Seven Seasons of Buffy: Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors Discuss Their Favorite Television Show (Smart Pop series) (38 page)

Dialogue from the episode seems to confirm this interpretation. For example, Anya says to Vamp Willow, “You know this isn’t your world, right?” Vamp Willow replies, “No, this is a dumb world. In my world, there are people in chains, and we can ride them like ponies.” Later she tells dominant-world Willow, “Your little schoolfriend Anya said that you’re the one that brought me here. She said that you could get me back to my world” (“Doppelgangland,” 3-16). Whether Cordelia’s wish created the bizarro realm or simply accessed a dimension that already existed, it seems clear that this realm now has an independent existence, as a locale from which Vamp Willow can be summoned and to which she can be returned. While the “real” Willow’s spell must have reached into the bizarro world’s past in order to extract Vamp Willow before her death, this point need not prove fatal to the objective reality of the other realm. Time may flow differently in the two worlds, as in many fantasies of cross-dimensional travel (such as C. S. Lewis’s
Narnia
series) and in the third-season
Buffy
episode “Anne”
(3-1). Note the implications of Vamp Willow’s mission statement to her vampire lackeys: “This world’s no fun anymore. We’re going to make it the way it was” (“Doppelgangland,” 3-16). To her, the bizarro dimension is the “real” world, while what we think of as the dominant reality is an alternate (and inferior) timeline. Reality in the
Buffy
verse depends on one’s point of view. Whether Cordelia’s wish created a new universe, as Jonathan in a sense did in “Superstar” (4-17), or only allowed access to a previously existing realm, that dimensional plane now has objective existence.

When Jonathan uses an augmentation spell to make himself into a “paragon” in “Superstar” (4-17), reality reshapes itself to fit his transformed status, rewriting past history. For example, now everyone remembers that Buffy gave Jonathan the “Class Protector” award, rather than vice versa. As discussed above, what consensus reality accepts as the truth about the past
is
essentially the truth. Subject to the magical alteration of past and present, however, the established story line continues with respect to the hunt for Adam and the tension between Riley and Buffy. The changes effected by the spell have been seamlessly integrated into the preexisting reality, just as, in the dominant timeline, reality has changed only as far as necessary to integrate Dawn’s past into the remembered past. To Anya, the world created by Jonathan’s spell is real, and any alternative seems wildly implausible: “You could even make a freaky world where Jonathan’s some kind of not-perfect mouth breather.” When the Scoobies begin to suspect the truth, Riley ventures the question, “So if this is the world he created, what’s the real world like?” Willow, who expresses fear of the changes that will result from reversing Jonathan’s spell, says after the dominant reality has been restored, “I can’t believe we believed it.” “It seemed so real,” Riley confirms, to which Buffy responds, “Well, in that world, it was real.” Buffy’s comment reinforces the point that “reality” can be subjective.

Unlike “The Wish” (3-19), “Superstar” (4-17) involves some overlap between the two versions of reality. After the spell is broken, the inhabitants of Sunnydale do not instantly forget Jonathan’s world. “I think some people are kind of angry,” he notes. He mentions that “the twins moved out,” implying that the two young women are still living with him when the reversal occurs. (Since his luxurious home obviously ceases to exist when the dominant reality is restored, do the twins suddenly find themselves in Jonathan’s “normal” residence, perhaps the basement seen in season six?) We notice that some events
that occurred in Jonathan’s world have become part of the dominant reality’s past. For instance, when Buffy tells Jonathan that he “can’t keep trying to make everything work out all at once, with some huge gesture,” he reminds her that he gave her similar advice about her relationship with Riley, advice she then puts into practice (“Superstar”). We may conclude that the alternate world of “Superstar,” unlike the world of “The Wish,” does not exist independently alongside the dominant reality, but while Jonathan’s spell remained in force, that world was as “real” for its duration as the dominant timeline is in the series’ present.

What about the alternate world of “Normal Again” (6-17)? On the surface, Buffy’s experiences in the mental ward appear to be delusions evoked by the demon’s venom. Do we see any evidence that these experiences are actually glimpses into a parallel timeline that split off from the dominant reality at the point of Buffy’s brief commitment to a mental hospital years earlier? Perhaps we are seeing, as Spike puts it, “Alternative realities. Where we’re all little figments of Buffy’s funny-farm delusion.” Buffy wonders, “What if I never left that clinic?” and her “delusions” show her probable fate if she had remained a mental patient. The final scene of the episode suggests that she has seen an actual alternate reality rather than the phantoms of her own mind. Note that in the closing scene, set in the institution, we see Buffy in a catatonic state. Since she has no awareness of her surroundings, that scene cannot be presented from her point of view. Without Buffy as viewpoint character, we must assume the action is being shown from an omniscient perspective, as objectively real. The placement of this scene at the close of the episode reinforces this assumption. The institutional psychiatrist in the alternate timeline has, so to speak, the last word. This alternate world, unlike that of “Superstar” (4-17), occupies a completely separate and independent dimension from the dominant reality. Whatever the “intent” of the writers, we can evaluate only the events we see in the episode as filmed, and what we see in the final scene of “Normal Again” (6-17) is a separate, self-consistent world.

In this episode several lines of dialogue draw deliberate attention to the fictionality of the dominant-world
Buffy
verse. For instance, Xander protests, “What? You think this world isn’t real just because of all the vampires and demons and ex-vengeance demons and the sister that used to be a big ball of universe-destroying energy?” (“Normal Again,” 6-17). The doctor in the mental ward reminds us of the retroactive alteration of the dominant reality by the introduction of Dawn: “Buffy
inserted Dawn into her delusion, actually rewriting the history of it to accommodate a need for a familial bond.” “Rewriting,” of course, precisely defines what the program’s creators did when they “inserted Dawn.” When Buffy comes around to the belief that her life as a mental patient is a fact and the dominant timeline a delusion, she echoes Xander’s comment: “’Cause what’s more real? A sick girl in an institution . . . Or some kind of supergirl—chosen to fight demons and—save the world?” From our vantage point as television viewers inhabiting our own primary reality, of course, the former seems more credible. In terms of plausibility, the
Buffy
verse is to the mundane “real” world of the television audience as Jonathan’s world is to the
Buffy
verse dominant timeline. To add “The Wish” (3-9) to the analogy, in the hierarchy of plausibility the bizarro dimension stands somewhere between the dominant timeline and Jonathan’s world. The metafictional references in “Normal Again” draw attention to the malleability of the “real” throughout the series. To propose an extreme instance, what if Willow had carried out her threat against Dawn in “Two to Go” (6-21)? If Willow’s power caused Dawn to revert to pure energy, would the monks’ spell reverse itself and restore the dominant timeline to the condition it would have reached at that point if Dawn had never existed?

The advent of Dawn at the beginning of season five and the glimpse of Buffy’s own alternate life in “Normal Again” (6-17)—as it would have unfolded in a mundane world like our own, in which demons, vampires, and Slayers are purely imaginary—reveal how malleable, fluid, even fragile, this dominant reality is. The parallel worlds in “The Wish” (3-9) and “Superstar” (4-17) also draw attention to this fluidity. So do less durable windows into alternate timelines, such as Xander’s view of his supposed future in “Hell’s Bells” (6-16). Although this precognitive glimpse turns out to be a deception perpetrated by a malicious entity, it is certainly a possible future, one path Xander’s life with Anya might follow. Another temporary alteration of the timeline occurs in the
Angel
crossover episode “I Will Remember You” (1-8), in which the Oracles agree to erase the previous twenty-four hours, allowing only Angel to retain the memory of that brief fragment of alternate history. The bits of metafictional dialogue in “Normal Again,” by foregrounding the fictional status of the
Buffy
verse as a whole, further emphasize the fluidity and fragility of the “real.” In short, the theme of alternate realities lurks at the central core of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
. The general of the Knights of Byzantium predicts that if the Key is
activated, “The walls separating realities will crumble” (“Spiral” 5-20). To a greater or lesser extent, however, the erosion of this wall has already occurred many times.

A
S THE
C
HOSEN
O
NE
, the Slayer, Buffy Summers is doomed to spend her life battling monsters. Is she doomed to loneliness, as well? Must she go through life unpartnered? Sure, she has her friends, but let’s face it, so far her love life has been a disaster—every relationship has failed spectacularly. Only three ever really even got off the ground, and all of them crashed and burned. Angel’s curse pretty much destroyed any chance for long-term happiness there, she and Riley never managed a solid emotional connection, and Spike—well, that was messy, wasn’t it?