hazelk | More season 3 redux (Reply)

With the first two episodes having largely dealt with the fallout of Becoming this is where season 3 finally starts to do its own thing. Mostly. Of the titular trio only two are new in town, Scott Hope has been there all along and in this story his main function is to remind Buffy of the one zombie that didn’t come back up to get her in Dead Man’s Party namely Angel. Scott triggers some PTSD flashbacks but the main disinterer of the whole Angel issue is Giles. I suppose Faith, Hope and Trick just scans a lot better than Faith, Giles and Trick.

My memory of Giles’s ruse to make Buffy face up to having had to send a re-ensouled Angel to hell was that is spanned several episodes but in fact it all takes place in this one. In hindsight ME were really clever about the way Giles was written in Dead Man’s Party. He was absent from (and innocent of) the emotional “let’s blame Buffy” climax and overall had very little non-plot related to do or say – his best moment was a silent one taking off his glasses in the kitchen. All that negative character action was perfect preparation for what he doesn’t do in this episode, he doesn’t interrogate Buffy about what actually happened just gets her to talk about every other detail around the event so that when she’s ready to confess she can. It’s possibly Giles’s best moment of playing the father in the entire series - the equivalent of her recognizing him in demon form in A New Man - he sees her. Which means of course that it’s never going to be that good again but still hold the memory for now.

Enough of the old, what of the new Slayer in town? Faith’s first episode and I have to say all the elements of her later arc, the outward bravado, the covering, the vulnerability, the rage, hunger and horniness, the “who’s the real Slayer” thing between her and Buffy, it’s all present here all wrapped up in in one ‘spartan’ apartment. Since they’ll be plenty of opportunity to discuss the rest later I’ll take the chance to riff on that apartment now. Because actually getting to see the home life of Buffy’s peers is as new a thing as Faith is, part and parcel of the focus broadening out from high school and its peculiar hierarchies. Faith and her chosen living conditions as much as her accent and style of dress mark her out as working class. Not geek or cheerleader or some other high school tribal affiliation but an actual real world socioeconomic class.

I suppose the class thing really began earlier in Anne but despite the hammer and sickle pose and the underclass literally underground Buffy’s bed-sit was curiously a degree less sleazy than Faith’s motel rooms and all Lily needed to do to become Anne was pick up the job that was waiting for her and move in. Almost if not quite getting on her bike but then how else can you play it when the story has to be wrapped up in one episode? With Faith a recurring character there’s more space for the class issues to play out. Come to think of it, this is also the season we find out that Xander’s family are looked down on by his posh car-owning relatives and Cordelia’s Queen C status has ill gotten tax money backing it up. That there is a higher authority than the Principal and that Watchers aren’t the mystical carriers of some hereditary duty (as per the movie) but part of big faceless bureaucracy. There’s a Council, a City Hall and a system and I’d really better stop before I start sounding like a less tuneful Dr. Horrible.

There are some beautiful parts to this. The opening to Willow reading The Call of the Wild. The Guidance Councellor’s thoughts on being love’s bitch. Angel going on his knees before Buffy in less than idealised romantic circumstances and her response. I’ve actually enjoyed all the Buffy-Angel stuff so far. Dream Angel is much more passive-aggressive interesting than the real thing becomes after that one great moment. Other than that the episode is just so beastly didactic and the Jekyll/Hyde stuff hits every Freudian bollocks trigger I have. Pete is a cipher but Debbie is interesting at least Buffy’s baffled response to her brokenness is when thinking about Season 6. She’s still very young.