Graduation Day 1 & 2

[Updated April 30, 2013]

The Changing of the Guards

“Gentlemen,” he said,

“I don't need your organization,

I've shined your shoes
I've moved your mountains and marked your cards
But Eden is burning

Either get ready for elimination
Or else your hearts must have the courage

For the changing of the guards.”

 

Graduation Day ties together what I see as the three principal themes of S3. The most important theme involves Buffy’s acceptance of the absurdity of the world. For Joss, that’s a key insight in becoming a true adult. I’ll summarize that below and explain how the events of GD2 fit in with that theme and with Camus’s concept of rebellion as an important response to absurdity. The second theme, related to the first, involves the corruption of adult institutions represented by the Mayor and the Watcher’s Council. The teenage years are a natural time for rebellion and corrupt adult institutions are proper targets to rebel against. Lastly, we have the Faith arc, which involves both Buffy’s reconciliation with her shadow self and the existentialist quest for authenticity.

The Prom

[Updated April 30, 2013]

Looking back on it, I find it hard to believe that I didn’t much care for The Prom when it first aired. Now I love it and can re-watch it whenever I need a feel-good moment. I’m not even sure any more why I wasn’t thrilled with it. Now I see it as Buffy’s just reward.

Choices

[Updated April 30, 2013]

With the emphasis I’ve given to the importance of choice in existentialist thought, you should expect that I think an episode with the title Choices will have something significant to say. You’d be right. Faith’s made her choices, Buffy makes choices, Willow makes choices, and all those choices have (or will have) consequences for which they need to take responsibility.

Earshot

[Updated April 30, 2013]

Those who watch Buffy on DVD get to experience something the TV viewers didn’t: Earshot in the correct order. The originally scheduled air date was the week after the shootings at Columbine High (April 20, 1999), and the network decided that the Earshot storyline was too similar. It eventually aired on September 21, 1999, just before the beginning of S4.

Enemies

[Updated April 30, 2013]

The title of Enemies is ironic. Faith became Buffy’s enemy the moment the Mayor opened his door in Consequences. Buffy just didn’t know she had an enemy until now.

Doppelgangland

[Updated April 30, 2013]

Doppelgänger is a German word meaning “a paranormal double of a living person, typically representing evil or misfortune.” Wikipedia tells us that “Doppelgängers, as dark doubles of individual identities, appear in a variety of fictional works …. These doppelgängers are typically, but not always, evil in some way. The double will often impersonate the victim and go about ruining them, for instance through committing crimes or insulting the victim's friends. Sometimes, the double even tries to kill the original.”

Given this meaning, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Doppelgangland appears at this point in the season, right after two episodes showing Faith as the dark side of Buffy’s Slayer half. It’s the same basic theme. And if it’s the same basic theme, that means I think there’s a message about Buffy in the episode even if it seems to focus on Willow.

Consequences

[Updated April 30, 2013]

“There were few at the scene, but they all agreed

 That the slayer who ran looked a lot like me.”

Consequences reads like waking up with a hangover after a night of binge drinking. Maybe binge drinking that led to a hit and run accident.

Bad Girls

[Updated April 30, 2013]

Bad Girls begins the final run to the conclusion of S3, just as Surprise did in S2. It’s arguably the first episode of a two-parter with Consequences, but they aren’t formally treated as one and there’s plenty to discuss separately so I’ll make separate posts.

The Zeppo

[Updated April 30, 2013]

The Zeppo is probably the most obvious of the POV episodes I listed in my post on The Wish. If you weren’t persuaded that The Wish is best seen as Cordelia’s view of the world, then watch it again now that you’ve seen The Zeppo. Or maybe the Buffy/Angel relationship really is as overwrought, nay melodramatic, as it appears to Xander here. And maybe the apocalypse is pretty much a parody.

No, it seems clear to me that in this episode we’re seeing the world through Xander’s eyes. Sometimes we’re even seeing what he fantasizes: that he’s the real hero in the SG notwithstanding his role as Everyman. In an interview for Entertainment Weekly (August 21, 2013), Joss described the episode as “a very deliberate deconstruction of a Buffy episode in order to star the person who mattered the least.” http://insidetv.ew.com/2013/09/24/joss-whedon-interview/5/

Helpless

[Updated April 30, 2013]

Writer David Fury says in his DVD commentary that Buffy’s red coat in Helpless was a deliberate reference to Red Riding Hood. Kralik reinforced the reference at several points: “Why did you come to the dark of the woods?”; “To bring all these sweets to grandmother's house?”; and “If you stray from the path you will lose your way”. So, in line with the theme that fairy tales are real, let’s see what Wikipedia tells us about the original version of Red Riding Hood:

“The antagonist is not always a wolf, but sometimes an ogre or a ‘bzou’ (werewolf), making these tales relevant to the werewolf-trials (similar to witch trials) of the time…. The wolf usually leaves the grandmother’s blood and meat for the girl to eat, who then unwittingly cannibalizes her own grandmother….  In [other versions] she escapes with no help from any male or older female figure, instead using her own cunning.”

Gingerbread

[Updated April 30, 2013]

What appears to be the principal message of Gingerbread – tolerance versus tyranny – comes across as lacking in subtlety. There are, I think, two more significant issues raised in the episode which get lost because of that heavy-handed treatment.

Amends

[Updated April 30, 2013]

This is a long post. I’m going to deal first with some very important features of Amends before I discuss the issue which I’ve been saving for this episode, namely Angel’s culpability, if any, for the actions of Angelus. I’m covering a lot here and I hope I haven’t tried to do too much.

The Wish

[Updated April 30, 2013]

On the surface, The Wish is a very entertaining episode with important things to say about the characters. The problem is that if you look at it a bit more closely, it suffers from a couple of significant flaws which lurk below the surface: (1) the episode leaves us believing that none of the characters actually learned any of those important things; and (2) the WishVerse creates major continuity problems. I’m going to explain below the existence of these two problems and offer a metaphorical reading which (mostly?) solves them, but first I need to talk about it just from our perspective as viewers.

Lovers Walk

[Updated April 30, 2013]

Lovers Walk is one of my personal favorite episodes. It has the return of Spike, no longer a metaphor, but a chaotic force as he blows into and out of town and tears the masks of deception off of Buffy, Willow, and Xander. He’s great in every scene: with Joyce in the kitchen; his “love’s bitch” speech; with Willow in the factory. The episode also has possibly my favorite scene with the Mayor and it has the PEZ witch.

But while it’s incredibly funny, the episode has a real bite to it. Xander and Willow get caught, er, “fluking”, and the repercussions are going to be with us for a while. Willow’s would-be attempt at “de-lusting” shows that she’s unwilling to do the hard work of dealing with her emotions. The spell was doubly wrong: she shouldn’t be using the dark arts for such purposes; and she didn’t have Xander’s consent to perform magic on him, a particularly egregious omission given his experience in BB&B. I think the point is to contrast her with Buffy, who does, with an assist from Spike, reach an understanding about her own desire and manages to control herself without any supernatural aid.

Spike’s words to Buffy and Angel obviously had an impact, but the opposite of the one we might expect. Instead of embracing Spike’s view of love, Buffy seemed to fear it and take it as something to avoid. Perhaps we can see the reason for this by comparing Spike’s view of love with that of Mr. Platt in Beauty and the Beasts:

“Spike:  (faces them) You're *not* friends. You'll never be friends. You'll be in love till it kills you both. You'll fight, and you'll shag, and you'll hate each other till it makes you quiver, but you'll never be friends. (points at his temple) Love isn't brains, children, it's blood... (clasps his chest) blood screaming inside you to work its will…. *I* may be love's bitch, but at least *I'm* man enough to admit it.”

“Mr. Platt:  Look, lots of people lose themselves in love. It's, it's no shame. They write songs about it. The hitch is, you can't stay lost. Sooner or later, you... you have to get back to yourself. …  If you can't... (inhales) Well, love becomes your master, and you're just its dog.”

The dialogue in Lovers Walk doesn’t reference Mr. Platt’s view, but we heard it just four episodes ago and Buffy surely remembers it. If Platt was right, Spike’s words aren’t a paean to love, they’re a big red warning light. Buffy may or may not want that kind of love (see below), but she’s mature enough to recognize that she can’t have it with Angel.

There’s another point worth noting about the speech. This is a paradigm case of the problem inherent in attributing the views of a character to the author. Spike’s view may or may not be true; it may or may not be that of Joss Whedon. But we can’t take his words as true in principle or even as true for Buffy and Angel, any more than we can the diametrically opposite view of Mr. Platt. All we really can know is that his words express how Spike himself sees love.

In S2 I made a big deal out of the fact that Xander and Cordy were a parallel relationship for Buffy/Angel, so I should note here that Cordy turns away from Xander in the scene immediately preceding the one in which Buffy tells Angel that she’s not going to see him anymore.

Trivia notes: (1) Spike knocked over the Sunnydale sign just as he did in School Hard. (2) “Cletus the slack-jawed yokel” is Cletus Spuckler, a character from The Simpsons. (3) The book Angel was reading by the fire is La Nausée by Jean-Paul Sartre, which I mentioned in my post on Lie to Me. In the DVD commentary for the Firefly episode Objects in Space, Joss says that La Nausée is the most important book he’s ever read. In my view, we’ll see the results of Angel’s reading beginning next episode and continuing through Gingerbread. (4) Weird Science – Buffy’s description of Willow’s failed love spell – was a 1985 film by John Hughes. (5) Charisma Carpenter actually suffered an accident very similar to the one which befell Cordelia in this episode. (6) The words we heard at the funeral while Buffy and Willow were talking are from the Wisdom of Solomon 1:14-15. (7) Buffy’s demand that Angel tell her he doesn’t love her echoes the same demand by James to Grace in IOHEFY. (8) The version of “My Way” which Spike sang at the end is by Gary Oldman for the movie Sid & Nancy.

Revelations

[Updated April 30, 2013]

Revelations brings us front and center to a critical issue: the extent to which Angel is responsible for the crimes of Angelus (consistent with my posts to date, I’m using the name Angel to refer to him with the soul, Angelus without). Xander and Buffy take different sides of this debate; complicating the picture is the bias each has because of Buffy’s relationship with Angel. He’s jealous, she’s in love.

I want to put aside the bias problems for purposes of thinking about this issue. Frankly, it’s a distraction from the merits. However, I also want to hold off on the merits too until we get to Amends. What I’m going to do here is analyze the actions of Buffy on the one hand, and Xander and Faith on the other. In each case I’ll simply assume for the sake of argument that they’re right in their contradictory views of Angel.

Band Candy

[Updated April 30, 2013]

After 3 episodes which prefigure one of the two important themes of S3, we now get two which prefigure the other major theme and some of the plot lines. I’m not going to spoil the plot, but I do want to talk about one of the themes: maturity. Since Buffy’s a senior this year, it’s shouldn’t surprise us that maturity is a theme. Mature is what all seniors are supposed to be when they graduate.

Homecoming

[Updated April 29, 2013]

“Welcome to Slayerfest!” is one of those lines that makes me laugh every single time. The Mayor, whom we meet for the first time and who is one of my favorite characters in the whole series. Lyle Gorch, whom we see for the first time since Bad Eggs. Homecoming has all these things, but it’s not a particular favorite of mine. This is basically my own issue: I dislike scenes in which people are humiliated even if it is really good for Buffy’s color. For example, I hated what the frat boys did to Xander in Reptile Boy. Buffy’s painful attempt to become Homecoming Queen makes me very uncomfortable and those portions of the episode therefore hard to watch. This doesn’t make it a bad episode; I think that my sense of discomfort was intended by the writers in order to remind us of something about Buffy.

Beauty and the Beasts

[Updated April 29, 2013]

Buffy’s shadow self/dark side has been explored in a number of episodes to date. Beauty and the Beasts examines the dark side of 3 men: Pete, Angel, and Oz. Pete’s case is the most obvious, because the story of Jekyll and Hyde – the obvious inspiration for the episode, which Willow mentions at the end – is a metaphor generally for the dark side/shadow self (or “civilized” versus “animalistic” as a specific case of the general idea). The trigger for Pete’s transformation is his potion, a fairly thinly disguised alcohol metaphor. Some literary historians argue that Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, was himself a cocaine user.

Faith, Hope & Trick

[Updated April 29, 2013]

The title of Faith, Hope and Trick seems to take its inspiration from Corinthians 13:13: 'But now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love'. I think all three virtues play a part in this episode, but I want to discuss them in reverse order.

Dead Man's Party

[Updated April 29, 2013]

I have a hard time writing about Dead Man’s Party because it’s one of two episodes in the entire series which I really dislike watching (the other being As You Were, if you must know). I wrote the following 9 years ago at ATPO, and my opinion hasn’t really changed:

“When something bothers me, people tell me I "must" talk about it or things will get worse. I find this untrue. I find that talking about it is, in fact, what makes things worse. It works much better for me to resolve things internally; that's the way I’m able to put them behind me and move forward. When Buffy ran away after Becoming 2, I completely identified with her and was (and still am) furious at Xander, Joyce, and Willow for their mis-treatment of Buffy upon her return.”