RUPERT GILES & BUFFY SUMMERS

British actor Anthony Head, best known for his roles in TV shows including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Ted Lasso, Merlin and Little Britain, has died at the age of 72. Head found international fame as Rupert Giles in hit supernatural teen show Buffy in the late 1990s. He went on to have a recurring role in sketch show Little Britain, play king Uther Pendragon in the BBC's Merlin, and appear as former football club owner Rupert Mannion in Ted Lasso. "He passed away peacefully of complications due to pneumonia, surrounded by his family," his daughters Emily and Daisy said. His daughters' statement said "it is with heavy hearts that we announce the death of our extraordinary father". They added: "It has been, and forever will be, an honour and a privilege to be his daughters, and to have witnessed firsthand the impact both he and his work have had on so many." They also said they knew "how dearly he will be missed by friends, colleagues and fans of the show he was in", adding that he "loved his job very much" and "always considered himself incredibly lucky". His family acknowledged that "his legacy will live on" and said they considered themselves "lucky" to have watched him doing what he loved throughout his career. Head's other credits included The Iron Lady, Persuasion, The Inbetweeners and Manchild.

I'm genuinely not sure most audiences could handle Dory Sief. She doesn't have a tragic backstory. Her goals, even the self-proclaimed altruistic ones, aren't about bettering the lives of those around her or For The Greater Good--they're about giving herself a sense of personal identity no matter the cost. With the exception of what happens to her in season 4, she brings...just about everything on herself. It's a comparatively rare occasion when she even feels guilty about the things she does, and she straight-up convinces herself that she wasn't at all responsible for the first and most narratively-significant Immoral Act.

She's selfish. She loves her friends, but not quite as much as she loves believing she's an Important Person with a Grander Purpose. She has several opportunities to try and better herself (and even shows a potential desire to sometimes), but at every single turn she actively chooses to be worse. She's still complex, she still feels like a real person--as does everyone on this show--but she's not meant to be a sympathetic or Super-Relatable Character™. She just...is.

And even more than the wacky plots or funny jokes or seasonal genre shifts or the excellent cast, I think this is ultimately what makes the show so fresh, entertaining, and...honestly special. Plenty of creators are...almost afraid to make their women truly messy. To unapologetically say, "No, this woman is not a good person," especially when that woman is a WOC. But this isn't a commentary on women in general being deceitful and evil, nor is it positing that people of color are uniquely dangerous. The people who made this show simply wanted to tell a story about someone who turns into a highly objectionable woman, and they actually stuck to it.

I've billed this as Everyone Gets Worse: The Show, but that's not just there for the sake of shocking the audience or because the creators ran out of ideas or don't understand what subversive stories are. The "getting worse" is an intentional choice. And the writers are well-aware that none of these people are good, and there's no attempt at telling the audience they are. We are asked simply to be entertained by the increasingly deranged misadventures these characters find themselves in. Which the show does deliver on quite well because even if these people suck as people, they are clearly still people. They have complexity, they have ugly and human emotions, they handle things poorly and immaturely, yes in a broader sense, but on a smaller interpersonal scale, too. None of them really know who they are or what they want. And all of this makes them still, in a show that goes progressively off-the-rails, incredibly human. Because even if the way their flaws manifests on a wider narrative scale isn't anything the audience will ever experience, we all know people who have those flaws.

I think also one of the great things about this show is that it very easily could have made Dory the Sole Bad Person In It. To do what so many other stories do and write her off as "the manipulative bitch." But her friends go along with her willingly. They commit and cover up crimes, they refuse to take responsibility for their actions, and while they place the blame on Dory's unscrupulous behavior by framing her as a uniquely bad influence, the show itself never does. They choose to keep coming back to her, to follow her lead, even though she is very much not forcing them to. And in most other shows, Drew would be written and/or presented as a completely innocent party, victim to Dory's Corruptive Woman Wiles. In this one he kids himself into believing that, even though the choices he makes tell us otherwise. This hypocrisy is the point, flipping the script on so many stories about one-dimensionally evil Femme Fatales; on so many fictional narratives that misogynistically put every single bit of culpability on the women, regardless of whether that even matches up with what we see on-screen or on-page.

I just see how many people do exactly that--hold female characters to a higher standard than their male (usually white) counterparts, blame them for everything even events they had little to no hand in. And I think of Dory and how so many people would probably react to her despite the quality and cleverness and complexity of her writing.

Luckily the oncoming driver saw this as well, turned on his warnings and pulled up to block her from other drivers.