Bargaining 1 & 2

[Updated May 2, 2013]

I need to begin S6 with some comments about how I see the season in the overall context of the series. I saw S1-5 as tracking Buffy’s progress to becoming an adult. As I read The Gift, she dived off the tower into adulthood. The natural consequence of that reading is that S6-7 should be understood as dealing with the first stages of Buffy’s journey as an adult.

In all previous seasons, Joss never knew if the show would be renewed for another season. At the end of S5 the show moved to a new network and he had a two year deal. I see S6 and S7 as one long, extended story about Buffy’s adult journey. That, in my view, explains both why Joss didn’t write the finale to S6 (the only finale he didn’t write), and why S6 ends on a cliffhanger.

Because of the move to the new network, because UPN had a very relaxed view of “standards and practices” (i.e., censorship), and because Buffy moved into new territory as an adult, S6 made some daring choices. There are very dark passages, very adult themes; naturally, the taste for such things will vary, especially given the contrast with previous seasons.

To say that S6 was controversial would be understating the situation a lot. I doubt there’s ever been a more controversial season on any show (not that I could measure such a thing anyway). As if further evidence of this were needed, the Mark Watches reviews of S6 episodes within the last few months generated raging internet debates over 10 years after the original air date. I guess I should be impressed that the show can inspire such emotion over such a long period of time, even if things got more than a bit out of control. Still, what happened there was just a small sample of the fights which took place in real time.

The season as a whole was controversial, one particular metaphor was controversial, and one episode, Seeing Red, became probably the most controversial episode of any TV show ever. Since I think the social impact of the series is important, I’ll be discussing all of this in addition to the individual episodes as we go along.

In previous seasons we saw Buffy learn from the mistakes of others. The show used devices such as “shadow self” (Cordelia, Faith) to tell us what she should not do, leaving Buffy herself to learn to follow the right path after seeing the wrong one. This changes to some extent in S6 and S7, and I think that the change is one reason why these two seasons are so controversial among fans. In these two seasons, Buffy often learns from her own mistakes, as adults generally do. That is, we see her take the wrong path initially, only to figure it out by the end. Many people felt that this made her unsympathetic as a character. I disagree – I see that as true to life and as making her character less remote, as superheroes so often are.

My overall assessment, up front, is that S6 was like A Tale Of Two Cities: it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The peaks of S6 are (JMHO) the highest of any season. Unfortunately, I have very strong criticisms of one part of the story. Whether you love it or hate it, though, there’s nothing else like S6 in the whole history of television.

“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”

Joss wrote the season openers every year except in seasons 5 and 6. I don’t know why he didn’t write the opener in S5, but he had a very good excuse for not writing Bargaining in S6. We’ll see the result in, yes, episode 7.

The title – Bargaining – has multiple meanings in the episode:  Willow bargains for Buffy’s life; the vampire attempts a bargain with the demon bikers. Most important, though, is that “bargaining” is one of the five “stages of grief” hypothesized by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. The reference to the five stages is very clever on multiple levels, but I want to remind you in particular of this dialogue from Intervention, which I obviously think is intentional:

ANYA: We’re just kind of thrown by the you having sex with Spike.
BUFFY: The ... who whating how with huh?
ANYA: Okay, that's denial. That usually comes before anger.

Denial and anger are, respectively, the first two stages, bargaining is the third.

As applied in its original form – to impending death – bargaining “involves the hope that the individual can somehow postpone or delay death. Usually, the negotiation for an extended life is made with a higher power in exchange for a reformed lifestyle. Psychologically, the individual is saying, ‘I understand I will die, but if I could just have more time...’” Quote from link.

It’s worth asking whether someone in these episodes promised to be better – to reform her life – as part of a bargain, and what that might mean metaphorically:

DAWN: You told me I had to be strong ... and I've tried. (tearful) But it's been so hard without you.

Buffy still has eyes closed, frowning.

DAWN: I'm sorry. I promise I'll do better, I will! (still tearful) If you're with me. Stay with me ... please. I need you to live.

In my view, we need to interpret this via the metaphor. Dawn isn’t the Key anymore, but she still has a metaphorical role as Buffy’s inner child. Buffy’s inner child wants her slayer half – the adult half – to pay more attention to her, and promises to be better in return. Keep that metaphor in mind as we go through S6.

But remember also that there are 2 more stages; I think those are critical for understanding this season. That’s a hint.

Willow’s behavior in Bargaining touches on the debate regarding Buffy’s refusal to kill Dawn in The Gift: what price is worth paying, when does the end justify the means? It seems to me that when Willow sacrifices the fawn she’s metaphorically sacrificing her own innocence. She tells Tara that the ingredient was “vino de madre”. Literally translated, that means “wine of the mother”. Symbolically, it means “blood of Mother Earth”. Note the color change of Willow’s clothing: she’s wearing white in the scene with the fawn, red afterwards. She’s stained with blood. Will she ultimately think it’s worth that price?

Making matters worse is the fact that Willow concealed her actions from Tara and everyone else. I was a bit surprised that Tara went along with the idea of resurrecting Buffy, but it seems likely that pressure from Willow, her own sense of wanting Buffy back, and an unwillingness to ask the hard questions about Willow’s methods led Tara to agree.

For all that Willow gets a lot of criticism for resurrecting Buffy, she has some good arguments to make on her side. One is the one she emphasizes in these episodes, namely, the need to rescue Buffy from Hell. If you honestly believed someone was in Hell, I assume you’d be willing to do a lot to try to get her out. Medieval Catholics paid lots of money for indulgences to keep themselves and their loved ones out of “mere” purgatory or to shorten their time there. The incentives are huge.

In addition, there’s the fact that we as a society go to fairly great lengths to preserve life. Doctors try their best to restore a beating heart or otherwise bring back someone from the brink of death. Willow’s actions are consistent with that.

There are personal and consequential arguments too: Willow understandably misses her best friend. She recognized Buffy when Xander, Anya, and Tara didn’t; Buffy’s especially important to Willow, and there’s a good metaphorical reason for that in S6. Bear in mind also that Willow’s been saddled with a great deal of responsibility, and it’s clear that she’s barely held herself together except with the thought that Buffy might be brought back: “Nothing, it was all for nothing. Buffy's gone. She's really gone.”  She’s obviously been leading the SG in the nightly war against vampires, but Sunnydale needs a Slayer. Giles strongly implied this in the teaser and the invasion by the demon bikers reinforces Willow’s exercise of responsibility to restore the Hellmouth’s guardian.

Against all these, though, are some pretty serious downsides. Willow didn’t just conceal her methods from everyone, she and the others hid the very deed itself from Giles, Dawn, and Spike, all of whom had a right to know. It’s doubtful that Willow considered the full price of her spell, assuming she knows it. The gang seems never to have considered bringing Faith into Sunnydale in order to establish a new guardian. There are some other downsides in addition, one of which we’ll see next episode.

I’ll talk more in my next post about what it means for Buffy to be back. For now I’ll just make one point. Buffy’s first words were “Is this Hell?”. Writer Marti Noxon refers to the destruction Buffy sees as “the external manifestation of Buffy’s inner turmoil.” Buffy must have thought that her sacrifice in The Gift had been for naught. When she looks out over the tower, remembering back to the events of The Gift, it’s hard to tell if she’s thinking of suicide or if she believes she needs to jump again in order to save the world from the Hell it appears to be.

A final comment:

I’m not at all a fan of the demon bikers. The writing of them is over the top and needlessly heavy-handed. Worse yet, most demons on the show serve a metaphorical purpose. If there is one here, I don’t get it.

Trivia notes: (1) Xander’s “great googly moogly” comes from Maggie and the Ferocious Beast. (2) Xander referred to The Fury when Willow used telepathy to talk to him because that movie involved a girl with psychic powers. (3) Spike mentioned Dadaism after some of the Buffybot’s word salad. See the link (and recall that Buffy used a similar expression to Xander in The Freshman). (4) The fact that Dawn’s class created a high-tech, futurist society after reading Walden is surely intended as irony. Thoreau’s purpose in living by himself in the woods was to “see if I could not learn what [life] had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." That may refer to Buffy’s situation here. (5) Tara mentioned that they could perform the spell because Mercury was in retrograde. Mercury was the messenger god. One of his duties was to guide the souls of the dead to the underworld. In astrological retrograde, Mercury would then do the opposite, meaning guide the souls of the dead back to the world. (6) Willow’s invocation to the fawn – “Adonai, Helomi, Pine”, etc. – comes from a 17^th Century book of demonology called The Lesser Key of Solomon. The specific words are from the “Prayer at Calling”, which you can find here. (7) Tara’s “Grr! Arrgh!” as they bid goodbye to Giles is an in joke because it was taken from the closing credits of the show. (8) Willow calls on Osiris to resurrect Buffy, and it was Osiris whom Dawn invoked in Forever. (9) In Nightmares (S1) we saw that Buffy’s nightmare was rising out of a grave as a vampire. Here she has to claw her way out of her coffin just like one. SMG, as I mentioned in my notes on Nightmares, is somewhat claustrophobic and was not happy that Joss made her do this again after he promised not to. (10) Razor’s “I’ll service ya, girl toy.” is a pun. To “service” someone in American slang is to have sex with them. The phrase “girl toy” is a play on “boy toy” and may also refer to sex toys generally. (11) Xander’s “We got trouble. Right here in Hellmouth City.” plays off the lyrics from the song “Trouble” in The Music Man. (12) Tara’s spell invoking Aradia to find Willow is the same one Willow used in Fear, Itself. (13) Xander’s comment about Tara being Tinkerbell recalls Tara’s comment to Willow in Out of my Mind: “TARA: How'd you do that? With the light? WILLOW: Oh, you know. You taught me. TARA: I taught you teeny Tinkerbell light.” (14) NORAD, which Xander mentions, is the North American Aerospace Defense Command, and he means the headquarters. In short, it’s the command central for a nuclear war. “Defcon 1” is the highest level of alert. (15) “Gentlemen, start your engines” – what Razor says when they destroy the Buffybot – is the phrase used to start the Indianapolis 500. (16) Xander referred to the demon bikers as “the wild bunch” after the movie of that title. Some of the events in Bargaining 2 bear a general resemblance to the movie. (17) Xander’s “the better to cut you down to size” plays off the dialogue in the story Little Red Riding Hood. (17) The UPN Standards & Practices department was much more lenient than the WB’s. We see evidence of that here with Willow and Tara kissing in a romantic way (something the WB never allowed) and will see much more later. (18) For those watching on DVD, there was a lot of discussion over the summer between S5 and S6 about whether another Slayer would be called upon Buffy’s death. The answer is that there would not. The reason is that calling the new Slayer works only for one death. The Slayer line runs through Faith now, and has since Kendra died. It’s important to add that while Joss said this, that doesn’t mean the characters within the series realize it.