Btvs S7 - Tumblr Posts

Just to expand on S7′s unwillingness to challenge the audience on Spike… it’s such a frustrating season for me, as a fan of Spike’s character, because like so much of the season it is so close to something so interesting, but refuses to actually go there.

Seeing Spike with a soul is so potentially rich, because it’s not something we’ve ever seen on the show before. Angel’s situation was different - not because of anything magically different about his soul, but the fact that we are first introduced to Angel and get attached to Angel, before the sudden turn to Angelus. The soul canon is irrelevant - what matters is that Angel with a soul is a different character to Angel with a soul. He acts different, he talks different, he dresses different - he’s a different character. So when he gets his soul back, it’s easy for the audience to see that as simply a reversion to the original character they already knew.

Whereas Spike’s story is a bit more interesting, because the character the audience has experienced for five seasons is a Spike without a soul. That’s the character we love and have grown attached to. When you give that character a soul, you can’t do an Angelus and have him act like a completely different character. He has to be recognisably Spike, as we’ve known him. He has to be the same person or we will not care about the character. So that opens up this incredibly fascinating territory to explore. If Spike is the same person with or without a soul, then can he be forgiven for the crimes he committed before? Where is the line drawn when it comes to moral responibility? Or if he is different without a soul, then is he no longer Spike? Can anything he did before this point really count - including the good stuff like protecting Dawn? What about his relationship with Buffy? This is really interesting, fertile ground for storytelling and either direction you go in, the audience is going to be challenged.

And so they decide to go in neither direction. They straddle the line. They have their cake and eat it too. Spike is absolved completely of any previous crimes. The show is didactic about this - he has a soul now, so it’s fine. Yet, at the same time, there is no change in Spike as a character. He’s still basically the same. The show engineers a situation in which Spike is killing again, and yet cannot reasonably be held accountable for it - yet other characters are held accountable for how they react to it.

Nowhere is this line-hopping more apparent than in how the show approaches Nikki’s coat. The coat is an essential component of the character the audience recognises as Spike. Spike is indivisible from his iconography, and the coat is part of that. Fool For Love makes sure to soak that iconography in blood, and so make Spike’s crimes invisible from Spike. It is metaphorically a dead woman’s flayed skin. S7 then reminds us of this history through Robin, and the pain he experiences seeing a man in his mother’s metaphorical flayed skin. And Get it Done doubles down on this - the coat is tied to this idea of the “old Spike”, the person who tried to kill Buffy. The person who killed Nikki. And yet, when it comes to confronting Robin, the show is insistent on this Spike being new and different. He has a soul now. 

So which is it? Are we going to get rid of this piece of iconography because it represents “old Spike” (challenging!)? Or are we going to keep it and have Spike literally shoulder his old crimes (challenging!). What they do is neither. He doesn’t need to feel guilty about anything he’s done, but he gets to keep the coat because it looks cool. It does not explore the tension of that, because it’s not interested in risking the audience liking Spike less. The show’s stance is vague - and not so that the show can explore the ambiguities, but so that in any given situation, Spike can always be in the right. I don’t care if he is or not - I care that this approach is deeply boring.

It’s so frustrating. Spike is a deeply complex character who has always existed to to challenge the audience on what they thought they knew about vampires, and love, and the soul. Yet at all opportunities, S7 refuses to say anything challenging about Spike, and so avoids any stories that are actually you know, interesting.

I have a redemptive reading of S7, which is that it's all about Buffy backsliding in what she's learned over the years, and repeating the mistakes of her failed mentors. Buffy is in the wrong for most of S7, and I think that's the point.

In Selfless, she parrot's Faith's words in Consequences about how they, as Slayers, are the law. Faith isn't entirely wrong in what she's saying, but she's also saying it from the midst of a suicidal spiral and desperately trying to find reasons to repress her own grief - it's not meant to be good advice. And the events of Selfless show that Buffy's solution is objectively less useful than the third option that Willow finds (the one that saves the dead boys). Buffy is falling into the blind spots of her failed mentor and therefore losing her ability to find alternative solutions like she used to.

In Potential, she recreates the Cruciatmentum that she suffered in Helpless, this time by locking the un-powered potentials in with a dangerous vampire, buying into the Watchers Council propaganda about it making them stronger. Throughout the season, she repeats the mistakes of early-S1 Giles - refusing to connect emotionally to her mentees and not allowing them to have fun and a life outside of the war against darkness. She falls into the hyper-militarised mindset of the Initiative, and the disaster of Empty Places occurs at least in part because Buffy, just like the Initiative, insists that the people around her should just follow orders and not ask questions, because she knows best.

It is entirely understandable that Buffy falls into these mindsets. She has gone through so much and made so many tough decisions that it's no surprise that she feels she knows best. The whole first third of S7 is all about Buffy being haunted by the people she couldn't save, and so it makes sense that she goes back on her previously learned lessons.

And the tragic thing is, this is inevitable. She is forced into this role of hard general, forced to make these life-and-death decisions, forced to depersonalise everyone around her, because the role of the Slayer demands it. The structure of the Chosen One demands loneliness, and demands these misguided mindsets that Faith, the Watchers, and the Initiative already showed to be flawed. She doesn't really have a choice but to repeat them. This is why Faith immediately falls into similar mistakes when she takes on the mantle. They are trapped by the system.

That's why the structure needs to be from destroyed. That's why she needs to rip up the rules and empower all the Potentials. It's the only way to break this cycle, to not repeat these mistakes again.

I'm not 100% sure this is the intended story, and to be honest I'd like another watch of S7 before I totally nail myself to this pole. The execution is muddled enough that it does become unclear, and that's why opinions tend to be very polarised on Buffy in S7. On balance though I do think this is the intended takeaway.. I think there are so many moments where Buffy repeats the words of a failed mentor, and where that leads to an objectively worse outcome, that I think this is meant to be the takeaway. I think that the most interesting read - and the only read that isn't thematically incongruent with the rest of the show - is that Buffy is consistently in the wrong in S7, and that she's meant to be, and that that is was allows her to break out of the system in the end.

I’m way behind on posting about my rewatch - there’s plenty I do want to say about S2, and there’s a whole essay about gender and Phases that I’m probably never going to write - but I’m into Season 3 and I really want to note how much early S3 establishes the issues that are going to drive Buffy’s long breakdown in seasons 6 and 7.

Firstly, Buffy's tendency to pull away from her friends, feeling she has to take care of everything for herself and protect them from her problems and her feelings rather than sharing them. It’s a consistent pattern, and we see it in her running away at the end of Season 2, and continually refusing to talk about what happened with Angel with both the Scoobies and Faith. When she eventually does try to talk to her assigned school counsellor about Angel, she explicitly says she can’t talk to anyone else about what’s happening (only to find him dead, which I’m sure didn’t help).

Of course, this isn’t just a flaw of Buffy’s - her friends have a pretty big role to play, especially Xander. His sanctimonious, judgemental whining about Buffy leaving, as well as anything to do with Angel, does a lot to push Buffy away. (Not to mention the first thing he does when he finds out Angel is back is try to manipulate Faith into murdering him.) It’s also hard not to suspect that Xander’s lie back in Becoming did a lot of damage - because of that, Buffy thinks even Willow hates Angel and wouldn’t understand her continued feelings for him. ‘Kick his ass’ made Buffy feel like literally no-one is on her side.

Regardless of the reason, here we see the beginning of the split that will make Buffy feel increasingly isolated and unable to trust or rely on anyone as the series continues into the depression years, especially Season 6. But we also see the start of a pattern that will become a central flaw in Season 7 - her inability to express empathy or care for anyone who she sees as a reflection of herself.

I’m actually not talking about Faith here - that’s related, but it’s also a whole can of lesbian worms I don’t want to get into right now. But aside from Faith, in the first few episodes of Season 3 there are two girls who mirror Buffy, specifically in her relationship with Angel. In Anne, we have Lily/Anne, who’s wants to spend the rest of her life with her older boyfriend, who has a criminal past and seems a little crappy but also genuinely loves her and is trying to be good to her, and who ends up being sent to hell. Then in Beauty and the Beasts, we see Abby, who started dating a guy who seemed nice at first, but who turned out to be an abusive monster. Both are very obvious parallels to Buffy in her relationship with Angel (in soul-having and soulless forms), and serve as ways for her reflect on that relationship.

But what I want to focus on is the fact that, while Buffy does try to help both girls, she’s also unusually harsh and unempathetic towards them. Her attitude is ‘This is how things are, and you need to set aside your emotions and just deal with it immediately and without emotional support’; it reflects how she treats herself, but it’s also a pattern in how she treats people whose challenges reflect hers. Which will come to a head in how she treats the Potential slayers in season 7, and the way she alienates everyone around her in part through her treatment of them (and therefore also her treatment of herself).

It’s just interesting to see these issues that will dominate the last couple of seasons come across so strongly in this early part of Season 3.