Just arguing about vampires and such

So the primary theme of the episode is pretty obvious: it’s about guilt and forgiveness and, you know, making amends, or more broadly repairing relationships. In this regard it’s very much picking up on the estrangement-fest at the beginning of last episode, which in turn is built up from events and discoveries in the previous two. We get:

Willow and Oz making up

Buffy and Faith making up

Xander and Cordelia notably not making up

Xander making amends to Buffy for “not being the greatest friend” over “the whole Angel thing”.

Angel and Giles… not quite making up but interacting despite the everything between them

Buffy and Giles... sort of settling a little bit more the issue of what she's doing with Angel and whether he'll help

Angel and Buffy debating redemption in general and also progressing through another stage of their unclassifiable relationship

Angel being tormented by a succession of dead people to whom he can’t make amends

And that actually works really well? I think? Like, the different interactions all feel true to the characters, and between them they’re an interesting exploration of different ways to make, or not make, amends for things.

But to complete that good Buffy the Vampire Slayer formula, you need some sort of supernatural menace to go with it, and what’s frustrating is that it would not be hard to have a menace which fits with that theme. Loads of monsters are about guilt - ghosts and revenants and punishment demons of various sorts, not to mention the potential from spells, as well as everything ill-advised someone might do with magic in an attempt to atone. The choking hand of past wrongs is arguably one of the most basic components of horror.

But! The writers want to weave in this other thread, of why Angel came back from Acathla’s realm, and the associated trans-dimensional cosmic plans of prophecies associated with that. And you can see why they would expect that to work. It’s linking up interpersonal atonement with grand cosmic questions of worth and purpose. “Am I a thing worth saving?” and so on. So they want a villain that seems appropriately grand and cosmic, rather than some local little ghost or unquiet dead guy. Hence: The First Evil.

There are problems with this. Most notable is that they don’t actually have an answer about why Angel came back from Acathla’s realm. The First makes a claim (it brought him back to kill Buffy and become evil again) but Buffy reasonably points out that there’s no particular reason to believe it.

(And... that plan doesn’t really make much sense, either. First off, it’s weirdly convoluted - restore your enemy in the hope that later on you can get them to switch sides, and that they’ll then hopefully kill your other enemy. Second, if the First brought him back why not start working on him immediately? When he’s feral and confused, surely, might be a better time to make him your pawn. Or when he’s still a guilty secret and the two of them are kissing, isn’t that a better time to make them have give in to their lusts? Why wait until now? Thirdly, it just doesn’t seem that likely to work. Newsflash, First Evil, women have agency. Even if you can get Angel to try and seduce Buffy, there’s no guarantee she’d go along with it; even if you can get Angel to try and assault or kill her, there’s no guarantee she wouldn’t just kick his ass, as she has done before and will do again. Fourthly, why not work on Buffy herself if your plan is to kill her? There’s dead people that could haunt her, maybe make her suicidal enough to go along with Angel’s self-destructive decisions. There’s probably a fifth and sixth points but you get the picture.)

But also, the very fact that the First is so malevolent, that it’s not Jenny Calendar, or any of these other dead people, actually really undercuts the moral drama. If Jenny Calendar comes back and says “you should KYS”, or says “I forgive you”, or says something more complex in between, she has authority to say that and Angel would have to listen. It would create actual debate about what he should do! (She could come back and maybe be mad at other people for other stuff too, if we remembered she’s a character in her own right.) But instead the one twisting the screws on Angel is pure absolute evil, so the debate is pretty simple. (Good rule of thumb: don’t do what pure absolute evil wants you to do.)

And maybe I’m going to go on a bit of a rant about Christianity here? Maybe. Here goes. The interpersonal amends-making that we see from Willow and Xander and Buffy here, for all its variations, is at least focused on the other person. They have to talk to them, think about them as individuals, listen to what they say. And yes, Angel’s victims are dead so you can’t do that (without a bit of necromancy, which doesn’t actually seem to be impossible in this setting but whatever). But it’s still possible to be other-focused - to visit their graves (one is right here in Sunnydale!), to tell their stories, to find out if they have descendents or if there are causes they cared about (or if they’re a vampire now and what to do about that). It wouldn’t necessarily be easy but you could at least try.

What we see instead is a very self-focused conception of guilt - these various specific victims are just here to illustrate the general theme that he’s a monster, and the conception of making amends that’s offered by Buffy is to keep doing generalised good for generalised others, and the weighing of these two ends up being all about him and his worth and value, and then that question gets punted up to the big cosmic judges in the sky to decides, and they send a miraculous snowfall to render their verdict, and the result is that individual victims are very much not in the picture.

A few other aspects of the episode contribute to this, I think. One is that Angel's past as "Liam", when he was a drunken layabout and "a huge disappointment to your father" is brought up alongside his murders and atrocities - these are very different in their relation to victims (the first doesn't obviously have any that we see) but they're linked together as both bearing on his individual "worth".

The other is the running away! Angel sees these visions and he runs away, says "leave me alone", etc. That's an understandable response, but you could have scripted the opposite: he sees Jenny Calendar and he desperately follows, fearful yes but also hoping against hope that *this time* he might be able to speak to her, to apologise, to ask what she thinks or why she's here or what she wants him to do. (What's the worst she can say? "I know you feel badly about what happened, and I just wanted to say: good. Keep it up"?)

Anyway, I don't know if this is more a matter of how the writers are thinking about guilt or a deliberate statement about how Angel thinks about guilt, but the miraculous snowfall thing sort of suggests the former...

And I think this is a sub-optimal way of thinking about guilt and forgiveness, and I think many strands of Christianity encourage it with their theology, where specific harm to specific others gets subsumed into a general condition of “sin” (which everyone has, remember, so don’t get too judgemental, sure maybe they hurt you really bad but Augustine says you thirsted too greedily for the breast when you were a baby so…) and then that gets wiped away by the freely-given grace of Big Daddy JC, and anyway I shouldn’t rant about it too much because the real problem with Angel’s relationship to atonement here is just that there’s nothing new.

Warning, this is sort of a rant, with lots of headcanons and pedantry. (You can skip to the less pedantic bits if you want, they're halfway down under "Values")

Powers

Ok so on the power issue, I actually want to start with something fairly fiddly: how exactly is Anyanka’s necklace/power centre involved in the wishes she grants? What we see is her approaching Cordelia in human disguise while wearing it, putting it on Cordelia, then Cordelia makes the wish and Anyanka grants it and vanishes. Cordelia goes about her day, still wearing the necklace, and is still wearing it when she’s attacked and eventually killed. Giles takes it off to study, identifies it as “the symbol of Anyanka”, and then… summons Anyanka with a spell (I don’t think we see what happens to the necklace at this point?) and she appears already wearing that necklace, or one very like it. He rips it off her neck and smashes it, her power is gone and her wishes reverse.

Why is Cordelia left wearing this necklace for so long, if Anyanka is apparently able to… retrieve it magically somehow? It’s not necessary to sustain the wish: Cordelia dies and then loses the necklace and nothing happens. I don’t think we see any necklace at work in season 7 when Anya’s back at it. It might, of course, be that what Cordelia is wearing is just a necklace with the symbol of Anyanka, distinct from the power centre itself, but 1) if Anya can grant wishes without the power centre, why does she appear wearing it when summoned? And 2) when there are two identical magic necklaces in an episode it seems perverse to insist they’re different.

And if it is the power centre, does that mean all the wishes would be reversed if Cordelia had tripped and fallen the right way to break it? If she had got angry about the wish and stomped on it? They go to burn Cordelia’s body; if Giles hadn’t spotted the necklace would it have just been destroyed by heat and then the wish gets reversed out of nowhere?

You could try and concoct a jury-rigged set of requirements (“the wish only works if the wisher is wearing the power center while wishing and then also for at least 90 minutes afterwards”), or something, but doing so just raises further awkward implications (if Cordelia had taken off the necklace right after the wish was granted, then she’d have saved herself?).

The simpler explanation might have to be: Anya is very foolish. She didn’t have to leave her necklace with Cordelia, in fact doing so was the number 1 most important thing for her to not to do (it both makes her ridiculously vulnerable and enables Giles to deduce her role). Maybe she didn’t need to wear it when summoned either! The whole plot of the episode is basically a comic story about Anyanka making a sequence of entirely unmotivated and incredibly stupid mistakes.

(Which actually fits with her next appearance, in Doppelgangland, when D’Hoffryn tells her she lost her power through her own carelessness so he’s not going to help her.)

Why am I belabouring this point? Well, the deeper problem I was going to complain about is that wish-granting beings, whatever we call them, are ridiculously powerful. And if the above reasoning is right that they don’t even need to risk their power centres to grant wishes, then they’re really powerful, held back only by their own foolishness. If Anyanka had been minimally sensible, there’s no way (or no way that we’re shown) that Giles or anyone else could have either identified her as the culprit of the altered reality, or reversed it.

This results in a very silly picture of how reality works. Larry asks, incredulously, if this means that “the entire world sucks because some dead ditz made a wish?” Of course, what we see here doesn’t actually affect the entire world. But if Cordelia had made wishes in a different order, we might have seen a world where most men had vanished, except a “dumb and really agreeable” minority. What ifIf she had wished for a world with no demons, or a world with no magic? Or wished for D’Hoffryn to die instantly?

Above I noted that Anya made what seem like very dumb decisions; if we imagine her not only as not-dumb but as actually smart, think about how easy it would be to weaponise wishes. Suppose she takes a shine to the Nazis. Surely in 1946 there were plenty of unhappy German women, at least some of whom had been scorned (maybe by an American soldier who was suddenly rotating out of the country despite his promises of fidelity?). How hard would it be to induce one of them to wish that the Axis had won WW2? And if she changes her mind, just find a scorned woman on the Allied side and wish it back. This is just a farcical view of reality.

And, like, this isn’t really the fault of BtVS itself - it’s just a problem with wish-granting in general. The power to actually literally grant wishes is the power to do anything which can be put into words, which is too big to fit into any remotely serious world. I think the best way to headcanon our way out of this problem is to suppose that wish-altered versions of reality like this are inherently unstable: even if Giles hadn’t de-powered Anyanka permanently, something else, some ragged edge of the magic, would somehow caught and collapsed and made things revert back, all at once or in stages. Maybe any locations that have the right warding and protection spells in place are unaffected, and the people there will notice the change outside. Maybe a sufficiently powerful being can sense the impact of the spell and resist, or locally reverse it. Maybe if you wish for the death of D’Hoffryn or Glorificus, they just feel the wish come up to them, shake their head, and cancel it.

(This is in line with something I’ve mentioned before, that I hang a lot on Adam’s statement, in S4E17, that “These magicks are unstable, corrosive. They will inevitably lead to chaos.”)

Note that this won’t necessarily affect all the wishes Anya grants. “I wish that this guy’s head explodes right” isn’t a systematic alteration of reality and memory, it’s a discrete effect that, presumably, won’t be reverted by the destruction of the power centre. It’s just these big things that require changing how the world works or creating false histories. Those wishes, I maintain, generally collapse under their own weight after a while.

(I also complained, in an earlier post, that various character’s statements, from Doppelgangland onwards, seem to imply contradictory things about reality alteration, so it’s very possible that Anyanka herself doesn’t understand her powers all that well!)

Ok final point and then I’ll shut up about powers. Wish-granting is still a very potent power, and you might wonder: if D’Hoffryn can imbue this sort of power, and isn’t as careless, why doesn’t he use this power himself to wish for whatever he wants? I’m sort of attracted towards the thought that he can’t: the human part of vengeance demons is load-bearing, and so is the “altruistic” element of granting someone else’s wish.

The idea would run something like: demonic magic is selfish, it’s just making things happen because you want them, and material reality resists it. Hence big-name demons being forced out into demon dimensions and humans replacing them. Humans have these “souls” that let them care about other people, and this somehow fits better with the material world. Vengeance demons combine the two somehow, providing a material-world anchor or beachhead from which to alter reality. But maybe as a result, they can only deploy this demonic power at someone else’s behest - it only works if there’s this chain of aligned wills from wisher (human) through vengeance demon (hybrid) to D’Hoffryn (pure demon)? Anyway that’s just an idea that appeals to me.

Values

Speaking of alignment of wills between wisher and demon, that’s a good segue to the (perhaps more interesting) question of Anyanka’s motives and values. Oz remarks, in response to Larry’s above-quoted remark, that “if [Cordelia] wished for a long and healthy life, she should get her money back.”

And this wish isn’t unique: every single time we see Anyanka or Halfrek grant a wish in the show, it makes the person who wished worse off. Either they die (Cordelia) or their dog dies (the woman whose ex gets turned into a giant monster worm) or they’re horribly traumatised (the girl who sees multiple frat boys dismembered by a spider demon) or their life is threatened somehow (Dawn, also the last two examples). This isn’t a one-off: it’s the general pattern.

And this shouldn’t strike us as weird. Anyanka is perhaps the most classically “devil-like” demon we’ve seen so far - or, perhaps better, the most Mephistophelian. She sidles up to vulnerable people, plays on their insecurities, and induces them to (semi-)voluntarily accept a deal which, predictably, is worse for them in the long (or very short). There’s a superficial show of friendship, but the underlying goal is predatory: she’s only here to damn Faust’s soul/hurt Cordelia.

When she talks to D’Hoffryn, neither of them seem to shy away from this: “I brought forth destruction and chaos for the pleasure of the lower beings.”

Which works. It’s classic demon. It makes her a perfectly good one-episode (or two episode) antagonist, and for this one episode (and most of “Doppelgangland”) it’s how Anya is pretty consistently presented. She’s deeply, purely, evil, because of course she is.

(Giles does describe her as “a sort of patron saint of scorned women”, and patron saints don’t usually destroy their own worshippers as standard operating procedure. But Giles doesn’t endorse the aptness of the description: he may simply be repeating the label that Anyanka spreads to encourage more victims to call her up and destroy themselves.)

But starting in “The Prom” we start to get this different narrative. It starts with Xander addressing her as “Anyanka, punisher of evil males”, which is already sort of missing the point (she punishes scorned women just as much). And she comes out with this weird line about having witnessed so much treachery and wrongdoing from men, leading her to declare “men are evil.”

Later, at the prom, she’s talking about her past a vengeance demon. It’s an odd scene for multiple reasons. One is: Xander seems incredibly bored, which is a frankly wild reaction to your date having lived through the last thousand years of human history and wanting to tell you about it. But, obligatory dig at Xander aside, there’s something off in the content here: she’s describing only stories in which the male “scorners” die horribly, and leaving out any mention of hurting or killing the scorned women themselves. And thirdly, the tone of this conversation is weird: she’s talking about all the evil she’s done, but neither she nor anyone else seems to see this as anything more than a quirky eccentricity.

And from that point on she presents herself in this new way: not as a Mephistophelian trickster but as something more like the Ancient Greek Erinyes, a destructive and violent force of vengeance that does nevertheless actually go after the “wrongdoers” specifically. This is a very different demonic archetype, though equally well-established. This reaches its apogee in the episode where Halfrek insists on describing herself not as a vengeance demon but as a “justice demon.”

(What, D’Hoffryn empowers you to uphold justice… for the pleasure of the lower beings?)

And this just doesn’t really make sense. If you’re actually trying to right wrongs and inflict “punishment”, you can’t also busy yourself tricking victims into destroying themselves. These are not compatible missions: one might be the cover story used to trick the marks for the other, but here it really seems like Anyanka is “high on her own supply”, believing her own PR so as to retcon her thousand years of torturing and killing women as a bloody feminist crusade.

(There’s already a taste of this in “Doppelgangland”, in the maudlin self-pitying tone that Anya takes, though she hasn’t yet transitioned to fully self-righteous and self-justifying.)

Alright, maybe I’m belabouring the point. Everyone kind of admits that the ethical ramifications of Anya’s past aren’t explored very seriously. The writers themselves might admit that! They write her as a funny character, not a serious one. Maybe I should lighten up.

Ok but: the comedic writing is still buying into her self-serving “Greek Erinyes” narrative. The joke is that, while we might all agree that cheating husbands deserve some sort of karmic comeuppance, she takes it to an extreme and makes their heads explode. That’s a very sympathetic sort of evil — we might not endorse it, but we can relate to the desire. Scorned women can have little a murder, as a treat.

But that’s not what she’s ever shown actually doing. Her standard modus operandi is to find the women those men have mistreated and kill or hurt them in ways that are ironic enough to be amusing for her demonic patrons. That’s much less relatable! And it’s the opposite of how she seems to perceive herself. If there’s comedy here, it’s the comedy of someone deeply and bizarrely deluded about her own activities.

I’ve been throwing out various headcanons already here, so here’s one more: vengeance demons are all morally psychotic. Whatever D’Hoffryn does, to imbue demonic power into a human being, it creates a hybrid sort of soul which is always morally deranged. Vampires are all basically psychopaths because of their demonic souls; humans are capable of moral sanity because of their human souls; vengeance demons have these hybrid souls that automatically make them both fanatical devotees of some insane moral code and completely incapable of reflecting on or even noticing the disconnect between their actions and professed values.

(Maybe it also… damages their general cognitive powers? Makes them take crazy needless risks with their power centres? Makes them flunk math?)

Does Anya still have that? Or has her human soul been restored by the loss of her power? I think you could just about read her as newly capable of moral reflection but deep in denial because she can’t confront the reality of what she’s been doing, though the simpler reading is that she’s still got her hybrid soul and that’s why she never feels bad about anything she’s done. Of course in season 7 this all seems to crumble - is that a delayed effect of an Angel-style soul restoration, or a Spike-style anomalous evolution of conscience in a normally inhospitable soul? I don’t know, and we’re still pretty far from season 7 so I’m mostly focused on her trajectory from late season 3 into seasons 4-6.

(And, I guess while I’m ranting this endless rant, I’ll add that I might find it easier to ignore all these incoherent character foundations if the story they ended up telling with her was more appealing. “Violent misandrist is redeemed by falling in love with unremarkable man, sings song about becoming “his missus”," it's… not my bag.)

Anyway: at least in seasons 4-6, it feels like Anya’s way too central to the show to be purely a running gag. She’s a major character, so her emotional struggles and difficult choices are, at times, central focuses. And it never works for me because of this basic incoherence. If you can remember how she’s first introduced, she’s not just a quirky but basically sympathetic person with a chequered past. She’s a mass murderer who still defends her crimes based on seemingly unbreakable delusions.

Ok so first, a quick run down of why none of these stories can quite carry the episode.

As "an excuse for the show's regulars to dress up in unfamiliar outfits (both literally and metaphorically)", I have no real complaints, we get vampire Willow and grim Buffy and desperate Giles and entrepreneur Master and so on. It’s just that this isn’t enough by itself without some connection to the actual setting and characters.

As a story about Cordelia, well, the set-up is strong. We get a good look inside Cordelia’s life and perspective, we get a sense of her specific problems and how she thinks about them, and then… the wish she makes isn’t really to do with that. Her problems are about Xander and Willow, it’s sort of a leap of logic to blame Buffy, and then an even bigger leap to jump from anything specifically about her problems to the more general fact of Buffy’s existence in this town. And so the Wishverse is sort of answering a question unrelated to Cordelia’s specific problems. And she does learn to be careful what she wishes for, sort of: she changes her tune and wants Buffy back, but it’s all completed within the first half of the episode and then she dies and then even when she’s brought back to life she doesn’t remember any of it, so there’s no growth… it’s like we get the set up to this and then it veers away and wraps up too quickly to really deliver.

The Wishverse isn’t really that relevant to Cordelia’s specific problems, but it is relevant to anxieties Buffy might have, about whether her presence and her evil-battling has really helped or changed anything. And she will express precisely those anxieties… in two episode’s time, in “Gingerbread.” But they’re not on her mind at all here in this episode, so it’s like we get an answer to a question nobody asked.

As it happens, though, neither Cordelia nor Buffy actually resolves the problem here. Buffy’s arrival is a bit of a cargo-cult (Giles gets the idea she was meant to have already been here, but bringing her here now isn’t the same), and she ends up dying (albeit after participating in a big everyone-kills-everyone fight scene). Cordelia dies even sooner, but she does at least give Giles the idea to research her weird necklace, which leads him to Anyanka, and to the destruction of her power center. Which turns out to be oddly easy and convenient, but does at least involve Giles having to be the mad irrational hope guy and not Mr. Sober Rationalist, for once. The problem is just that this whole Giles arc begins halfway through the episode and proceeds so quickly and straightforwardly. Cordelia’s plot thread gives us set up and then no real resolution, Giles’s gives us resolution and no real set up.

Finally, there’s Anyanka, the actual mechanism that connects the main timeline with the Wishverse. She… does her job, but I don’t know if she really holds up to sustained scrutiny as a monster concept. Partly it’s about power: she’s wildly overpowered (she kills hundreds and resurrects others, with a word) and yet both hyper-constrained (she needs someone to wish it first) and ridiculously easy to defeat (just grab her necklace and smash it). But it’s also that her moral role is sort of contradictory - is she an actual patron saint for scorned women, trying to help them get their vengeance? Or is she a malevolent trickster who preys on scorned women, hurting them by turning their own wishes against them?

Ok that was meant to be a “quick” rundown, but let me say a bit more about the specific problems for this as a Cordelia episode and how you might try to interpret/headcanon things to fix them.

Because I think you could try to make this episode have a coherent story about the real true deep Cordelia, if you took her claim that she was only attracted to Xander because of his proximity to Buffy as a key to understanding her. Throughout season 2 there were sort of two things to notice about Cordelia:

Her thing with Xander is actually never explained, even a little - they seem to outwardly dislike each other, neither of them is nice to the other, it’s all just uncontrollable make-out impulses

She keeps turning up to help out the Scooby Gang, even though doing so is socially costly, even though she’s usually complaining about doing so.

And I think if you squint you could read her roughly as follows:

Cordelia is not intrinsically obsessed with high-school-popularity and its trappings; rather, she’s a smart and ambitious girl with a deep desire to excel, so she looks for what seems to be a Big Deal, and sets about dominating and excelling at that. High-school-popularity happens to be what everyone tells her is a Big Deal, so she becomes Queen Bee.

This makes Buffy Summers a deeply disturbing/intriguing figure to her right from the beginning: someone who clearly could excel at high-school-popularity, but chooses not to, instead hanging out with losers and engaging in freak behaviours. At first she dismisses it as just, ok, Buffy’s a freak, but you can sort of see it getting under her skin. And as season 1 progresses she increasingly picks up that Buffy’s freak behaviours do actually involve a fair amount of saving people’s lives. Including, at times, Cordelia’s. And that seems… important. Like a Big Deal, relative to which high-school-popularity starts to look less important. And so the drive to be the best at whatever’s most important, which is why she first made herself popular, starts eating away at her, pushing her to figure out how to get involved in this more meaningful Big Deal and, ideally, become the Queen Bee of Slaying or something.

And the Xander thing is some subordinate to this. Specifically, you can imagine Cordelia realising that, while the Scooby Gang will more-or-less happily accept her, it’s only as a sort of junior Slayerette: she’s not going to be the queen bee, in fact she’s not even going to be a core team member, she’s a hanger-on. And she maybe registers, hey this isn’t just a professional evil-battling team, it’s also a friend group: Buffy’s the central figure because of her superpowers, but Willow and Xander are core members because they’re good friends with Buffy. And so her drive to dominate and excel says: you need to find a way to get more securely and centrally into this group. And the instincts trained by her years in high school (under patriarchy) direct her to do so, not by practicing witchcraft or learning hand-to-hand combat or whatever, and not (alas) by seducing Buffy Summers herself, but by attracting and securing a boy.

And maybe she does actually think Xander’s physically cute, maybe she doesn’t. Maybe she’s gay, maybe she’s ace (I think I’ve seen people HC this?) but on this reading, the impulse to make out with Xander is… not exactly calculated, but something like the conscious manifestation of a subconscious calculation of influence and advantage. What she really wants is to be a core gang member and Xander’s lips feel like the fastest path to that. Maybe she becomes fond of him over time, maybe she just persuades herself she has, who knows. When he pisses her off enough to dump him, she goes back to her previous clique but it doesn’t feel the same: she now knows that this isn’t a big deal, it’s just a silly game, she’s undermined her own ability to take it seriously. Hence she goes back to Xander, but really it’s not about him, it’s about Buffy and the more satisfying Big Deal that she represents.

I think this reading fits with what we see on screen, and explains its broad contours pretty well. But! It also relies on a whole bunch of stuff that we don’t see, and in a divination of authorial intention it might well lose out to the simpler reading that she’s a one-dimensional but entertaining character who starts hanging around more because they want her on screen more and dates Xander so they have something to do with her/it would be funny. Oh well.

Anyway, this reading would explain why it actually makes sense for Cordelia’s resentment towards Xander to get directed at Buffy, and to focus on her entire presence in the town. It’s still not really fair - it’s not that Buffy did anything specific. It’s that Cordelia is angry she can’t be the queen bee of something important any more, both because she’s burnt up her high school social capital by doing things (like dating Xander) which Buffy inspired her to do, and also because she can no longer take high school popularity seriously enough — again, because of the more meaningful option represented by Buffy. Buffy coming to Sunnydale is the real problem, because by doing so she altered Cordelia’s value system and ruined her for other cliques. That’s why she makes this particular wish.

Not three things about this reading.

First, it seems to make good sense of her subsequent development, both her gravitating towards Wesley (finally! Another boy in Buffy’s group who’s not already taken or middle-aged! A way to get back in! Except eventually he also turns out to be lame and unsatisfying...) and then towards Angel in LA. I haven’t watched much of AtS, but I get the sense Cordelia continues her re-alignment towards heroism and caring about the needy and battling evil, again suggesting that her contact with Buffy has started this value re-alignment that she can’t reverse even though it’s a huge pain.

Second, it’s a bit gay. Right? Like, she thought she was happy living a conventional life, then this girl turns up who’s different and unconventional and something about her just burrows into Cordelia’s mind and rewrites her sense of who she is and what she wants out of life. All of her increasingly frantic responses take the form of desperately heterosexualising some boy or other (from Owen through Angel and Xander to Wesley) but fundamentally, it’s all about the girl.

Admittedly, the actors never play the dynamic between Buffy and Cordelia as sexual. There’s tension! Lots of tension, lots of personal investment in how they feel about each other, but it’s always, uh, played straight. If Eliza Dushku had been in Charisma Carpenter's place, maybe that would have been different, but as it is, the sexual potential of this relationship is pretty thoroughly suppressed and sublimated. But still. It’s structurally gay.

Ok but the third and final thing is: does this actually save the episode? Sort of… I mean the case for “yes” would be that this wish Cordelia makes does really represent something deep in her heart, she’s seen that more important things are going on behind the scenes of her surface world, she’s tried and failed to have an important role in them, she’s angrily wishing that she’d never seen them at all. And she learns that this isn't actually a realistic or viable wish: getting rid of the person visibly battling the evil just means that the evil spreads and eventually undermines her whole surface world and kills her. Sort of a "you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you" moment. You can kind of see this as a valid lesson that Cordelia needs to learn, for the sake of her continuing heroinification.

But! The case for "no" would be... for one thing, she doesn't learn anything because she doesn't remember any of it! So there's that. And she's still dead halfway through the episode. And this is all still relying on a psychoanalysis of her that's going well beyond anything that the scripts themselves really explore. So it's like, there is this satisfying story but we're only getting random glimpses of bits of it.

Also, it's sort of a cheap lesson, in some ways? Yeah, saving-people's-lives girl is doing an important job, getting rid of her doesn't mean that suddenly nobody's lives need saving. Duh. It's sort of obvious, from the basic set up of the show. It could be a good arc for an episode if there was a more sustained and sympathetic exhibition of why someone might have thought that Buffy's presence isn't helping anything. Maybe a Joyce episode where she sees what would have happened if she could have somehow stopped Buffy from being the Slayer! But Cordelia's desire here is, while understandable and relatable, ultimately so shallow and selfish that having it lose out to "saving the world" is sort of boring.

Alternatively, you could make an episode out of this theme by connecting it to real-world phenomena with a similar structure (e.g., we expelled the "troublemakers" and the "agitators" but the problems they were complaining about slowly got worse and harder to ignore, "first they came for the..." style) but that would be a fair bit more political than the writers usually want to be.

The best in-universe explanation I can see would revolve around different evil factions balancing or limiting each other. My preferred timeline is: the Master rises during the Harvest, vampires begin to basically take over the town while preparing the open the hellmouth when it’s at the peak of its activity cycle (in “Prophecy Girl”). But this forces the mayor’s hand, he steps out of the shadows and basically says “hey, we can collude peacefully or I can make things very very difficult for you, how about you delay the apocalypse just two years?”, and the Master, reluctantly or otherwise, accepts this. (Was it the mayor who earthquaked him away in the 30s? Does he know that? Good questions…)

Then in season 2, either Spike and Drusilla don’t turn up because they dislike the Master, or they do but he (or Darla) refuses to let them use Angel’s blood to cure Drusilla. They leave empty handed and that butterflies away her visions that locate Acathla or the pieces of the Judge.

Does that mean the sense of urgency in previous finales was a lie? No. It does mean it was a bit overblown, but “teenager prevents the literal end of human civilisation 4 times in two years” was already a bit hard to swallow. But the Wishverse is clearly worse than the real timeline, and might be due for a genuine apocalypse (or two, if the mayor and the Master both get their druthers) in six months, if not before, so Buffy still gets credit for saving a lot of lives and/or the world. A great achievement, just not "greater than all other human achievements in history, four times".

That said, there is a problem for the attempt to show that the Wishverse is worse, right now, than the real timeline. The problem is that it’s not actually that different, it’s just, so to speak, read with a different tone of voice. Like, there are monthly memorials at school, and the half-empty classrooms suggest that half the students are dead. But… Sunnydale already has regular obits in the student newspaper and a shockingly high mortality rate. In both worlds, the average student here has surely, by this point, personally known at least one person who disappeared or was brutally murdered in a way that nobody can explain and nobody seems able to stop. It’s just that in the Wishverse, everyone hurries furtively because they feel the weight of this pressing against their eyes, while in the main timeline they crack the occasional joke and get on with life.

Similarly, the Wishverse has a curfew and people choose their outfits to avoid getting attacked by vampires and nobody goes to the Bronze because the odds of getting murdered are too high. But realistically, surely, main timeline Sunnydale also ought to implement a curfew? People there also ought to structure their routines around how they can keep themselves safe. They also should stop going to the Bronze! The odds of being murdered might be only, say, 1% per month, but that’s pretty crazy high!

And sure, there’s a difference of degree - it seems like, out of a high school of maybe a couple hundred people, more than a hundred have died here whereas maybe only a couple dozen have died in the main timeline? So in universe you can kind of just accept that that difference marks the threshold for where the human spirit snaps, but… you could make either number sound horrifying if you wrote and shot the script in a way intended to bring that out.

Or maybe the idea is that the knowledge of Buffy herself makes a difference? That the students shrug and get on with life, despite the 1% chance of death, because on some level they feel like 'well, Buffy's out there handling things.' That might be the intended reading (though it's hardly the way that *Cordelia* seems to feel in the main timeline...), though it has the odd implication that people are taking needless risks with their lives because of Buffy, which... is just sort of an awkward implication?

So the writers have this slightly awkward job, of making the Wishverse situation seem deeply unsettling - like a place where you keep going through the motions but the fear makes it impossible to really live your life - when the real timeline would be equally unsettling if they presented it with the same tone and framing. For what it’s worth I think they succeed? Wishverse Sunnydale feels very different from main timeline Sunnydale. It’s effective. I just think it’s… sort of a funny corner they’ve backed themselves into?

It also raises some interesting questions about what the Buffyverse outside Sunnydale is like. This can’t be the only town where something like this has happened — vampires overpower/subvert local authorities, the town becomes their plaything. Perhaps when you’re not on a hellmouth the sheer number of vampires doesn’t get so high - at some point, surely, the vampire population becomes greater than what the human population can support, they start fighting or driving each other away? Maybe without the mystical convergence that point comes sooner? (Does the hellmouth make each vampire need less blood to feel full?) But really the big question is: do they usually set up night clubs with cages and pool-table bondage? I feel my gestalt impression of vampire media is: yes absolutely they do.

Something else that presumably isn’t unique is the formation of a “white hats” team: regular people working together to fight vampires. And while the show’s not always very consistent about this, I think what we see in the various altercations here is consistent with the basic balance of power that the show has shown us in a few earlier. episodes. If humans 1) outnumber the vampires and 2) have the right equipment, it can be a equal contest, with a lot depending on who gets the drop on who. When the white hats roll up and surprise Willow and Xander, they can keep them at bay long enough to rescue Cordelia; when Willow and Xander sneak up on them, they kill one and knock out the other two without any apparent effort. When Giles tries a rescue without outnumbering the vampires, he gets bonked on the head and survives only because a Slayer turns up.

(Buffy asks at one point "You know where he lives, and people have never tried to take him out", which suddenly made he realise... yeah, the classic vampire hunter method is to find them during the day wherever they're sleeping, get the advantage that day. It's rather remarkable that we never see that in BtVS! Giles does of course say that "people have tried", so it's not like it's a guarantee of success (these vampires can operate pretty effectively during the day as long as they're indoors) but it seems better than the alternatives.

(I guess you can headcanon that this is how most vampire hunters across the world operate, it's just that 1) when you're a Slayer it's unnecessary, 2) the White Hats are too much on the defensive to be trying to actually kill vampires (at least any more...), and 3) the Scooby Team last summer were primarily hunting newly-risen fledglings?)

It’s remarkable that we never see a daytime hunt staking…

Also: the vampires have run this town for two years and the Slayer, who apparently in this timeline travels around a bunch, hasn’t come here yet? (Indeed, she hasn’t even heard of the Master.) That seems to imply that this isn’t a uniquely messed up situation. Or perhaps it is in some respects uniquely messed up but the mayor/master duo is good at keeping it off the radar?

We also encounter the idea that you can summon a slayer? Like, watchers can make a phone call, insist strenuously, and about a day later the Slayer’s there. By herself, without a Watcher (and her Watcher doesn’t seem to have a great sense of where she is right now - if that’s who Giles is on the phone with). This is very different from how we see Buffy operate (she stays in one place, albeit a major hotspot) but it matches pretty well with how Kendra seems to operate, suggesting that this is something like standard operating procedure for Slayers? Moving around, identifying one big evil after another and killing it then moving on because of a phone call or a set of auguries. (My sense is that the comics/dialogue at the end of Chosen also suggest this as the general pattern for Slayers in the new “Slayer Organisation”?) It makes a certain amount of sense, though it seems probably even more hostile to attending university than being stuck in one particular town…

One last random bit of world-building: vampires are attracted to bright colours? Really? I don’t think we’ve seen any suggestion of this before or since, and it doesn’t seem super plausible (biologically: night vision and colour vision tend to trade off against each other, why would the night predators be into colour?; psychologically surely the appeal of the human in the clothes would swamp any purely colour-based factor?). So I’m inclined to think probably this is just one of those desperate superstitions that springs up because people need something they can control?

Anyway. The first way that the Wishverse is surprising is that it doesn’t show an apocalypse, just a worse version of the status quo. The second way that it’s surprising is that it then contrives a new sort of apocalypse for us: the Master’s mass production scheme.

Which is... interesting. It's fun, with his little fuck-ass espresso cup of blood, and a great opportunity for Metcalf to chew the scenery ("undeniably the world's superior race! but held back by the parochial routine of the predator!" "the humans, with the Plebeian minds!" (actually I think this episode might have taught child-me both the word "parochial" and the word "Plebeian"?)). It's quite a departure from bringing back the Old Ones, but maybe he's exploring ways to retain human blood and keep drinking it in a world ruled by ancient demons. Or he's just trying out new things.

But it's also sort of... goofy, and unclear what it's meant to achieve. Is it about total quantity of blood available - because these vamps don't seem to have any trouble getting humans to feed on. Is it about efficiency? What does it even do - it seems to fatally stab this poor girl (do we know her name?) and then drain out... all of her blood? But surely it's less efficient to get, you know, ten pints now from killing someone rather than 1 pint a month for years and years of feeding off them?

And then I found myself wondering what the most efficient possible system would be, and I guess it would be a sort of horrendous factory farm analogue, with each human just locked inside the machine with tubes stuck in them, kept alive by IV nutrition and being constantly milked for blood the rest of their lives, maybe sedated every time they go mad and try to end it all by smashing their heads against the walls of the box. And then I thought, hmmm maybe that *is* what the Master's machine is meant to be doing - when he says "She's still alive you see, for the freshness", he means she's going to stay alive perpetually, for maybe another year or so (until the blood quality declines too much?) And ok now I take it back, this is genuinely horrifying.

I do still find myself wondering... who is this for? Most vampires seem to actively enjoy the chase and the feeding, so surely replacing that with just drinking blood from fancy wine glasses would be a downgrade... If it's about allowing vampires to rule the world more thoroughly it seems counter-productive, since humans are still the ones who, you know, manufacture all the bondage gear they wear, and I don't really imagine vampires volunteering to take over that sort of work so... anyway, I'm probably overthinking it, it's grisly enough to work for the few brief scenes it gets, and I'm sure however it played out would be very bad for some number of humans.

Um, ok, so the final thing to talk about is the various characters who we get to see a counterfactual version of.

Most notably, Willow and Xander! Who are here being fun and evil and sexy. The bisexual suggestions aren't quite as strong here as in "Doppelgangland", present mostly in them both enjoying feeding and torturing people of the same gender (Xander with Angel, Willow with Cordelia and also the Master's victim), though I guess that's sort of the vampire thing, right? Everyone is delicious, it makes monosexuality seem weird. In this episode they're mostly interested in *each other*, for the obvious reason that this just twists the thumbscrews on poor Cordelia: "I wish us into bizarro land and you guys are still together?"

Vampire Xander seems closer to main world Xander than Vampire Willow and Willow, I think? Like, he has roughly the same sort of demeanour, just a bit more confident, whereas she's shifted a lot into this lilting, playful, almost dreamlike demeanour, which you can see the roots of in Willow's occasional babytalk but which seems like a bigger shift.

And, just to sort of throw out my take: I reckon this is a mix of two factors, one being that real-world Willow is more influenced by... not just her "soul" but the whole complex of things that vampirism strips away. She cares what people think, she's more timid about breaking rules, she's conscientious and altruistic and so on, so losing all of that at a stroke is going to change how she expresses herself quite noticeably. The other factor is: she's bored now! She says that a lot, and in a way her great misfortune is to be sired in a town already crawling with bigger bads. She's one of the Master's top disciples *now* (since Luke and Darla are... off on a mission somewhere?), but his plan is in motion and there's not much for her to do. And she no longer cares about school or earning the approval of human authority figures, so... there's nothing to scheme for! Give her a project! I feel like she'd be more recognisable as Willow if she had something intellectually stimulating...

(Maybe she was instrumental in designing the blood-extraction machine, but now that's set up she's been sidelined? I don't know.)

But also: where are Darla and Luke? It hardly seems likely that someone else killed them, if Buffy (+Angel) didn’t, though it’s not impossible that something very messy happened with Spike and Drusilla… my preferred headcanon is that they’ve been dispatched on missions elsewhere, insidiously extending the Master’s reach. Maybe Cleveland? I hear there’s a lot of demonic activity there.

Other characters notable by their absence: Jenny, the Anointed One, Amy. Jenny is, in a sense, well-served mission-wise, in that Angel is still pretty dang miserable. But probably not as well-served in every other respect. (Did she have something to do with Angel not being sacrified to restore Drusilla? Did she blow her cover and get killed for her troubles?)

Is the Anointed One off on a mission? Or the victim of some sort of... schism or factional fight? Or did he just never rise in this timeline?

It wouldn't have been hard to slot Amy in as a White Hat, but then again the best way to explain her absence from Scooby Gang activities is, plausibly, that she has a healthy fear of dying and being killed, so maybe she's not White Hat material...

Giles here is… pretty close to Giles in canon? Definitely more stressed out but gone for basically the same role just with a different group of teenagers. It's a bit odd that they seem to know what a Slayer is but he hasn't told anyone he's a watcher...

(Also, Rupert, take your *goddamn* glasses out of your mouth when you're intoning an summoning incantation, ok?)

Oz is likewise... not too different from in canon? Larry definitely seems more somber and mature, there's probably some interesting backstory there. This Nancy person is... also present.

Angel isn't too interestingly different: he's still got his habit of being tied up and erotically tormented by vampire couples where the girl seems to sort of really want them all to have a threesome.

I was slightly amused by Buffy asking him how he knows her name and he says something about how she was meant to come here, and *doesn't* say "I watched you creepily from a car in LA). But what's rather interesting here is that... in this timeline the same prophecies and "powers that be" still expected her to come to Sunnydale and had their messengers send Angel there based on that? Just an interesting datapoint...

And finally, of course, we get Wishverse Buffy. The vampires know her name, though they don't respect it ("that name is striking fear in nobody’s hearts"). More importantly, she's clearly very different from her real timeline counterpart: all the light is gone from her eyes. She doesn't "play well with others", she thinks there's just "one thing I'm good for", she's not even punning! Her unremittingly grim demeanour is mirrored in her refusal to countenance hope, or even complicated magic (though she must know that such magic exists). She barely seems to be trying to stay alive in the final battle; she's a walking embodiment of Spike's every-Slayer-has-a-deathwish thesis.

I forget who it was (probably @coraniaid) who theorised that this is probably a version of Buffy who had to see her mom killed by vampires, and who maybe didn't come to Sunnydale for that very reason (taken into Watcher custody maybe?). That makes sense, but whether the big difference here is that or the absence of her Sunnydale friends, it's pretty directly speaking to the show's overarching thesis that the tension between her Slayer life and her Fun-with-Friends-and-Family life isn't actually a weakness or liability, as it often seems, but a source of strength. In the real timeline it takes at least a couple more years for her to reach this level of suicidality, and she ends up emerging from it only because she's surrounded by people (Willow, Spike, Dawn) who (in various ways) refuse to let her die.

I sort of wish we got more information on the mucusy demon; it seems to have Buffy on the ropes but then goes down awfully quickly to a well-placed knife. I’ve seen people identify it as the same type of demon that will reappear, still unnamed, in “The I in Team”, controlled by brain-chips and used to try and trap and kill Buffy when Walsh betrays her. But having gone and checked, they’re not quite the same - the tentacles are similar, but the mouth isn’t an upside-down vertical slit in those guys. But maybe they’re still related!

Anyway, the demon is obviously not the focus - just a sort of gesture at there being various demons around that need slaying and get slain. (For what it’s worth, I sort of dislike this, and not just because every time I see a monster I want more info about it. Gesturing at there being all these other supernatural things offscreen feels like it’s saying that the supernatural is mundane and boring, and surely the point of having monsters and curses and so on in your show is that they’re strange and exciting? If they’re so unremarkable why both including them? (Yes it’s a character beat that the strange and exciting becomes mundane and boring to the characters after a while, but you can show that without actually making it mundane and boring to the viewers! We’re not Buffy: we’re glad she’s going through all this bullshit, we love it, in that respect we’re sort of her enemies… (and sure, the other benefit of mundane monsters is that it’s funny by incongruity, but if it makes monsters seem less significant then it seems like a long-term cost for a short-term benefit, which is not a great deal (ok that’s enough parentheses (probably)))))

Anyway, this transitions into the gang discussing their four bad break-ups, with the four love interests conspicuously absent: Cordelia, Oz, Angel, and Faith. (I mean, they don’t name the Faith thing as a break up with a love interest, but structurally the parallel is pretty clear...)

But at the same time Faith is absent-but-mentioned, you know who has been officially promoted from absent-and-unmentioned to absent-but-mentioned? Amy! Last we saw her, she was at the center of a terrifying botched love spell, now Willow is learning things from her about where Cordelia has been and how scary she looks. That’s a data point!

Anyway, we get a lot of focus on Cordelia, with the phone calls and the burning photos and the cool outfit walking into school and the asking random dudes if there’s stuff in her teeth. It’s striking how this contrasts with Oz, who is as usual quiet, and mature, and sympathetically clear-eyed about everything and firm in his boundaries. Which is, you know, refreshing when everyone else is a hormonal goblin, but it also means that he’s just offscreen causing no drama and we as the audience get nothing to work with. Give this character something to do!

Harmony’s clearly enjoying being queen bee (in a way that really underlines that it’s odd she wasn’t a homecoming queen candidate in E5?). Very mean to poor Jonathon, who’s just minding his own business. Four months from now he’ll try to take his own life. 😃👍 (Probably not just because of this event but I'm sure it's not helping.)

I guess I don’t know exactly how sympathetic I am to Cordelia here. Like, ok she’s now low-status...just like all the other low-status people (like Jonathon!) she used to mock. I mean I guess I see how it all fits together: she gave up her high-status clique, but she’s also now rejecting the low-status clique she had fallen in with, so between them she’s sort of uniquely alone, and of course she’s been cheated on, and she’s clearly genuinely hurt by that and doesn’t have anyone to commiserate with, or anyone who can sit and tell her how stupid and evil Xander and Willow are.

But at the same time (and here’s the central wrinkle of the episode, I guess) she directs an odd amount of her ire at Buffy, who did not in fact cheat on her or anyone else (except maybe symbolically Faith?), and who is actually trying to reach out and connect. (And possibly saved her life in that vampire attack?) So that sort of limits my sympathy a bit?

And also yes she has this horrible gut wound… but I did complain last episode that this feels sort of random? Like, there’s no reason why it happened to her and not to anyone else, it doesn’t seem to connect to any broader characterisation or specific choice? So I dunno.

Wait I lied the dude says he can’t be seen with her in public but offers to go somewhere private if she wants to fool around. I’m sympathetic again, supply her with weapons.

Um, just to shift over the Willow and Xander, observe the juxtaposition at the Bronze between Willow saying there’s not enough paying in all the world for what they did, and Xander saying he’s had enough, so “you want to do guilt-a-palooza, fine, but I'm done with that.” It’s a striking juxtaposition, it’s of a piece with last episode, where Willow was actively looking for ways to break out of the affair (everything short of just not doing jt) and him not. Reinforced by her insisting on them not touching. At least on the surface she seems genuinely penitent and he seems mostly just aggrieved. (You can just see him feeling like with every new voice message he leaves, he’s racking up grovel credits and becoming more entitled to stop feeling guilty, even though they aren’t doing anything to help Cordelia and she’s clearly not asking for them… is this the Angel model of entirely self-directed and self-adjudicated atonement?)

(But I also think there’s probably something interesting to be said about… Willow feels like she needs to actively do things (like not touch Xander) because she still has the hope of reconciliation, and next episode she will in fact achieve it. Xander won’t, and clearly on some level doesn’t expect to or think he can, and there’s a chicken-egg dynamic between those two facts. Like he's bitter and aggrieved because on some level he knows he has less going for him and probably won't be able to fix things? While Willow's confidence in her own fundamental goodness allows her to safely berate and self-flagellate because she trusts the world to forgive her?)

Um, anyway, shockingly bad vampire security here, is everyone really just walking through this dark passage area that vampires randomly jump out into? Still?

And that maybe does connect back to the central wrinkle, of why Cordelia is so hostile to Buffy. The episode sort of contrives a justification for this by having the vampire jump them when she’s talking to Buffy, and then she gets shoved in the fight, but… would she have been better off if Buffy wasn’t there? It sort of feels like this, like the gut wound, reflects the writers' lack of confidence that her venom towards Buffy is grounded in something about her character, so they have to bolster it with these contrivances...

And then of course we get the immortal line, “I never would have looked twice at Xander if Buffy hadn’t made him marginally cooler by hanging out with him.”

Grand unified theory of season 3: Cordelia, Willow, and Faith all get together with Xander because it feels like the closest option to getting together with Buffy, who they’re all in love with.

(Or second closest, after getting together with Angel, which two of them also try to do… hmm maybe this grand unified theory has legs…)

(I know there are more nuanced ways to read Cordelia's emotions here, I guess I'll to work them out in post 3/3.)

And finally there’s Anya, who it suddenly occurs to me occupies the same structural role in relation to Harmony and Cordelia that Buffy did in S1E01 in relation to Cordelia and Willow: new girl falls in with the popular crowd, sees their leader be performatively mean to an unpopular girl, immediately goes to befriend that unpopular girl.

And in a way, just watching the non-Wishverse parts of the episode, what it leaves me with most of all is the missed opportunity of Cordelia and Anya. Because Cordelia finally looks so happy and so pleased to have this friend who will validate her grievances, and follow her around pretending to grant her vengeful wishes. She just needs a flunky or two with good taste in bags! This could have been so healing for her.

Instead, the next time we see them together on screen is, I believe, at the Prom, when… Anya is there with Xander? I feel like the space of 11 episodes makes us forget but that’s sort of a shocking reversal, isn’t it? Sort of kick in the teeth, or a spike in the guts?