Rewind it!
Apr. 11th, 2005 10:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hazelkJust three days back from Edinburgh and e-mail reminders of the need for two more trips arrive. Elder son still hasn’t forgiven me for last week’s excursion. He wants to go to Edinburgh. Not some time in the future, which could be fun, but last Friday. He wants that time back. Every morning he wakes up chanting “Rewind it mummy, rewind it.” Autism is supposed to mean not being able to generalise. He shouldn’t be capable of concluding that what works with TV, works with real life. He shouldn’t. So far all I can do is tell him we’ve lost the remote.
Of the two great tragic finales in BtVS I’ve always found The Gift more affecting. It’s not really justifiable, I simply wasn’t very emotionally invested in the series during S2. To the point that my main reaction to Buffy having to kill re-ensouled Angel was “Cool! Plot twist.” Swiftly followed by “DB looks like he’s trying to hail a taxi with his arse glued to a lamppost.” But I can easily see that an equivalent reaction to the swan dive of self-sacrifice could be “Huh” followed by “SMG has a major wedgie.”
Feeling sophomoric today, I’m going to discuss a less frivolous criticism of The Gift namely, that in this episode Buffy is not prepared to sacrifice Dawn to save the world, whereas in Becoming II she did ultimately kill Angel. Is this a lapse of moral judgement, a regression on her part? It’s hard to argue that a few more minutes of life for one human being outweigh the lives of everyone in all possible universes. The ghost of Kant’s Categorical Imperative could be invoked, but this type of problem might have been expressly designed to attack Kantian ethics and damn it’s effective. But maybe that designed aspect is significant. Do such clearly defined choices ever get presented outside of philosophical debates? In the real world complete certainty about the outcome of deciding to follow option A rather than option B is rarely possible and the possibility of an option C or K appearing can never be ruled out.
I think in moral terms The Gift is more of an invitation to ask the right questions than an argument about the ethical validity of competing answers. I think it’s very significant that when Giles first makes the point about choosing between Dawn and the World there really is another option they hadn’t at that stage considered. I think it’s equally important that when it finally does prove too late to simply delay the blood-letting yet another option presents itself.
Because Dawn is more than Buffy’s sister, more than a symbol of Buffy’s moral rectitude. She’s a person in her own right and the choice is not just between protecting her or killing her. There’s a third option available, which is to allow Dawn to exercise her own choice. Dawn chooses to sacrifice herself:
“Buffy, you have to let me go! Blood starts it, and until the blood stops flowing it'll never stop. You know you have to let me ... It has to have the blood ...”
I believe that hearing her sister make that choice triggers Buffy’s sudden realisation that she and Dawn are one. They both have the blood of heroes in their veins.
Of course at this stage of her development Buffy is unable to allow her sister that hero’s ‘purgative’ while she’s able to sacrifice herself in Dawn’s place. But it’s a progression from telling Angel to close his eyes, without even considering the possibility that he might choose to die willingly, and by the end of the series she’s finally ready to let another be the sacrificial hero.
Because Chosen is the bestest finale of all (ducks).
Of the two great tragic finales in BtVS I’ve always found The Gift more affecting. It’s not really justifiable, I simply wasn’t very emotionally invested in the series during S2. To the point that my main reaction to Buffy having to kill re-ensouled Angel was “Cool! Plot twist.” Swiftly followed by “DB looks like he’s trying to hail a taxi with his arse glued to a lamppost.” But I can easily see that an equivalent reaction to the swan dive of self-sacrifice could be “Huh” followed by “SMG has a major wedgie.”
Feeling sophomoric today, I’m going to discuss a less frivolous criticism of The Gift namely, that in this episode Buffy is not prepared to sacrifice Dawn to save the world, whereas in Becoming II she did ultimately kill Angel. Is this a lapse of moral judgement, a regression on her part? It’s hard to argue that a few more minutes of life for one human being outweigh the lives of everyone in all possible universes. The ghost of Kant’s Categorical Imperative could be invoked, but this type of problem might have been expressly designed to attack Kantian ethics and damn it’s effective. But maybe that designed aspect is significant. Do such clearly defined choices ever get presented outside of philosophical debates? In the real world complete certainty about the outcome of deciding to follow option A rather than option B is rarely possible and the possibility of an option C or K appearing can never be ruled out.
I think in moral terms The Gift is more of an invitation to ask the right questions than an argument about the ethical validity of competing answers. I think it’s very significant that when Giles first makes the point about choosing between Dawn and the World there really is another option they hadn’t at that stage considered. I think it’s equally important that when it finally does prove too late to simply delay the blood-letting yet another option presents itself.
Because Dawn is more than Buffy’s sister, more than a symbol of Buffy’s moral rectitude. She’s a person in her own right and the choice is not just between protecting her or killing her. There’s a third option available, which is to allow Dawn to exercise her own choice. Dawn chooses to sacrifice herself:
“Buffy, you have to let me go! Blood starts it, and until the blood stops flowing it'll never stop. You know you have to let me ... It has to have the blood ...”
I believe that hearing her sister make that choice triggers Buffy’s sudden realisation that she and Dawn are one. They both have the blood of heroes in their veins.
Of course at this stage of her development Buffy is unable to allow her sister that hero’s ‘purgative’ while she’s able to sacrifice herself in Dawn’s place. But it’s a progression from telling Angel to close his eyes, without even considering the possibility that he might choose to die willingly, and by the end of the series she’s finally ready to let another be the sacrificial hero.
Because Chosen is the bestest finale of all (ducks).
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Date: 2005-04-12 01:46 pm (UTC)In a way. I think killing Angel works better in the context of the whole series than it does as the end of the S2 arc. After all it’s a classic, or do I mean Shakespearian, tragedy – the hero makes one mistake that she pays and pays and pays for. But the official S2 subtext is rather more modern – romantic young girl sleeps with older man, finds that he was just using her and has to come to term with that. Really it’s the Parker story, so when she finally skewers her romantic illusions about him we should be happy for her. Mismatch.
However, in terms of the series arc she’s not putting a sword through Angel so much as her youthful optimism, she’s letting her duty destroy her heart and that’s definitely tragic.