Touched

[Updated May 3, 2013]

“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

Continuing the point from Empty Places, the chaos of the teaser in Touched drives home the logical necessity that someone has to be in charge. The group was incapable of even having a discussion, and both Xander and Kennedy suggested that not everyone should participate (without, of course, including themselves out, to quote Samuel Goldwyn):

XANDER
You know, I'm thinking that everyone here shouldn't have a say.

KENNEDY
I just wonder if those of us who have been here longer should have more of a say.

The follow-up group discussion in the basement emphasizes this conclusion. As was apparent in Empty Places, Buffy had succeeded in isolating herself from everyone else over the course of the year. That’s what the role of General entails. The Potentials thought that switching to Faith would change things. Kennedy states this expressly: “I thought things would be different now, but you keep shutting me out”.  What Kennedy’s missing is that she can't function as an equal because Faith has power that she lacks. Given that ineluctable fact, Faith will always be the one who decides who to slay and who not, just as Buffy was. The logic of the situation demands a General.

Faith’s reaction to Kennedy in the basement builds on this premise, and states expressly the logic of the situation which demands Kennedy’s obedience to Faith’s orders: “Look, you guys, I'm not Buffy. I'm not the one who's been on your asses all this time, but I'm not one of you any more, either. I'm your leader, which means I go first, and I make the rules, and the rest of you follow after me. Is that clear?” My emphasis.  Nor does Faith treat others any better, as witness her curt dismissal of Wood. Thus, one point of Touched is to make it clear that the problem is not individual to Buffy, nor to Faith, but to the existing system.

Turning now to Buffy, we see that events all season have been preparing us for her admission that she is responsible for cutting herself off. Indeed, as Buffy herself says, she’s done so from the beginning. As an example, go back 130 episodes to When She Was Bad:

JOYCE:  Did she manage to stay out of trouble in L.A.?

HANK:  She did, yeah. She was, um... you know, great.

JOYCE:  But?

HANK:  She was just, I don't know, um... distant. Not brooding or sulking, just... there was no connection. The more time we spent together, the more I felt like she was nowhere to be seen.”

Not so much connected, as she says in CWDP.

In Lessons, the manifest spirits told Buffy that she had failed to protect them. In Help, Buffy was faced with what she should do when she couldn’t help, and in subsequent episodes she felt that she failed in her duty to protect the Potentials. Her very understandable reaction was to cut herself off in order to avoid the pain, as she tells Spike: “That's my problem. I say the word, some girl dies...every time. … These are girls that I got killed. I cut myself off from them...all of them. I knew I was gonna lose some of them and I didn't….”

This reaction became more pronounced after she had to face down Xander over Anya in Selfless, and after she kept losing Potentials (Annabelle, Eve, Chloe, Molly) and saw Xander horribly wounded. We could see how distant she forced herself to become in the hospital scene in Empty Places. In turn, the loss of lives meant that the Potentials would no longer accept her harsh commands in a trade-off for safety.

All of this background we now understand as essential to explain why Buffy seemed so distant to the Potentials and to her friends. Now that Buffy herself has recognized it, she has the ability to take the next step and find another answer to the question she posed at the end of Help:

BUFFY
… I failed her.

DAWN
… I guess sometimes you can't help.

BUFFY
So what then? What do you do when you know that? When you know that maybe you can't help?

Never did I like Spike more than in this episode, first calling out the SG over their betrayal, then with his inspirational talk to Buffy. Without spoiling, I can also say that his dialogue with Buffy, like that between Faith and Wood, provides a major clue to Buffy’s intuitive solution in Chosen.

Two quick points about the paralleled love scenes with Heather Nova’s “Only Love” playing in the background. Not surprisingly, Joss had to fight to get Standards & Practices to permit the Willow/Kennedy sex scene. It was, AFAIK, the first lesbian sex scene ever shown on network TV. Since you all know that I don’t mind Kennedy but that mine is a distinct minority view, I’ll let Masq give her verdict on that scene:

“I think we all wish that when a network television program finally decided to show two women making love the way they always show a man and a woman making love, that it would Willow and Tara. Because we all felt the love of Willow and Tara.

But when Joss and co. decided to push that envelope, and when UPN had the cajones to show it, it was Willow and Kennedy.

And I, for one, thought it was HOT, and I want to applaud Joss, ME, and UPN for doing it.”

Willow didn’t need anything more than sex to reassure her that her sexuality was not the source of darkness in her, nor was it the cause of Tara’s death. Local-max added in comments: “She's always associated her sexuality with evil, at least subconsciously … IMHO, rather than being a mistake, the shifting of the metaphor of magic from lesbian sex to power generally [not getting into the drug stuff here] actually emphasizes something real about Willow, which is her deep-rooted fear that being joyful, acknowledging her desires and love, being empowered (which are all related), make her a bad person. For Willow, magic represents power first, and secondly I think it represents the...transgression of social boundaries -- which is why it's appropriate that it is a gateway to *both* her non-normative sexuality and her darkness.”

While the sex has meaning for Willow in this sense, the scene where Spike just holds Buffy pretty clearly establishes an important distinction between love and sex – only love makes a true connection to others. I see the scenes as running a spectrum from B/S to W/K to X/A to F/W to Caleb/First. The three human couples were (mostly) just having sex, Buffy was trusting Spike. It turns out Buffy was right when she told Giles in Empty Places that Spike is the one who has her back. She’s connected to at least one person.

And that’s the double meaning of the title. Someone “touched” Buffy. That enabled her to defeat Caleb by the simple expedient of not letting him touch her, just as the First can’t be touched. She circumvented it using its own strength.

Since the consequences of Faith’s turn as General and of Buffy’s discovery of the cool axe-thingey spill over into the next episode, I’ll discuss those topics in my next post.

Trivia notes: (1) Giles thought the phrase “power to the people” sounded like something from the ‘70s. It was actually from the ‘60s. (2) Anya’s metaphor (?) of Girl Scouts trying to make quota refers to the fact that Girl Scouts sell cookies door-to-door to raise money. (3) For the Model UN see the link. (4) Faith said the people from the power company “got the hell out of Sunnydale”, playing off the expression “got the Hell out of Dodge”. It’s American slang meaning to get away from a situation. (5) Spike recited the “I spy with my little eye” line when he first saw Giles as the Fyarl demon in A New Man. (6) After Giles congratulated Kennedy for her “performance as a disgruntled minion”, Kennedy said that she was “method”. That refers to a school of acting, but it’s also a joke. Method actors try to put themselves into the actual thoughts and emotions of their characters. Kennedy’s response said, in effect, that she was a disgruntled minion. (7) Anya didn’t think the Bringers were Rhodes Scholars, for which see the link. (8) Andrew was thrilled to ride on Spike’s “hog”. That’s a slang term for a large motorcycle, but not the one Spike has. (9) Faith told Spike that Buffy had him “whipped”. The full phrase is “pussy-whipped” and it’s American slang for a man dominated by a woman. (10) Spike’s reference to the comfy chair as a diabolical torture device is a reference to Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition. (11) I’ve seen it suggested that there are echoes of Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King in the Buffy/Spike scenes. I can’t confirm that, but it seems reasonable. (12) Faith asked the Mayor if he was a shrink now. That’s an in joke. Harry Groener played a psychiatrist in the Roswell episode Who Died And Made You King?,which aired in April 2002, i.e., about a year before Touched. (13) The Mayor previously called Faith “firecracker” in Graduation Day 1. (14) Faith said a “whole lot of Jack D” killed the pain. She’s referring to Jack Daniels Whiskey. (15) Heather Nova’s “Only Love” was the last vocal music on the show. It’s pretty obviously Joss’s taste in music, and I hear it as a valedictory. (16) Iyari Limon (Kennedy) didn’t really have a pierced tongue; that was a prop. (17) Given my previous comments about Wood’s Oedipal issues, the fact that he and Faith have sex in Buffy’s bed is, well, kind of icky. (18) The First’s desire to be corporeal in order to feel a neck crack is the same explanation Moloch gave in I Robot, You Jane. (19) It’s unclear what Caleb means when he refers to Buffy as the “prodigal Slayer” when she enters the vineyard. The word “prodigal” is often misunderstood to mean “wandering”, and he could mean it in that sense because Buffy has left her friends. However, the word actually means “spendthrift”, so he might be taunting her about her supposed willingness to risk the lives of her friends in Dirty Girls. (20) Buffy’s reference to Caleb as a “woman hating jerk” was apparently originally written as “woman hating prick”. For some reason, Standards & Practices objected to the latter phrase.