#revelations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hence:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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