and Dawn into an underground tomb, before heading off to locate a Satanic temple beneath Sunnydale and bring it to the surface. Or something. The exact detail of her plan is irrelevant, but the intended result is literally the end of the world.

Don't worry, it doesn't happen! And, improbably but in a way that ultimately makes perfect sense, it's all thanks to Xander. Confronting Willow right at the end, he takes everything she throws at him, continually assuring her that he loves her. As much as she initially mocks him, his persistence pays off and the rage of Dark Willow gives way to the grief and vulnerability of, er, Regular Willow. The world is saved, and Xander, the creepy man baby who has been in so many ways the weakest link in the Scooby Gang since day one, actually redeems himself.

So, Buffy Season Six, then. Some pretty lacklustre episodes and a few brilliant ones; bad shit happening to pretty much everyone; actively irritating bad guys. For all I kinda wish it had never happened, those last three episodes, with Dark Willow belatedly becoming the proper Big Bad, are remarkable, and I accept that in various ways the rest of the run was necessary to build up to its finale. Let's hope that's all the mysogyny out of the way, though, eh?

Oh...

 

anatomical incompatibilities that, uh, tend to tear up little girls.

Read more at: https://transcripts.foreverdreaming.org/viewtopic.php?f=122&t=8406