Chosen

[Updated May 3, 2013]

DRUSILLA
… You like our little songs, don't you? You've always liked them, right from the beginning. And that's where we're going...

THE MASTER
...right back to the beginning. Not the Bang... not the Word... the true beginning. (Lessons)

Joss: “And the real beginning was girl power. The real beginning is what does it mean to be a Slayer?”

There’s much to say about Chosen and about S7 as a whole, such that this, like most of the finale posts, will be a long one. As I did with The Gift, I’ll start with the conclusion. It’s always easiest to reverse engineer the season once you know where it’s going. Then, because S7 often gets criticized, I’ll outline how the season themes played out and the paths of the core characters.

Season 7, like Season 3, has empowerment of others as the solution to Buffy’s challenges. Empowerment of others is the Ultimate Boon, the answer to the question Buffy asked Giles in Grave:

BUFFY: (quietly) I guess ... I wasn't ready before. It took a long time for that feeling to go away ... the feeling that I wasn't really here. It was like ... when I clawed my way out of that grave, I left something behind. Part of me. I just... (pauses, looks Giles in the eye) I don't understand ... why I'm back.
GILES: You have a calling.
BUFFY: But it was my time, Giles. Someone would have taken my place. (Giles grimacing) So why?

She knows she's special but doesn't really understand: "Why me?", a question even more poignant after her death and resurrection. All during S7 she struggled with the sense of isolation. She first tried to overcome it by withdrawing even more into her "special" cocoon, but that only isolated her all the more. Only here in Chosen does she meet her challenge, and it’s not by making herself special, it’s by making everyone her equal.

Let’s fit this theme of empowerment together with the metaphor of the First Evil. As is always true, the main villain represents in metaphor the challenge Buffy has to overcome. As I noted in several posts, the First represents separation or isolation. It’s the voice inside us that tells us we’re not good enough, that others don’t care for us, that we should go off on our own. Buffy’s sense of isolation from being the Slayer has been present since the very first episode of S1, and we were shown it repeatedly in S7. I’ll quote from Conversations With Dead People because it’s simple and spelled out bluntly in scenes Joss himself wrote, but I’ll bet I could find 50 similar expressions of the same point throughout the series, beginning in Welcome To The Hellmouth:

HOLDEN So, all that time, you were a slayer?

BUFFY The.

HOLDEN "The", like as in "the only one"?

BUFFY Pretty much.

HOLDEN Oh. So, when you said not connected, that was kind of a telling statement, wasn't it - ?***

HOLDEN So, you meet someone, you form a bond...

BUFFY But it never lasts.

HOLDEN Do you mean in all relationships, or just yours?

BUFFY …I think there're people out there who'd make it. I just... target the impossible ones... with deadly accuracy.

HOLDEN You think you do that on purpose? Maybe you're trying to protect yourself?

BUFFY Protecting myself? From heartbreak, misery, sexual violence, and possible death? Not so much.

HOLDEN From committing.***

BUFFY I feel like I'm worse than anyone. Honestly, I'm beneath them. My friends, my boyfriends. I feel like I'm not worthy of their love. 'Cause even though they love me, it doesn't mean anything 'cause their opinions don't matter. They don't know. They haven't been through what I've been through. They're not the slayer. I am. Sometimes I feel - (sighs) this is awful - I feel like I'm better than them. Superior.

HOLDEN And so you can't win. And I thought I was diabolical - or, at least I plan to be. You do have a superiority complex. And you've got an inferiority complex about it. (laughs) Kudos.

BUFFY It doesn't make any sense.

HOLDEN (sits forward) Oh, it makes every kind of sense. And it all adds up to you feeling alone.

Joss: “I lived my life feeling alone. That's just the way of it. I always did. As soon as I was old enough to have a feeling about it, I felt like I was alone. No matter how much I loved my family - and I actually got along better with my family than I think most people do - but I just always felt separate from everybody, and was terribly lonely all the time. I wasn't living a life that was particularly different from anybody else's, a pariah - it wasn't like I didn't have friends, but I just... we all of us are alone in our own minds, and I was very much aware of that from the very beginning of my life. Loneliness and aloneness - which are different things - are very much, I would say, of the three main things I focus on in my work.”

I don't see how it could be any clearer that the First Consequence (TM) of becoming the Slayer is the psychological sense of separation the Slayer feels from the rest of the world. The First – which made itself known to the SG in CWDP – is therefore the metaphorical demon which stands between Buffy and the world at large. Not only does it force Buffy into a position – General Buffy – in which she becomes even less connected, but we see at the end that the First itself, in the shape of Buffy, has the goal of "feeling" the connection to others. Buffy is at war with herself. Note that when the First appears as Buffy, it always portrays her as arrogant and obsessed with power. That’s the superiority side talking, and it’s telling.

Buffy only recognizes this internal conflict when the First/Buffy confronts her in the basement in Chosen. When the First/Buffy overplays its hand by taunting her with her aloneness, that gives her the solution of ending the isolation of the Slayer by empowering others.

Sharing power solves all of Buffy’s problems identified in the early episodes of S7: she no longer has to function as “the law” (Selfless). She therefore will no longer suffer the sense of isolation and uncertainty she faced because she was the only one (CWDP). And she no longer has to save everyone (Help) because not only are others available who might also save them, but lots of people can now save themselves. Empowerment of others solves Buffy’s problem not just for S7, but for her whole career as the Slayer; that makes it a perfect theme for the series finale. Given that, I should explain how I understand the empowerment spell to work.

I’ll start by asking, whom does she empower in Chosen? In a narrow sense the Potentials. Let me just explain in a bit more detail how I understood that process.

As long as Buffy functioned as “the” Slayer, she was necessarily placed in the role of General. I’ve explained the logic of this in previous posts, so I won’t belabor it here. The problem began with the Shadowmen. The evil of the Shadowmen was not that they imbued the First Slayer with power; for all we know, that power was benign. No, the evil was the lack of choice, the fact that they forced her. They isolated her from all other women and made her alone fight the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness.

The tactic of the Shadowmen was to fight demons by concentrating power. Within that paradigm, it's not that Buffy was wrong about the fact that she was therefore in charge, it's that she was right. Buffy felt uncomfortable with her role – that instinct caused her to reject the Shadowmen – but she was trapped by the paradigm that said power had to be concentrated in order to be used in opposition. Her answer wasn't wrong, the question was. “It’s about power” needs to be interpreted in the sense of who has it, not in the sense of how much one person has.

We saw in Showtime that Buffy’s actions as “the” Slayer, as General, made everyone conscious of their own weakness. Everyone else was subservient to her. In GiD, Buffy’s harsh attitude was sucking the power out of everyone else.

This is very realistic. It’s pretty well established that a relationship involving subservience distorts the character of both master and servant. This was widely observed under slavery, where the obsequious false cheer of the slave became a stereotype (see Gone With The Wind). It wasn’t just the impact on the slave which was harmful, though. Here’s Thomas Jefferson describing the effect of the process on the masters:

“The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. … 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….”

 

Slavery is an extreme, but the same is true even under lesser forms of oppression, with weaknesses exaggerated (Rona) and strengths hidden or rejected by the victim (Annabelle and Chloe). We also see cases of bravado like Kennedy, who, much as Jefferson described the child, acts like she thinks Buffy would want while training the Potentials in GiD. As I said in my post on Potential, I see the Potentials as representing the less attractive aspects of womanhood precisely because they’ve been forced into a position of subservience.

As we saw in Get it Done, that subservient role was created by a patriarchal structure, which is important because Buffy adopted a traditional patriarchal role as General. It was as if the only change necessary for women was for a woman to replace a man in a traditional man’s role. In fact, the Potentials are at first excited by this (see the look on Kennedy’s face after Buffy defeats the Ubervamp at the end of Showtime). Eventually they’re disillusioned because their condition doesn’t change. Buffy actually perpetuates and even reinforces their subservient role.

Buffy’s speech in BotN was therefore a critical turning point in the season because in calling for an “army” she took the wrong path. We didn’t realize it at the time: the speech was emotionally stirring; we knew there was “only” one Slayer, so it seemed natural for Buffy to take the lead; Giles had pushed her in that direction with his “it’s up to you” comments; and we ourselves structure armies this way. But the whole point of the episodes from BotN through Empty Places is that Buffy is making a mistake. The ability of one woman alone to fit herself into a patriarchal role is not the answer.

By taking on the role of General and protector of the Potentials, Buffy accepted them in their subservient state rather than recognizing that what they needed was not protection but the ability to protect themselves. It’s like the old proverb “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” It’s not an accident that in the episode titled Potential, Dawn “gives” her power to Amanda even though it wasn’t really her power to give. That’s the solution Buffy adopts in Chosen.

The choice Buffy offered the Potentials in Chosen was not to be empowered, but to participate in the fight against evil. They will be Slayers – that is, someone who joins in the fight – not because they were Chosen, but because they have Chosen. Those who followed her into the Hellmouth didn’t do so because they had power – Willow hadn’t done the spell yet – they did so because they chose to fight. Given the strong similarities between S3 and S7, it’s worth noting the similar decision at the end of Choices made by Willow, Buffy’s metaphorical spirit. And given that, it’s interesting that it’s Willow who provided the opportunity for Anya to choose her own destiny in Selfless.

That’s the narrow case for the way empowerment plays out in S7. But I see the theme as much more generally applicable, as I’ll try to explain.

I know that it's common to speak of Buffy as a feminist icon. Joss has implied this, reviewers cite it in support, authors write books with that as the theme, it's a commonplace on the net. This means something a little different to me than it may mean to others.

In one sense, having Buffy as a feminist icon may mean that the message we get from her and from the show is directed mostly (exclusively?) to women. That is, that feminism is a way to empower women, to encourage them to work through the specific problems they face. I think that this interpretation of the show is very valuable; certainly I felt my own daughters watched with this perspective and learned from it.

But the show always meant something additional to me. To me, feminism is a lens, a perspective, through which to view human problems. In my interpretation, the message Buffy sends is for women, but it’s not just for women, it's for all of us, male and female alike. As I said in the Introduction, Buffy may face her problems as a woman, but all of us, no matter our gender, should identify with her as much as we do male heroes. As Joss put it, he wanted Buffy to be “a hero, not just a heroine, but a hero.”

For me, the Central Metaphor of the show is that Buffy is us, the viewers, and we are her. In this larger sense, she has no color, she has no gender, she has no age; she is a human figure. That’s not to diminish her role as a woman, it’s to universalize it. In the same way, Martin Luther King faced his problems as a black man, but the lessons of his struggles aren’t limited to that; he’s a hero to all of us, black or white. When Buffy empowered the Potentials, I felt she empowered me. And everyone else too. She didn't diminish or reject her own power, she made me aware of and enhanced my own.

At the end of Chosen, Buffy achieved the thing she’s desired since we first saw her in Welcome to the Hellmouth. She’s “just a girl”. Buffy’s now “normal” not because she lost her power, but because everyone else has theirs back. A “normal” life is not an unempowered life, it’s an empowered life with everyone else empowered too. She is now "normal" only in the sense that we no longer live through her, but with her.

There’s an inherent tension in the show's Central Metaphor: if only one is Chosen, can she really stand for me as a separate individual? The answer is yes, as long as the metaphor holds. But the metaphor is unstable precisely because it has to focus on a unique individual while simultaneously trying to symbolize all of us. Chosen resolved this dilemma. “Look around”, Buffy says. “If you can be a Slayer, you will be a Slayer. Can stand up, will stand up. You are me after all.”

In my view, Joss did something incredibly daring in S6-7. Having created the greatest hero in all of American literature in S1-5, he turned around and asked, in effect, “do we really need heroes, or can we all be heroes?” Joss: “It was very important to me to say, ‘Ok great that you've worshipped this one iconic character, but find it in yourself everybody….’”

Before I review the season as a whole, I need to revisit some points I made in my posts on S3 and explain how the empowerment solution of S7 fits with Joss’s absurdist philosophy. As a brief review, I argued (Gingerbread, Graduation Day) that absurdists distinguish between rebellion and revolution. The former is fine, the latter is not. Revolution is bad because it attempts to deny the fundamental nature of the world, to make it into something it’s not. This leads to violence and terror.

At the end of Chosen, Willow tells Buffy “we changed the world”. So they did. That, however, doesn’t mean Buffy accomplished a revolution. The reason it didn’t is that the world we saw until Chosen was an artificial construct. The Shadowmen (Get it Done) isolated the Slayer by imbuing her alone with power. All other women were held in subservience. For the Slayer, the fact of her power was a very mixed blessing, as has been apparent for some time (at least since S3). By using the Scythe to unlock the power which had been artificially confined for so long, Buffy didn’t change the fundamental nature of the world, she restored the world to its natural state, one that the Shadowmen – the founding Patriarchs – had artificially corrupted. Buffy restored the balance.

Now I can review how the themes of S7 were established and played out in the individual episodes. Here’s Joss explaining his idea for the season in an interview in Cinefantastique magazine: “Let's go back to the beginning…. And the real beginning was girl power. The real beginning is what does it mean to be a slayer? And, not to feel guilty about the power, but having seen the dark side of it, and finding the light again.”

Lessons set that goal: It’s about power. Note that it wasn’t Buffy who said that in the sequence at the end, it was the First in Buffy’s form. The statement was still true, but not in the way the First meant. To compare the way in which the understanding of power changed over the final seasons, start with Checkpoint, where Buffy asserts her individual power against Glory and the WC. Then go to Two To Go and Grave, where Willow seeks to match her power against Buffy’s, only to be undone at last by Xander turning the other cheek. Here in S7, Lessons gave us the First’s implication that the key issue was the amount of power possessed by one individual; Same Time, Same Place and Potential signaled the shared power theme; and Get it Done had Buffy understand that the amount of power wasn’t important.

Also in Lessons, Willow told Giles that “It’s all connected”. As we learned in subsequent episodes, “it” might be all connected, but Buffy wasn’t. Connecting to others by empowering them turns out to be what defeats the First, the metaphor for separation, of selfishness. We saw that prefigured in Lessons itself with Buffy’s advice to Dawn at the end (my emphasis): “You guys are gonna be OK. School is intense, but you'll do all right as long as you're careful. And you might want to think about sticking together.”

Same Time Same Place also gave us the theme of isolation with Willow’s self-imposed separation from her friends. That’s what Willow’s spell did – it shifted her out of the same plane as her friends and left her feeling desolate and alone. Note the similarity of the metaphor with what Buffy told Spike in Touched: “Being the slayer made me different. But it's my fault I stayed that way. People are always trying to connect to me, and I just slip away.”

STSP also introduced the eventual solution Buffy would adopt in Chosen. At the end of STSP, Buffy joins hands with Willow and offers her power because Buffy has so much power she’s giving it away. This theme was reinforced in Potential when Dawn acknowledged Amanda as a holder of the power.

Beneath You gave us the hint that Buffy’s problem – more generally, the Slayer’s problem – arises in the subconscious, while Help spelled out the psychological dilemma Buffy couldn’t solve while she struggled in the inappropriate role of General. Help also gave us Xander’s hammer analogy so that we understood the necessary balance in using the power we have.

Selfless and CWDP drove home the theme of the Slayer’s isolation, reinforcing what we thought we knew from the previous 6 seasons – that there can be just one Slayer – and setting up the twist in Chosen. The constant reiteration of Buffy’s status as “the” Slayer left both Buffy and the viewers with no way to break the logical box which confined Buffy as the General precisely because she was the only one.

BotN and Showtime show Buffy taking the seemingly logically inevitable but wrong path of General. I promised in my post on Showtime to explain what Beljoxa’s Eye meant, and how it fits into the season themes, so I’ll do that here.

“BELJOXA'S EYE The First Evil did not cause the disruption, only seized upon it to extinguish the lives of the Chosen forever.

GILES Then what has caused the disruption? What—what is responsible for letting this happen?

BELJOXA'S EYE The Slayer.”

As Giles elaborated later, the problem arose because Buffy lives. Anya misunderstood the import of that, blaming herself and the others for resurrecting Buffy. That was a nice mislead. Now we can see the true interpretation: Buffy’s resurrection meant there were two slayers; if two, why not a hundred? Buffy has always been uncomfortable with the idea of another Slayer; she was very invested in the idea of being the One. That’s one reason she was so uncomfortable with Faith’s return:

FAITH
There's only supposed to be one. Maybe that's why you and I can never get along. We're not supposed to exist together.

As it turned out, Faith’s existence was a major clue to Buffy’s solution.

Get it Done took us to the source of the Slayer’s dilemma. By concentrating power in “one girl in all the world”, the Shadowmen forced every Slayer to operate within the confines of a patriarchal structure. That, in turn, guaranteed the isolation that was inherent in that role, which was essential to preserve patriarchal control.

We learned in Storyteller and Lies My Parents Told Me that Buffy was trapped in a narrative, and that the narrative consisted of lies told to her, in fact told to all Slayers, by the Watchers ever since the Shadowmen. The basic lie was the one which rested at the very heart of the Slayer line: that there was only one girl in all the world, etc. Buffy had heard that lie before she ever came to Sunnydale, and Giles repeated it in their second conversation in Welcome to the Hellmouth. Other lies flowed from that source, e.g., “The Mission is what matters”. Neither Nikki Wood nor Giles knew that was a lie, but it was. Neither did Giles know that it was a lie that the Mission required that Buffy be the General, but it was a lie all the same.

Dirty Girls and Empty Places demonstrated the inherent flaws in the structure. They also showed us just how difficult it was to overcome the existing assumptions about the Slayer, to break out of the established paradigm. The problem was not that Buffy was a bad General, though she certainly made mistakes, the problem was that Buffy hadn’t been and wasn’t willing to give up the idea that she was the Chosen One. The line is unstable because we have more than one Slayer (Faith), but one of them is refusing to share the role.

To give you some sense of how literally inconceivable it was for Buffy to share the power, I’ll re-post one of shadowkat’s comments after Empty Places. Note that she completely got the problem, but even as perceptive as she is, the hold of “ONE girl in all the world” was so powerful that she couldn’t see the solution:

“They are playing by the old rules. The paradigm. Set up by the Shadowmen, The Council. In the Angel episode Inside Out [which aired between LMPTM and Dirty Girls; no coincidence] - Gunn says something interesting to Fred about how if they are being manipulated, then it's time to flip the playing board. Start your own game. That when push comes to shove? No one knows the final score. You still have a choice.

Buffy and the SG are letting the FE dictate the rules to them. It sets up a big bad - they go fight the big bad. It opens up the seal, they go off to close the seal. It kills some of their team, they fight amongst themselves, giving it greater power. They don't like one slayer? They choose another slayer to lead them. … I have a hunch Faith is going to inadvertently make the same mistakes as Buffy. Unless she stops playing by the rules. And since she like Buffy has somewhat bought into them...I doubt that will happen.

The question therefore is - how do you change the rules? What are the SG and Buffy and Faith doing wrong?

1. Is it that they are fighting the bads the First sends to them in combat? Should they just stop fighting?
2. Is it that they are fighting amongst themselves?
3. Is it that they've put the mission above small things like respect, human comradeship, kindness, friendship, compassion?
4. Is it that they've stopped listening to each other and instead are talking at each other, projecting their worst fears on each other?
5. How can they flip the board, if they don't even know they are on it? Or how to flip it?

I don't know.”

The series closed as it began, with Joss completely subverting our expectations. The opening words in Touched gave us the answer: “Power to the people.” Giles, naturally, rejected the phrase contemptuously. Only later in that episode did Buffy’s path to the solution begin when she recognized her isolation, but the crucial insight doesn’t come until she faces the First in Chosen. What Beljoxa’s Eye told us, in the usual cryptic manner of oracles, was that Buffy was so invested in her role as Slayer that she wasn’t ready to answer the question Faith posed to her in Empty Places: “Can you follow?” Giving the Scythe to Faith in Chosen symbolically marks that moment.

To put it in the terms of the Hero’s Journey, Buffy used the power of the Scythe to enlighten the world with what she has learned. The Scythe, as I said in my post on End of Days, is merely a symbol, in this case of “female nature”, “the symbol of decisive resolve, of determined differentiation on the path of individual or collective evolution.” The Scythe represents feminine power, “girl power” to use Joss’s phrase. Accessing that power and sharing it with everyone is indeed the Ultimate Boon.

Since some of the criticism of S7 involves the core members of the SG, which I’ll treat as including Spike, let me talk about them both in story line terms and in metaphor.

One of the beneficiaries of the Boon was Spike, though not directly. I think Buffy inspired Spike’s road to recovery, though I don’t think he did it for her; he says as much in Touched. He did it for himself, which makes his sacrifice in Chosen all the more meaningful. Of course, Spike has always hankered after the Grand Gesture, and it’s fitting that he got it. Spike’s blood opened the Hellmouth in BotN. His soul closes it. Kind of like Andrew’s tears in Storyteller.

I’ve seen the complaint that it was Spike who actually did the work of destroying the Hellmouth, not Buffy. This seems to me to miss the point on two grounds. First, the point of the episode was not to destroy the Hellmouth – there’s another one in Cleveland anyway – but to empower the Potentials as Slayers. That was done by Buffy (through Willow). Second, the criticism ignores the similarity to GD2, where it’s Giles who actually kills the Mayor; Buffy merely taunted him and led him to the explosives. In both cases, though, it was Buffy’s idea and her organization which led to the destruction of the symbolic source of evil.

Spike’s reaction to Buffy’s declaration of love – “No you don’t. But thanks for sayin’ it.” – is perfectly consistent with his words to Wood at the end of LMPTM. Because Spike still sees slayers as devoted to “the Mission” above all else, he can’t believe Buffy loves him in the only way love is meaningful to him. He loves her that way, but thinks she can’t ever love him. The irony is that the empowerment of the Potentials leaves open the path for Buffy to love someone like that.

I think it’s also possible that it was Spike’s way of saying "You can go, you don't need to stay here with me." Had he not said that, Buffy might have stayed. Instead, Spike was able to do what he said he wanted in Grave: Give her what she deserved. In this sense, you could see it as the same lie Rick tells Ilsa at the end of Casablanca.

Giles’s role this year seems to be widely disliked. As I’ve said several times, Buffy’s decision to take on the role of General was a big mistake. In my view, her decision to take this role was a failure of mind, in the sense that her mind was out of harmony with her heart and spirit. Basically, the role of General was an extension of Buffy’s understanding of the Slayer’s role since at least Graduation Day 2. She stated it straight out in Selfless, in the passage I’ve quoted so many times before: “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.”

If the Slayer is, by default, “the law”, then it only makes logical sense that she should be the one in charge. As a practical matter, the final call will always be hers. She may take advice along the way, just as any General does, but at the end of the day only the Slayer can decide to slay. It’s inherent in the “fact” of there being just one girl in all the world.

When did Buffy formally adopt this role? In BotN, when she gave the stirring speech at the end. And when did Giles show up? Yes, in BotN. What did Giles tell her in that episode? “I'm afraid it falls to you, Buffy. Sorry. I mean, we'll do what we can, but you're the only one who has the strength to protect these girls—and the world—against what's coming.” Then he said similar things during the course of the next several episodes, at least through Lies My Parents Told Me. I see Giles’s philosophy in that episode as one of the lies we’re told by our parents. So the metaphor holds: Buffy’s mistake in S7 is one of mind, and it’s Giles who is, in substantial part, the origin of that mistake.

Ok, but there’s still Giles the character. I’ve made this point before, but Giles’s behavior seems to me very true to life. He has a “child” who has become an adult, but spent the past year making serious mistakes of judgment. She may seem to be on track now, but she’s faced with a huge challenge and he’s not confident that she can handle it on her own. The temptation to step in as a parent is overwhelming, as I can personally attest. Giles has so much invested in Buffy, and is so concerned because of what happened in S6, that he pushes too hard. This is why he seems so unsympathetic in the middle of the season.

If I’m right that the problem in S7 is an overreliance on mind, then it stands to reason that Buffy’s heart and spirit will feel somewhat left out and uncertain about their role. I think this describes Willow and Xander pretty well.

Willow’s case is obvious. As a character, she’s uncertain of her magical power for the very good reason that in S6 she abused it. Metaphorically, it’s important in S7 that Willow be unsure of herself, lacking the inner confidence that her power is for good and that she is worthy of it, because that’s how Buffy feels, as she told Webs in CWDP.

Willow’s struggle to balance her power – the theme of Xander’s conversation with her in Help – appears repeatedly throughout the season. Sometimes she’s too cautious, at other times she goes overboard; that’s why her use of magic seems inconsistent, at one minute unable to do a locator spell, in the next bringing Buffy back from the Shadowmen. Buffy struggles in the same way with her own exercise of power. The parallel between the two friends is explicit in Get it Done, where Anya describes Buffy’s “everybody sucks but me speech” and Willow sucks power from Anya and Kennedy.

I should note that Kennedy plays an important role in Willow’s progress precisely because she makes it clear that she is attracted to Willow the person rather than Willow the powerful witch (from whom she actually recoils after GiD). Willow needs that reassurance that she’s valued for herself, not for her magic. In my view, Spike plays a similar role for Buffy in Touched (and see trivia note 11).

By sharing power rather than grabbing it (contrast Chosen with Get it Done), the spirit is purified. The white, clearly feminine magic which purifies Willow – more than a little bit orgasmically, it must be said – tells us metaphorically that Buffy’s spirit is now pure because her spirit reached out to others and shared with them. In Get it Done Willow had taken power from Anya and Kennedy. Here she opened the channel of power for others – a channel the Shadowmen had closed – without taking any for herself. I’ll stress this because I think it’s important: the Scythe did not give power to the Potentials. No, as I interpret the spell it unlocked power already there, power which had been stifled by the decision of the Shadowmen to limit that power to one girl in all the world. The Scythe was the catalyst for the spell, nicely connecting with the conversation between Anya and Willow in GiD about the need for a catalyst.

I said in my post on End of Days that the Scythe was a symbol akin to Excalibur. It seemed to apply to Buffy in that context, but here we see that the symbolism reached much further, namely to everyone whose power was unlocked.

In assessing Xander’s role, we need to consider the status of Buffy’s heart. She’s doubly conflicted. First she’s conflicted about the seeming requirements of Generalship. For example, I think there’s reason to doubt that she really would sacrifice Dawn to save the world, notwithstanding her statement to Giles, because her kiss of Dawn at the end of LMPTM suggests she herself has doubts. Second, she’s uncertain about her relationship with Spike. This is perfectly mirrored by Xander’s on again/off again hesitancy about Anya. Both Xander and Buffy must decide how to deal with a recovering demon – I set out my theory of Spike at some length in earlier posts, and Anya is in the same basic position – and they aren’t sure whether to commit or not.

As a side note, I’ll suggest that since the two relationships are being paralleled both in story and in metaphor, your attitude towards one may affect your view of the other. Thus, if you believe Xander really did love Anya, it makes most sense to believe that Buffy really did love Spike. OTOH, if you doubt that Buffy loved Spike, that’s a good reason to doubt that Xander loved Anya. I should emphasize that I don’t think it’s absolutely essential to see the two relationships like this, but it’s suggestive.

Since we’re speaking of Anya, some viewers were upset that Anya died. Given that her role vis-à-vis  Xander was intended to parallel that of Buffy and Spike, it made sense for both Anya and Spike to die (and see trivia note 20). Note that she died doing something truly, nobly Selfless. Joss: “Andrew learning that the thing that he's sort of reviled for, making up stories, becomes the thing that he helps Xander with, becomes the thing that he actually is good at, giving her the epic death that she didn't actually get to have.”

Back to Xander, it’s only after Buffy has her insight about her isolation in Touched that she can restore her heart and spirit to their rightful place. She starts with Xander in the kitchen scene in End of Days, committing her human half (Dawn) to his care. With her heart now able to influence her judgment, she then welcomes Giles (“I really do.”) and Willow (“This woman is more powerful than all of them.”) into her plan. Xander protects Dawn in the fight, Giles organizes the escape, and Willow unlocks the Slayer power. The whole Buffy, united in heart, mind, and spirit, fully deserves her smile at the end.

BtVS began by reversing our expectations: instead of the blonde girl being the victim, she kicks the demon’s ass. The show stayed true to that theme even at the end – all these years Buffy and her friends have tried desperately to keep the Hellmouth closed, but at the end the secret was to open it themselves.

Rahael (AtPO): “What I was thinking also was that in a meta way, Sunnydale exists because Buffy is there. Kept all to herself, her power simply kept her in Sunnydale, imprisoned. Sunnydale (and indeed, the show, BtVS) exists because she is the one girl in all the world. But when the power is shared, all through the world, Sunnydale collapses, and the world lies open for the Scoobies.”

As the show ends, we see Buffy contemplating the possibilities of the open road. That was deliberate metaphor – she can choose, rather than be chosen, and the possibilities are limitless. When Dawn asks Buffy “what are we going to do now?”, she’s talking to all of us. We are Buffy.

Trivia notes: (1) Angel’s “not remotely reliable” source for the information on the First came from the AtS episode Home. (2) Angel’s description of the amulet as having cleansing power like “possibly Scrubbing Bubbles” refers to a commercial cleaning product. (3) Buffy asked Angel if he was “going to to go all Dawson on me”, referring to the main character of the TV show Dawson’s Creek. (4) Buffy’s statement that she’s “not done baking” references FE/Warren in Lessons: “She's a girl. Sugar and spice and everything...useless unless you're baking.” (5) Xander’s “party in my eye socket” line plays off a line from The Simpson’s episode Homer at the Bat. (6) I take Spike’s dream – “I’m drowning in footwear” – as a reference to the Shanshu prophecy. Spike is barefoot; that is, he’s sans shoes. (7) We first heard “Into every generation, a slayer is born. One girl in all the world. She alone will have the strength and skill to …” in Welcome to the Hellmouth. (8) Buffy’s decision to open the Hellmouth makes her speech in BOTN prophetic: “I'm standing on the mouth of hell, and it is gonna swallow me whole. And it'll choke on me. We're not ready? They're not ready. They think we're gonna wait for the end to come, like we always do. I'm done waiting. They want an apocalypse? Oh, we'll give 'em one.” (9) Faith’s claim to Wood that she has “mad skills” is American slang meaning she’s great at, uh, it. (10) For Trogdor the Burninator, see the link. (11) Joss said of the scene where Buffy and Spike stand facing each other in the basement that “to me it's almost the most important shot in the show because it shows the mystery of their relationship and that's one where I wanted the audience to fill in the blank. I wanted whatever you want to have happened to have happened. If people believe that on their last night together they made love great; if people believe that on their last night together they talked all night, if people believe they had a fight, great. Whatever it is, it's up to the viewer; the viewer has earned that.” When I watched Chosen the first time, I assumed they had sex, and that’s still how I interpret the scene. (12) Xander’s proposal of miniature golf references several previous episodes, notably When She Was Bad: “Hey, I got a plan: how 'bout miniature golf.” (13) Buffy’s shoe craving may reference Spike’s dream or her own shoe shopping noted by Hank in WSWB. (14) As the core 4 part from each other in the hall, they do so in reverse order of their introduction to Buffy in WTTH. (15) Giles’s statement – “The earth is definitely doomed” – echoes his concluding line in The Harvest. (16) Buffy, Faith, and the Potentials opened the Hellmouth by using Andrew’s knife from Storyteller. (17) The scene of all the Turok-han, like the one in Get it Done, is an homage to the Peter Jackson movie version of Lord of the Rings. (18) Buffy has always won by changing the rules or finding a creative solution. Her insight to empower the Potentials reminds me of Captain Kirk’s response to the Kobayashi Maru. (19) Note the pun when Buffy tells the First to “get out of my face”. In American slang, that means to get away from me, to stop challenging me. Here it also means “stop taking my form”. (20) Emma Caulfield asked Joss to kill off Anya. She’d been having contract disputes with the network and didn’t want to return. Joss intended someone to die, and this made the decision easy. D’Hoffryn may have predicted Anya’s death with his final words in Selfless: “ANYA You should've killed me. D'HOFFRYN Oh, I wouldn't worry about that. From beneath you, it devours. Be patient. All good things in time.” Fittingly, Anya’s last word was “bunnies”. (21) Spike’s “school’s out for bloody summer” comes from the Alice Cooper song “School’s Out”. (22) When Buffy’s and Spike’s hands burst into flame, I see that as a reference to the opening lines of “Walk Through the Fire”: “I touch the fire and it freezes me/I look into it and it’s black./Why can’t I feel?/My skin should crack and peel./I want the fire back.” (23) Spike triumphed with his soul glowing. One might say effulgent. (24) Buffy’s “I love you” fulfills Cassie’s prophecy to Spike in Help (“She’ll tell you”). (25) Since Spike was the one who created the huge crater, having the “Welcome to Sunnydale” sign fall over is a neat reference back to School Hard and Lover’s Walk. In both episodes, he drove into Sunnydale and knocked over the sign with his car. (26) Giles mentioned the existence of another Hellmouth in Cleveland, which was first noted in The Wish. (27) The last word we hear Buffy say is “Spike”. (28) Chosen is the 100^th episode since the First Evil was introduced in Episode 44, Amends. Just as Episode 100, The Gift, completed Buffy’s journey in the sense of bringing her to adulthood, so Chosen did in the sense of eliminating the loneliness of that journey.