Seven Seasons of Buffy: Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors Discuss Their Favorite Television Show (Smart Pop series) (19 page)

I’m writing this coda a week after the season finale and to be honest I’m still in shock. On the one hand, I’ve gotten my wish: season seven is the last season of
Buffy
. On the other hand, I’ve also gotten what I most feared: a set of
Buffy
DVDs I can’t do anything with.

Everything I write in this coda is flying in the face of my assertion that you really can’t have a coherent opinion about a
Buffy
season until it’s come out on DVD and you’ve seen it at least five times. I’m not saying I won’t change my mind, but right now I’m looking forward to watching season seven on DVD about as much as I look forward to a 24 hour plane ride in cattle class.

Season seven was a nightmare. Only three episodes I would describe as good (forget about looking for any works of genius—a “Once More, With Feeling”, a “Hush”—there weren’t any): “Selfless” (7-5), “Conversations With Dead People” (7-7), and “Chosen” (7-22). Each of these episodes had problems. “Selfless” added all sorts of resonances to Anya’s character, setting up exciting possibilities for future development. None of them went anywhere. The rest of the season trundled along as if “Selfless” had never happened. The rationale for Tara’s not appearing to Willow was lame in the extreme. Why would Willow be persuaded, even for a second, by the annoying ditz from “Help”? “Chosen” felt exactly like what it was: an episode butchered to fit its hour time slot. Everything except the tedious Spike & Buffy love story was
short-changed (I sure wish Faith and Robin Wood had gotten a bit more of that screen time). Anya’s death, which should have been tragic (especially in light of the groundwork laid down in “Selfless”), managed to elicit little more than a “bummer, man” expression from Xander. Hardly anyone else even noticed.

No episode of season seven made me cry. Well, okay, except for tears of disbelief that the show could possibly have become so bad. The worst failing of season seven has been the writing. Overall it’s been shocking. The humor was forced, and the characters all developed multiple personalities, none of them believable. The Buffy and Spike relationship become as wet and annoying as that of Buffy and Angel. Since when was Buffy a humorless bitch? Had the Scoobies learned nothing that they would so easily turn against her yet again? Since when did these people speak in a series of tedious speeches:

Buffy to Faith: “Don’t be afraid to lead them. Whether you wanted it or not, their lives are yours. It’s only gonna get harder. Protect them, but lead them” (“Empty Places,” 7-19).

And yet, after all, it is
Buffy
. This is the nasty divorce, but we may in a year or two become friends again. There’s always a chance that those DVDs will work their magic and I’ll be able to come up with a whole new set of
Buffy
mini-festivals. (I can’t help noticing that “Selfless” is the perfect end to the Anya’s-afraid-of-bunny-rabbits festival.) Right now, though, I’m just so relieved it’s over.

______________________

¹
See the coda at the end of this article for feelings about season seven.

R
OMANCE WRITERS TEND TO LOVE
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
because it’s the only show on TV that gets the dynamics of falling in love right most of the time. Whedon and his writers seem to have an instinct for the messy part of romance, the off-the-wall, over-the-top, why-am-I-doing-this? insanity that makes love such a pain in the neck, whether somebody’s biting you there or not. The reasons for this are many and varied, and all the more telling when the people at Mutant Enemy get it wrong. Watching
Buffy
is an education in how to write romance.

A look at how Buffy Summers meets and mates gives the first part of the answer as to why
Buffy
makes the best love on TV. Buffy has had three loves in her seven-year fight against the Hellmouth, and three of these relationships followed the basic psychological progress—assumption, attraction, infatuation, and attachment—which is why they all felt true emotionally, even if some viewers were less than pleased with Buffy’s choices.

The first move in establishing a relationship is assumption: gauging, consciously or unconsciously, if this person is somebody desirable, somebody it is possible to love. Is the object of potential desire physically attractive? Smart? Strong? Funny? These are all clues that
the object is genetically a catch, physically and mentally healthy; it’s DNA shrieking “Pick that one, I want to live forever!” Since Sunnydale is populated almost entirely by beautiful, verbal teenagers, this is not a difficult stage for the Scooby Gang, their angst notwithstanding. But Buffy as Mythic Heroine is going to need more than just a knee-jerk jock of the week, so Whedon ushers in Angel, the Heathcliff for the turn-of-the-millennium. He’s strong (he can hold his own with the Slayer), he’s smart (he knows the evil world she must learn about in order to fight it), he has a mordant sense of humor (even more effective because Angel is not a happy man), and he’s physically attractive, or, as Buffy puts it after she first meets him in “Welcome to the Hellmouth” (1-1), “dark, gorgeous in an annoying kind of way.”

Once assumption is made, the second stage, or attraction, begins: finding out if this is somebody who
should
be loved. Friends and family play a huge role here, along with physical and emotional connections. Buffy’s peer group sees Angel as attractive (even Xander’s jealousy is backhanded approval since he rates Angel a threat), her mother less so, perversely making him even more desirable because he’s outside the bounds of parental control. Also in the mix are physical cues: he falls into step easily beside her, they fight beside one another in sync, and they share long, deep looks (known to the psych trade as copulatory gazes). And then there are the emotional cues: he’s the only one who understands the darkness in her, she’s the only human he’s connected to in two hundred years. Everything is in place for Angel and Buffy to believably fall in love.

But for attraction to turn to infatuation, there have to be physiological cues—joy, or pain, or both. Joy is physical pleasure or emotional connection, great kisses or moments when eyes meet across a room in perfect understanding. Pain is stress, danger, jealousy, the reason for war romances and office affairs. (There’s a reason there are so many love stories in Sunnydale; it’s Pain Central.) The more of these cues that are present, the faster the relationship will move into the giddiness of immature love. And both joy and pain cues are all over the place in the Buffy-and-Angel story, climaxing in their first kiss, a physical thrill so great it provokes his vampire side, the part of his story he’d forgotten to mention (“Angel,” 1-7). The revelation that he’s her destined enemy would be enough to kill infatuation. But something has happened before the reveal: Buffy has moved past immature love to a recognition of who Angel is besides the hottie who loves her. She has moved into mature love.

The question “Is this real love or just infatuation?” misses the point: it’s all infatuation in the beginning, infatuation (or immature love) is the stage everyone passes through on the way to mature love. Erich Fromm in
The Art of Loving
makes the distinction between the two, pointing out that infatuation is about the person doing the loving, the lover, but true love is about the person who is loved, the object. Infatuation is about conditional love: I love you because of what you do for me, because you’re funny, you’re loving, you’re sexy, you’re smart, you’re not a vampire, etc. But what happens when the object stops being funny and sexy? What happens when he turns into a vampire? “I love you because” is conditional love, based on what the object does for the lover; the “You complete me” statement that sounds good but is really a threat: “Complete me or lose me, it’s all about me.” Mature love goes beyond that and says that it doesn’t matter whether the object is wonderful or not, the love is just there, like the air we breathe. So Angel vamps and Buffy screams and rejects him, but when she has the opportunity to kill him, fulfilling her destiny as a vampire slayer, she deliberately misses, and Angel saves her from the woman who made him a vampire, symbolically killing his old life to enter a new one with Buffy. Their love is unconditional, the season ends, the love story is finished. Unless, of course, it’s playing out in Sunnydale.

Buffy’s choice to spare Angel in the first season is not based on blindly unconditional love; she has plenty of clues in that story arc that he is on her side. The second season brings the real test: in one of Whedon’s blatant, powerful metaphors, Buffy loses her virginity to a loving, sexually skilled Angel and wakes up with the murderous beast, Angelus. It’s easy to love Angel, he meets all the conditions for it, he completes Buffy. Loving Angelus is the antithesis of that, nobody could rationally love a vicious demon who rapes and murders without compunction. In the same way, it’s easy to love Buffy-the-Savior if you’re Angel, impossible to love her if you’re Angelus.

And yet they still love each other, much to their mutual disgust and despair. Angelus is riddled with love for her, and because of that he is driven to destroy her. The loathing he feels for her is as deep as the love he fights; as he tells Spike in “Innocence” (2-14), “To kill this girl . . . you have to love her.” Buffy is stuck, too: she cannot bring herself to kill Angelus until he gives her no choice by opening the portal to hell. But she kills him as a sacrifice to save the world, not as an execution to punish and reject him, something that Whedon makes clear by transforming Angelus into Angel before she strikes (“Becoming,
Part 2,” 2-22). When he comes back from Hell, tortured for a century until he is only slightly above a beast, he still loves her and saves her instinctively, just as she loves and protects him even though his mind is gone (“Beauty and the Beasts,” 3-4). The power of their love is larger than life not because they’re larger-than-life characters, but because it is implacably and completely unconditional.

Their final act of love is their great sacrifice at the end of the third season. Angel leaves her to free her and Buffy lets him go: He’s protected her until she’s graduated into adulthood, she’s stood by him until he believes in himself again, and now unconditional love recognizes that they have to move on with only the hope of their promise at the end of the series that they’ll be together again some day. It’s brilliant storytelling that gives Whedon the opportunity to move the series to a different level, but it’s also brilliant romance writing, a love story of mythic proportions.