#s3e04

Ok so I guess I’ll start with the bad bits. I think there are sort of three actively bad things here (as opposed to missed opportunities to do something better).

Three Bad Things

One is Angel coming back at all. Partly it’s just, haven’t we had enough of this guy? He’s been a big deal for two seasons, whether or not to kill him was a huge plot point, he got his flashbacks and his chance to end the world and his climactic dramatic moment. It’s a lot more than most characters get! And now he’s back. Maybe this is just me but I’d have preferred all the time and energy he sucks up to be distributed to other characters or monsters. It also does cheapen all the drama and tragedy of “Becoming” and the last few episodes and the summer in between… it’s like with Jesus, if he was only dead for 3 days/3 episodes, the grand sacrifice suddenly doesn’t seem quite as grand.

(And the attempt to give it back its weight by suggesting that he was in a hell world for “hundreds of years” is just transparently cheap, and never mentioned again.)

But that said, I prefer the feral version of him in this episode to the version we get later in the season. If he’s going to come back, at least make him a mindless ravening beast for a while. At least until “Revelations”! Let the whole gang see feral Angel being kept as Buffy’s pet, let them wrestle with whether to be scared that he’s out of control and dangerous or sympathetic that he’s so broken after what he’s been through.

(I’ve seen people say that it’s weird to have him turn up to “save” Buffy from Pete, though from where I’m sitting it doesn’t look like Buffy was losing. Pete was getting some hits in, but the bad guys always do, right before she beats them. If anything, Angel just saves her from the moral quandary of what to do with Pete, by killing him brutally during a convenient bout of frenzy.)

Instead they bring him back and very soon he’s talking and walking and being his old self again, and that feels like the worst way to do it.

(And! As @badwolfwho1 says, he did just kill a teenager. Plus… at least one other person? There’s blood on his mouth when Buffy first meets him… I guess everybody figured it would be rude to bring that up later… but seriously who's blood is that?)

(Actually, now I think about it, a version of “Revelations” with feral Angel would actually be really fun, because Willow and Xander get to see vividly the effects of their joint dubious interventions - Willow’s soul spell and Xander’s lie. And I sort of feel like the writers contrived both “Revelations” and “Dead Man’s Party” to maximise angst on Buffy in particular, when I think spreading it around a bit would be more interesting. To me at least.)

Ok so that’s one problem. The other is Pete and Debbie. Pete is so consistently horrible to her, and then Buffy is so brutally harsh, and then she’s murdered by her boyfriend. It’s unpleasant to watch and the fact that 1) our very protagonist was calling her “broken” shortly before her death, and 2) everyone has forgotten about her shortly after her death, between them mean that’s no particular sense of catharsis or tragedy about it.

And this feeds into the third problem, which is a bit broader. The episode has this threefold mirroring among beast-man monsters, but of course they’re not just beasts: they’re boyfriends. Violent, destructive, monstrous boyfriends whose girlfriends all, in different ways, go out of their way to defend and exculpate them. It throws in lots of meta-commentary drawing out those parallels as well, readings from “the call of the wild” and Faith insisting that “all men are beasts” and so on.

All of which really really sets it up to deliver a Message, Lesson, Moral, or something. About domestic violence and the girlfriends who defend their violent boyfriends. Which is a tricky and sensitive topic, and the episode… doesn’t actually have anything coherent to say beyond “domestic violence is bad”?

I sort of feel like it doesn’t have a coherent message in part because it’s stuffed in so many mirrors and woven together so many quite different creatures. It's too rich to be coherent, we might charitably say. Angel and Oz and Pete are very different, in multiple ways, and so there isn’t really anything sensible to say about, e.g. Willow’s relationship with Oz that would also apply to Debbie’s relationship with Pete. And then Buffy’s relationship with Angel is so many different things that it just complicates further.

And of course one way to read the episode is that the differences are the point. Despite the mirroring, Pete and Oz are opposites (hence the scene of Oz being concerned and gentle with Debbie), and Angel is ambiguous between the two at this point (hence Buffy doesn’t know if she’s being more like Willow or more like Debbie). Maybe this is the point of Giles’ “two types of monsters” speech: Oz and Pete and Angel all have a monstrous side but Oz sees his as something he needs to redeem and compensate for and control, while Pete actively embraces his and wants to use it to control Debbie. Angel pre-Surprise was seeking redemption, Angel post-Surprise was actively rejecting it, and Angel now is ambiguous.

But I think even if this is the intention, the episode bungles it, in two ways. One is just that I don’t think it manages to get any clear message to come across, with the frenetic action and multiple sudden reversals. But the deeper problem is that this is a terrible way to think about domestic violence. The “good boyfriend” is absolutely not the one who is apologetic and tortured about what happens when his “inner beast” comes out, who bewails the violence they’re capable of but asks plaintively for your help in controlling it. That’s just the bad boyfriend shifting tactics to get you to stay with him. It’s a good model for a werewolf! But men are not in fact werewolves, and it is in fact possible - indeed easy - to just never be a physical threat to your loved ones at all.

Like, I think it was ultimately just kind of a mistake to make the “uncontrollable beast within” episode and the “domestic violence” episode be the same one. It has the effect that you end up either saying “Pete is basically like Oz” or “here’s how Pete is different from Oz” and both of those buy into the bad framing.

(Or, if you wanted to have both of those themes here, I think it would actually have been better to go with “Debbie drank the serum and committed the murders”, but otherwise keep everything the same. Pete is still an abusive POS but he’s the only one who really is, as Buffy puts it, not under the influence of anything except himself.)

Anyway so that’s the problems, and I think they’re significant. But what about the good bits? Again I think there are three big ones.

Three Good Things

The first is that, despite everything I just said, I feel like there is actually a pretty fun and coherent theme here. This is the episode about keeping your loved one as a pet.

Like, I find the first scene fun and charming, with Willow keeping her boyfriend in a cage and giving instructions on how to look after him like a parody of a millennial “cat parent” (read him stories but leave out the parts about rabbits, he gets too excited!). As I said, I think Angel is more fun in this episode than in the episodes before or after. It’s a lot of naked people growling and getting chained up or caged. That’s a fun topic to explore.

(You might be tempted to draw inferences about my... proclivities from this. And yes, those inferences would be entirely correct! But this isn’t purely a kink thing, so much as… I like thinking about relationships and power and control, and situations where those things are pushed to extremes are fun and interesting to me. YMMV, of course.)

It’s just that unlike domestic violence, human pets are not a real thing. There are no real situations where the right and appropriate thing to do is to start treating a rational human being like a dangerous animal while also still loving them like a precious pet. It’s a pure fantasy theme, like mind control or Doppelgängers, and while you can try to suggest real-life parallels (as this episode does, in a way that I've said is a big mistake) you can also treat it as a sci-fi hypothetical to run with, or a fantasy to enjoy, or whatever else.

From the perspective of this theme, the question for Buffy is whether to keep her boyfriend as a pet or euthanise him. The episode isn’t super explicit about this but I think you can absolutely read the last ten to twenty minutes as her getting ready to make the hard decision to put him down: talking to Giles about how anyone coming out of that experience would be a “lost cause”, the tearful confession to Platt, the semi-self-directed monologue to Debbie about how people are dying and you have to stop protecting him. I mean, imagine the angst! She has to kill him again? And it’s better because now she knows he’s at peace but still… And she just wants to do it and get it done before anyone finds out because she can’t bear a second round of everyone else weighing in on what to do with him and blaming her for not already having done what they want her to do.

But then at the end he says her name and gets himself moved off the euthanasia list. I sort of like this reading although it feels like it would work a lot better if spread over a few episodes.

(I think you could also, maybe, read the lesson for Debbie as: if your pet has aggression issues, the responsibility is on you to take control of it. This boyfriend thinks he’s in charge and that puts you and him and everyone else in danger - you need to enlist Slayers and cages and tranquilizers and whatever else to keep him in check. Put a collar on that boy and teach him to heel. Which, uh, I personally find a fun message but I know isn’t really applicable to real-life abusive relationships…)

Um ok so that’s one thing I liked. A second thing, noted above, is that I just enjoy this type of plotline: multiple monsters, open questions about who’s behind a given killing, investigation of suspects, at the end the monsters fight one another. I don’t think this episode always has the most watertight plotting but I also don’t think it’s done egregiously badly.

@coraniaid points out that it’s sort of weird for a lethally dangerous werewolf to be locked up in a cage that apparently Hyde-Pete can break open, with only one person watching them, inside a public school. And does Oz really not have any family he can involve? What’s going on with baby Jordy? Why does Pete apparently have a secret lab that’s just a… place in the school? Why does Pete kill his first target in the woods? How does Angel find Buffy and Pete? What exactly does Buffy tell everyone about Pete’s death? (An extremely convenient death because with that werewolf bite, he was about to become some sort of Jekyll-Hyde-werewolf-combo thing…)

But I guess those don’t seem especially problematic to me, the way that (e.g.) I complained about the unrealistic choices in “Passion” undermining the episode. There, the whole theme was about whether people were making sensible rational decisions, or giving in to passion, so having so many people running around with the idiot ball was a problem. Here, it feels like what we’re shown is an acceptable approximation of a realistic version of what they’re trying to convey?

Like, with Oz’s lycanthropy, the basic idea is: Oz recognises it as a problem that requires him to submit to unusual restrictions and monitoring by his friends; they pitch in good-naturedly to do this, the system largely works when not interfered with (e.g. by a Hyde-strengthed opponent actively trying to break him out), but sometimes leads to scares due to unforeseen complications. This works as a contrast to Pete (and people like Veruca), it’s interesting, it’s presented with a certain cobbled-together casualness but that’s sort of par for the course in the “high school students save the world” show. Realistically it probably wouldn't be exactly like this but I actually think it would be pretty similar - there would be a tendency for people to get lax once it became habitual, a risk of unforeseen complications that create scares or allow people to mess it up, that's just life.

(And I actually don't think Angel finding Buffy is that hard to explain, he's probably imprinted both on her smell and on whatever mystical ring-link pulled him out of hell...)

The final thing I really liked is Mr. Platt - who’s so charming and pleasant that I’m not sure if he or Buffy should be considered the titular ‘beauty’. Their first conversation is fun with the layers of irony (“demons can be fought”), but more importantly he clearly does succeed in offering Buffy something she needs because she comes back and says specifically that she can’t tell Willow or Giles (was there ever a time when Xander would be on that list?) and needs his help. It’s pretty hearbreaking, as well as creepy, when she realises, from the cigarette, that he’s dead - a very effective scene and a meaningful advancement of the "Buffy is being ratcheted closer to clinical depression every few episodes" plot arc.

Miscellanea

Ok let me also just list random funny lines of interesting observations or just odd things:

This is not a very good werewolf costume, is it? I don’t know whether I choose to pretend Oz always looked like this, or headcanon that the exact degree and form of transformation can vary and shift, and so this version is him transformed a little bit less than in “Phases”, a little bit more human and a little bit less wolf.

Platt warns Buffy against becoming “love’s dog”, in four episode’s time Spike will proudly declare himself “love’s bitch.”

Another odd paralleling is that Oz storms off and tries to explain that he’s doing so when Willow stops him; in “Doppelgangland” Willow tries to storm off and has to explain that she’s doing so when Buffy stops her.

“Poker? Not your game.”

“Clearly it’s a depraved sadistic animal.” “Present.”

Then the callback to Willow’s doughnuts: “I may be a cold-blooded jelly doughnut but my timing’s impeccable”

Oz does get a lot of good lines this episode. We even get a bit more emoting from him!

I am a simple person, “time’s up; rules change” gets me.

Faith is around a lot, as a general source of music, careless punches, and “good down-low tickles”. I am not the first to point out that the very first thing we see her do is wander through the graveyard with Buffy, her fellow teen, and ask “say, do you think teens have sex in this graveyard?”

Giles getting shot in the leg accidentally by an ally for a second time is funny, and the delivery of “bloody priceless!” is excellent.

Ok but I guess just to dwell briefly on the interdimensional stuff:

“There’s no record of someone returning from a demon dimension once the gate was closed”

It’s sort of odd Buffy doesn’t mention having been in a demon dimension just a couple of weeks ago? I mean, sure, the gate closed, it’s not like she returned post-closing. But the gate didn’t seem like a big deal, it seems like people can make them pretty easily.

In my discussion of “Anne” I suggested that small temporary one-demon gates are probably not that hard to make, and the thing that called Angel back closed as soon as it spat him out, so… the only real challenge would seem to be getting the gate to be in the right spot for Angel to go through. And it seems pretty plausible that demon-summoning gate-opening spells might work off of emotionally-significant objects like the Claddagh ring, so what I’m building up to here is… maybe there is no missing grand explanation of why Angel came back or what grand power of good or evil is responsible?

Maybe someone in Acathla’s dimension just got tired of him being around and made a quick portal to toss him through, and he landed on top of the Claddagh ring because that was the most salient location in this dimension? Like lightning hitting the tallest point?