Seven Seasons of Buffy: Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors Discuss Their Favorite Television Show (Smart Pop series) (14 page)

Surely no one, during season one of the show, could look at the shy, obsequious, sweet-natured Willow and predict that she’d one day, due to her own character flaws (as opposed to demonic possession, for example), try to destroy the world. Now, frankly, the season-six twist of Willow becoming “addicted” to magic was just weak writing. Prior to the sudden appearance of this premise in “Smashed” (6-9) and “Wrecked” (6-10), there was no precedent for it in her characterization or in the portrayal of magic, and it was a theme pursued at the expense of the meaningful conflict which had already been well established
for Willow—which was the abuse of power: Willow habitually and willfully misused magic for her personal convenience the way some people in our reality misuse wealth or political power, for example.

Starting with season three’s “Lover’s Walk” (3-8), we see a tendency in Willow to use magic as a shortcut for the ordinary troubles of life; in this particular episode, she tries to cast a spell which will eliminate her mutual attraction with Xander and thereby solve this volatile personal problem. While the incident is fairly minor, it’s Willow’s first misstep on a long, slippery slope over the next few seasons. She again tries to use magic to solve the emotional problems of her personal life in “Something Blue” (4-9). Although that incident nearly gets her friends killed and wins her accolades from the
capo
of the vengeance demons, Willow nonetheless reverts to such behavior again. In “Tabula Rasa” (6-8), she once again nearly gets all her friends killed by abusing her magical powers in an attempt to make her own emotional life easier (this time with an intrusive spell intended to affect those closest to her). So down that slippery slope this character goes, until this kind of misuse of her power eventually combines with a moment of such terrible emotional rage, upon Tara’s death, that Willow becomes the big bad villain whom the Slayer must confront and defeat in the season-six finale.

Sitting through season one, we might have guessed that, say, Cordelia could potentially become a murderous world-destroying bitch wielding enormous power to the detriment of mankind. But who knew that such potential for evil even existed inside of the soft-natured Willow?

It is through this slowly developing good-and-evil struggle within herself that Willow eventually becomes a fascinating character in her own right. Surely Willow’s most interesting year is season seven, as she struggles with the evil she has encountered within herself and which, like Angel, she must now learn to understand, incorporate, and utilize with good judgment. Now Willow’s magic turns inadvertently against herself, revealing her insecurities as she becomes “invisible” to her loved ones in “Same Time, Same Place” (7-3). Her power also exposes her remorse in “The Killer In Me” (7-13), when she takes on the appearance of the man she murdered, an event which also forces her to recognize how guilty she feels about starting a new relationship while her lover, Tara, lies dead.

All power comes hand in hand with danger as well as with temptations to misuse it, and Willow’s struggle with this is real to us, even if her immense magical power is clearly fictional.

Meanwhile, whereas one might have originally assumed
Buffy’
s Cordelia might turn into a major villainess in Sunnydale, she instead becomes, like Xander, a person whom we often don’t know whether to love or hate. Cordelia’s and Xander’s “evil” in
Buffy
is ordinary, familiar, and all too human.

Cordelia is self-centered, snide, arrogant, and malicious. We’d love to hate her; but we can’t, because Cordelia mixes too much good with her daily dose of mundane evil. She’s brave; she often joins the Scooby gang in battling monsters, and she conquers vampires with mere words in “Homecoming” (3-5). She’s honest; note how Cordelia says everything she thinks and never thinks anything she doesn’t say in “Earshot” (3-18). She’s sincere and capable of love, as we see in her volatile relationship with Xander; and we realize in “Lover’s Walk” (3-8) and “The Wish”(3-9), when Xander breaks her heart, that she’s as vulnerable as we are. Moreover, rather than whining and feeling sorry for herself thereafter, she relieves her pain by inflicting any number of clever, sharp-edged verbal assaults on Xander in subsequent episodes. Sure, she’s a bitch; but who among us doesn’t envy how bold and articulate she is when confronting someone who has hurt her?

If Cordelia is the evil bitch whom we can’t help liking, then Xander is the good guy whom we can’t help despising. Xander is a catalogue of petty weaknesses and minor evils; his characterization is practically a template for a venial sinner. During the gang’s high-school years, Xander often speaks and acts out of spite when it comes to Angel. Whether it’s something as minor as his many snide little comments or something as major as his urging Faith to kill Angel in “Revelations” (3-7), his jealousy over Buffy’s feelings for Angel is always among his motives. Nor is he a guy you’d want your sister to date. Even prior to his nuzzling with Willow behind his girlfriend’s back in season three, he demonstrates a roving eye with his obvious sexual interest in Faith (“Faith, Hope, and Trick,” 3-3) and his ongoing crush on Buffy while dating Cordelia. He takes Willow for granted, sometimes to a truly insensitive and unconscionable extent . . . right up until she has a boyfriend. It’s only when another guy loves her that Willow finally becomes sexually interesting to Xander. In subsequent years, he proposes to Anya, abandons her at the altar, and then attacks her with verbal viciousness when she later sleeps with someone else for solace. And he is harshly judgmental when he learns that Buffy has slept with Spike.

Yet, despite all this, Xander inevitably comes through in the end as
a decent, loving, and loyal friend. Moreover, though it’s not his “destiny” and he has no supernatural defenses, he nonetheless regularly chooses to be on the frontlines of the battle against dark forces on the Hellmouth. No matter how often we despise Xander for his petty evils, we also always respect him for his virtues.

The seemingly straight-arrow Giles was a rock ’n’ rolling rebel who resented and resisted his assigned duty to become a Watcher, and who even dabbled in demonology as a young man. Usually the figure of wise restraint and fatherly wisdom, he betrays Buffy in “Lies My Parents Told Me” (7-17) by colluding in the attempted murder of Spike. The laid-back Oz gets bitten by a werewolf in season two and eventually learns, as did Angel, that there’s no ignoring a monster inhabiting your body. By season four, in “Wild at Heart” (4-6), Oz realizes that he can’t progress as a person until he learns how to incorporate the wolf.

Faith is a colorful character when first introduced to us, but she becomes far more compelling when she tumbles across the unseen line into the dark side of her nature and then joins Buffy’s enemies. Faith’s longing to belong is most moving after she’s ensured that she can never belong again. Her desire to be a true Slayer only becomes truly apparent in season four, after she has betrayed and abandoned all that being a Slayer means. Prior to her downfall, Faith disregarded the moral principles of Slaying and enjoyed the violence and power. Only much later, as she struggles alone in a mentally unstable state during “This Year’s Girl” (4-15) and “Who Are You” (4-16), does Faith start grappling with what it means to be a Slayer, to protect the innocent, to commit murder, and (in the related
Angel
episodes) to atone for evil. Only after her own “demon” has dominated her life can Faith’s soul find a place to make its stand, ultimately enabling her to return in season seven as the edgy, wisecracking, self-aware ex-con who’s ready to die to save the world. And it is the journey to these extremes which makes Faith so memorable.

Faith’s story, of course, is entwined with the schemes of that great
Buffy
villain, Mayor Wilkins. Is there any fan who didn’t love finding such immense evil in the form of the squeakily clean-cut, self-righteous, platitude-spouting authority figure whom we have all known at some point in our lives? Yet, as delightful as he initially was, the Mayor continued growing and surprising us until, no matter how evil he was, it was impossible to see him
only
as a villain.

Eschewing the indiscriminately libidinous stereotype of so many boring villains, the Mayor kindly but firmly rejects Faith’s sexual overtures
when they become allies in season three. Not only does he deliberately choose the role of protective, supportive father figure with her, he also grows to love her in a selfless parental way. He talks with her about her problems, tries to build her self-confidence, and worries about her happiness. His genuine love for Faith is the weakness that Buffy exploits to defeat him in “Graduation Day” (3-21, 3-22). In “This Year’s Girl” (4-15) we learn that even as the Mayor was preparing for his Ascension, he made plans to protect Faith from beyond death in case his own schemes turned to ashes (as they did).

Apart from Buffy’s mother, the Mayor is the only person candid and clear-sighted enough to confront Angel about the huge sacrifices that his relationship with Buffy will force on her. The Mayor’s condemnatory comments about this in season three’s “Choices” (3-19), are so articulate and convincing that we realize, as does Angel, that he’s right. Though he is Buffy’s mortal enemy, the Mayor sees her dilemma with compassionate understanding. Mayor Wilkins is so vivid a character because of the ambivalent responses he continually creates in us with his contradictory nature.

However, probably no
Buffy
character’s ambivalence has ever fascinated us as much as that of Spike. His characterization as an exceptional and unpredictable individual began with his very first appearance, in “School Hard” (2-15): A particularly dangerous vampire who has killed two Slayers in his time, he stalks Buffy, despises Angel, kills Sunnydale citizens, and even murders the Anointed One (or, as Spike calls him, the “annoying” one); and yet this epitome of ruthless, bloodthirsty, wisecracking villainy loves Drusilla with a tender and selfless devotion that, frankly, not many human lovers can equal. He humors her strange moods, apologizes sincerely whenever he hurts her feelings, looks after her with the patience of a good nurse, and gives her unconditional, monogamous, and enduring devotion. He goes to great lengths to cure Drusilla’s physical weakness. Later, he’s emotionally devastated by her abandonment.

Nor is Spike just a devoted (or besotted) lover. Like the Mayor, he’s shrewd enough to understand the emotional lives of his enemies. As Buffy notes in “Lover’s Walk” (3-8), she can fool her friends about her feelings for Angel, but she can’t fool Spike. Though Spike usually uses his understanding of human emotion to torment his victims and inflict pain on his enemies, he can nonetheless demonstrate an unexpected sensitivity. In season four’s “Something Blue” (4-9), he snaps at Giles and Buffy for failing to recognize the depth of Willow’s emotional pain
over losing Oz. In “Fool for Love” (5-7), Spike credibly asserts that he understands Slayers even better than they understand themselves.

After the Initiative has planted the lifestyle-altering chip in Spike’s head in season four, Spike’s new habits gradually bring him into more frequent and intimate contact with the Scooby gang; and it’s ultimately only a matter of time before Spike’s empathy and insight combine with his penchant for grand passions and lead to the most interesting development in his story: He falls in love with the Slayer.

Spike’s extremes thereafter make him the most challenging characterization
Buffy
has ever explored. His sincere, tormented confession of love is heart-rending in “Crush” (5-14); yet he chains Buffy up in his crypt to make this declaration to her
and
threatens to let Drusilla kill her if she won’t admit to having feelings for him! In “Intervention” (5-18), Spike’s antics with the Buffybot are wonderfully comedic, but it’s nonetheless incredibly creepy that he’s had a robotic sex slave made in Buffy’s image; yet just as we’re thinking that a smart Slayer would definitely stake him for this . . . Spike endures torture at Glory’s hands rather than reveal to her that Dawn is the Key she wants, because he’d rather die than let Buffy endure the pain of losing her sister. In equal measures, Spike regularly repels us and wins our admiration.

Eventually, Spike and Buffy enter into a secretive sexual relationship so volatile and unstable that it’s frequently unclear to both of them whether he’s currently her lover or her
ex
-lover.

So, who is Spike? Is he really the stalker outside Buffy’s bedroom windows, the obsessed creep who steals pieces of her clothing to sniff in his crypt? The demon who chains her up and threatens to kill her if she won’t say she has feelings for him? Or is he really the strong knight who serves Buffy selflessly in “The Gift” (5-22), faithfully guards her sister in “Bargaining” (6-1), and is Buffy’s patient confidante in “Life Serial” (6-5)?

The beauty of Spike’s characterization is that he’s really
all
of these. He repels us and wins our admiration in equal measure precisely because he
is
equally repellent and admirable. He is both villain and hero; both demon and knight. Any attempt to define him as primarily one thing or the other is bound to fail, because he refuses to remain consistent with either definition. He regularly goes to
both
extremes, and that is precisely why he is such a riveting character.

Spike tells Buffy numerous times that loving her has changed him. Yet in “Smashed” (6-9), when Spike mistakenly thinks his chip has
stopped working, the first thing he does is stalk, attack, and try to kill an innocent woman.

Spike has spent more than a century killing hundreds—perhaps thousands—of people, and, prior to having a soul in season seven, he never expresses or demonstrates even a wisp of remorse for any of those murders. As Buffy argues in “Crush” (5-14), the chip in his head isn’t moral change, it just makes him like a serial killer in prison. According to the established natural laws of the
Buffy
verse, no matter how exceptional Spike is, no matter how much he loves Buffy, and no matter how much he wants to be worthy of her love, he can never become a compassionate, morally developed, trustworthy being, because he lacks the one absolutely essential ingredient for such a transformation: a soul.