Just arguing about vampires and such

And I do think Post works well as a character: the manipulations and put-downs and trickery are all very well-executed. Honestly it’s especially impressive that after discovering Angel is a vampire she’s immediately ready to throw down - very “not ideal but what can we do about it?”

There’s also something interesting about her structurally in the show. I remarked back in posting about "Faith, Hope, and Trick" that the show seems to kind of repeating fertile ideas lot. Spike and Trick are both “what if a vampire was self-consciously modern?”, Kendra and Faith were both “what if there was another Slayer?”, and Post serves as a sort of first-run of Wesley, as “what if there was another Watcher who was even Gilesier than Giles?”

Actually, recalling a post a while back about how Kendra and Faith, for Buffy, sort of parallel Tara and Amy, for Willow, we might likewise see Post and Wesley as two contrasting mirrors for Giles. Like, in each case we have a main character who is one thing (Slayer, witch, Watcher) but also more complex than that, and who encounters and interacts heavily with two other characters, one very rule-following and one very rule-breaking, who are more fully defined by that role.

Obviously there are limits to the parallels: Amy wasn’t initially introduced as a foil to Willow, after all, and Giles doesn’t date either of the other Watchers. (If there’s Wesley/Giles/Gwendolyn Post throuple fics out there please don’t link me to them. (Suggested title “What happens in the Cotswolds, Stays in the Cotswolds” (Why do they let me have an internet connection?)))

(Of the core four that just leaves Xander. Are there a pair of foil characters introduced as “what if there was another dude who’s just kind of around, but more so?” Riley? Andrew? I think this is maybe the point where the framework reduces itself to absurdity…)

Anyway! Considered as a character in her own right, Post feels like she's got juice: there’s both a clearly identifiable immediate vibe that she pulls off, and a lot of potential for depth and machinations (what’s her history with the Watchers? What schemes could she run if she had the chance? What does she actually want to do when she’s got the Glove? How does she know so much about Buffy and Faith?)

So it’s a shame that she’s killed off after one episode (though see below...). I do understand the impulse to wrap things up neatly - this episode is already way more concerned with tracking the fallout of previous seasons than is typical, and it’s struggling to handle all of that (as I’ll go into next post), but… if I could re-distribute the screen time I think I’d trade some of the endless returning of Spike and Angel for more Post (and more Amy (and vampire Kendra and ghost Jenny and…).) Or, more modestly, just split things more evenly between her and Ethan: have him eaten by Lurconis or executed by the mayor at the climax of Episode 6, and let a one-armed Gwendolyn turn up in Season 4 to deliver cryptic warnings about project 314.

(And seriously, what is going on with the Watcher’s Council? In discussing previous episodes I’ve suggested that the best explanation for Zabuto and Giles and Dormer not knowing about each other and their multiple Slayers is that the organisation is sort of hamstrung by paranoia, everyone suspects that the forces of evil will intercept their messages if they communicate too much. And Giles not getting the memo on Post seems to fit that. But now apparently someone who hasn’t been part of the organisation for “a couple of years” is able to know everything she needs to swan in and pretend to be the council’s representative? That sounds like they’re not being paranoid enough! But then, I guess maybe the reason for all the paranoia is that things like this keep happening. Maybe the rate of attrition on Watchers turning evil is actually very high? Maybe half the Watchers who get trained will at some point, ahem, “go Post-al” (apologies, why do they let me have an internet connection?) and that’s why they don’t want to share too much on the group chat? I dunno. It definitely doesn’t seem like a super well-functioning organisation…)

And then there’s Lagos, definitely the most under-developed element of the episode. He doesn’t even talk! He’s clearly a somewhat unusual demon, wearing armour and carrying an axe - and searching for an artefact! That’s not how we’ve seen any previous demons act - they’ve been focused on humans, eating them or recruiting them or otherwise killing or predating them.

@coraniaid says, why not just make him a vampire? Or, if it’s important to have a scene where Faith rushes in alone and gets beaten up, a group of vampires? Why does he carry a giant axe just so other people can use it to behead him? And are those horns or tusks?

That said, the flip side of something underdeveloped on-screen is room for speculation. Maybe Lagos doesn’t talk much because he’s not actually an unusually smart or civilised demon, he’s just Post’s patsy, who she’s somehow manipulated into finding this glove for her? Or maybe he’s the world’s most learned demon and she’s figured this out and decided to track him like a remora?

(Maybe the reason Post knows so much about Faith and Buffy actually has nothing to do with intercepting Watch communications, maybe she’s been in touch with Mr. Trick?)

(It’s also sort of odd that Angel seems to know so much about the glove. It’s not too hard to swallow: he’s at least 200-years-old, he’s presumably picked up a lot. And again, this is room for speculation: maybe he has some history with Lagos? Or with Father Theodore of Wolsham? Just, a lot for fic writers to pick up and run with, if they want.)

Finally, what’s the deal with this glove? It mostly serves as a MacGuffin for the episode, but considered in its own right it can seem a bit… underwhelming? Like, yeah, shooting lightning is a pretty cool offence, but as Buffy demonstrates, it’s pretty important to also have defences, which the glove doesn’t seem to give you, and if you have to summon storm clouds every time and shout in Gaelic then it’s pretty cumbersome and unwieldy, and if you have this permanent giant metal arm thing it’s going to cramp your style in, like, all the rest of your life.

Hence:

“This is why Mrs Post and the Mayor should have teamed up: they are both fans of elaborate, long-running evil plans that require deception and hiding in plain sight and gathering powerful magical artifacts and getting a vampire slayer to do your dirty work for you and which, ultimately, don't really have the pay-off to remotely justify any of this.”

But you know, they do say that “No record of this glove's full power exists”, so this may just be a place where we need to do some headcanoning. My own take would jump off from the idea that if you put it in regular flame (as opposed to special magical living flame) “it will only make the glove more powerful.”

I would suggst the glove has a fairly general “absorb/redirect energy” power. Lightning, fire, tasers, explosions: you’re safe from all of those while wearing it because you can just suck them into the glove to charge it up. Maybe this also works with magic - if Amy was around and tried to turn Post into a rat, she could just use the glove to absorb the energy of the spell. Maybe it even works with kinetic energy if you can get good enough, learn the right words to just stop bullets and big shards of glass in their tracks.

And then, having absorbed the energy, maybe you can spit it out in all sorts of ways - not just lightning bolts but fireballs and tasers and lighting your cigarette and jumpstarting your car and violet wands? Maybe you can use it to cast spells even without having your own witchy power. Maybe it can even regenerate lost or damaged body parts? No record exists of its full power, after all.

(And the fact that Post has to use Gaelic to direct it suggests that its powers aren’t just all available immediately when some schmuck puts it on - there’s more you can do with it if you get better at using it.)

And this kind of generalised ability to draw in energy and use it for other things might explain why it’s so hard to destroy: even if just a part is left, it might be able to repair itself if charged with enough energy.

On this reading, summoning lightning and shooting it back out is just the most easy-and-explosive, way to use it. If Post had gotten a chance to try it out somewhere quieter, and not hubristically attacked literally everyone around her, we might have seen a much more flexible and powerful version of her.

Ok so the above is my headcanon - the interpretation that, in my view, best explains the significance the glove seems to have in the narrative. What follows is much more just a fic idea, but:

We never see the glove destroyed. We get Xander (famously thorough and careful) declaring it destroyed, but we know that the ritual is tricky. If something threw it off, Giles might find that the living flame leaves behind some seemingly insignificant scraps - a few bits of metal slag, ash, burned fibres, something that Giles looks at and decides, hmm, that’s probably good enough. He puts the scraps and residue into a little container in case it needs to be studied, and files it away in the library.

But the actual reason why the ritual doesn’t quite destroy the glove is that there’s something trapped in there now. Gwendolyn Post is dead, sure, but she died from a magically-induced lightning bolt that was itself headed for the glove. That is, she was right in the middle of a mystical energy flow into the glove, and maybe some scrap of her spirit gets caught in the current and stuck there, a ghost haunting the artefact. Not able to do much, maybe barely aware, just a germ of a ghost, but able to preserve just a little of it from destruction, and then stuck in box in Giles’ library, waiting for some source of energy to absorb.

Xander: Basically never appears except as supporting member of a group, but gets some funny lines. I actually can’t decide between:

“Principal Snyder, thank you! You weren't visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past, by any chance?”

“I don't get this. The candy's supposed to make you feel all immature and stuff, but I've had a ton, and I don't feel any dif… Never mind.”

Willow: Present on screen a lot but mostly as a sounding board for Buffy and a researcher into baby-eating. Since I’ve already set the precedent of picking two favourite lines, I guess I don’t have to choose between:

“Oz is the highest-scoring person ever to fail to graduate.” (Repeated twice, sufficiently for Cordelia to complain. I guess the mystery of why he didn’t graduate has been solved offscreen?)

“’Kiss rocks'? Why would anyone want to kiss… Oh, wait. I get it.”

Trick: I really like ““I know a beast who knows a guy.”

But honorable mention also for this devastating endorsement of the American dream:

“That's the reason I love this country. You make a good product, and the people will come to you. Of course, a lot of them are gonna die, but that's the other reason I love this country.”

Snyder: Ratboy is on fire as usual. I think it’s a tie between:

“Everybody expects me to do everything around here because I'm the principal. It's not fair.”

All his efforts to impress Joyce, ranging from the bad Tae Kwon Do display to shaking his head seriously at the mention of eating babies and expressing his emphatic and over-sincere disapproval.

Oz: Being in the band performing at the Bronze lets him squeak into a supporting role that feels like it would normally go to Xander?

“They're teenagers. It's a sobering mirror to look into, huh?”

The mayor: A perfect episode for exhibiting his two sides, actually - on the one hand you’ve got him strolling around his office talking about scotch and how “I keep my campaign promises”, and then opening the cool cabinet of grisly magic stuff (that I have tried too many times to pause and get a good look at…). And then the flip side of that is when he’s down in the sewers surrounded by vampires watching a ritual human sacrifice, and hops on the phone to Carol to talk about committees.

Joyce: Favourite moment probably has to be pulling out the handcuffs (“Never. Tell me.”), but I also enjoyed the line “Must be exciting being from England” because that is literally the kind of thing Americans will sometimes say…

Giles: Obviously ASH sort of steals the show here, so basically every scene with “Ripper” is fun, from “ooh copper’s got a gun” to all the fuck-ass little preening mannerisms with his hair and cigarettes and so on.

But my favourite bit I think is when he’s been urging Buffy to hit Ethan, and then she finally does and he pumps his fist in the air.

Ethan: We actually don't get a great performance from him here, compared to his other episodes? It feels like he's squeezed between other villains so much that he ends up having to mostly do exposition? But he does manage to run and hide and get beaten up with a surprising amount of grace so I guess I'll give him that.

Cordelia: Appears very little, and mostly to facilitate Xillowing, but I do appreciate the intonation of "Oh, God, are we killing something again?" in response to the simple idea of "working on something tonight." Also "Where is Giles already? I'm bored, and he's not here to give me credit for it." And she has layers, so jot that down. Buffy: Carries most of the episode, obviously, but for fun silly little lines it’s a tie between: interpreting ‘Band Candy’ as a gift provided by the band (“very generous”) and telling an out-of-breath, 45-year-old Giles who began smoking again three hours ago “That's what smoking will do to you.”

Angel: Well, the thing with Angela is he’s here as a plot device but not really as a character, so I’m going to use him to start off the: “what’s happening to them offscreen?” section.

Angel: So I guess he's still recovering? The traumatic effect of (supposedly) hundreds of years is dealt with in a few weeks? Honestly I wish it wasn't - I wish we got more feral, snapping, suddenly uncontrollable again when something triggers a memory Angel. But also: I'm going to just say it, I don't think he was in hell for hundreds of years. Maybe a year, sure, so there's a time dilation of 1:4, or heck maybe just for a really rough three months, but... I just don't see one casual and speculative line as sufficient basis to inflate this ordeal so much in ways that never get brought up or mentioned again...

Faith: It's really quite odd not to have Faith here - thematically she could be a great foil to Buffy in discussions of "responsibility" and its absence, and logistically it's odd to spend so much time on how Giles is training and over-scheduling Buffy but not mention his other Slayer. You could, of course, do a minimalist reading, in the sense of downplaying the significance of her absence: oh sure, she's around, it's just the others have been worrying so much about SATs, which she thinks are stupid, that she's not hanging out in school much and in the heat of the moment the others don't think to call her in, and then the peril is resolved within one night. But you could also play up the significance: maybe she's busy doing whatever odd jobs scrounge up the money for her motel? Maybe she's hurt after seemingly being ditched by Buffy at Homecoming? Maybe she heard Buffy complain too many times about Giles spending too much time training her, was struck by how nobody suggested he should split that time between them, got pissed off and started avoiding the gang for a bit? (I sort of like the latter explanation the most, both because it sets her up for Gwendolyn Post next episode, and because it allows her to be sort of a thematic foil to Buffy without ever appearing: Buffy is complaining about excessive supervision and attention, Faith is silently suffering from the opposite problem.)

Amy: Obviously this episode is all about parent-child relationships so it all depends on how things stand with her dad. As for my take on that, I think I'll just drop an excerpt from the fic-in-progress:

Amy is at the Bronze, having been de-ratted in the Summer after season 3. She's trying to re-integrate after missing graduation, but instead she gets Harmony, newly aware of the supernatural, quizzing her on which of the various weird events of the last three years she's responsible for:

This is sort of fun, albeit a little convoluted, and admittedly the complexity does mean there are a lot of places where the logic seems a little frayed.

(Are four babies really enough for such a big demon? Will stealing them really create so much outcry (the people of Sunnydale seem able to ignore a lot) that a town-wide revel is the inconspicuous option? Won’t the people working the packing line raise an outcry about their manager just snapping a worker’s neck out of nowhere? Why work through the school, and not the water supply? Or just the hospital staff specifically? And what does Lurconis even do for the mayor in exchange for this tribute?)

But I can look past it because the whole point seems to be that endlessly more layers of scheme are being schemed in the shadows, so maybe there are good explanations available that were just not being shown.

In a way, the key moment comes right at the end, with something that the protagonists don’t see. Buffy interrupts the ritual, dusts the minions, beats up Trick, and he escapes while taunting her that “There's hard times ahead!” And Buffy remarks, wearily:

“They never just leave. Always gotta say something.”

(Ethan himself will say something similar next season: “I’ve really got to learn to just do the damage and get out of town. It's the "stay and gloat" that gets me every time.”)

But, of course, one person did “just leave.” The mayor was down here, and as soon as there’s any sign of trouble, he’s just silently and unobtrusively gone. And honestly against the backdrop of melodrama and threats that does manage to make him stand out, and suggests the larger point that even behind the various campy secret villains that cavort through Sunnydale, there's a yet-more-secret villain sitting quietly in the shadows.

Which fits with the layeredness itself: because Trick and Ethan and Lurconis are all there to attract attention, the mayor gets to keep his hands clean. (Presumably not a coincidence that his introductory scene last episode was him lecturing his deputy on the importance of clean hands.)

(Alan Finch doesn’t appear in this episode? Are we meant to infer that he’s only just being drawn into the weirder side of mayoral business? Hence his confusion last episode?)

Also seems noteworthy that the mayor, despite running the town, does still feel the need to run a cover-up here: he can’t just send an order for some of the nurses to skim some babies off the top. Munro and Snyder might know they’re on a hellmouth, and know that the mayor knows this, but they either don’t know just how involved he is, or they’re among a very small number of people who know anything. (See also: in “Consequences” he doesn’t seem able/willing to just order the arrest, charge, and conviction of Buffy and Faith; he either doesn’t have that much control over the local justice system, or it would be too costly/public to exert it.)

Something else I sort of like is that all four of the villains are left as loose ends who could come back at some point, though the show uses them to very disparate degrees:

The mayor, obviously, plays a big part in the whole season, especially after episode 14.

Mr. Trick appears a few more times, but not really enough to live up to the “hard times ahead” taunt he directs at Buffy. Possibly that’s because he did in fact sort of mess things up this time around - Ethan Rayne succeeded at creating enough chaos for the baby sacrifice to go ahead, but he also 1) swiftly attracted the attention of the Slayer, 2) hung around in a location which all manner of patsies like Snyder knew the chocolate was coming from, 3) signally failed at fighting her or even running away from her successfully, and then 4) gave her enough information for her to track down Trick, the babies, and the Mayor. Clearly, if you want chaos, Ethan is your guy; if you want clean hands and peace of mind, not so much. If I was the mayor, I might not put Trick in charge of something for a while either.

Ethan will only appear in one more episode, which is sort of crazy to think about given how integral to the show he feels. He doesn’t even get very much opportunity to be homoerotic with Giles here, though there is something strikingly… amicable about his interactions with Giles and Buffy? Like, I just listed all of his failures above, and honestly it doesn’t seem like he’s trying all that hard. As with the line I quoted from season 4, he does seem to really enjoy hanging around to gloat. He doesn’t give the impression of someone who’s genuinely scared he’ll be killed or locked up. He’s sort of just here to have fun.

Which is actually a pretty reasonable attitude for him to have, given that the last two times he came here they just hit him a few times and told him to leave town. So why not come back - what does he have to lose?

(This is just one example of how a culture of impunity for old white men is corrosive to a functioning society…)

(Though, if I were the mayor, or Mr. Trick, I’d be really disappointed to find out that he’s more scared of getting punched in the face than of whatever he thought I would do to him for betraying me!)

Not to mention, the tone in which he says “Ripper” sort of suggests “I was hoping you’d find me.” Heck, he probably took the job in the first place because he wanted an excuse to come back to Sunnydale! Maybe the whole “age regression” idea was based on his desire to see Giles acting like “Ripper.”

So really, in a way, you might say that the big-picture story here is that the town is saved by gay lust. If Ethan hadn’t been so down bad for Giles, then either he’d have run a more professional operation, or someone more professional would have been brought in, and the babies would have been eaten before the Slayer even figured out something was wrong.

Ok, finally: Lurconis. Trick says “one less demon to pay tribute to”, suggesting that he assumes Lurconis is dead, but all we actually see is t being on fire a bit and then retreating into the tunnel. Presumably a fairly wet tunnel. So it would be completely unsurprising if Lurconis turned up six months later, scarred and angry but very much alive.

The show doesn’t do that, and probably everyone is fine with this decision. I may be the only viewer who wishes we got more of this giant worm-thing. What can I say: I don’t hate the human form but it’s so overdone. When there’s a monster that’s not just a dude in a mask, I appreciate it.

(Obviously the obvious reference point for Lurconis is “giant snake” but if you look at the head shape it’s not really that snake-like. It’s worm-like in some ways but worms don’t have big toothy jaws like that. Really what it’s closest to is either a legless lizard or a caecilian…)

Lurconis is also interesting because what sets the plot in motion is that the mayor “has made certain deals”, but we never find out what the deal was. Did Lurconis provide some service for the mayor in the past (help defeat Balthazar? Bestow immortality?) or is it being propitiated to prevent some sort of greater catastrophe it might inflict (tunnelling that causes earthquakes? Bursting up through the floor of the hospital to seize babies directly?), or whatever?

(An idea that’s a bit out of left field but that I nevertheless enjoy is that Lurconis is being paid for some sort of role in regulating other demons, and the non-payment in this episode is part of why there are suddenly so many of them running around looking visibly and obviously inhuman in the next couple of years…)

There’s this exchange right after confronting Buffy together where the two of them sit down on a couch, and Joyce says oh I just want to protect her but it’s so hard, and Giles nods along sympathetically and says yeah, as though they’re on the same side here. It’s very “here’s Buffy’s mom and dad” coded.

And yet. A moment’s thought makes this exchange distinctly weird. One way to put it is that they both have good cause to give the other a hard time here.

Like, Joyce should give Giles a hard time because he’s not actually on her side, trying to protect Buffy. He’s the thing she needs protecting from! I mean, obviously he does care about her and want her to be safe, but it’s secondary: he wants to keep her as safe as possible while also shoving her directly into the path of every monster that comes through. The single line “I blame you” ended up being about the sum total of Joyce’s anger at the guy who, more than anyone else, is responsible for putting Buffy into the firing line of everything that endangers her.

Yet at the same time, Giles might reasonably point out that Joyce is going about “protecting” Buffy in a completely wrong-headed (though understandable) way. She doesn’t want her driving - and when explaining why she brings up the summer in LA. She doesn’t want her going to the Bronze without them knowing where she is - and again, when arguing about why, she brings up the summer in LA. It seems clear that the lesson she’s internalised is that Buffy did something irresponsible because she had too much freedom, so to protect her Joyce needs to limit and monitor and restrict her more. Limited modes of transportation, more oversight, etc. “I want you here.”

Which is just obviously not actually what’s going on: Buffy ran away to LA because of being under unbearable pressure, not because she’s a flighty fun-loving kid who can’t “be trusted”. More rules and restrictions will do the opposite of help. And Giles, to his credit, seems like the only member of the cast who really gets this - unlike both Joyce and her friends, he never gives her a hard time about running away, he seems to recognise the extent to which she is burdened and obligated out of all proportion to her peers, he even devises clever schemes to get her to open up about what happened with Angel.

So the fact that they’re here slumping down together is a bit odd. I think probably the best reading is that they’re both, on some level, aware that they don’t really have a good handle on things, that their way of relating to Buffy isn’t really what it should be, and moreover that they’re not really on the same side. But they don’t have a better option, and they’re don’t want to be pushing all alone. So they overlook their differences and humour each other’s unworkable approaches for the sake of having someone they can think of as an ally.

(And also, maybe, because they’re horny for each other, and/or lonely - Joyce next season says she hasn’t made many friends, Giles is probably not over Jenny yet…)

Ok but I want to say a bit more about Joyce, because Giles here is not that different from how he’s been for two prior seasons, and the conflict between his role as Watcher and his feelings towards Buffy is pretty clear and straightforward (and will come to a head in six episodes’ time). But this is a new stage in Joyce’s reckoning with all of this.

As I noted above, I think Joyce seems to have taken somewhat the wrong lesson from the summer. And I think we get more insight from something she says while Band Candy’d:

“Screw you! I want candy! You want to slay stuff and I’m not allowed to do anything about it. Well, this is what I wanna do, so get off my back!”

This is pretty funny, but it also expresses the same misreading of Buffy’s situation that I’ve been suggesting: that the basic problem is Buffy acting on her desires, being too free, doing what she wants.

(Of course the Band Candy has altered her, but mostly to remove inhibitions: I think the rest of the time she still feels this way, but doesn’t say it.)

This amounts to saying that Joyce has only partially shifted from her viewpoint last year. Back then she thought that Buffy was involved in some unknown sort of persistent misbehaviour, for unknown reasons, which kept interfering with her schooling and getting her in trouble, and which Joyce was trying her best to get Buffy to quit, but which she kept choosing not to quit for reasons that might turn out to be sympathetic (because she’s not a bad kid) but are still ultimately bad reasons.

Now Joyce has found out what sort of trouble it is: fighting monsters. And she’s accepted that this is a fact of life that she can’t change: she’s no longer trying to Buffy her to quit, she’s determined to be supportive and “cool about it”. But she still sees it as fundamentally something coming from Buffy rather than something imposed onto her. It’s like a sort of eccentric extra-curricular activity that Buffy insists on choosing despite its dangers.

(And just to link this to some of what I’ve been saying about Xander, Willow, et al., I think on some level they also see slaying this way, as something fun and exciting and sexy. They do in fact keep choosing it despite its dangers, and there’s definitely something admirable in that but it does contribute to the disconnect between them and Buffy that we see in episodes like “Dead Man’s Party” and “Faith, Hope, and Trick”.)

(I don’t know how far the queer metaphor can really be pushed but I think this does map pretty well onto a certain sort of still-latently-homophobic parent: they’ve accepted that their kid being queer isn’t a tragedy or a sin or a terrible sick perversion they need to fight to save them from. But on some level they still feel like: why did my kid have to be like this, why did they have to pick the life that’s //bad and scary// complicated and dangerous?)

I mean, Joyce doesn’t seem like someone who’s internalised that if Buffy had listened to her and done what she wanted in their fight in Becoming, then Joyce and everyone else in town (and maybe the world) would be dead. I suspect she might intellectually accept that sort of claim - that Buffy going off to do her Slayer-activities is necessary to save lives, including Joyce’s life and those of her friends - but she might not even do that. She might nod and sort of humour it while thinking it must be exaggerated somehow.

More broadly: she doesn’t really seem to accept that Buffy handles higher-stakes responsibilities than she does, is under greater pressure than she is, has more serious things to worry about than she does. That Buffy could make a reasonable case for being the more adult one of them, in some respects.

Which, you know, isn’t completely unreasonable - it’s a lot to take in, and it’s sort of just the fantasy premise of the show that this is true. It’s reasonable to default to thinking that a teenager is probably being immature and exaggerating the significance of their struggles and is liable to mess things up if given free rein. It’s just that in the actual events of the show, that’s not the case. The reason Buffy is sneaking around and hiding it is because she’s tending to an otherwise helpless person’s psychological and physical wounds. As soon as she registers that something has gone wrong in the town, she immediately takes responsibility for identifying and fixing the problem.

Anyway, this is all to say: I like Joyce and I think she’s expressing a flawed outlook here in a very relatable and compelling way. Specifically, she’s unwilling to give up on the basic framework she’s got entrenched in, unwilling to fully adjust to how weird and bizarre Slayerhood makes things between her and Buffy. Because if she did, she’d have to accept that she 1) can’t really protect Buffy from violence or death, 2) can’t really keep herself safe either because these damn vampires are everywhere.

But the result is that the burdens of Slayerhood are still, as often as not, something that Joyce holds against Buffy rather than something she helps her manage. Which means that if last year Buffy had the ambient feeling that she was always always disappointing someone and had no way to satisfy the people in her life no matter how hard she tried, she might still be feeling that this year. Not great.

A final observation: to a certain extent Joyce has to be this way for the show’s premise. The mundane world has to be uncomprehending and obstructive so that we can televise the struggle of both living in it and defending it. Joyce is, after all, one of the few remaining characters who hasn’t gotten enmeshed in the supernatural one way or another. And so you might read this as simply an artefact of the show’s genre set-up, with little symbolic resonance in and of itself.

(After all, if Buffy’s monsters are symbols of everyday teenage problems, then Joyce not taking them as seriously as Buffy does is, like, out-of-universe-appropriate: it’s a mistake if taken literally, but it’s an appropriate attitude to the things they symbolise.)

But you could also read it as symbolic in itself, if we think of Buffy’s monster problems not just as symbolising “teenage problems” like SATS and homecoming dances, but as symbolising real life-crippling problems that sometimes befall teenagers, like drug overdoses or sexual violence or poverty or domestic abuse. Because teenagers do sometimes find themselves dealing with those things in contexts where the adults around them turn a blind eye and powerful institutions mostly function to protect themselves and nobody will cut you a break even on things that really are matters of life and death. And sometimes that’s because adults who could help are too attached to their mental models of the world to see how dangerous reality can be, and end up perceiving the teenagers (or others) who do respond to those problems as being themselves the problem, as histrionic or trouble-makers or just as naive kids who need to grow up and reconcile themselves to how the world works.

Willow and Xander I don’t have too much to say about this plotline. I don’t think I mind it all that much, I sort of like seeing my fictional characters doing messy dumb horny stuff that blows up in their faces. But I broadly agree with @coraniaid

“I think I can see why the writers convinced themselves this would work -- obviously Willow had had a crush on Xander for a long time, and we did get Xander telling Willow he loved her in Becoming (even if I think that was mean to be read platonically), and especially with Cordelia leaving for Angel next year I can see they wanted an excuse to break things up and (as Willow might put it) spin the whole group dynamic out of orbit. And giving Willow and Xander a big secret to parallel Buffy's own secret about Angel also makes a lot of sense. The problem is that, well. The execution just doesn't work.”

I agree that the execution is rushed, and weirdly lacking in chemistry. I also think… these two are both going through interesting growth, but that growth is largely pointing in the opposite direction from this!

Like, Willow is becoming a witch, Xander was until recently the dashing “Nighthawk”, they’re both dating people way more popular than themselves, they’re generally growing towards being more confident adult versions of themselves. And it’s going well - they haven’t suddenly suffered a horrifying shock or trauma, the previous episodes have mostly ended well for them. Turning back towards their childhood together feels like a regression for no good reason.

Now don’t get me wrong. People do dumb stuff for no good reason all the time. You could totally construct an explanation of why they might suddenly do this turning away from growth. The last few episodes even provide some candidate reasons:

Xander doesn’t really like Cordelia, but has trapped himself in a relationship with her because of messed up ideas about status and success. (As @coranaid notes, it’s significant that Xander insists “that he would never cheat on his girlfriend with his best friend, because he respects Willow and Oz too much”, with no mention of respecting Cordelia.)

Cordelia isn’t shy about how much disdain she has for Xander and how inexplicable she finds her own attraction to him (in a way that often targets the wealth disparity between their families, which the borrowed tuxedo might be reminding him of?)

Oz is very uncommunicative, including about things like (not to come back to this but) whether he has graduated high school or not! Willow likes to know stuff, so this might really frustrate her and Xander’s tendency to over-share might seem attractive by comparison

Willow’s gay (?), and maybe can’t banish this creeping feeling that all her snuggling and smooching with Oz doesn’t quite feel the way she knows it’s meant to feel, and is panicking and casting about for some sort of alternative.

Incredibly fucked up stuff keeps happening to them. Willow just saw an abused girlfriend defend her boyfriend up to the point where he killed her, right after she spent an episode defending her not-abusive-but-a-werewolf boyfriend. That might shake her into taking the werewolf thing more seriously as a red flag!

Lots of people came to the welcome-home party they threw for Buffy, but supposedly “they were killed by zombies”. Whether that means ‘all’ or just ‘some’, you can imagine that messing with their sense of finally being popular - ‘yeah I can get a big party together, but then people die…’

(My suspension of disbelief refuses to let me read this as “all”: if dozens of high school students died in Buffy’s house that would surely have to be a bigger deal than it’s presented as here. If one or two people died and everyone else fled the zombies, yeah, ok, that can just about fit with the general “I skip straight to the obits” attitude…)

So there’s six interesting potential explanations for why these two would cheat like this. The issue just… none of this is even hinted at on-screen. All of these are things which the show broadly encourages us to skim past and not think too much about, so if we were supposed to see them as the operative cause here, we’d need to at least see a scene or two highlighting them and their impact on the characters. Without that it’s just: oh, so now this is happening.

Slayerfest

So in some respects Slayerfest is a perfect idea for Mr. Trick. He observes, coordinates, pulls some strings to put Buffy and (supposedly) Faith in the right place at the right time, and then sits back in a win-win situation, where either the Slayers are eliminated or all the contestants die and he’s just rich and untouched.

(Would have been even better if he hadn’t recorded a video so they could see his face and potentially hunt him down afterwards…)

At the same time, it does raise the question of why the contestants are not only taking on this huge risk of death, but actually paying for the privilege. And I can see two interesting ways of answering that.

One is sparked by @coraniaid reporting that supposedly the “Jungle Bob” character was meant to be Gib Cain, the werewolf hunter from “Pangs.” I think that’s would have given the whole thing a nice “former antagonists come back and team up” sort of vibe: Gorch from S2E12, Caine from S2E15, Trick from S3E03.

I think then it would really have felt like a grudge thing, with some extra folks (yellow-skinned and/or German) brought into the mix too. (And it works with the title - chickens “coming home” to roost kind of thing.)

But with Cain not returning, it shifts to a slightly different reading: apparently “amoral big game hunter who hunts supernaturally-empowered beings despite their human status” is a common enough thing for two of them to pass through the same area of California in less than a year.

Back in S1E09, “The Puppet Show”, we got our first tease that “demon hunters” existed who weren’t Slayers; we’ll see another one in a prominent role with Robin Wood in season 7, and I know they become a bit more of a thing on AtS, but they always stay a bit underdeveloped as a concept. And going by what the show has presented so far… well, the list of non-magic-using, non-cultist, non-supernatural people who knowingly engage with the supernatural (and have no connection to Slayers or Watchers) is:

Pre-Dummy Sid

Willy the Snitch

Billy Fordham

Patrice (and maybe Octarus?) from the order of Taraka

Gib Caine

Jungle Bob in this episode (ok apparently his name was Frawley?)

These two Germans and their sugar daddy

Of these ten or so people, it’s striking how little evidence there is of any sort of “protect humans” mentality - that might have been Sid’s motivation, but really the great majority of these guys seem to be motivated primarily by killing. Sid’s mission is to kill certain demons, the Order of Taraka is out to kill their targets, Caine and Frawley are out to kill werewolves, the Germans are out to kill for completely unclear, vaguely Nazi-coded reasons?

So implicitly the worldbuilding that emerges from all this is that when people get involved with the supernatural, they tend to be ones who love killing, and are looking for bigger and badder things to kill. Which is an interesting data point!

And just to add: I think it would have been cool to explore this a bit more in connection to Slayers. Their job description makes them sound pretty similar (it's just a synonym for "killer"), and Faith, at least, talks a lot about the pleasure and joy of slaying (with the implication that Buffy has similar feelings (plus Kendra just likes to hit)). I think it would have been really interesting to show them during a “good period” when the vampire numbers actually drop down low enough that asses to kick are in short supply, and showing the conflict between “yay this is good we made the world safe” and “god I just need something to kill”.

And I sort of wish we’d had more calling back, in later seasons, to the Class Protector award, which offers a different definition of what Buffy’s job is - a very “I love not the sword for its sharpness, the arrow for its swiftness, or the warrior for his glory; I love only what they defend” sort of moment. And I wish we got to see Faith find out about the class protector award…

Faith

Because let’s talk about Faith. Like in the last episode, she has some minor scenes that manage to convey her distinctive outlook. Reading @coraniaid that the writers still weren’t sure what they would eventually do with her, I can believe it: she’s being established as a recognisable character but not driving much in the way of plot.

(You don’t need me to tell you how gay it all is: “boys should break up with you more often”, “why don’t the two of us go?”, the vengefulness at Scott on Buffy’s behalf. I will note that this is possibly the only time we see Faith in a dress until the pink one in “Graduation Day” that the mayor makes her try on? Black suits her better but it’s still unusual… I mean symbolically she’s here temporarily in place of Cordelia, who’s out being mistaken for a Slayer, so I guess it makes sense to not quite be her usual self...)

(In a sense, Faith spends most of this episode not as a character but as a false image, projected onto Cordelia. Which makes sense in relation to Buffy: being a Cordelia-esque girl mistaken for a Faith-esque Slayer sort of captures this disconnect between her two halves. It doesn’t really connect to Faith herself: she doesn’t have a Cordelia side, and indeed she and Cordelia basically haven’t interacted… at all?)

(Wait, do Faith and Cordelia ever interact? Like, we have Cordelia referring to her as “slut-o-rama”, and rolling her eyes at Xander when he flirts with her, but are there any scenes where one of them actually speaks directly to the other?)

But I guess I do want to expand on how Faith fits into the saga of Buffy Summers' deteriorating mental health. The last few episodes have really revolved this division and opposition between her two worlds - the supernatural world, here represented by Angel, and the mundane world, here represented by Scott.

And her problem is that both of them are sources of pain. The supernatural world is non-stop violence and pain and secrets and guilt and solitude - being tormented by Angel, killing Angel, running away from home, and now this shivering flinching avatar of trauma she’s hiding from everyone else. The mundane world is what she thinks she wants, what everyone expects her to want, what she’s trying really hard to want. But it’s not working, she can’t inhabit it, it doesn’t make her happy. And when people notice this, they blame her. Hence Scott, the "solid dependable guy she can rely on" /smash cut to him dumping her.

And this prompts her to make a last-ditch effort to aggressively re-insert herself into the mundane world by campaigning for homecoming queen, only to 1) completely fail, and 2) get assailed by the supernatural world anyway.

This episode re-uses the “it’s a long story”/“apparently not that long” gag from S3E03, which I think is fun but also an effective way to distill the sense of separation between her and her friends. They all experience supernatural shenanigans, but Buffy feels defined by them and so feels like it matters to get the details and the context and the mitigating factors right. It’s the same as how she says in this episode that she’s hiding Angel because the other’s wouldn’t understand, and in the last episode went to talk to Mr. Platt because Giles or Willow would freak out, and in S3E02 she shies away from telling everyone about where she was, and tells Willow that she wouldn’t understand if she tried to explain what she was going through. Understanding the adventures properly means understanding her life; misunderstanding them means misunderstanding her. But her friends are able to boil the whole affair down to “got bit” or “got hunted”, as one episode in their otherwise normal life, and move on.

Faith offers a third way: embracing the supernatural side of Slayer life and enjoying it, not worrying constantly about duty and wrongness. Her one interaction with Buffy this episode begins with her complimenting Buffy on being angry and good at punching (not commiserating or tiptoeing around her romantic frustrations the way that her other friends do in the first scene). She gets some of the very few unforced smiles that Buffy smiles in this episode (possibly the only ones?). She wants to hear the long story. She’s uniquely positioned to make Buffy feel happy, and alive, and good about herself, in between two competing forces of depression.

So the mayor. We finally get our first introduction, after a lot of little hints, and I sort of do love his style of speaking - the misdirection, the focus on irrelevancies, the “clean under your fingernails”. It all serves quite nicely to throw off whoever’s he’s talking to, establish a sort of dominance, and maintain maximum plausible deniability. I think you can see exactly how this would produce the sort of attitude we see with Snyder, where underlings are basically encouraged to project whatever they want onto the mayor, because he smiles at their suggestions and never explicitly tells them anything beyond these unsettling remarks that signal that of course he knows all about everything but not in a way that could be used against him in any way.

(Favourite line isn’t actually “you have all my Faith”, but rather the bit where he says it’s an important year for him, Trick says “election year?”, he says “something like that...”)

Cordelia: So my esteemed colleagues have opened my eyes to a lot of interesting questions about how this episode fits into the longer saga of Cordelia Chase. Has she already lost her family money? Is she trying to regain the status she lost last year in S2E16? Would she have lost even without Buffy cannibalising her vote? Does she really “need this more”? Is she subconsciously angry at Buffy because she blames her for her loss of status and so deliberately doesn’t tell her about the yearbook photos? Is this simultaneously Buffy’s last attempt to “be Cordelia” and the beginning of Cordelia’s metamorphosis towards “being Buffy”?

The problem is none of that’s on screen. We even get several scenes of Buffy and Cordelia stuck in the woods together under great stress, with Buffy admitting various difficult things about her feelings and why she cared so much about the homecoming dance, and Cordelia… still just complains in funny ways about how unfair it is that Buffy is putting her in danger or how she won’t get to do various things that we already know she wanted.* If they wanted to give her a richer inner life or more sympathetic motivations they could have, the scene was literally set for them to do that. And if I was a big fan of this character I guess I would be happy to decode and speculate, but… I’m not, so by default I’m just sort of running with what we’re given.

(*Ok, sure, she also complains that dying will mean she never gets to figure out if she has real feelings for Xander or not. That's the closest we get to vulnerability, and you *could* connect it to the homecoming contest, but the episode *doesn't*...)

I guess this is similar to my grousing about Oz in earlier episodes: characters who are designated love interests for anyone other than Buffy don’t get a lot of deep exploration, or rather what exploration they get is always secondary to them committing to the ‘bit’ that makes them funny. Which I guess is understandable given the constraints of a 45-minute episode, narrative space and attention are limited, but when half the episode is about the character it can feel a bit… unsatisfying?

Finally, Kulak of the Miquot Clan. I have thoughts. Not really about Kulak, in themselves, because we’re not really given anything definite about this character beyond the visual appearance and him wanting to kill Slayers. But rather about that fact in and of itself. A few times in this rewatch I’ve sort of pondered the question “what are demons?”, and noted that the show undergoes a shift in how demons are depicted, and this right here - this yellow guy with the “spiny-looking head things” - is ground zero.

Previous demons on the show - Moloch, “Marc”, Machida, Eyghon, the Judge, Der Kindestod, Acathla, even Ovu Mobani - have been very diverse in lots of ways. But they had one thing in common: defeating them involved understanding them. All of them were the subjects of research and investigation, aiming to discover their methods, or the methods of their followers, and either identify weaknesses, select appropriate rituals, or at least just figure out where they were hiding and who was working for them.

Kulak is the first demon who appears out of nowhere, jumps at the protagonists, and gets killed through the simple application of sufficient kinetic energy. But he won’t be the last - the next few episodes see a string of similar “demons.” In “Revelations” it’s Lagos, in “The Wish” it’s an unnamed “mucus-y” demon who’s stabbed to death in the first scene. Even Lurconis in “Band Candy”, who at least gets a non-humanoid body plan, a bit of research, and a suggestion of a background, only appears for one scene and gets killed pretty quickly. In all these cases, there’s a demon sort of thrown in to play second fiddle to a more interesting adversary. No longer even a monster-if-the-week, now just a monster-of-the-scene.

Which, I don’t love. It makes them, and by extension the world, feel a bit flatter, a bit more boring. Like, in earlier episodes even when discovering a demon’s name didn’t actually make much difference in the end, it was clear that the characters cared and saw that as important information, and I as a viewer am a highly imitative primate, so that made me feel like each new antagonist was worth being curious about. Now we’re sort of a trajectory towards season 4, where the Initiative is capturing a new rubber-masked critter every week and treating them basically as mildly interesting animal species.

Ok, that's enough for now. Next post will cover:

Mr. Trick and the Logistics of Slayerfest (including the two human slayer-hunters who are... still alive?)

The much-maligned Xillow stuff