The Killer in Me

[Updated May 3, 2013]

The Killer In Me is, I think, a very good episode which could have been a great one and just misses. The basic concept is excellent and IMO Alyson Hannigan and Adam Busch both do great jobs. Part of my disappointment is that some of the Spike scenes are played almost as slapstick. Part of it is my annoyance at the lame joke about touching Giles, which bothered me a lot the first time around but which I ignore on re-watch. I, uh, won’t touch the Giles story and instead will focus on the important ones, Spike and Willow.

Some people had a problem with the fact that the Initiative lab still existed, contrary to what the government official instructed, somewhat contradictorily, be done at the end of Primeval: “The Initiative itself will be filled in with concrete. Burn it down, gentlemen.  Burn it down, and salt the Earth.” My view is that the failure to follow through is all too typical of government and not a retcon. In any case, it makes for a nice metaphor of Buffy and Spike stumbling around in the dark to find a solution to Spike’s chip/soul nature.

Buffy’s decision about the chip would seem to be easy after her “I believe in you” speech. It’s hard to show that belief by denying someone free will. Still, Buffy’s a protector too and the chip may be necessary if Spike gets triggered again. One thing is clear: Spike can’t make any real progress on his journey as long as the chip is there. The chip was Spike’s internal panopticon. His soul is his authentic self.  Removing the chip is essential to him accepting moral authority for his own actions, something he hasn’t yet done as we see from the teaser:

BUFFY
OK. But you've been fine. In close contact with the girls.

SPIKE
(looks at Buffy) With you by my side, yeah. You won't let me hurt one of them.

He fears the killer inside him, just as Willow does, and, for that matter, Andrew does.

If Buffy does decide to remove it, that puts Spike to a real test. For the past 3 years Buffy has to some extent protected him even when she probably shouldn’t have, because he was defenseless against everyone but her, and defenseless against her for much of the time. That won’t be true if the chip comes out, so the uncertainty about the continued presence of his “trigger” creates a risk for Spike as well as for those around Buffy and even Buffy herself – not of being attacked by Spike, but of having to stake someone she obviously cares for. The existence of the risk posed by the trigger means that Spike has one more step to take before he completes the journey which began in The Initiative.

In comments, local-max pointed out that we don’t see Riley, but this episode closes out his arc in a much better way than As You Were. The military leaves it up to Buffy to decide because Riley respects her choices.

Kennedy noticed that Willow always turned off the Moulin Rouge DVD after chapter 32. Chapter 32 ends with Christian and Satine singing their love, i.e., before Satine dies and Christian – who never moves on – writes of his “love that will live forever”. Similarly, Willow has stopped herself at the moment Tara died. The point of the episode is that Willow, unlike Christian, does need to move on.

Willow has two sources of guilt, namely killing Warren and letting Tara go. Both are triggered (word used advisedly) when she first kisses Kennedy. She was confused by Kennedy at first, then reluctant. To her surprise, I think, the evening at the Bronze actually went well. The kiss was awkward, but clearly Willow liked it and began to respond. Being Willow, though, her self-control never really lets go and her guilt took over. That’s the point at which she punishes herself (as we eventually learn). Willow should be able to move on from Tara, but fears that if she does that might mean that Tara’s really gone, that she’s living while Tara is dead:

Willow: No, she was never gone. She was with me. We should have been forever, and I— (cries) I let her be dead. She's really dead. (breaks down into tears) And I killed her.

The metaphor of turning into Warren and (nearly) re-enacting Tara’s murder perfectly expresses both forms of her guilt. Amy serves as Willow’s dark side. If you read them carefully, Amy’s first words to Willow tell us exactly what Willow is going through:

AMY: It took me a long time to really see myself. But I did. Because you know that's the crazy thing about hitting rock bottom, you get to relive all the crappy things you did.

The spell makes Willow “really see herself” as her guilty conscience sees her: as Warren. She “relives the crappy things she did” as Warren. Amy’s wording also fits Willow because Warren came to kill Buffy because she had exposed his weakness, and now Willow nearly kills Kennedy for exposing hers.

Amy pretends to try to help Willow, but the words of the spell Amy recites are ambiguous: “Give back the form the soul requires. See that the balance is set right.” The first sentence could call for Willow’s restoration, but in the context of Willow’s guilt and internal desire to be punished, it could also reinforce Warren’s presence. I see it as the latter – Amy used the spell to amplify the effect of her hex. We can also see this metaphorically as Willow’s dark side reinforcing her punishment.

The second sentence would have meant one thing to Willow, but something much different to Warren. Willow's first Warren-like behavior came immediately after Amy performed her spell in the presence of the coven. Before then, all we saw was Willow's personality in Warren's body. Amy's second spell contributed to the emergence of Warren and set “him” on a path to “set things right” from his warped perspective.

Amy, speaking both as character and as metaphor, then gives us further insight into Willow’s internal guilt when she tells Kennedy “It’s about power. Willow always had all the power, long before she even knew what to do with it. Just came so easy for her. The rest of us—we had to work twice as hard to be half as good. But no one cares about how hard you work. They just care about cute, sweet Willow. They don't know how weak she is. She gave in to evil—stuff worse than I can even imagine— She almost destroyed the world! And yet everyone keeps on loving her?”

Willow, of course, is Buffy’s metaphorical spirit, so if what Amy says is true of Willow – and it is to some degree, or at least true of how Willow sees herself – then the same holds true for Buffy. If you hear Amy’s words as Willow speaking of herself, then except for the part about destroying the world, it’s substantially similar to how Buffy described herself to Webs in CWDP: “I have all this power. I didn't ask for it. I don't deserve it. It's like... I wanted to be punished. I wanted to hurt like I thought I deserved.”

It’s important, though, to keep in mind that the whole point of S7 is to question the idea of “power”. What Amy’s talking about is one form of power, but it’s not the only one. The question is whether Willow, and therefore Buffy, will find a different way to exercise power.

Willow, by the way, was right about the spell in the first place:

WILLOW/WARREN*
Maybe, but I probably brought it on myself.

BUFFY
What makes you think that?

WILLOW/WARREN*
Well, it wouldn't be the first time. I have a history with my witchy subconscious making things go kerfloopey. Remember the wacky "I can't see you, you can't see me" spell?

That’s exactly what Amy’s spell did, as she explained to Kennedy later:

“AMY: The hex I cast lets the victim's subconscious pick the form of their punishment. It's always better than anything I can come up with.”

In my reading, Amy deliberately let slip the fact that she had “put a hex on her”. The ending of the episode essentially requires that Amy send Kennedy into Buffy's backyard (of course, the plan must have been that Willow would actually kill Kennedy). Amy couldn't have known in advance what the trigger was for Willow to feel the need for penance, because she set the spell up to let Willow's subconscious choose the punishment. Nor, for the same reason, could she have known in advance what form the punishment would take. Once she saw that Willow had turned into Warren, the first piece of the puzzle was in place. Amy then needed information about the trigger in order to take full advantage of Willow/Warren, and could only get it from Kennedy. My assumption is, therefore, that she let the secret slip on purpose to discover if Kennedy was the one who should be sent to serve as the intended victim.

This episode seems to have marked the beginning of the dislike for Kennedy that’s so widespread on the internet. Her aggressive flirtation with Willow doesn’t bother me, any more than Tara’s original extreme passivity did. Both were just ways for the writers to address Willow’s situation at the respective times in a reasonable way. Joss:

“Kennedy is … a bit of a brat. What I wanted was an anti-Tara. I wanted somebody who was as different from Tara as possible. Tara was very reticent, and she was somebody that Willow caused to blossom. What I wanted was somebody who was further on down in dealing with her sexuality than Willow ever was. Somebody who was totally confident, who was totally not earthy-crunchy, who was a completely different person. What I wanted to explore was the concept of Willow moving on. We did that with the first kiss, that turned her into Warren. … the things that Willow has to deal with emotionally, her fear of her power and stuff, and Kennedy's kind of involvement in that. That's what Kennedy was for.”

In the current situation, Willow was not so much rejecting Kennedy’s previous flirtations, she was letting her guilt prevent her from moving on, from living. Plus, I like that Kennedy could be depicted as openly sexual and gay, and the fact that Kennedy cares nothing for the magic means that Willow can be sure Kennedy’s attracted to her alone (compare Willow’s fear at the end of Wrecked that Tara only loved her because she was superpowered).

Kennedy also gets real credit from me because, despite the danger, the second kiss was purely compassionate, not sexual like the first one presumably was. It’s that expression of compassion which brings Willow back, and it demonstrated that she understood that Willow needed someone to recognize her emotions.  The kiss symbolically seals Willow’s decision to forgive herself and move on. And if you think about it, so does the tea – it’s sexual when Buffy jokes about it, comforting when Kennedy offers it at the end. I mentioned in my post on Beneath You that Joss said he wanted to explore forgiveness in S7, and TKiM is another example of that.

Trivia notes: (1) I loved Buffy’s description of her experience in Intervention when telling the Potentials about the Vision Quest. (2) As is always the case on the show, the song at the Bronze fits the scene. The words we hear as we pan over to Willow and Kennedy are “So I can be happy again….” (3) The better word for “lesbidar” is, of course, “gaydar”. (4) As Spike suggests, nobody can use the phrase “who you gonna call” because that line was used in the movie Ghostbusters. (5) Kennedy says she likes “skate punk, Robert Parker mysteries”, for which see the links. (6) All the scenes with Willow and Warren were shot twice, once with each actor. (7) Andrew mentioned “dancing schnauzers”, referring to a breed of dog. (6) Willow threatened to tell everyone about Xander’s “Aquaman Underoos”, referring to the comic book character and Xander’s underwear. (7) Andrew is waiting for the new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a comic book series. (8) Andrew spoke on the phone to Robson, who was the watcher we saw attacked by the Bringers in Sleeper. (9) Willow mentioned the Wiccan group’s “bake sale phase”. That was the discussion the first time we saw them in Hush. (10) Andrew wanted to play the game “Ghost”, for which see the link. The name of the game probably references the First and their concerns about Giles. (11) Andrew suggested the license plate game as an alternative. (12) Amy first appeared 132 episodes ago, and now we see that she’s pretty much turned into her mother. It’s pretty remarkable when you think about how they’ve managed to use characters like her and Jonathan even stretching back to S1. (13) Willow’s first two sentences and her posture with the gun as she entered Buffy’s back yard were the same as Warren’s in Seeing Red.