Seven Seasons of Buffy: Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors Discuss Their Favorite Television Show (Smart Pop series) (15 page)

Yet, despite this void, Spike demonstrates over and over that he is capable of love, loyalty, adaptation, even of kindness. Whether because of these qualities, or because of his charm, or simply because he wants it so badly, we
want
to believe he is capable of the changes he keeps trying to claim. And yet, without a soul, he clearly has no moral compass. In “Smashed” (6-9), he tries to kill an innocent woman; in “As You Were” (6-15), he’s involved in a scheme to sell deadly demon eggs; in “Dead Things” (6-13), he can’t understand Buffy’s moral dilemma over having killed an innocent bystander.

However, Spike does have a moral code, and he states it plainly to Buffy: “I don’t hurt
you
.”

And this is why Spike finally reaches a moral crisis in “Seeing Red” (6-19) after he tries to rape Buffy. Acting upon life without a soul, Spike is ultimately capable of horrifying even himself. At this nadir of his existence, even
he
becomes repelled by his own extremes in one direction.

Being Spike, of course, he then goes to another unforeseen extreme in the opposite direction: He risks his life in pursuit of regaining his human soul, hoping it will make him worthy of Buffy. And, Spike being Spike, his demon nature and his human nature are so incompatibly extreme that trying to incorporate them into one persona makes him mentally unstable at first—and therefore vulnerable to The First in season seven.

Despite the soul, there’s enough demon in Spike that The First easily manipulates him into killing many victims; and, in the perpetual paradox which is Spike, despite the demon inside him, he begs Buffy to kill him in “Never Leave Me” (7-9) so that he can’t cause any more suffering. In “Lies My Parents Told Me” (7-17), he refuses to feel any
remorse for killing Principal Wood’s mother, who was a Slayer, because killing each other is what vampires and Slayers do; but he spares Wood’s life, despite his anger over Wood’s ambush, because he understands—even empathizes with—what his slaughter of the mother meant to the son. So the acquisition of a soul only serves to strengthen the persistent contradictions of this fascinating character.

Finally, the central figure of
Buffy
, the Slayer herself, may not be the show’s most ambivalent character, but she, too, endures the same kind of internal struggle. The Slayer has, after all, been in love with not one but
two
vampires. Moreover, she took one of them as a lover even when he didn’t have a soul. And we suspect that Faith is not wrong when she suggests in “Consequences” (3-15) that Buffy was attracted to Angel “even when he went psycho,” i.e., lost his soul and was evil for half a season. When Spike tells Riley Finn that Buffy likes some monster in her man, he’s right; the power of Buffy’s feelings for Riley never equals her love for Angel or her obsession with Spike.

It’s no coincidence that possibly the most honest conversation of Buffy’s adult life occurs with a vampire when she confesses her emotional secrets to one, in season seven’s wonderfully twisted “Conversations with Dead People” (7-7). As we see here, there are some things about Buffy that the evil undead are more capable of understanding than her closest human friends are. Indeed, this is precisely Spike’s emphatic assertion on numerous occasions, even before they start sleeping together. It’s a theme that he explores thoroughly in “Fool For Love” (5-7), and Buffy’s riveted attention as he talks in that episode about her inescapable flirtation with death is clear evidence, despite her angry rejection, that he’s found a path to the darkest part of her heart. And Buffy exercises these dark impulses in that same scene by intentionally humiliating Spike as punishment for having exposed her this way.

Of course, Spike isn’t the first character to probe Buffy’s dark side. In “Bad Girls” (3-14), Faith makes a giddy effort to convince Buffy that the Slayer’s rightful motto should be “Want, take, have.” Under Faith’s influence, Buffy clearly starts finding visceral pleasure in the kill, and she winds up gleefully participating in an episode of wanton vandalism and burglary, though she does not follow Faith across the thick dark line into murder and betrayal.

Throughout Buffy’s tenure as the Slayer, there is a ruthless, ambivalent side of her character which is, in fact, crucial to her survival. In “Becoming” (3-21, 3-22), as Buffy approaches her showdown with
Angelus, she coldly warns Xander that he’ll be solely responsible for saving Giles because “I’ll be too busy killing.” In “The Wish” (3-9), we see a chilling, dispassionate Buffy, the persona which
our
Buffy would have developed under different circumstances. Much of Buffy’s growth as a Slayer has involved her learning to understand, accept, and utilize this dark side, rather than continue denying it. In “Restless” (4-22) and “Intervention” (5-18), the First Slayer makes it clear that a seamless incorporation of dark strength is necessary to a Slayer’s success. And by season seven’s “Selfless” (7-5), Buffy explains to Xander that an essential part of being the Slayer is being able to do what others find unthinkable—such as killing a friend or loved one.

In her struggle to incorporate character traits that conventional morality tells us we’re not supposed to have, let alone accept—and which, nonetheless, many of us either have or fear finding within ourselves—Buffy the Vampire Slayer is not only the bright-and-dark heroine of her own world; she is also
us
. It is precisely because her painful internal ambivalence is all too familiar to us that she inevitably becomes terribly real to us despite her supernatural trappings.

R
ILEY
.

Just two syllables, but concatenate them in that particular order, and you’ll cause a rash among a surprisingly large number of the more civil of
Buffy
aficionados. Among the less civil, you’ll be the proud recipient of linguistic eruptions of a particular and unenviable nature, although if you’re into safety, you can cover your momentary lack of taste by tacking on a
different
last name, and then turning the subject of conversation to either Angel or Spike.

And why shouldn’t people complain? Let me get to that in a moment.

First, let’s look at the introduction of Riley Finn.

One, he appeared in the meandering and directionless fourth season. While many episodes of note—well, one at least (“Hush,” 4-10)—made their debut in season four, possibly the worst of the Buffy episodes to date also called it home (“Beer Bad,” 4-9). His initial introduction—as
the target for a large number of falling books—went without a hitch, as did saving Willow’s life, and he sealed the “all good” vignettes with a direct punch to the loathsome mouth of Parker, a boy who slept with Buffy and dumped her after his one-sided one-night stand.

How could it have gone wrong from there?

Well, actually, it goes wrong from way, way back.

The Scoobies were misfits. They managed to be cute without projecting
cute
(Alyson Hannigan. Sarah Michelle Gellar. Need I say more?); Alyson Hannigan was the nerd’s nerd, Nicholas Brendan’s Xander was the witty pop-culture guru who couldn’t get a date with something that wasn’t trying to eat him or his friends, and Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Buffy, although beautiful, was considered too weird for words. The Scoobies were misfits.

People seemed to identify with that.

Hell, I did.

Self-confidence changed the Scoobies slowly but surely—it does that in real life too. Saving the world a few dozen times or more tends to make the little things in life less and less important. But this growing self-confidence is problematic because it conflicts with the major theme of the first three years of the show: that horror is a metaphor for life, especially among outsiders, underdogs, and people who go unheard in the halls of comfortable authority. Buffy, Xander, Willow, Oz, and even Cordelia survived all of this at a point when Joss Whedon’s metaphor had just hit the shoals with the benefit of a dim and shaky lighthouse of dubious intent. Sort of like this metaphor just did.

Riley Finn was parachuted into the archetypal Buffy landscape when he very clearly had no such outsider archetype to anchor himself to.

On top of that, he was delivered into the arms of Buffy, a woman who had just lost the Love of Her Life. The end of season two—the death of Angel—marked the coming of age of the Slayer. It’s hard to die in the line of duty, and she did that so perfectly in “Prophecy Girl” (1-12) it broke my heart to watch her take that final step.

But as much as that moved me, “Becoming: Part Two” (2-22) was the true heart-stomper, because if Buffy could
kill
in the line of duty, she stood on the precipice of a much, much more difficult act: to kill someone who you are so certain—especially at eighteen—is the love of your life. It’s possibly the most dramatic and moving season end I’ve ever seen.

Nothing that Riley Finn could offer her could come close to that because, for one, he wasn’t attempting to destroy the entire world.
Any growth that could come out of the relationship with someone like Riley is a quiet growth.

David Boreanaz should have
stayed
dead, and would have if it weren’t for his following in television land. The sacrifice of Buffy’s love for him was an act of duty, and the certainty of its necessity, along with the pain of the loss, would have meant so much more in the context of a permanent death. But hell, if Marvel could bring back Jean Grey, writers can do anything.

So, for no reason whatsoever—certainly none that was given an onscreen explanation in anything but a cursory and ill-conceived way—Angel was unceremoniously dumped back in the lap of our heroine, a loose end that was handled with less grace than even television dictated.