Primeval

[Updated May 1, 2013]

Unlike every other season, S4 has its climactic events in the penultimate episode. Primeval “concludes” the season, but the brilliant coda of Restless gives us closure. Because it comes right before Restless, Primeval is often overlooked or criticized, but I really enjoy the episode and can re-watch it repeatedly.

The teaser brings us to the conclusion of the theme we’ve been following since the reference to Of Human Bondage in The Freshman. Adam, who now stands in for Prof. Walsh as well as for the consequences of Prof. Walsh’s Initiative, promises Riley the lure which society, including particularly college, offers all of us in return for our compliance:

Adam: You have no power.  Not yet.  Once you forget your old life and embrace your destiny as I have, you will know power you've never dreamed of.  I think you're going to like it.

The final phase of the Initiative is to make this process an assembly line – the specific humans and demons in the Initiative itself are a synecdoche for all of us. Buffy’s challenge at this point of her journey to adulthood is to defeat Adam, thereby metaphorically rejecting college’s/society’s attempt to mold her into something monstrous. We therefore need to look at how Buffy defeats Adam in order to understand the remainder of the episode and the conclusion of the season.

As I’ve suggested throughout S4, and as Joss Himself says, a key theme of the season is identity. In order to understand the point of this theme to Buffy’s journey, I think it helps to start with the critical event(s) of the climax. As I’ve argued in several previous posts (The Freshman, The Initiative, and Goodbye Iowa), the challenge facing Buffy on this part of her journey is how to create her own identity. The price for Riley’s “reward” is the sacrifice of his own identity; as Adam tells him, and as we see clearly demonstrated by Riley’s inability to act on his own, he has no power. Buffy, it turns out, does – she’s “never been one to toe the line”. Here’s how it worked:

Willow (taking cards from a tarot deck): Spiritus...Spirit. (lays it down in front of her)

She hands a card to Xander.

Xander: Animus...Heart.

She hands a card to Giles.

Giles: Sophus...Mind.

Willow: And Manus...

Cut to Buffy punching Forrest.

Willow: (o.s.) The hand.

Buffy had to unify her mind, heart, and spirit. This is accomplished via metaphor, with each member of the SG serving as a representation of a particular aspect of Buffy. I first suggested this equation of these characters with these aspects of Buffy in the Introduction and this scene is obviously one source for that suggestion (we’ll see more in Restless and later episodes). I hasten to add that this reading is not original to me; many others at AtPO noted it and relied on it.

That this unification spell was an essential step for Buffy can hardly be doubted. It involves integrating essential features of her authentic self. I’ve mentioned before that themes which we see in S4 also appear in Joss’s series Dollhouse. In the episode which closes the first season of that show, Epitaph 1 (mild spoiler follows), one of the main characters tells others that she can show them the way to Safe Haven, a place where they’ll be protected from those trying to steal their identities: “Where no one can be changed. You die as you were born. Heart in concert with mind. I know the way to Safe Haven.” My emphasis. The idea in Primeval is much the same, only more elaborate in some ways.

That’s metaphor. On the storyline, it would be easy to criticize the reconciliation as rushed or incomplete, especially given the long-standing nature of the feelings which I discussed in the post on The Yoko Factor.  I think the fact that Spike played such a key role allowed the SG to put aside their differences. Those differences didn’t really vanish, but they could be pushed away and the blame cast on Spike – “Buffy: That’s where it came from, the stuff we said the other night.” – for the sake of the emergency.

I suggested in my post on The I in Team that Buffy adopted the wrong solution by attempting to join the Initiative. That was the cause of the problem, not a solution. The flaw was not that she went off on her own, per se, it was that she didn’t understand what her true identity consisted of, that is, she didn’t understand the “I” in the title. Buffy’s identity – her “I” – includes her friends, her metaphorical heart, mind and spirit. Her team and her identity are the same. The joining spell represents a commitment to that identity, just as Willow committed to hers in New Moon Rising.

After unifying her heart, mind, and spirit, Buffy then calls upon the essence of the First Slayer:

Willow: We enjoin that we may inhabit the vessel--the hand...daughter of Sineya...first of the ones...

What does it mean to call upon the essence of the Slayer? In my reading, becoming the Slayer is a metaphor for becoming a true adult. Thus, in order to defeat Adam, a metaphor for the false adulthood college and society try to force upon us, Buffy calls upon the powers of true adulthood: “The power of the Slayer and all who wield it. Last to ancient first, we invoke thee.  Grant us thy domain and primal strength.  Accept us in the power we possess.  Make us mind and heart and spirit join.  Let the hand encompass us.  Do thy will. …” Those powers include the mystical because that’s an essential part of life. Using that power to pull out Adam’s power center and float it away is a metaphorical way of rejecting both the power of a college and society which try to force us to conform and the monstrous results from that.

The actual execution of Buffy’s exercise of adult power was inspired by the comic series Promethea (feminine form of Prometheus). In essence (pun intended), Promethea is the essence of a being which manifests in our world through a series of different human bodies – vessels – down through the ages. That’s why Willow twice uses the word “vessel”, by whom she means Buffy: “We enjoin that we may inhabit the vessel”; “We implore thee, admit us, bring us to the vessel….” In the comics there’s a mystical connection between the vessels, so in Primeval we learn something hinted before with Faith, namely that there’s a mystical connection between Buffy and other Slayers.

There’s also a general anti-materialist and anti-science theme in the Promethea comics. This obviously ties in rather well with the science v. magic theme for S4. As I’ve mentioned before, the struggle against Adam highlights the masculine/feminine dichotomy for which science and magic, respectively, stand. Primeval emphasizes the masculine nature of Buffy’s opposition through the association of Adam as a botched science experiment, the military use intended for him, the rigid attitudes of Forrest and Col. McNamara, and the twisted nature of the “family” Adam has gathered together (ZombieWalsh, ZombieAngleman, DemonForrest, Adam himself, and Riley). Please do remember that the “masculinity” which is criticized here has nothing to do with any specific person’s gender; it’s the ideology, not the sex, against which Buffy fought.

Buffy’s situation contrasts that of Adam at all points. Her “family” is an organic one, developed out of friendship and love over the years. She isn’t giving orders to her “troops”, they’re helping her out of love and adding to her power. She doesn’t rely on science, but on magic and mystery. The spell that the SG used to overcome Adam was not knowledge that College or the Initiative could ever either acquire or disseminate: "You can never hope to know the source of our power. Yours is right here." In Doug Petrie’s phrase, “science gets its ass roundly kicked”. William B suggested in comments that the anti-science theme is more nuanced than Petrie’s comment seems, and I think he’s right: “I do think that rather than anti-science, the season more argues that the human (psychological/ethical) condition can't be reduced to science. … it's the use of the tools of science to exert control that is Walsh's (and Adam's, and the Initiative's generally) downfall.”

The phrase “the source of our power” is nicely ambiguous. I’m inclined to see it as meaning (a) the united force of her friends; (2) the metaphorical joinder of heart, mind, and spirit; and (3) the power of the Slayer/adulthood. Any of the three probably works individually as well.

By defeating not just Adam but the government and (by inference, since the message got muddled) university attempts to create monsters out of disparate parts, Buffy rejected the effort to force her into “normality”. Instead she reaffirmed her own identity, consisting of heart, mind, and spirit.

Now let’s talk about the demons. William B. suggested in a comment that WTWTA provides a reminder that repression merely leads to a break out later on. That showed us in metaphor what actually happens with the caged demons in Primeval. As the voiceover at the end explains,

“Man: It was an experiment.  The Initiative represented the Government's interests in not only controlling the otherworldly menace, but harnessing its power for our own military purposes.  The considered opinion of this council is that this experiment has failed. …

Man (v.o): … I trust the irony of that is not lost on any of us.  Maggie Walsh's vision…was brilliant, but ultimately unsupportable.

Man (v.o): The demons cannot be harnessed, cannot be controlled.”

We’ve known this since S3. The vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness are intrinsic to the world. Society can no more control them than Joyce could in Gingerbread. Nothing external can change them.

This has important consequences for the other themes of S4. If demons can’t be controlled from the outside, then Bentham was wrong about the reformation of character via the panopticon. Spike’s essential nature can’t be changed with a chip.

Nor, ultimately, could Riley’s. Maggie Walsh did to Riley what she’d done to Spike and what Kathy tried to do with Buffy in Living Conditions – steal his identity. Riley thought he had a secret identity; turns out it was a different secret identity than the one he thought he had. As with Spike, Riley’s chip takes away his ability to act on his own volition, to choose his own path. Where Spike’s case might have been arguable, and where we might even have justified it because of Spike’s vampiric nature, Riley’s is not. He’s a person and what Maggie did to him is an abomination. This is where the shift in focus to Adam really changed the way we might view the season. The emotional resonance of what happened to Riley was lost because Maggie’s been dead for months, and Adam wasn’t the guilty party in his case.

Yes, Riley seems "better" than the SG (and Xander always sees him that way), but I think the end of TYF tells us that may not be the case. After Buffy storms out and says she's going to find someone she can count on, the scene cuts to the high school and good old dependable Riley isn't there. His programmer has summoned him. And for all his good qualities, that's Riley too.

Riley’s a fundamentally decent person whose love for Buffy leads him to reject his programming, just as Angel’s love for Buffy led him to the road to recovery from his metaphorical addiction. He’s been moving in that direction since the fog was lifted from his eyes in Goodbye Iowa, but his journey was longer than he could have realized. Staying with the Initiative, even with his eyes open, as he tried to do from Goodbye Iowa through New Moon Rising, couldn’t work. He not only had to leave permanently, he had to consciously remove the programming Prof. Walsh had installed in him. Riley’s removal of the chip is pretty unrealistic, as are other features of the chip if you think about it. However, the chip is a metaphor for the way he’s been forced onto the “normal” track (like Philip in Of Human Bondage). The removal of the chip signifies his rejection of that path, similar to Buffy’s removal of Adam’s power core.

One interesting point to contemplate as we move forward: Did Riley only come to like Buffy because Walsh told him to? In The Initiative, Prof. Walsh told Riley that she liked Buffy. This was important to Riley (mother’s approval). He even mentioned it to Buffy in The I in Team:

Riley: It's . . . a little unusual.  She's just not used to it.  Maybe because you barely ever opened your mouth in her classroom.  But I know she likes you.  In fact, she liked you before I did.

Buffy: (hopeful) Really?

Riley: Told me so herself.

Consider this dialogue in light of what we now know about his chip. How much of his identity was really him and how much was created by Maggie Walsh and social expectations (regardless of the chip)?

Trivia notes: (1) Spike’s reference to getting Buffy into the Initiative as going “down the rabbit hole” is a reference to Alice in Wonderland. (2) When Spike referred to Buffy as “Nancy Drew”, he meant the eponymous heroine of young adult detective novels. (3) If you really want to know about asymmetric key algorithms for encryption, see here. (4) When Xander said Spike had to “get his ya-yas”, he was referencing the Rolling Stones song “Get Yer Ya-Yas Out”. (5) Buffy’s “give the demon his due” plays off the phrase “give the devil his due”. (6) We didn’t see Riley tell Buffy about Adam’s uranium power core, but Riley learned it from Jonathan in Superstar. (7) David Fury wrote most of the episode, but Marti Noxon wrote the scenes in the elevator shaft. (8) “Must See TV” was NBC’s advertising slogan during the 1990s. (9) Spike’s “Dr. Owe Me One” puns off of Obi-Wan from Star Wars. (10) When Willow says “there’s no there there” regarding the space behind Room 314, she’s referencing a quote by Gertrude Stein (who said it about the city of Oakland, CA). (11) Note that the escape from the Initiative during the battle was a scaled-up version of Spike’s escape in The Initiative. Joss wanted Spike’s escape to be “epic”; now we see why. (12) In comments, State of Siege offered a post-modernist interpretation of the series which is too long to quote here but is definitely worth reading. There are spoilers, but they’re labeled.