Empty Places

[Updated May 3, 2013]

Et tu Brute?

Empty Places made viewers angry when it aired and I think still does today. It’s comparable to Dead Man’s Party in its plot, and that generated a similar reaction. I don’t like DMP (second bottom on my list), but EP works for me. What’s the difference? Mainly the fact that the abuse of Buffy was SO one-sided in DMP. It wasn’t just that Xander and Joyce, and Willow to a lesser extent, were self-righteous, the episode and its successors implied that they were entirely right. In EP the situation is much more nuanced. We see the conflicted feelings of the SG, we see Buffy’s side, we know that there’s something to be said on all sides. While my heart’s with Buffy, just as it was in DMP, here I can see the point of her critics.

Let me deal with a couple of preliminary points before I get to the big mutiny. First there was the question of Faith taking the Potentials to the Bronze. Yes, blowing off steam was probably needed. That still doesn’t make the Bronze a good choice. Faith put herself at risk of arrest and everyone at risk of death had Caleb showed up rather than the cops. Bringing up the raid on the vineyard as a way of defending herself to Buffy was not only offensive, it was a terrible argument. There’s a huge difference between a military operation gone wrong and putting everyone in danger in order to get some R&R.

That said, Faith was very mature and considerate of Buffy earlier when Dawn insensitively tried to talk about Xander. The fact that Buffy didn’t want to discuss that topic, though, shows just how far she’s controlling her human feelings and steeling herself to function as General. It’s another sign on the road to the mutiny.

In order to discuss the mutiny, I want to review how we got here, even at the risk of stating the obvious and repeating points I’ve made in previous posts. Since BotN, the Potentials and the SG have seen Buffy in full “General” mode. Indeed, to a very substantial extent they’ve insisted that she take on that role. As I’ve emphasized starting with my post on BotN, the logic of this is irrefutable. We’ve known since the very first episode of the series that the Slayer alone can stand against the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness. If the Slayer alone can slay, then the Slayer alone gets to make the decision to slay. That means the Slayer must necessarily be in charge.

The unique status of the Slayer has always made Buffy uncomfortable, and her discomfort has been highlighted throughout all 7 seasons, most recently in CWDP. The inescapable fact of being the Slayer isolates her from everyone else. That was her complaint in CWDP, but really it’s been a factor since the very beginning: “Prepares me for what? For getting kicked out of school? For losing all of my friends? For having to spend all of my time fighting for my life and never getting to tell anyone because I might endanger them?” (Welcome to the Hellmouth)

From the very beginning of the series, Buffy reacted to her situation by accepting the responsibility which came with her unique status. She articulated that responsibility in the passage I keep repeating from Selfless: "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."

Note that both parts of the dilemma are expressed in this single quote. The Slayer is isolated, and yet the Slayer must perforce make the decisions because there’s no one else. I think this pretty well expresses what Buffy has been doing for a minimum of 3 years before Selfless (at least since Graduation Day).

However, accepting this responsibility, good though it is, causes an additional problem. This is the problem raised starkly in Help, but one which has simmered below the surface all along in episodes such as Phases, Gingerbread, and Lessons: Buffy simply can’t save everyone. Thus, accepting the full responsibility which comes from being the Slayer inevitably puts an incredible burden on her, above and beyond the risk of death she faces every night.

Seen from the other side, many of the Potentials have relied on Buffy to protect them. That was the point of Showtime. Eve/First told everyone “I don’t think Buffy can protect us.” After Buffy defeated the Ubervamp, the Potentials could be confident that they were safe. That kept them on Buffy’s side, notwithstanding her harsher moments, until Dirty Girls called that into doubt. Thus, Buffy feels the burden of protecting the Potentials, causing stress on her, yet the disaster in Dirty Girls means that the Potentials have now lost confidence in her ability to protect them. Her plan to return to the vineyard therefore appears to them as reckless.

The point of the episodes since BotN is to show how these factors conjoin to isolate Buffy. Get it Done emphasized both parts of her dilemma. She “failed” to save Chloe, but when her guilt at that “failure” caused her to react as General she succeeded in angering everyone around her. Empty Places is the culmination of this cycle. Everything Buffy says to the mutineers is true, but it doesn’t matter. The emotional impact of the disaster at the vineyard means that they won’t follow her once more unto the breach. She’s also now isolated from her friends – and remember the metaphor: they’re her mind, heart, and spirit – even above and beyond the isolation that comes from being the Slayer which she noted in Selfless and CWDP.

Part – but only part – of Buffy’s problem is that she has not issued her commands in an acceptable way. Farmgirl62 pointed this out in her excellent comments on GiD. Buffy knows this is true. She told Giles this in LMPTM: “Have you seen me with those girls? I mean, the way I've treated my friends and my family and... Andrew.” The truth is, though, that even accounting for this, Buffy’s still on the wrong path.

The true heart of the problem, to put it in existentialist terms, is that the role of General inherently requires treating other people as objects rather than subjects. You can put a gloss on this by saying that Generals should be very nice in the way they treat their objects, but at the end of the day the privates are still objects for the General to order into combat. And yet, the logic of the situation inescapably demands that there be a General.

Let me state this for emphasis: when Buffy took on the mantle of General in BotN, she made a mistake. We’re supposed to recognize it as a mistake, even those like me who reflexively defend her most of the time. While I’m not going to spoil the finale, I will offer this clue: An essential part of Buffy’s dilemma is that the role of General is a traditional patriarchal role. It reinforces the isolation she feels, there being, of course, just one General. Exchanging a woman (Buffy) for a man (Watcher’s Council) in the role may seem like progress, but it’s actually not.

Everyone can sense that something is wrong, including Buffy, but nobody (yet) can see a way out of the logical trap I summarized above. Kicking Buffy out of her house is how the SG and the Potentials express their sense that another attack on the vineyard is the wrong plan, but that’s the excuse for the mutiny, not the reason for it. I’ll argue over the three remaining episodes that they’re right to be disturbed – Buffy is indeed on the wrong path – but wrong in the way they went about it and wrong in their solution.

Having acknowledged that Buffy is on the wrong path, and has gone down that path making mistakes along the way, let me now review the mistakes of the SG and the Potentials. The biggest problem is that they’re trapped by the same paradigm which has trapped Buffy, so they decide to let Faith take command. Wood was the first (heh) to make this suggestion, but Dirty Girls should have taught us to be skeptical of his advice. He was the one who pushed Buffy to “test” the Potentials, and that led to the disaster. As shadowkat put it, “Wood is a metaphor for authority figures who've always under-estimated Buffy.” His last name may very well serve as a double entendre to emphasize this point.

I’ve said this before, but I don’t think Wood is evil. I think he’s an asshole for not recognizing his own responsibility for the attack on the vineyard, and for attacking Buffy in public, but he’s not nominating Faith because he wants the First to win. That would be derogatory of Faith in a way that’s unjustified given how far she’s come. No, he’s nominating Faith because he’s simply incapable of seeing any alternative.  That’s partly on him, but it’s also inherent in the logical trap that the Slayer power entails on the Slayers.

It’s easy to see, though, that Wood’s suggestion can’t possibly work. If, as I suggest, the whole problem is caused by the fact that Buffy was the General, then making Faith the General obviously won’t solve that problem. She might be a better General, but she’ll still have to bear the same burden Buffy has been laboring under. All that will happen is that the burden will shift from Buffy to Faith; there’s no net progress.

At the time Dirty Girls and Empty Places aired, there was lots of argument that Buffy had showed herself to be a bad General tactically as well as in the way she treated her subordinates. Many were enthusiastic at the idea of Faith taking over. I don’t agree with these arguments, but I think my point about burden shifting demonstrates that the whole issue is irrelevant to the themes established in the opening episodes to S7. Good tactics or bad, the mere fact of being the General leaves the Slayer isolated and unable to protect everyone.

The next problem with the mutineers is that they don’t actually know what Buffy’s plan is. Yes, she wants to go back to the vineyard. They don’t, understandably enough, but they never allowed Buffy to explain how she would return or what she planned to do. They simply refused to go.

There were lots of bad arguments in the room besides those of Wood; the Hellmouth must have been really acting up. That’s a joke, but we were shown Storyteller and the earlier scene here with Giles and Willow for a reason:

WILLOW
(walking away with Giles) Good idea. My control was fading. What's up with those cops?

GILES
Oh, same as everyone. The Hellmouth is active again.

Buffy undoubtedly interpreted the mutiny as a sign of the Hellmouth’s influence, and we can see it that way in metaphor to some extent: we can interpret the whole scene as the blooming, buzzing confusion of Buffy’s internal thoughts. I don’t doubt that the Hellmouth influenced everyone’s reaction, but as was true when it was Spike in The Yoko Factor, “trouble was stir-uppable”.

In each case, the bad arguments stemmed in part from existing resentments. I mentioned Wood already, and his resentment is easy to understand after First Date and LMPTM. Anya has shown all season that she still resents what happened in Selfless. She made the claim that Buffy was “luckier” than everyone else: “But you didn't earn it. You didn't work for it. You've never had anybody come up to you and say you deserve these things more than anyone else. They were just handed to you. So that doesn't make you better than us. It makes you luckier than us.”

As we saw in Get it Done, the Slayer power isn’t a matter of “luck”, it originated in a primal violation. That doesn’t make Buffy a victim – she’s not – but it does mean that Anya is effectively criticizing Buffy’s personal moral character. That’s pretty hard to take after what we’ve seen over the last 7 years, and is pretty rich coming from Anya. Note also that if Anya’s argument had any merit, it would make no sense to expel Buffy and then pick Faith as the new leader. Choosing Faith is internally contradictory to Anya’s position in two ways: first because Faith would be just as “lucky” as Buffy; and second because Faith’s existence actually refutes Anya’s assertion that Buffy is “luckier than anyone else”.

That said, Anya’s comments mirror what Buffy told Holden in CWDP: “I have all this power. I didn't ask for it. I don't deserve it.” So while Anya’s comments are indefensible in character terms, they do express Buffy’s own internal insecurities.

Rona’s joy at seeing Buffy gone made her even more widely disliked than Kennedy, high a bar though that may be. Rona was the one who showed up in Sunnydale expecting to be protected. She’s lost confidence in Buffy’s ability to protect her. Her obnoxious comment reflected that the whole issue, for her, is more about being protected and about resentment than it is about anything else. I do wish, though, that Dawn had slugged her instead of just telling her to shut up.

One reason that Wood, Anya, and Rona all spoke up is that they have come face to face with Buffy’s harsher side over the course of the season (Selfless, GiD, LMPTM, the scene at the Bronze here). We, the viewers, have had the advantage of also seeing Buffy’s moments of doubt and compassion: her rescue of Spike in Showtime; her rejection of more power in GiD; her caress of Dawn in LMPTM; the scene with Andrew in Storyteller; her tears on seeing the picture of herself with Xander and Willow earlier in EP. The important thing about all these scenes is that the other characters have NOT seen these moments when Buffy lets down her mask. Thus, she has appeared harsher to them than she has to us. This makes their rebellion more understandable even if it doesn’t improve their logic.

Unlike DMP, Xander and Willow are not the moving force here. Their comments are not directly critical of Buffy, they just conspicuously fail to defend her. That’s a betrayal in its own way, but not nearly as bad as what we saw in S3. And it’s somewhat understandable after the events at the hospital. We as viewers can see how broken Buffy is by her guilt over Xander’s injury, but that probably wouldn’t have been as clear to Willow and Xander.

I’ve noted before that Giles lacks confidence in Buffy’s decision-making (meaning, metaphorically, that Buffy lacks confidence in herself), and it showed in the mutiny. Putting metaphor aside, just 2 episodes ago Giles was urging her to be the General and saying that everyone was expendable. Now he’s against her, even as she recites the principles he’s been advocating all year, because “This is a hell of a lot to ask”. And disclosing to the entire room her private doubts about trusting others, which she overstated in her anger at him for sending Spike away, was a gross and unfair breach of confidence.

The most controversial line was undoubtedly that of Brutus Dawn: “This is my house too”. This struck most viewers as preposterous. While it’s true literally, it’s just not right literally. No child believes she has the right to tell her parent to leave the house. Metaphorically, however, it works perfectly. Dawn IS Buffy; that is, she’s Buffy’s non-slayer part, what Buffy sees as her better half. Thus, the scene plays out metaphorically as Buffy’s human, compassionate part telling her Slayer half to step down and stop dominating. In this sense, Dawn is indeed a joint occupant of Buffy’s (metaphorical) house, and fully entitled to exercise her rights.

So there's plenty of fault to share in EP. The way I see it, though, Buffy is "more" right. Though I’m not going to analyze her statements in detail, everything she said was factually true. She took a position consistent with her behavior over the previous seasons, with what her mentors have been telling her since BotN, and with the existing paradigm of the Slayer. The mutineers, in contrast, had no real solution. They didn't want to follow Buffy's advice, but they found themselves trapped in the same situation except for a different name at the top of the firm resume. To make such a minor change at the cost of betraying Buffy seems much less defensible to me.

One last fact to note about the mutiny, and it’s an important one. The Potentials and the SG may have kicked Buffy out, and they may have done so for bad reasons, but they haven’t deserted the battlefield. They’re still prepared to fight, they just don’t know how yet.

So why did they kick her out, instead of just getting up and leaving en masse? I think that the metaphor is driving the plot here. All of Sunnydale is now deserted, but Buffy’s house is crowded with her hopes, her dreams, her thoughts, her confusion, her insecurities. She needs to get away from all that in order to regroup. In addition, as Allie pointed out in comments, it would be logistically difficult as well as dangerous for everyone else to move.

I have to admire Buffy’s attitude on the porch at the end, both forgiving Faith and giving her the chance to make a difference. In a way, it’s what Faith told Wood before the meeting: “WOOD: Why didn't you fight back? FAITH: Other things matter more.” And props to Faith, who’s the only one to come out of the whole scene looking good.

Trivia notes: (1) Clem asked Buffy if she could “believe this mishegas”. That’s a Yiddish word meaning “craziness”. (2) Willow and Giles pretended to be from INTERPOL, the perhaps unfortunately named International Criminal Police Organization. (3) Xander mentioned his Halloween costume, meaning his pirate outfit from All The Way. (4) Faith likes to remind Anya that she had Xander first, which she did in The Zeppo. (5) Caleb’s mocking words about Buffy’s tears recall Buffy’s nightmare about her father in Nightmares: “BUFFY: Why are you saying all these things? (a tear rolls down her cheek) HANK: Because they're true. I think that's the least we owe one another. She begins to sniff and cry. HANK: You know, I don't think it's very mature, getting blubbery when I'm just trying to be honest.” (6) Andrew used the phrase “called dibs”, which is American slang meaning that he asked for it first. (7) It’s very hard to see on screen, but what Giles and Dawn see in the photo is an imprint of Caleb’s ring. They could recognize it because of Shannon’s burn mark in Dirty Girls. (8) There’s a joke in the location of Spike’s mission. Giles told him to go to Gilroy (CA), which advertises itself as “The Garlic Capital of the World”. Having second thoughts about Giles’s motives now? (9) Giles suggested that Andrew bring his “Pan flute thing” along on the trip with Spike. In Greek mythology, the god Pan played the flute. (10) This is the last episode to feature a scene at the Bronze, so the band was Nerf Herder, who wrote the Buffy theme music. (11) While riding the motorcycle, Andrew wears the same helmet Dawn wore in Bargaining 2. (12) Spike mentioned the “onion blossom things” at the Bronze. We learned that he liked those in Triangle. (13) The inscription on the wall in the monastery is in Latin, but written in Greek letters. (14) Giles suggests that Buffy is leading them to find “windmills”. The phrase “tilting at windmills” means to fight a non-existent foe. While the phrase isn’t precise, he means she’s chasing after nothing. (15) Buffy’s claim that Faith tried once before to “take everything she had” refers to the body switch in Who Are You. (16) Rona’s “ding dong, the witch is dead” comes from The Wizard of Oz.