Selfless

[Updated May 3, 2013]

Season 7 has its critics, but I’ve never seen anyone who dislikes Selfless (this being the internet, I’m sure someone will now prove me wrong). It’s in my top 25, and it’s one of many reasons I personally rate S7 so highly. I think it’s a perfect example of what Joss meant when he said that we would understand S6 much better when we saw S7 – Anya’s story here couldn’t be told without the background of Hell’s Bells and succeeding episodes.

Although Spike’s very brief scene seems unrelated to the main story line, I think it’s very much on point. I’ve always seen Anya as a parallel to Spike. Both were long-time cold-blooded killers. Both would have preferred to remain that way. Anya lost her amulet, Spike gained a chip. These events resulted in forced socialization that originated in attraction to one member of the SG. Both struggled with the adaptation to humanity after so many years as a demon.

Spike and Anya are now both struggling with their consciences. Spike’s dialogue with the first Buffy is, as I see it, an internal dialogue in which he’s imagining that she would understand if he went to her for help, though he knows that he has no right to ask. The Buffy he “sees” in that dialogue represents something internal to him, the nature and purpose of which I’ll explain later:

SPIKE
I'm in trouble, Buffy.

BUFFY
I can help you.

SPIKE
I could never ask. Not after...

BUFFY
It's different. You're different.

SPIKE
I could never ask.

The harsher-sounding Buffy, dressed in black, then comes in to tell him to take steps to help himself. That tough love advice comes from the real Buffy, as we see from the fact that she’s wearing black for the remainder of the episode. Similarly, as I’ll discuss below, Anya takes steps to help herself only after Buffy’s intervention.

Anya’s story actually begins in the opening scene, though she’s not in it. Dawn’s advice to Willow in the teaser describes someone who has no self:

DAWN
My advice to you is do exactly what everyone else does all the time.

WILLOW
Got it.

DAWN
Do what everyone else does, wear what everyone else wears, say what everyone else says.

WILLOW
OK.

DAWN
People may say something to you you don't understand. Just don't be afraid to keep your mouth shut and pretend like you know what they're saying.

When Buffy and Xander return to the house and learn that it was Anyanka who summoned the demon, Buffy tells him that she’s been thinking about the problem of Anya since the summer. We can be sure that she also considered her duty with respect to Willow in STSP. It’s pretty clear Willow understood that too, in light of their conversation at the end of STSP:

BUFFY
I have a confession to make. I thought it might be you. With the flaying.

WILLOW
I know.

BUFFY
I wanna be the kind of person that wouldn't think that. Xander never thought it.

WILLOW
He did, a little. Heck, I did a little. Xander has the luxury of not saying it, but you're the slayer. You have to say stuff like that.

This, I think, helps explain Willow’s sympathy for Anya throughout the episode.

Buffy’s sense of responsibility for the dead frat boys must be all the greater because she let Anya’s behavior drop after Anya reversed the spell on Ronnie in BY. We should remember the lessons of Innocence and Passion; Buffy does.

When Buffy mentioned Xander’s Lie in Becoming, I literally jumped up off the couch and shouted at the TV. Finally! This was a hotly debated topic on the internet for years but it seemed the writers would never bring it up again. Not only did Drew Goddard use it at exactly the right moment (93 episodes and 4.5 years later!), but he made it clear that Buffy viewed Xander’s previous betrayal and his current hypocrisy as stemming from precisely the fact that he had cheered her on to kill the man she loved. Think back to the sword fight in Becoming 2. Angelus told Buffy that she had “no weapons…no friends… no hope.” It wasn’t that her friends were not physically present. It was that if those whom she called friends were willing to cheer her on to kill the love of her life, then they weren’t really friends at all.

I had never seen anyone articulate this aspect before, despite reading hundreds of comments on this topic. Among other things, this cast a whole new light on Buffy’s decision to leave Sunnydale at the end of S2 and her reaction to her friends at the start of S3. It also speaks volumes about Buffy’s character that she never said these words until Xander forced her.

Buffy’s use of the phrase “I am the law” should bring to mind Faith’s very similar statement in Consequences: “You know in your gut we don't need the law. We *are* the law.”

There’s a crucial difference between the two, notwithstanding the similarity in the words used. In context, Faith said it in order to avoid responsibility. Buffy said it as a way of accepting her responsibility in the course of her duty. It’s the burden each Slayer has faced from the beginning (word used advisedly):

BUFFY
It is always different! It's always complicated. And at some point, someone has to draw the line, and that is always going to be me. You get down on me for cutting myself off, but in the end the slayer is always cut off. There's no mystical guidebook. No all-knowing council. Human rules don't apply. There's only me. I am the law.

This is another key point of the season, tied in with the seasonal themes, the problem Buffy posed at the end of Help, and the solution Buffy will adopt to her seasonal problem.

Although Xander told Anya that Buffy was not coming as part of an “intervention”, I think that’s exactly what it was. Buffy gave Xander a head start, and she looked to Willow for an alternative.

When she arrived at the frat house, her actions can be seen as shock therapy, perhaps. I believe Buffy knew that something drastic had to be done to get Anya to change (compare the real Buffy’s “tough love” advice to Spike earlier). I interpret Buffy’s action in the fight as letting it go on as long as possible so that Anya would understand the reality of it. Then she told Anya she was sorry and stabbed her. That moment was, thematically, the death of Anyanka. Note that Anya had been in demon face before the sword, but was in human face after. (Drew Godard, DVD commentary.)

Buffy surely remembered the experience in OAFA when a sword through the chest failed to kill Hallie, an incident Anya expressly mentions afterwards. IMO, Buffy suspected that Anya was attempting suicide by cop as a cry for help and pushed it just far enough to force her to change (with some help from Xander and Willow). Anya wanted to die – she lay unmoving on the floor as Buffy raised the sword over her (Drew Godard, DVD commentary).

I personally had underestimated D’Hoffryn and thought of him as less threatening than he was revealed to be in this episode. I guess the pimp can seem sympathetic until one of his “girls” tries to leave, and the dialogue here certainly supports that characterization of D’Hoffryn. He converted Anya’s attempt at selflessness into a horrifying punishment – killing her only friend in the story, killing her vengeance demon side in metaphor – leaving Anya to find her true self on her own.

Trivia notes: (1) Selfless was Drew Goddard’s first ever script. (2) Joss provided the dead frat boys story and wrote the X/A scene at the end. (3) Aud – which gets pronounced “odd” by Anya so we can get the joke – was an actual Norse name of an early settler in Iceland and the wife of Olaf (really). (4) Spike remembered that Dru saw stars even indoors, which she did in Innocence. (5) Spike’s line “scream Montresor all you like” refers to Edgar Allen Poe’s story The Cask of Amontillado. Montresor walled up Fortunato in the basement in order to kill him, and Fortunato screamed Montresor’s name to no effect. (6) There was a revolution in Russia in 1905, but it failed. (7) Halfrek referred to the “Winter Mansion” in connection with that revolution, presumably meaning the Winter Palace. That palace featured in the 1917 Revolution, but not in 1905. (8) Anya’s claim that workers would overthrow absolutism and lead the proletariat to revolution succinctly summarizes the stated goals of the Communists. (9) Buffy says that Anya chose to become a vengeance demon twice. It was actually three times, though Buffy had no way to know that – Anya demanded her powers back at the beginning of Doppelgangland. (10) Willow got the talisman to summon D’Hoffryn in Something Blue. (11) In Anya’s flashback, Xander said that he just wanted a happy ending, which is what he said when everyone discovered that he summoned Sweet in OMWF. (12) Anya’s mention of coconuts also refers back to OMWF. (13) Marti Noxon and David Fury sing the mustard song in the background of the flashback. (14) Joss wrote Anya’s song in the flashback. (15) Anya Christina Emmanuella Jenkins was the name Anya gave the Council in Checkpoint. (16) Anya’s phrase “I’ll never tell” refers back to the song she and Xander sang in OMWF. (17) All of Kali Rocha’s scenes for the season were shot on 1 day, which shows how far in advance episodes were plotted. (18) Just to complete the point I made in my essays on The Wish and Doppelgangland, I’ll mention here the issue of Anyanka’s pendant. One potential weakness in my interpretation of The Wish as a daydream is the existence of her pendant as a real item. While there’s plenty of evidence in those S3 episodes that Anyanka needs her pendant as her power source, there’s evidence to the contrary in the episodes from Entropy through Selfless. In those episodes no amulet or pendant is ever mentioned, nor is she ever shown relying on one, even when she’s acting as a vengeance demon. More significantly, the whole ending of Selfless makes no sense if there had been one. Nobody would have needed D’Hoffryn to reverse the deaths of the frat boys and to expel Anyanka from the Order – they could have just smashed her pendant as Giles did in The Wish. Thematically, of course, Anya had to ask – to wish, actually – rather than have her pendant smashed involuntarily.