#theme:choice

(This is the fourth of four essays on ‘Becoming’. They are standalone and you do not have to read them to understand this one, but if you want to, you can find them all here.)

This is the episode where we meet Buffy Summers.

We have seen Buffy, the Slayer, fighting evil for two seasons now. We were introduced to her in Welcome to the Hellmouth, as she introduced us to the show. In Killed by Death, we saw her experiencing some vital firsts: her first brush with the supernatural, her first acts of heroism, and her first experience with death. We got a full non-canonical-but-informative prequel story in 1992. But this episode, right here, is where we finally get it. Buffy Summers’ origin story. This is the start of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

(This is the second of four essays on 'Becoming'. They are standalone and you do not have to read them to understand this one, but if you want you can find them all here)

It’s a shame that Darla's dead. She is notable for her absence in this season, which introduces and then focuses so heavily on the surviving members of her vampire family: Angel, Drusilla, and Spike. One of the great tragedies of the Buffyverse is that we never get to enjoy a modern-day reunion for the Fanged Four, all together in one dysfunctional room.

But we must appreciate what we have, and there’s an awful lot to appreciate here. Here, we learn so much about these three remaining vampires. This is a revelatory episode on first watch, and even moreso on a rewatch, with the context of ten more Buffyverse seasons. We see the events that have brought Drusilla to this point, the events that will trigger Spike’s development, and for Angel we see both. We see how the three of them are linked – to each other, but also all to Buffy, their fates irrevocably tied to her and her influence. We see what has brought them to this point, what sends them in new directions. All the possible people that they could become.

I’ll show you what I mean.

Part 19 of the Insect Reflection, a series of essays covering every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

If season one was about placing the basic foundations of the show, then season two is about expanding its scope, and its complexity. It holds a prism up to the light that season one shines on the characters, splitting it into a thousand rays, a thousand ways to look at the show. This is a show that grows like a wild garden, always becoming more complex and intricate, shoots and vines emerging in unexpected places. This isn’t always necessarily good, but it is always interesting.

Though nearly every episode contributes towards this exponential complexity in some way, there are certain ones that I would call tentpoles. Episodes which expand the scope in some way, that take some significant stride towards transforming this show from a fun teen-drama romp with likeable characters, to a serious and complex piece of art, which is also still a fun teen-drama romp. After Prophecy Girl and School Hard, this is the third of those tentpole episodes. This is a quietly stunning installment, which gives ink to a theme that has been sketched into the background so far, and will go on to be perhaps the defining theme of the series: the theme of choice.

There comes a point in the life cycle of every piece of popular culture, when a major twist stops being a spoiler, and becomes instead common knowledge, presumably known by anyone who has not dwelt beneath rock for their entire life. Darth Vader is Luke’s father. Rosebud was his sled. It was Earth the whole time. Snape kills Dumbledore. I’m not tagging these as spoilers, because you already know them, even if you haven’t seen these films. And the fact that you do know these twists changes the fundamental experience of viewing them. You can never have the same experience that those original audiences did. The emotions that they originally intended to invoke are lost to time. The pop-cultural osmosis that these texts have undergone has twisted the texts themselves into something new.

It is in this context that we must view this seventh episode, Angel. Because this episode is built around a major twist: the shocking revelation that the mysterious Angel, the man who has been following Buffy around dropping cryptic warnings, is in fact… SPOILERS BENEATH THE CUT

The Zeppo is one of those episodes that so consistently shows up on fan lists of “underrated” episodes, that I don’t know if it can really be considered “underrated” anymore, but I think it deserves a little extra appreciation. It’s definitely an episode that takes a second viewing to appreciate, thanks to how oddly it is constructed, in a way that isn’t immediately advertised to the viewer. Other episodes with unusual styles such as Once More With Feeling or Hush very much wear their concepts on their sleeve; you can’t watch them and not immediately realise what they are doing. That’s not a knock against those episodes - part of what makes them so great and iconic is that they get right to the point and so can do interesting things with the concept. The Zeppo is just a quieter kind of unique. It uses the limited perspective of both the characters and the audience themselves to show a cracked-mirror version of the world. It’s an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer told from the perspective of somebody looking in on another episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s fun and weird and I want to dig into it a little bit.

I haven't really seen anyone else talk about this parallel, so I'm gonna try. Here we have the two sidekicks of the show both declare what their narrative role is not. Willow claims she is not a "bad guy", but by the end of the season she will emerge as the indisputable Big Bad and try to destroy the world. Xander states, in typical self-critical fashion, that he is not the Hero, but he will be the one who stands against the villain Willow and single-handedly save the world.

That's some pretty cool foreshadowing that I hadn't appreciated before. But I also wonder if it's an intentional attempt from the writers to comment on choice and identity. I wouldn't be surprised if it it was, because these writers fucking love to talk about choice and identity. One of the central ideas of the show is that you always do have a choice in how you react the world around you. You might not have a good choice, but you have a choice. And one of the key ways that you can we interact with the world is by defining our own identity. Others might try to impose roles onto us, but we can reject that and declare our own identity. Every queer and trans fan will be intimately familiar with this concept, and the show uses its own queer metaphor) (being a slayer) to comment on self-identification In Anne, Buffy rejects an attempt to eradicate her identity by declaring her slayer-ness (”Who are you?” / “I’m Buffy. The vampire slayer. And you are?”). In Restless, she does the opposite, rejecting the First Slayer’s attempt to reduce her to solely to a slayer and asserting her human side. (”I walk. I talk. I shop. I sneeze.”)

*(It’s not just a queer thing though - being a slayer is also used as a metaphor for growing up, and part of growing up is deciding who you are and declaring that. Most of these thoughts aren’t really relevant to the queer experience, it was just something I wanted to note)

What is interesting is that in these moments, Buffy declaring her chosen identity is a powerful moment of triumph and catharsis. She says who she is, punches the enemy in the face, and victory music plays. But I think what the show is trying to say now is that that is not enough. As Michael Scott showed us all, just because you declare something, that doesn't make anything happen. Willow justifies her actions in bringing Buffy back on the basis of self-image - she sees herself as Not A Bad Guy, ergo what she did was Not A Bad Thing (implying of course that if a Bad Guy did the same then it would be a Bad Thing). But Willow's actions continue to get more and more morally dubious, revealing the truth - Willow's claim that she is Good is meaningless against the material consequences of her actions. Her perception of herself allows her to take actions that prove that perception false.

One lens you could use to view this, which is far more appropriate than a queer reading at this point, is through the idea of privilege, and how people will deny their own privilege by claiming their identity as a Good Person. So many white people deny the existence of white privilege by saying "well, I'm not A Racist". They think that they can brush away any benefit they receive from white supremacy, any complicity in unconsciously upholding racist ideas and racist institutions, by simply not identifying as A Racist.

This season is filled with others declaring their own narrative role, but failing to actually live up to it. The Trio call themselves Buffy's nemeses(eses), but that insistence doesn't make them anything other than sad little boys playing dress-up. It is especially notable in Dead Things, where Jonathan and Andrew are shocked when told that their mind-control of Katrina constitutes rape, because they don’t perceive themselves as rapists. Spike sees himself as a romantic lead, "deserving" of Buffy's love, but his actions in Seeing Red prove that untrue. He doesn’t understand why Buffy can’t just love him, when he’s obviously a suave Byronic hero. Buffy has to spell it out (”Ask me again why I could never love you”). Anya's arc has shades of this theme, though it won't be fully explored until Selfless next season.

Xander I think is the more positive flip-side of this. Because he doesn’t think of himself as a hero, he has the humility to simply turn up and be there for Willow “just to hang”. He doesn’t try and save the day all guns blazing - if he had, Willow would’ve blasted him to pieces. He’s not the archetypical Hero, he’s the sidekick - the Zeppo. His self-identification as just a guy who turns up and helps out is what allows him to be the exact hero that this story needs - a guy who turns up, just to be there if Willow needs him.