Joss Whedon: The Biography (45 page)

The stage was set for a definitive showdown, but exactly how would Joss bring a satisfying end to the series and character that had changed his life? Killing Buffy wouldn’t work—he’d already done that a couple times. He realized that he could convey a new message through the Potential Slayers, girls who had yet to go through Buffy’s journey of receiving power and then learning how to deal with it. Throughout the final season, the Scooby Gang tracks down the Potentials and gives them shelter in the Summers home. As the First’s plan to wipe out the entire Slayer line comes to light, Buffy is joined by her fellow Vampire Slayer Faith, and together they train the girls in preparation for an epic final battle.

In readying her troops for the showdown, Buffy gives several speeches about how she’s in charge because she knows better than all of them what’s right and what needs to be done. They all need to fall in line, she says, and she’d sacrifice each one of them if she had to. (“Honestly, gentle viewers,” another character remarks in one episode, “these motivating speeches of hers tend to get a little long.”) One wonders how much Buffy’s speechifying reflects Joss’s own feelings about the conflicts behind the scenes of the series and his view of his role in the Mutant Enemy world. Joss later told the
New York Times
that “Buffy also became a little bit closed off from the other characters, in the same way that a star is kind of separated from an ensemble, so we dealt with the idea of the isolation of the Slayer, of the person who has to lead.” This characterization is quite different from the Buffy of the first four seasons—the Slayer who was stronger because of her friends and the support system she had built together with them.

But the season finale, “Chosen,” written and directed by Joss, returns the series to a more inclusive notion of empowerment. As a battle with the First Evil’s minions rages in the newly opened Hellmouth, Willow performs a spell that grants
all
the Potentials the full powers of the Slayer,
defying the “one Slayer in every generation” rule set forth millennia ago by the progenitors of the Watchers Council. As Buffy puts it:

Here’s the part where you make a choice. What if you could have that power, now? In every generation, one Slayer is born, because a bunch of men who died thousands of years ago made up that rule. They were powerful men. This woman [Willow] is more powerful than all of them combined. So I say we change the rule. I say my power should be
our
power…. From now on, every girl in the world who might be a Slayer will be a Slayer. Every girl who could have the power will have the power. Can stand up, will stand up. Slayers, every one of us. Make your choice. Are you ready to be strong?

It is definitely one of Buffy’s better speeches, and the subsequent montage is a monumental one: girls around the world overcome with a new strength and sense of power. These girls will go on their own hero’s journey, like Buffy herself.

The loveliest moment in the episode comes just before the final battle, as Buffy, Giles, Willow, and Xander stand in the halls of Sunnydale High School making small talk, with the unspoken understanding that none of them are certain to make it through alive. It mirrors the final scene in the two-hour series premiere, in which Buffy and her high school friends walk off, ignoring Giles’s warnings of upcoming danger, leaving Giles to say in exasperation, “The Earth is doomed.” Here Buffy, Xander, and Willow again ignore Giles as they head down the hallway and off to their separate battle stations. Giles, watching them go, confirms that “the Earth is definitely doomed.”

Once “Chosen” aired on May 20, 2003,
Buffy
was finished. Possible spin-offs were discussed, including one starring Eliza Dushku as Faith, who would become a traveling do-gooder in the mold of
Kung Fu
or
The A-Team
. “It would have been Faith, probably on a motorcycle,” Tim Minear explained, “crossing the Earth, trying to find her place in the world. I’m sure it would get an arc at some point, but the idea of her rooted somewhere seemed wrong to me.” Dushku passed on the pitch, eager to move on from her character and onto a new Fox sci-fi series,
Tru Calling
. Another idea, a spin-off set in a Slayer school for the former
Potentials who were imbued with Slayer power in the
Buffy
finale, also failed to come to fruition.

For now, it was time for
Buffy
and its characters to rest—as it was for Joss. When asked what he would have done if he’d had one more year with the cast, he answered, “Honestly, if I had a strong answer for that question there probably would be another season. I think it’s time they all went their separate ways. And so my answer is, I can’t possibly think of anything, I’m simply too tired. That’s the end, thanks very much.”

Yet some time after Buffy aired its final episode, Joss was having lunch with Tim Minear and the subject turned to
Buffy
’s final two seasons on UPN. “I realized that there was a scene I had never written that I wished I had thought of at the time, which was simply Buffy expressing gratitude about power,” Joss explains. “It was such a burden for her, and we were always turning the screws, and I realized that to complete the statement of the show, it would have been better to have a moment where she just said, ‘It’s awesome that I have this. It matters.’”

With the end of
Buffy
and
Firefly
’s cancellation,
Angel
was suddenly the last man standing in Joss’s TV regiment. When the WB announced that the series would return for a fifth season, it turned out that Joss would be doing it with one fewer woman. Charisma Carpenter, who had played Cordelia Chase since
Buffy
’s first day, had become pregnant during season four, and her character was placed in a coma at the end of the season so that she could take time off to have her baby. Viewers expected that Cordy would wake up and return to the show when the new season began, but Joss confirmed to
TV Guide
that Carpenter had been removed from the cast list.

“We had taken that story … about as far as it could go,” he said. “Some choices are ultimately kind of controversial about who stays and who goes and who we focus on. But obviously, we had to have her out of a bunch of episodes toward the end of the year because she was having a baby … so what we had [leading] up to it wasn’t a dynamic I wanted to play out that much…. When you have an increasingly large ensemble week-by-week, and you come in in your [fifth] year kind of having to revamp the show and trim the budget and also think creatively, ‘How am
I going to service all of these people?,’ sometimes the people who have been around the longest, you’ve done the most with them.”

Carpenter was shocked and hurt by the turn of events. In 2009, she elaborated on how she felt things had transpired: “My relationship with Joss became strained. We all go through our stuff…. I was going through my stuff and then I became pregnant, and I guess in his mind [Joss] had a different way of seeing the season go in the fourth season…. I think Joss was, honestly, mad at me—and I say that in a loving way. It’s a very complicated dynamic working for somebody for so many years. As you’ve been on a show for eight years, you’ve got to live your life, and sometimes living your life gets in the way of what the creator’s vision is for the future, and that becomes conflict,” she said. “I found out in a really horrible way…. I never got a phone call from anybody. I actually got a phone call from somebody in the press.”

Carpenter had also been unhappy with the way her final season had gone. David Greenwalt was the one responsible for bringing Cordelia onto the spin-off in the first place and had been protective of the character, so when he left at the end of season three, she no longer had a champion on the writing staff. Perhaps as a result, season four had seen her character make some very questionable decisions. As her pregnancy progressed, they locked Cordelia up in a love nest with Angel and Darla’s teenage son, Connor (Vincent Kartheiser), who was born in season three but aged rapidly after being kidnapped and taken to a demon dimension. Season three had teased a romance between Cordelia and Angel, so the idea that she would then romance his son was more than a little creepy.

As for Kartheiser, the future
Mad Men
star later admitted that he wasn’t a fan of Joss’s work and felt miscast in the role of Angel’s son. He did not like the direction the writers took with Connor, either. “The character lost its thrill about four episodes in…. I felt like I was doing the same scene over and over and over. Every week I’d show up and have a scene with Cordelia, then Angel would show up and I’d have some sort of conflict with him. There’d be a couple of fight scenes where I’d fight with them even though I didn’t want to and then I would sulk and leave. That to me was every episode,” he said. “Ultimately, they wrote him into a corner…. I think the majority of the fans really hated Connor and really hated me and getting me off the show was the highest priority. And I don’t blame them.”

If
Buffy
’s sixth season was the one in which fans felt the show most lost its way, many viewers felt the same way about the end of
Angel
’s fourth season. Angel’s demon-fighting comrade Gunn (J. August Richards) makes the comment that he “spent most of this year trapped in what I can only describe as a turgid supernatural soap opera”—which is an apt description of the season. Cordelia is saddled with a number of soap opera tropes, from amnesia to the aforementioned love triangle to an unexplained pregnancy, to a sudden personality change that turns her evil. Several other characters are stuck in another love triangle, while Angel temporarily reverts to the evil Angelus, a version far less cunning and charismatic than his earlier
Buffy
incarnation. By the time Joss brought on
Firefly
’s Gina Torres as Jasmine, a goddess birthed by Cordelia who brings inner peace to all who gaze upon her, the season felt wrung out and ready for an end.

Whether it was because two of the people who had been steering the ship—David Greenwalt and Tim Minear—were gone or because Joss had been consumed with launching
Firefly
and ending
Buffy
, the
Angel
storylines seemed to have gone off the rails for a bit. But now Mutant Enemy was down to just one series, and both Joss and Minear returned to give
Angel
a reboot. Minear penned the fourth season finale, “Home,” in which the team was offered leadership of the evil law firm of Wolfram & Hart. Season five would ask what would happen if the Big Bad they’d been fighting for the past four years suddenly agreed to do their bidding, and whether working within a corporation with immense resources and reach would be worth making a literal deal with the devil.

The summer after
Buffy
was canceled, Marvel Comics editor in chief Joe Quesada considered reaching out to Joss about writing for the company. It would be his second recruitment attempt; he’d first approached Joss nearly two years earlier, when he decided that one of his first projects as editor in chief should be to reinvent the X-Men universe.

The X-Men are a group of mutants with special powers in a world where “normal humans” fear and mistrust them. This conflict is often compared to the struggles of real-life minority groups in America, such as African Americans and the LGBT community. The property was created by writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby in 1963, and Quesada thought it was very much in need of an update. So in late 2001, he decided to get in touch with Joss, whom he had never met but who was working with his friend Jeph Loeb on the
Buffy
animated series. Quesada cold-called Joss and basically said, “Hey, Mr. Whedon, you don’t know of me, but I was wondering, how would you like to write an [X-Men] book?”

There was a pause, and Quesada felt that his pitch was not going well. Perhaps it gave Joss flashbacks to a previous entanglement with the property, when he served as a script doctor for Bryan Singer’s 2000
X-Men
film. He’d been asked to punch up the last fight sequence, but he felt that the story had bigger problems than just the ending and did a major overhaul of the script. To his chagrin, only two exchanges from his draft made it in the final film.