As You Were

[Updated May 2, 2013]

Anyone who’s so obsessive as to rank all 144 BtVS episodes (ahem) will, necessarily, have one which finishes dead last at No. 144. For me, that episode is As You Were, one of only 2 episodes I actually dislike (the other is Dead Man’s Party). I’ll summarize the reasons why without even mentioning the “Mary Sue” nature of Mrs. Finn or the addiction dialogue.

The demon(s). The dialogue is hopelessly contradictory within the space of 10 lines: the demons are “rare” and “nearly extinct”, but they’re “breeders”: “As soon as we put one Suvolte down, a dozen take its place. … One turns into ten, ten becomes a hundred.” In which case they pretty obviously aren’t “rare”. That’s why Buffy could refer to them as “tribbles”, creatures which multiplied faster than the bunnies in Tabula Rasa. Nor is it very plausible that Riley would forget to tell Buffy not to kill the demon.

Spike’s purported international arms dealing makes no sense, particularly when sprung out of the blue in this episode with no lead-in. Among other problems, how can Spike be a demon arms dealer when he's a social outcast hated by all other demons and doesn't even have a telephone line (he used a pay phone to call Buffy in Smashed)?

Nor is Spike noted for his competence: “He-he's too incompetent.” Notwithstanding Todd’s reference to Machiavelli in the teaser, Spike doesn’t exactly fit the image. As recently as Dead Things he couldn’t even weight a body properly, and he has a long history of bollocksing up plans beginning from his first appearance in School Hard. Perhaps the “arms dealing” plot is satirical, but that’s not obvious and satire usually makes a relevant point.

Riley ex machina (h/t Exegy). This episode reinforces my view that the writers, particularly Doug Petrie, had a very different attitude towards Riley than the fans, and misjudged their reaction to him. Does anyone really believe that it’s Riley, rather than Angel, who would have the impact on Buffy we see in this episode?

Sam told Buffy how “ripped up inside” Riley was about Buffy: “The only thing that could ... help Riley work it out was time. Lots of time. Took him a year to get over you.” This is sloppy. Riley left 14 months ago and has been married for 4 months – so long ago that he implausibly forgot to mention it. Assuming a month or two of “courtship” (his word in The Initiative), he was over Buffy in 6-8 months max.

Riley's “pep talk” to Buffy in AYW brought to mind Xander's similar speech in The Freshman. Both came when Buffy was down, confused and ineffective (was it just me or were her initial attempts to fight the Suvolte demon very unSlayer-like?). Xander's speech worked for me, Riley's didn't. Why?

Xander, whatever his faults, worships Buffy. He has from the beginning. He is the most ordinary of the characters. By ordinary, I mean he's not an image, he's a person with flaws. His recognition of those flaws is both endearing (sometimes) and the reason why we accept his hero worship; people who don't recognize their own flaws generally worship only themselves. Buffy could respond to him because she and we could see Xander’s devotion.

Riley, in contrast, comes across here as a stereotype. He's the child from Seventh Heaven or Ozzie and Harriet. Too good to be true. I think of him as an image from the 50s of what we were all "supposed" to be. His character has completely regressed – it’s as if the events of Goodbye Iowa through Into the Woods never happened, and it’s doubtful that regression means progress. The episode title even implies this.

When this Riley delivers his speech to Buffy, there is no sense of hero worship in it because we can't believe this Riley sees Buffy as a hero. This Riley sees himself in the heroic image. When delivered from this background, his speech is condescending. Not "I admire you", but "You're better than this", an attitude he made clear in his earlier comments like "He's evil or had you forgotten that?" and "It doesn't really touch you". Buffy reacted not because she felt his sincerity but because she felt his reproach.

And he never asked about her mother.

The only way to read the episode as anything more than a writer’s misjudgment, it seems to me, is to interpret the episode as a Buffy fantasy. That is, we’d see it as her daydream about something that might happen to take her away from a life she hates. I see two problems with such an interpretation. First, there’s an episode coming up which uses this idea, albeit in a very different way. Second, and more important, this theory runs aground on the point I made above – it’s just not realistic that Buffy’s fantasy would include Riley rather than Angel.

If we are supposed to see it as a daydream, it doesn’t really get Buffy anywhere except to break up with Spike. That could be seen as progress, particularly since she did it with respect. OTOH, as I’ve argued before, I think the sex with Spike is a symptom, not a cause, of Buffy’s problems this season.

On the subject of Spike, I think it’s important that Buffy referred to him as William in the scene at the end. She was apologizing to the human being, not to the monster: “I'm using you. … I'm just ... being weak, and selfish... and it's killing me. … I'm sorry ... William.”

William became a monster because one woman rejected him and another came along to affirm that monster. Now a woman has rejected the monster while affirming the human. William/Spike’s life has come full circle.

Buffy’s apology raises an interesting issue about the nature of moral wrong. In his book Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson made the following argument against slavery:

The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism....Our children see this, and learn to imitate it....The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.

I've always thought this a clever tactical argument. The only people who could, in practice, eliminate slavery in Virginia in 1783 were the slaveholders. Jefferson showed that it was in their interest to do so: by abusing their slaves, they were killing themselves.

This is, if I'm not mistaken, the very effect Buffy attributes to herself. But consider the case of slavery. Do we really think slavery a moral wrong because of its effect on the slaveholder? And if not, how does this affect your view of Buffy and the conclusion of AYW?

Trivia note: (1) The title is a military command which means to disregard the previous order and return the situation before it was issued. (2) Spike’s role as arms dealer, including the name “The Doctor”, was loosely based on the story of Columbian drug lord Pablo Escobar. I’m no fan of the magic/drugs metaphor, but I suspect this episode could have succeeded – or at least fit better with the season themes – if they had stayed with the drug dealer model. (3) Todd’s reference to the “glass ceiling” is to the way in which women are unable to rise in a corporate hierarchy. (4) Todd mentioned that he and Buffy don’t work at “Burger World”, which is where Beavis and Butthead work. (5) Dawn brought Willow an “Arnold Palmer”, which is iced tea and lemonade. (6) Todd used the word “zeitgeist”, which means “spirit of the time”. (7) The scene where Riley shouts about the wild bear was taken from the movie Men in Black. (8) Buffy’s “mazel tov” to Riley is a Yiddish expression meaning literally “good luck” and in context “congratulations”. (9) Xander referred to Riley as “love taker, heartbreaker”, which is the title of a song by Pat Benatar. (10) Spike called Riley a “tin soldier”, referring to the children’s toys. (11) Xander mentioned Nick Fury from the Avengers. Ten years later… (12) Riley’s mention of “bug hunts” is possibly a reference to Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers.