Buffy Season 6

[hazelk]

What follows is a distillation of some thoughts I’ve been having for a while about the character arcs, especially Willow’s, in S6 of BtVS. I’ve been rather struck by the way all the characters seem to hit rock bottom at points that reveal their underlying issues to be based on real-life rather than mystical problems and wondering how this might fit into the framework of the series as a whole.



The Age of Disillusionment

Season 5 of BtVS has been described by no less an insider than Marti Noxon as ‘epic’. Thematically it’s easy to see why. Much of Buffy’s arc is occupied by an examination of what it means to be a ‘warrior’ and the complex relationship between the slayer and her mortality. Willow’s experiments with magic suggest yet another classic fantasy storyline, the one in which the talented ingénue becomes corrupted/seduced to the dark side by the power he/she seeks. Meanwhile, Spike’s pining after the unobtainable Slayer begins to resemble a modern retelling of medieval romance conventions. It feels almost inevitable that things should end, as in so many tales of the great battle between good and evil, with the hero’s sacrificial and noble death.

If the proper end to an epic story is death, Season 6, by the very act of existing, repudiates the epic. This will be the season of “au revoir m’sieur metaphor”, in which real life will prove scarier than monsters and evil will come, not from an irresistible godly force, but from three little boys (and one girl) who just don’t know when to stop. In fact the process of undermining the mythic begins even before Buffy’s magical resurrection, in the final words of “The Gift”. After all, if the hardest thing in this world is to live in it, shouldn’t the hero be up to that challenge too?

And challenge it proves to be, “Everything is hard and bright and violent,” says Buffy, “Everything I feel, everything I touch”. Initially our erstwhile hero withdraws into herself. When she finds she can’t even protect her friends from the knowledge of what they’ve done, she lets herself believe she’s come back a monster and vents her consequent self-loathing on Spike. But she’s not a monster, only behaving like one. Finally, the events of ‘Normal Again’, offer her a poison-induced return to heavenly bliss, but the heaven she now envisages is no Valhalla and the valiant hero is just a sick girl in a lunatic asylum. In the climatic scenes of the episode Buffy at last rediscovers the strength to reject the illusion and begin the journey back to life in earnest.

While Buffy actively chooses disillusionment, Willow and Spike seem more deeply committed to the epic interpretations of their lives/unlives and have to be forcibly shocked out of their fantasies.

In the early episodes of season 6, the idea of becoming the next Anakin Skywalker seems to exert the same pull on Willow as Supervillany does on the three nerds. She gains the power to remake the world to her own liking, but is that really what she wants? This is the girl who balked at even being called the Big Gun following her first experience of real power in the final episodes of Season 5. Raising Buffy from the dead feels amazing but also absolves Willow of having to stay “boss of us” and that may be the point. Like most of us, I suspect, Willow wants to feel like Super!Willow without the attendant responsibility of being her. She wants power, yes, but largely as means to avoid having to experience unpleasantness, and if achieving that disrupts other people’s lives then so be it. It takes a trip to Rack’s for her to finally see through what she’s been doing and she crashes to the ground, neither Dark!Phoenix nor fallen angel, but just another junkie seeking a fix for her emotional inadequacies.

Spike’s arc begins by apparently continuing to follow the Courtly Love paradigm of the previous season. However, this breaks down in OMWF, which forces him to admit to his distinctly unknightly feelings of frustration and anger in song. When he and Buffy finally have it out and bring down the house, his romantic illusions revert to the gothic model. “Great love is wild and passionate and dangerous. It burns and consumes.” And disintegrates into narcissistic delusion, with all that effulgence coming down in the end to no more than a brutal scuffle on the bathroom floor.

Much (but by no means all) fan criticism of season 6 seems to revolve around the writers’ perceived failure to deliver the “promised” Willow and Spike arcs of corruption and redemption, respectively. I would argue that deconstructing fantasy/romance conventions was, in many ways, the point of a season that looked beyond the hero’s death, to the metaphorical equivalent of that stage of life when you finally abandon childhood dreams of playing for England or winning the Nobel prize for medicine.

Comments

[azdak.livejournal.com]

I like this, especially the idea that epic notions of romance and power and warriorhood are being deliberately undercut. You've given Spike's arc in particular a coherence that isn't always readily apparent in the show, when he goes from Sweet Spike in the opening episodes to Dirty Dumpster Sex Spike. You should post this to mutant_allies, I'm sure it would interest people.

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

Thanks! And yeah poor Spike. Without a soul he seems capable of moments of selflessness but completely unable to sustain them. So how does the mutant_allies thing work or is it completely obvious once you join?
I'll go sign up.

[yourlibrarian]

I quite like your take on the three arcs, and yes, yet again the show functioned by disrupting the conventions raher than following them.

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

I guess it all goes back to the blonde girl who trounces the monster in the alley. Thanks!

[meri-sefket.livejournal.com]

It takes a trip to Rack’s for her to finally see through what she’s been doing and she crashes to the ground, neither Dark!Phoenix nor fallen angel, but just another junkie seeking a fix for her emotional inadequacies.

This is the first time I've seen the Junkie!Willow story line make sense in any analysis. I have to think about this for awhile, but I like where this is going. Thanks for the new perspective.

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

I've always had a weakness for Wrecked for perfectly shallow reasons. Psychedelia pretty! Monster explode! It was fun to think through a justification.

[spacedoutlooney.livejournal.com]

Great post. I love your thoughts about Willow here:

Like most of us, I suspect, Willow wants to feel like Super!Willow without the attendant responsibility of being her. She wants power, yes, but largely as means to avoid having to experience unpleasantness, and if achieving that disrupts other people’s lives then so be it.

I actually feel that Willow going overboard at Rack's and everyone concluding that she was addicted to magic was actually a way of avoiding rather confronting her problems, but I think that her wanting power without the responsibility is a big part of her problem and a large factor in the decision to resurrect Buffy.

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

Thanks! And good point – Willow trades delusions of grandeur for junkie romanticism. She’s recovering addict!Willow. Then, after Tara’s death, she’s relapsing vengeance!Willow on a suicidal bender. Untill Xander shows her that beneath it all she’s still just the girl he’s known from kindergarten. I don’t think it’s as coherent as the pre-Wrecked arc, however, because the addiction aspect doesn’t get addressed directly until Lessons and her vengeance issues open a whole new can of worms. And what londonkds says.

[londonkds.livejournal.com]

Like spacedoutlooney above, it's a nice theory about junkie!Willow as part of S6's undercutting of high drama, but I'd be more convinced if the addiction model (and the later posession model in S7) hadn't been used as a way to let Willow off dealing with the deeper personality flaws established pre-Wrecked

[spacedoutlooney.livejournal.com]

The "posession model in S7?" I've never heard of that before. Do you care to elaborate?

[londonkds.livejournal.com]

Sorry. It's my own personal description of the way in which during S7, from Selfless onwards, Willow keeps trying to do magic and being Overcome By Evil in a very melodramatic way that's played as possession by some external force. It's quite similar to her truly psychotic behaviour after she drains Rack in Two To Go, and in S7 she and other characters sometimes behave as if all her actions after Tara's death were driven by some external added evil influence. And then in Touched and Chosen there are her explicit worries about being overcome by power and turning evil if she has sex with Kennedy and then if she does the mass-activation spell, until the actual activation spell is played as if she comes into contact with some powerful force of good that drives the evil out of her. I don't like any of this, because it seems to me to suggest that all of Willow's more negative actions in S6 were down to coming into contact with an external force of darkness, and that it can all be magically blown away without her having to deal with the inherent negative aspects of her personality that were implied in S4-6.

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

I think there are occasions when Willow herself seems to reject the possession concept. In CWDP and at the end of Get it Done. “That’s how I work.” And I really wish they’d followed that up in the Touched conversation.

I’m OK with the absolving issue as far as S6 goes, basically because I’m extremely dubious about addiction completely excusing things in real life. But I take your point.

[spacedoutlooney.livejournal.com]

OK, I see what you mean. However, I think Willow does take responsibility for her actions in season 7 (ref in Lessons to Giles "I killed people, Giles", and in CWDP like avcheb says). With the way its talked about, it seems a lot like vampires having a demon inside of them. I think the dark side of magic draws out the worst in a witch, like the demon amplifies the worst personality traits in a vampire. So maybe it's about controlling that influence. In the end though, it's still them, the vampires and Willow, that's doing all the bad things.

I would agree that everyone but Willow and Giles do use this possession model though, unfortunately. (We never see Buffy asking Willow if she meant all those things she said at the end of season 6, for example.) What's good is that Willow doesn't use that as an excuse, I don't think.

[superplin.livejournal.com]

Excellent analysis, and I agree with all your points. I'm especially on board with the idea that a real hero is one who faces the grittiness of everyday existence in the world. That seems to be a theme in both series, and it's the main reason I'm always disappointed when people say they thought The Gift would be the perfect ending to the series. (The other reason has to do with the sacrificial model of womanhood, which irritates me. Well, and also it would have meant no S6 and S7, which I loved!)

I once wrote a post comparing the tower jump and the S6 aftermath to any really big accomplishment in life: you think, "If only I could finish my dissertation/graduate/win an Olympic medal/become president of the company/whatever, I would have this great shining moment, and everything would be perfect!" Except, even once you've attained your ultimate goal, and gone out in a blaze of glory, life goes on. You still have to take out the trash, pay the bills, watch over your bratty kleptomaniac younger sister, get a crappy job, and still go out every night saving the world. The big shining moment is just that--a moment. It's a punctuation mark in the narrative of your life, not the sum total of it.

So that's why I love where S6 went, in Buffy's case, and you do a great job of explaining why it was important for the others, too. I think the same reasoning as above works for Spike's return in AtS S5: he still needed to learn to make an unlife for himself after his ultimate sacrifice. Otherwise, it would be an easy out.

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

Is there a link to your shining moment post, I’d love to read it. Our education systems do seem set up to push that model of life with the emphasis on finals/thesis completion. But whether it would be possible or even desirable to avoid it completely? I don’t know.

And Spike, I think, spent S7 learning to love like a person rather than a Byronic hero but was still very much a work in progress on other fronts by the end. So although giving the hero’s sacrifice to him was a good end to Buffy’s story, I agree it would have been too much of an easy out for his.

[superplin.livejournal.com]

Is there a link to your shining moment post, I’d love to read it.

Er, lord knows when it was. It was not a big fancy essay, pretty much what I wrote above.

Our education systems do seem set up to push that model of life with the emphasis on finals/thesis completion. But whether it would be possible or even desirable to avoid it completely? I don’t know.

I really think the "big achievement" model is an intrinsic part of Western society, American in particular. Always pushing toward some huge goal, thinking that will make one's life have a purpose. I'm hardly an expert on Eastern philosophies, but it seems there are other cultures that place more emphasis on the value of the small, everyday gesture.

Or maybe it's just a "grass is always greener" thing. ;)

So although giving the hero’s sacrifice to him was a good end to Buffy’s story, I agree it would have been too much of an easy out for his.

Yeah, there was a lot more for him to do. Even after S5, alas, although we'll just have to make it up ourselves at this point.

[frelling-tralk.livejournal.com]

Great discussion, thanks!

And yes I love the darkness of Villains as Willow tortures Warren *shiver* And woot someone else that likes Wrecked! The car crash and JunkieAmy was over the top granted *snerk* But I loved Rack, "you taste like stawberries", and Willow's weird tripping.

And I actually like the cheesey junkie talk

And that's where you lost me :p "I'm so juiced" *cries*

Sorry, I have verbal diarrhea at the moment...

[frelling-tralk.livejournal.com]

In a way I can enjoy the final two episodes if I sit back, switch my brain off, and acknowledge that it's all about the pretty effects. There is something fun about evvvil Willow. "Shame on you" heh.

But as a Buffy episode that just doesn't work for me. And then there's the forced sentimentality, "I want to show you the world" *gags*

IMO it does just come across as panicking, trying to give the audience what they think we want. Trite love conquers all messages, and an evil Willow battling Buffy as Angelus and Faith once did in popular earlier seasons. Really season 6 didn't need the big dramatic finish, although I'm not sure how I would have ended it in ME's place...

Re: Sorry, I have verbal diarrhea at the moment...

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

And then there's the forced sentimentality, "I want to show you the world" *gags*

Oh lord those earth monster scenes. I mean I like the idea of handing the sword to Dawn and foreshadowing the whole potentials thing but having to watch while it happens so very, very slowly. Not so much. And all the extra helpings of exposition. Giles rising from his deathbed to explain what we’ve just seen just in case we didn’t get it already. From the commentary they actually wanted even more explosions, dragons even but couldn't afford it.

Re: Sorry, I have verbal diarrhea at the moment...

[frelling-tralk.livejournal.com]

One of my Buffy guides gets into that. Pointing out that The Gift did look like an actual apocalypse and clashing of universes. Whereas Grave tried to introduce the idea of Willow ending the world, but it just comes across like two people arguing on a cliff.

[thedeadlyhook.livejournal.com]

Great take, particually the observations about Willow. I still feel that S6's final dispensations come off a bit mixed (and let's not even get into the end of S7 outright refutes it), but the idea that supernatural means aren't of any real help in solving the real problems at hand does indeed hold through in "Grave" - the answer is Xander's very human power of love. Now, if only we'd gotta more followup on the idea of "consequences"...

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

Thank you. And Xander saving the world with talking, of course.
Mixed messages. Probably. I’m a little dense about getting messages from stories, hence the tolerance for Wrecked. I mean I can see them when people explain them, and you do so very eloquently. But what I get from S6 mostly is how things feel rather than what ought to be done about it. More like an exegesis than an analysis. Maybe life is just living, like the man said.