BtVS S8.13 Wolves at the Gate II

[hazelk]

It starts out laughing and ends screaming. This issue also does funky things with colour. Muted mauves for the Dracula’s mansion, neon lit purple stalking the streets of Tokyo, old versus new.

So from Renfield to Butterfield, how much do I love this latest incarnation of Dracula? The dark and O so bitchy queen, the fallen movie star, tottering around Sunset in a drunken haze. After Andrew’s version of events you begin to wonder whether anything is real. Is Dracula even a vampire or is the whole thing a glamour? Vlad of Oz hiding behind the curtains of legend, trading souls for motorcycles. We know this Dracula can bite, he bit Buffy once, but latterly is all bark and bluster. No Albanians were harmed in the making of this episode.

The new guys talk less (Kimiko hardly talks at all) and cut straight to the gore. They have Dracula’s ancient magicks but they don’t vamp pretty, pretty much bypass the whole seduction schtick and are genuinely scary.

There’s a lot milling around here. De Milling around even. If Dracula’s power is all smoke and mirrors how much is Buffy’s? She gets the same star treatment Dracula once did but new girl Aiko dispatches a whole troop of kabuki demons (loved the little platform feet and sumo stomachs) without so much as a scratch and sets off on her next assignment cooler than Kool-aid in violet shades. It’s effective in giving her depowering and subsequent slaughter an emotional kick but until then she was making Buffy look almost maiden auntly. Which was at least a less negative characterisation than the glimpse of Frau Buffydant that followed. The other scoobies fare little better. Willow is all prurient curiosity but unable to call a spade a dyke, Xander in semi-thrall to a racist old drama queen who Renee doesn’t fall for at all.

The cumulative effect is a subtle change of focus, such that when Willow says “we’re the army and Buffy’s the General and that’s never going to change” she sounds about as reliable a narrator as Andrew on a good day. Things are changing. In earlier issues scenes of new Slayers being mentored were shot from the point of view of Buffy or Giles or Andrew. This time we’re looking up at Andrew from the point of view of the young Slayers, hearing their conversations drowning out his teachings. Similarly, in the control tower the Slayers working the consoles are foregrounded, we have to peer over them to see Buffy instead of having the eye drawn straight to her as when she and Willow were discussing funding in the Faith arc.

It’s always about power so what happens when they take yours? Dracula without his is reduced to Norma Desmond status, remembrances of close-ups past. Aiko reverts to girl being slaughtered in alley. Alone. Take away all Buffy has, well we know what happens when it’s Buffy the girl but Buffy the Superstar? Take away the army’s power, is physical strength all that binds them? With no weapons and no hope can they still be friends?