hazelk | BtVS S8.11 A Beautiful Sunset (Reply)

It’s Buffy’s book
For a series still nominally about “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” S8 has been remarkably oblique in its depiction of our heroine. We see her mostly through other people’s impressions. Faith brings out the worst in her, petty Buffy wisecracking about being the good guy. Willow inspires the funny and the academically challenged while being ever so slightly afraid of her and what she represents. Giles idealises her and despairs at any indication that her feet are made of clay. Not!Buffy sees a hero, Gigi a rival, Ethan Rayne a fantasist and Twilight a self-involved, self-righteous little girl. There have been snippets of Buffy speaking for herself, philosophising about changing the world, bemoaning her isolation and her self-involvement, expressing her doubts about what she’s doing and (although she didn’t admit it then) what she’s done. Lots of little fragments as if observing her through insect eyes, kaleidoscopic aspects of Buffy trapped under glass.

This issue is the first direct prolonged look, the one to turn readers into stone. She’s still a complicated girl. There’s philosopher Buffy, who knows what she did and didn’t leap in blindly but couldn’t forsee everything. Sometimes she segue’s into self-involved Buffy blaming herself for gun transgressions, love’s inevitable pain, global warming and Britney’s divorce. But at the same time she’s more other people-involved Buffy than I think I’ve ever seen her, paying far greater attention to Satsu and Xander’s romantic complications than her own. On first reading the story feels a little content-light, if you’d been paying attention the guilt, self-doubt and disconnection were already there. Those are the aspects that are foregrounded, bookended even. “Yay, me,” Xander’s speeches and Twilight’s accusations. All things Buffy knows about herself too well.

You think you know what you are.
But there are things she doesn’t know. She thinks she’s disconnected that all her friends leave, that it’s better for them (Sephrilian through Willow really did a number on her). She’s always thought love was something big and melodramatic announcing itself with a flourish of trumpets and cataclysmic letdown. But one guy is still there and then there’s the whole sequence with Satsu. Our fearless leader has come a long way from turning down Xander in Prophecy Girl or Spike in Crush facing the issue head on, once more with compassion. Even more striking is what happens after Twilight leaves. It’s a moral and physical defeat comparable to the one Caleb inflicted in Dirty Girls and yet rather than setting off to walk the streets of Edinburgh (the rooftops look like Edinburgh, certainly not Glasgow but I’ve never spent much time further North) she heads straight back to her fallen comrade and those comfortadoress scenes are strikingly physical for Buffy. She would stroke Dawn’s hair as she lay sleeping but never cradle her in her arms or hold her hand in hospital. She’s not one of the girls but she is their den mother, a new type of connection for all concerned.

More with what the hell am I doing?
The big shock last issue was the revelation of how all the James Bondery had been funded. Enough of itself to account for Buffy’s clear unease and overcompensation there for. This one shows both the unwelcome ramifications of that action and its deeper roots. Once Buffy could steal a rocket launcher or blow up a school without fearing that others would do likewise. Not so much now. More than that does having more weapons simply generate more foes? There used to be a balance, one slayer many demons. Demons respected that and the world carried on, groaning a little under the yoke of the W&H apocalypse but still turning. It’s a Hobbesian universe that they live in but I’m not sure the solution lies in the conservative philosophy Twilight suggests with his talk of averting disaster. Suppressing further change is surely throwing out the magical baby with the mystical bathwater.

Twilight falls
Who is that masked man? Could be anyone, Riley, Tucker, Scott Hope, the Cheeseman. If there can be three of Buffy it might not even be one person wearing the cheese. Whoever it is has clearly been watching Buffy for a long time, with hindsight that’s the very first thing we see him doing. What did he mean about his first gift being his last? Death is her gift but who gave it to her? The Shadowmen, the Council, the Master? The first two were also watchers in a less determinedly literal sense. More metaphorically, I suppose, he's the very picture of the male comic superhero establishment.

Whoever he is he’s smart. The First attacked her through the Potentials, a whole line of proto-Dawns she couldn’t protect. Now they can protect themselves the weaker link is Buffy herself, kill her and create a martyr, her name has power. Better to demoralise her, defame her reputation, make them doubt her name, make that power work for you.