Seven Seasons of Buffy: Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors Discuss Their Favorite Television Show (Smart Pop series) (36 page)

The redemptive power of love is articulated in traditional fashion: Spike’s soul is restored, which makes him once again capable of sin (as opposed to simple evil). He falls prey to The First because he is in a
sense innocent, newly reborn, while at the same time he is an experienced adult subject to adult temptation. He kills. His need for human blood is portrayed as an addiction, which he can overcome through withdrawal, unlike Willow’s magic, which is an essential part of her and must be controlled, not left unused. Spike’s redemption is actually easier than Willow’s, but in the end Spike can only be a martyr, while Willow becomes a goddess.

Spike confesses to Buffy. She forgives him. She calls it penance, but actually she grants him absolution—his penance is the withdrawal agony followed by torture by The First. At the end of “Showtime” (7-11), Spike is indeed restored and Buffy takes him home.

Willow is useful, but is not completely restored to the family until the series finale—both she and others are afraid that her powers could run rampant again. Anya says she, Willow, and the rest of the Buffy family are responsible for the breach in the fabric of the universe caused by their resurrection of Buffy at the beginning of the sixth season—but it was Willow who led them in that venture.

Giles, once a father figure to Buffy’s family, returns with several young Slayers-in-training—but it is Buffy who has to demonstrate that if they work together they can win: “If we all do our part, believe it, we’ll be the ones left standing.” As for Giles, his role has changed drastically. He now treats Buffy as an equal, and until the great betrayal scene in “Empty Places,” he lets her lead the fight against The First while he attempts to find and prepare the young potential slayers.

Buffy, Xander, and Willow remain to the end at the core of the family, with Anya still a trusted member and Dawn increasing in strength and confidence. Spike is restored, and when Angel returns to offer himself as Champion, Buffy reminds him that he has his own front to maintain against evil if hers fails, and sends him back to the family he has created in Los Angeles. All of Buffy’s immediate family take a parental role with the apprentice Slayers. The central characters have moved from being high school kids with parents or parent-figures in the first season, to all taking the role of parent-figures themselves in season seven—just as happens in traditional families, the children evolve into adults, and in return take responsibility for new children.

Xander’s relationship with Willow saved the day at the end of the sixth season, but the series ends with a group effort, the central family of kids who had to grow up too fast in the first two or three seasons dealing with the Potential Slayers who have to grow up even faster.

In the last few episodes Buffy’s chosen family is tested nearly to
destruction. The young potential slayers squabble and rebel against authority like any group of teenagers. Faith returns, redeemed in her own way, and is accepted into Buffy’s family only to betray it by undermining Buffy’s authority in “Empty Places.” However, Faith quickly recognizes her inadequacy as a parent figure.

Buffy is compared to King Arthur in the final episodes, from her sending Angel away because it is her fight, not his, right down to pulling the weapon with which to defeat The First out of a stone. However, that weapon on the one hand is not a sword but a scythe, the weapon of the Grim Reaper, and on the other hand is not wielded alone: when Buffy is wounded in battle and thinks she cannot continue, she tosses it to Faith. And there is the crux of the difference between Buffy and Arthur (or any other hero of the monomyth): Buffy defies the tradition that has the hero of the monomyth dying in the final battle by fighting alone or with only a single faithful companion at his side. Like a mother providing for her children, Buffy shares her power and survives.

Arthur’s round table was his family, and Camelot ended when Mordred succeeded in dividing the ranks of that family. Dawn would be the obvious Mordred analogue, but instead Faith is brought back, Buffy’s evil twin, as it were. Faith’s betrayal, though, this time lasts only one night; the very next day she cedes authority back to Buffy, sisterhood is restored, and Buffy resolves the problem in a way that would never have occurred to Arthur: she gives her power to all the potential slayers, thereby changing the very laws of her universe.

The only person with the power to confer such powers is Willow, who has not conjured such power since she almost destroyed the world at the end of season six. A year later she redeems herself and becomes a goddess, transforming all the Potentials into slayers, and making it possible for them to hold back The First until the surviving members of Buffy’s family can escape.

However, the Hellmouth has been irrevocably opened. In the monomyth, the hero dies saving his society. There is no saving Sunnydale, most of whose citizens have left anyway. Only Buffy’s family can be saved, and not without sacrifice. More than half the Potentials die in the fight, as does Anya. But Spike achieves transcendency. If there is any question in the mind of the audience that Spike had redeemed himself (there is plenty in the mind of every character except Buffy), it is dispelled when he becomes the conduit for the energy that destroys the Sunnydale Hellmouth once and for all.

Buffy’s surviving family escape, ironically, in a Sunnydale High schoolbus, and pause to take stock. Buffy has come full circle in one sense, but spiraled higher in another. She is once more part of a broken family, one that has lost many of its members not to divorce but to the finality of death. The members of that yet again broken family must move on—some of them possibly to Cleveland—and build new families as Buffy built hers in Sunnydale and Angel his in Los Angeles.

But Willow is now a force for Good as powerful as any Evil they have fought in the past seven years, while Buffy, who may not have the sheer power that Willow wields, is the inspirational force whose idea has permanently changed the universe she lives in. Buffy, Willow, Giles, and Xander, the only survivors of the original Buffy family at the beginning of the seventh season, have all survived to fight again. Xander, despite losing an eye, is still the one who sees clearly, and the one who keeps up everyone’s hopes.

Redemption and survival seem to be the final themes of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
, made possible through the creation first of the tightly-knit central family, and then the extended family that can even admit and protect a weak link like Andrew.

A highly untraditional family, perhaps, but a successful one because of its bonds of love.

A
LTERNATE REALITIES ARE NEAT
,” declares Anya in the
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
episode “Superstar” (4-17). Apparently the creators of the series agree, for the malleable nature of “reality” proves to be one of the
Buffy
verse’s central themes. Anya reminds us of the infinite variety of possible worlds and the great differences that seemingly minor changes can produce: “You could, uh, have a world without shrimp. Or with, you know, nothing but shrimp” (“Superstar,” 4-17). Or Buffy could inhabit a world with or without a younger sister. The advent of Dawn at the end of the first episode of season five sharply draws the viewer’s attention to the fluidity of this fictional
universe. The transformation of the
Buffy
verse by the sudden appearance of Dawn (“sudden” to the audience, not to the characters, who “know” Buffy has always had a sister) highlights the importance of the “alternate reality” theme in this series. Most television programs imitate the presumed stability of the primary world, the “real” world we live in. At most, the average series may feature an occasional fantasy sequence or
It’s a Wonderful Life
pastiche.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
in contrast, presents several alternate reality episodes that produce major dislocations of the world as the characters know it. This recurring motif infects the
Buffy
verse with a fundamental instability. The introduction of a younger sister retroactively transforms Buffy’s entire family history. Cordelia wishes into existence (or possibly just reveals) a timeline in which Buffy never moved to Sunnydale. Jonathan works a spell to create a timeline in which he stars as a superhero. And the episode “Normal Again” (6-17) reveals a timeline in which Buffy is, rather than the powerful Slayer, a helpless mental patient. Unlike most secondary (i.e., invented) worlds, the reality of
Buffy
undergoes frequent, unsettling alterations.

All these episodes produce deviations from the “original” reality of
Buffy
, the world we viewers recognize as being altered when Dawn appears, which I refer to as the dominant reality, or dominant timeline. The magical transformations in the various episodes create alternate realities, worlds that resemble our own but deviate at some point in their history to generate timelines that can vary widely from the dominant one as a result of a single critical change. I use “alternate reality” and “alternate universe” interchangeably. Note, however, that the various transformed realities in the series are not all of the same type, but belong to at least two different categories. If the alternate reality exists in complete independence from the dominant timeline, I classify it as a separate dimensional plane. Alternate realities that replace the dominant one and run in the “real time” of the characters’ lives can be labeled alternate histories. I consider “The Wish” (3-9), for example, to belong to the first category and “Superstar” (4-17) to the second. As for the “demon” or “hell” dimensions often mentioned in the series, they exist on other dimensional planes but do not qualify as alternate realities in the sense being considered, because they do not conform to the model of a universe that parallels ours except for the ramifications of one critical change.