Just arguing about vampires and such

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?

Kendra frowned. Behind him she could see Buffy and Faith looking mystified by what Giles had said. But she had studied enough Greek and Latin to piece together his meaning.  “That is correct, sir. I intend precisely that.” Giles’ face fell, and she felt her stomach drop at the sight. She didn’t like to think about how closely his shocked dismay probably matched what Mr. Zabuto would feel, if he knew how she lived now.  “And what does, what does… your master, uh, think about that?” But Kendra didn’t have to answer that, because her master had just entered the library behind her. And when they did, Giles entirely forgot what he had been talking about.  Her master now appeared entirely human; their face and arms, hair and hands, were unclothed and fleshy, with the dark hair and sardonic eyes of the woman Kendra had seen in photos all throughout their house. A careful comparison might have shown them now a little taller: their robotic skeleton was tall for a woman and short for a man, but average enough to be unremarkable in either case. One eye was of vitreous humour, the other a life-like glass-and-metal imitation holding a camera. And they were wearing a long, loose, black dress, with a satchel slung casually over one shoulder. After months of concealing the various strange and unnatural parts of their body, they looked shockingly normal.  “Jenny…” Giles was frozen, as if entirely unaware of his surroundings; Buffy and Faith were also staring, and even Oz had paused in his raging, as though suspicious of the sudden silence. “Hi everyone.” Her master paused, then kept walking to the table and dropped their bag on it. “As you may have noticed, I’ve made some progress with Balthazar’s amulet.” 

Giles and Buffy talk as though Buffy has a responsibility to be here in Sunnydale - a responsibility which Faith might relieve her of, though at the end of the season that option will have vanished, and so Buffy does in fact stay here. The idea of such a responsibility is brought up again in seasons 6 and 7, and ultimately relieved only through the extreme expedient of destroying Sunnydale entirely.

But it’s weird, right? There was no Slayer here before season 1, and no other Slayer we’ve heard about was fixed to Sunnydale. The Chosen One brief is “you must battle the forces of darkness”, not “you must relocate to Southern California.”

I think the best is a way to reconcile these two sides is through the idea that a hellmouth can be dormant or more or less active (or, in the extreme, open). In “Welcome to the Hellmouth”, Giles says:

“It’s getting worse! The influx of the undead, the supernatural occurrences, it's been building for years. There's a reason why you're here and a reason why it's now!”

This suggests that maybe up until the 90s, Sunnydale was just a regular town — which kind of fits with the way that the Harvest and all these other prophesied big deal events seem to be on some sort of calendar? The stars align, the hellmouth begins to open, and that’s when you need a Slayer on it.

Of course, in the same episode Giles also says:

“Dig a bit in the history of this place. You'll find a steady stream of fairly odd occurrences. Now, I believe this whole area is a center of mystical energy,that things gravitate towards it that, that, that you might not find elsewhere.”

The language of “steady stream” seems initially in conflict with “it’s been building for years”, but I think both can be true. Suppose the baseline level of vampires and supernatural shenanigans across the world is pretty low (as is required for homicide and missing persons statistics to be anywhere near their actual levels). Maybe even a dormant hellmouth leads to, say, ten times that level - enough for a “steady stream” of odd occurrences, but still one that only becomes apparent to those who “dig a bit” into local history. Maybe that’s the situation in Cleveland.

But in the few years leading up to season 1, Sunnydale has stopped being that: it’s gone from being a dormant hellmouth to being an active one, which means a rate of supernatural stuff that, by season 1, is, like, a thousand times higher than normal - enough that the steady stream is now noticeable to any high school student or concerned parent who pays attention.

(In “the Harvest” Giles says:

“Some sixty years ago, a very old, very powerful vampire came to this shore, not just to feed. [Buffy: He came 'cause this town's a mystical who's it.] Yes. The Spanish who first settled here called it 'Boca del Infierno'. Roughly translated, 'Hellmouth'. It's a sort of, um, portal between this reality and the next. This vampire hopes to open it.”

This suggests that the activity level of the hellmouth has been high before - high enough, at least, to attract the notice of the Master and some Spanish people. But that might be an “every 50-100 years” sort of thing?

Anyway, the upshot would be: while the hellmouth is in this highly-active state, it maybe does sort of need a Slayer on it? Consider that Kendra had to visit Sunnydale twice in a 6-month period, and she still missed a potential apocalypse-level event (the reassembly of The Judge). That does sort of suggest that if you want to keep the world really safe, boots on the ground is best practice for an active hellmouth - and the Sunnydale Hellmouth, for whatever reason, has stayed active for multiple years in a row now.

You might ask, why would anyone live in a place like this? Which brings us to…

Question 2: Is the mayor really on top of everything?

The mayor talks casually about how, when Spike was around last year, they were keeping tabs on him, and holding back from intervening into his various “shennanigans”. (The deputy mayor’s reponses seem to suggest he remembers this, so I guess that answers my question from back in E5 about how long he’s been in the know.)

M’learned colleague @coraniaid suggests that this “doesn't really hold water”, especially given what we see next episode in the Wishverse timeline. And it certainly doesn’t seem like everything was "under control” in the last two years, what with the hellmouth briefly opening, the Bronze being taken over for the Harvest, the Judge attacking a shopping mall and Acathla almost sucking the world into Hell. Those all seem like things that you’d expect the mayor to have done something about.

But I think there might be a way to thread the needle? In a previous post about local and global apocalypses, I suggested a scenario roughly as follows: if necessary, the mayor (and probably other shadowy figures around the world) could have probably closed the hellmouth, or reversed Acathla’s portal, etc. But doing so would be costly and dangerous would require revealing themselves (to other shadowy forces, to the Slayer, etc.) in a way that they’d rather avoid. So they take a gamble: hang back and monitor the situation, and see if someone more heroic fixes things first. If they do - great, you’ve kept your hands clean. If they don’t, well, some large number of people have probably died by the time you manage to resolve things, but they’re not you so who cares?

(Not to jump the gun on the Wishverse, but appealing to a mayor of this sort also strikes me as the best way to explain why the Master in the wishverse hasn’t already opened the hellmouth and ended the world - the mayor steps out of the shadows when it’s clear that nobody’s going to stop that happening, and negotiates some sort of truce (at least until after graduation…).)

I mean, obviously the big apocalypse plots of the previous two seasons aren’t written to signal anything like this, but I think they’re just about compatible with it…

(To link this to question 1, Faith in E17 will say “the mayor built this town for demons to feed on”, which suggests the “steady stream” model of abnormally high supernatural occurrences. Just, maybe not as high as these last few years. High enough, at least, for the Spanish to have decided not to settle right on top of the hellmouth! And for that clever decision to have only been made once there was a guy who hoped to profit off a century of people getting quietly snacked upon.)

Question 3: What’s the deal with holy water?

I had forgotten until this rewatch that the one thing Angel and Buffy actually achieve is driving off a large group of vampires by throwing lots of holy water at them. This is, I think, the first time we’ve seen holy water used since season 1? Crosses and stakes have been reliable go-tos, but not holy water, even though it seems to be pretty effective whenever it's used.

The best explanation I can think of is that it’s good for driving vampires away, but not actually for killing them. I think me and m’learned colleague @badwolfwho1 had a back-and-forth a bit earlier in the rewatch about what crosses actually do, and my preferred reading is that their effect is as much mental as it is physical - in the Master’s words from S1E10, they “suffuse [vampires] with mortal dread”, a sort of supernatural terror. And maybe holy water does the same thing, but doesn’t do much to actually kill them (unless drunk, as in E12). We do see (in E16) that Wesley carries some with him, suggesting that it has a valid defensive role, but you can see why a Slayer who’s meant to be hunting vampires down and slaying them wouldn’t have much use for something that will make their quarry run away.

(A deeper question is what holy water is, because the characters clearly don’t act like it’s water that’s been imbued with the power of Jesus Christ the one true God by ministers of the true church that represents Him on earth. The best reading seems to me to be something like: at least some priests and their congregations are sort of stumbling into a fairly basic sort of magical spell, conferring power onto one individual which they can then imbue into water (and, as we see in S2E01, earth). It’s sort of like invitations, in terms of vampires being affected by certain sorts of human socio-psychic-acts, even without the humans involved knowing why? And it makes me sort of want to write a fic where Buffy or Willow or someone tries to figure out what they need to do to start making their own holy water…)

(Is there such a thing as, or a counterpart to, holy water in Judaism? Could Willow deploy… holy oil? Or is it better not to get into that?)

Question 4: What’s the deal with magic shops?

When Jenny went to get her orb, the shopkeeper very clearly differentiated between “tourists” and those who were “in the trade”, to the extent of using different accents with each. This shopkeeper (who will survive approximately as long) doesn’t seem to do that - does she already know that Willow is serious? How long did that take? Has Willow been coming here all year so far? Since the summer?

(Does Amy come here? @badwolfwho1 suggests that Amy’s role in this episode would probably be to advise Willow against doing the anti-lust spell and be ignored - I've been toying with a fic idea that she arrives at the magic shop and finds the shopkeeper, who she’s only recently persuaded to trust her, dead and vampirised, and it reinforces her feeling that she ought to stay as far away from vampire-slaying as possible.)

I’m also sort of curious what the shopkeeper planned to say after “are you sure you know what you’re doing?”, if Willow had confirmed she was planning a love spell. What are the professional ethics here? Are you just selling the equivalent of roofies and firearms to any teenager who comes in?

What’s really disappointing in this regard, though, is that Giles himself takes over running a magic shop in season 5, and does so little vetting that he sells vital magical supplies to a Hellgod! Though I suppose Anya does look over the receipts and identify a problem, implying there’s some level of expected oversight that simply lapsed here, but…

I dunno. This is just an area that I feel like would be really interesting to explore. Presumably to be profitable you need to be running two games at once, selling harmless nonsense to the many guillible “tourists” and rarer high-ticket items to the professionals, but… just lots of unanswered questions.

Question 5: What is involved in “putting together a welcoming committee”?

This isn’t really a big question anyone’s asking, but it just occurs to me that there’s no clear reason to think that all 15 or so of these vampires was already around, contemplating the fact that they can live forever, finding and killing humans regularly and driving up the homicide rate. It’s equally possible that “putting together a committee” means finding a group of, like, outlaw bikers or something and turning them into vampires very quickly, then exploiting their impressionable young minds to send them straight into battle. (I think in Vampire: The Masquerade this is termed a “mass embrace”?)

Question 6: What’s going on when vampires fight? In the big fight scene at the end, Buffy does some staking, and gives stakes to Angel and Spike, but they don’t use them much (I believe Spike stakes one opponent, and only after beating on them for a while). And I sort of realised: if you put two random vampires in front of each and make them fight, there’s…basically no way for either of them to die? They can’t suck each other’s blood, and without weapons they’re not decapitating each other or staking each other or setting each other on fire.

There’s a thing in nature where animals with serious natural weapons tend to have a lot of evolved instincts to let them settle disputes without actually maiming each other, with displays and submission signals and dance-offs and so on. What’s interesting is that vampires seem to be the opposite: because there’s so little they can do each other, they’re very willing to just beat each other up. They probably welcome the fact that they can’t kill each other, since it means they get to spend more time fighting.

(If you’re leaning into erotic metaphors of vampirism then their fighting is mostly just foreplay…)

But they can, presumably, still do various amounts of damage to each other’s bodies, which leads into:

Question 7: Why did they let Spike go? I really wish they hadn’t let Spike go. Sure, have him get away so we can use him again, sure, but would it be so hard to clearly indicate on screen that he is escaping, not just strolling off while the supposed Vampire Slayer watches?

As it is, what’s shown on screen is very ambiguous. There’s one reading, which some of my Spuffy-leaning colleagues will probably prefer, that something in Buffy already has a bit of thing for Spike (she lets him live three times before he's chipped - in "Becoming", in this episode, and again in "The Harsh Light of Day.") I don’t really like this reading, just because it sort of undermines the serious of her mission, (especially with how everyone was so mad about letting Angel live). Spike just turned up and almost killed Willow and Xander!

The other reading, which I prefer, is that Buffy feels she can’t pursue him because she’s worried about Angel. Because while clearly none of these dozen vampires was able to kill him, they did drop a wall on him and run over top of it. Plausibly, all of his ribs are broken and all of his internal organs are punctured? If he has to keep fighting, he might be at risk of collapse - just becoming physically, mechanically, unable to move around effectively. And if she engages Spike and he realises he has no insurance any more (having told her where her friends are), he’s suddenly much more dangerous and might use the stake she just gave him to finally kill Angel.

(Though if I were, say, Xander, given the option of risking Angel to kill Spike, I might make some remarks about bird-to-stone ratios…)

Question 8: Why can Spike drink? I think this is the first time we’re shown vampires eating or drinking human food/alcohol? I don’t really like it - I want my vampires to remember that they’re dead! If they want to get drunk, find a drunk human and feed from them!

But Spike is, at least, shown to be kind of a freak in this regard (see also Season 4 and the weetabix). So I guess the easiest thing to say is: Spike is a freak, and he just kept on consuming human food and drink for years as a vampire, and somehow it eventually altered his stomach so that he’s able to metabolise at least some of it.

Question 9: Why can Spike drive? That blacked-out car thing - what? It blocks sunlight enough that he doesn’t burn and yet still lets through enough light that he can see the road?

Man, I dunno. I guess my answer here is:

Question 10: Why did Angel happen to be hanging around Buffy's house?

Because he's compulsively creepy like that, it's his single most consistently established character trait. Next question.

Q11: Is Spike right about Buffy and Angel?

It’s already been pointed out that “I can fool Giles, I can fool my friends, but I can’t fool myself. Or Spike for some reason” is pretty clearly not true. Giles and her friends were not fooled: Buffy was perhaps only fooling herself. At least, that seems true on the topic of whether she and Angel have romantic feelings, a desire to be more than friends. Spike is clearly right about that, but everyone already knew that (the kissing and almost-kissing sort of give it away).

But Spike's actual claim goes beyond this:

"You'll never be friends. You'll be in love until it kills you both. You'll fight, and you'll shag, and you'll hate each other till it makes you quiver, but you'll never be friends."

And this isn't, actually, true, is it? They are, admittedly, rather miserable and end up in an excruciating half-together-half-not situationship for the rest of the season, but they actually don't fight, or shag, or hate each other. By season 5, for instance, they do seem to be, approximately, friends. And they could both live decades more in which to settle more comfortably into that relationship. So I'm inclined to think that Spike is just flat wrong here.

(What, the drunk pathetic vampire is projecting his own problems onto others? Who'd have thought it!)

So: Xander and Willow. The foundation is already shaky, in that the previous episodes have rather failed to make this relationship either compelling or plausible. And then in this episode everything sort of happens for no reason. They keep kissing each other because of this sudden strange compulsion that comes over them - and which they both seem equally affected by, and equally dismayed by, at exactly the same time. (I feel like it would be so much more interesting if one or the other was pursuing, or one or the other was resisting successfully, rather than them just both being united in wanting to not kiss but failing to.)

They are eventually found out by random chance, and then Cordelia falls through the stairs and is injured on a metal bar by random chance, but she’s going to be ok because it didn’t pierce any vital organs… by random chance.

And yes. the Cordelia death fake-out is pretty funny, sure… but it feels like it’s at a place in the episode, at the big climax, where you’d expect to find things that actually matter, so it instead being a gag just adds to my feeling like the episode’s not really worth it. Like it’s putting too much weight on being funny? And that’s not the main thing I’m watching for?

Now to be fair, there are some choices made, at least if you count failures to choose as a type of choice. Both Willow and Xander fail to just stop kissing, which is, I think, actually fairly grounded in their characters. Neither of them are self-disciplined people, though Willow can give the superficial impression of it. (And “I never knew there was something inside me that could feel this bad” is also revealing, in its own way.)

The problem is that we still don’t really know why they have this desire now, all of sudden (and will stop having it abruptly as soon as this episode ends), so the character insight is very partial.

Willow does at least seem to see the situation as calling for some sort of action - whether that’s trying to confess to Buffy (last episode) or wanting to cancel their bowling plans or, in the extreme, resorting to an “anti-love spell.” The contrast between this and Xander, who seems content to just sort of coast along, is also grounded in character: Willow is consistently someone who believes problems can be solved if you just look hard enough for a solution, while Xander has this sort of gallows humour pessimism.

But! None of Willow’s choices have any meaningful consequences! Her confession to Buffy was derailed by Lagos and she lost her nerve, and this episode she never gets to cast her anti-love spell. You could argue that her attempt is what gives Spike his idea and leads to him capturing them, but… there’s no reasonable way to foresee that result, it’s not connected to her motivations or values, it’s just pure coincidence. Hence the overall feeling that the episode is structured primarily as a comedy.

It would almost be more interesting to see things play out without Spike there: does she convince Xander to go through with the spell? Does she use it as a sort of leverage: he goes and confesses to Buffy or else she’ll magic him? (Did she really expect him not to notice the spellbook, or was the plan always for him to realise what she intended?) If Buffy does find out, what does she do?