'most girls aren't attracted to dead guys'

I want to take as my jumping-off point something that Xander says right before they make the worst decision of the episode, to turn the quiet dinner that Joyce invited them to into an enormous house party. To justify this, he says:

“She doesn't want to talk about it, we don't want to talk about it, so why don't we just shut up and dance?”

Is this true (where “it” is “Buffy leaving for LA and its causes and effects over the summer”)? I don’t think so. It’s clearly not true of Xander, since he keeps bringing it up! The third thing he says to her in the whole episode is “Mad? Just because you ran away and abandoned your post and your friends and your mom and made [Giles] lay awake every night worrying about you?” He misses few opportunities to bring it up.

I also don’t think it’s true that Willow or Buffy don’t want to talk about it, though with them it’s less obvious. They feel more resistance, but it’s resistance holding them back from satisfying a fairly clear emotional need - the lack of communicaton between them is clearly a source of distress to them both. So the question is, how did it come to seem to everyone like everyone didn’t want to talk about this “it” that everyone does actually want/need to talk about?

More broadly, the confrontation during the party has this strong vibe of everyone involved feeling like they’ve tried - they tried to meet the others halfway and were rebuffed, and so now whatever they’re saying/doing is a last resort. Yet the corollary of everyone feeling like they tried was that nobody feels like they rebuffed the other, despite the others feeling that way. So there’s some sort of failure of communication, or a failure to perceive what the other side needs.

From Willow and Xander’s side, my sense is that what they really want from Buffy can be best captured in the word “recognition.” Recognition of the impact her decision had, what they’ve been through, what they’ve achieved in responding to it. Note two things about this.

First, this could be spun in either a negative or a positive way. You may have seen a bit of memetic advice that floats around, to reframe excessive apologies as gratitude. Instead of the negative framing “sorry I’m late”, give it the positive framing “thank you for being patient”, etc.

And so while Xander and Willow in some respects sound very different this episode, they’re expressing two sides of the same drive. Xander focuses on the negative (e.g. the above quote), while Willow focuses on the positive - the first thing she says to Buffy in the whole episode is “we were getting good. We dusted nine out of ten!” (Then corrected to six out of ten.) So I think either gratitude or apology would probably satisfy this need for recognition.

Second, they want recognition of what’s different now, how things have changed. They’re not just assistants to the vampire slayer now, they’re vampire slayers! They’ve gone through stuff and changed, because they had to. So while I think Willow was sincere last episode when she said “Wouldn't it be great if Buffy just showed up tomorrow, like nothing happened?”, I think her uncharacteristic quietness in this episode is partly her realising that she doesn’t actually want that - that it actively hurts her feelings and her pride to act “like nothing happened.”

(Lurking in the background here is the fact that both Xander and Willow have, fairly clearly, long nurtured a certain level of subconscious envy of Buffy’s position as Slayer. This comes out much more obviously with Xander, in a heavily gendered and kind of gross form: he wishes he was the one beating up vampires in hand-to-hand combat, and the fact that it’s not him but a petite girl is a slight against his fragile masculinity. With Willow it comes out more slowly, and more subtly, and more ambivalently, and it’s less gendered and atagonistic - she doesn’t want to reduce Buffy to being a helpless damsel to be saved (like in Xander’s fantasy in S1E04), but she does slowly work her way into accepting and relishing leadership, into the power that comes from witchcraft, into not wanting to be, as she puts it in S4E04, Buffy’s “sidekick”, but maybe something closer to co-equal (or at least second in command, or chief science officer, or something). So while I think they both felt hurt and scared and disoriented by Buffy’s sudden disappearance, I reckon there’s a part of them both that actively welcomed it - a chance to show that they could do this job themselves, if they had to.)

Buffy consistently doesn’t give them that recognition. Her first words to them are a tease (“Didn't anyone ever warn you about playing with pointy sticks?”) and her first action is to sneak up on and disarm Xander, then slay a vampire that they were failing to Slay. Her remark that “You guys seem down with the slayage, all tricked out with your walkies and everything” reads to me as sort of ambivalently mocking, and note crucially that Willow’s reluctance to hang out with her the next day comes up right after the following exchange:

“you can leave the slaying to us while you settle in. We got you covered.” […] “Well, thank you for the offer, but I think I just wanna get back to my normal routine.”

I think this is one of the moments where Willow and/or Xander feel rebuffed, but Buffy doesn’t realise. They say “we’ve done this thing that was really hard and scary and actually objectively kind of heroic” and she says “no, I’ll do that thing, just like before, we can forget you ever did that.”

In fact, from Willow and Xander’s perspective, this is sort of completing a whole scene of repeated scenes refusals of recognition. She doesn’t take their positive slaying efforts seriously, she doesn’t apologise or self-flagellate when Xander gives his little list of negatives, and she deflects their requests to know and understand what happened. She’s given three ways to recognise the significance of what happened, and refuses all three. She wants to “get back to normal”, just as Joyce and Giles say, and I don’t think that’s what Willow and Xander want at all.

But! That’s not what Buffy thinks she’s doing (this is key miscommunication 1). Rather than seeing “back to normal” as a selfish refusal of recognition, I think she sees it as the selfless option: if Xander is mad at her for “abandoning her post”, she’s going to get right back to her post. She’s going to resume doing her duty, being a good Slayer and an approximately normal daughter, and hopefully at some point feeling happy while doing it (and even the happiness is in part a matter of duty).

From her perspective, I think, there are basically four options:

Dwelling on her agonising pain around losing and damning Angel, the deaths of Kendra, Jenny, Theresa, and everyone else Angel killed, her fight with her mom, knowing that Angel is maybe being tortured right now, etc.

Pushing all of that down in order to keep going through the motions of her overburdened impossible life, doing her job but feeling as little as possible

Opening up and thereby becoming vulnerable to blame and anger from her family and friends

Leaving.

From her perspective, what’s salient is that she can’t face A, so she’s trying to do B instead of D, because that’s the right thing to do and that’s what everyone wants her to do. Option C is definitely on her radar but she’s terrified of it (“What if he's mad?”). So on my reading, although she is willing to go there, to apologise or explain herself, she really wants to insist on doing it slowly, gently, in safe conditions, and hopefully after first getting some signal of warmth or sympathy from the people she’d be opening up to.

Which I think is fair, and a basically reasonable sort of “bargain”. If her friends create a safe space for her, she can share what she’s been through and recognise the effect it had on them - but her very first meeting with them isn’t that safe space, for multiple reasons. Partly just because it’s the first meeting, so as Giles says she “could use a little time to adjust.” Partly because Cordelia is there to ask things like “So were you, like, living in a box, or what?” Partly because Cordelia and Oz are both, you know, not actually her close friends. Partly because while Giles and Willow and Xander are her close friends, they’re very different and what she would say to one of them isn’t the same as what she would say to another.

Notably, while she’s aware of the prospect of blame and anger, I don’t think she’s even registering her friends’ desire for recognition, something that could be positive, and this leads to key miscommunication 2: she perceives their requests for recognition as attempts to impose blame. So they make her shut down rather than prompting her to offer the recognition that they want.

(I think the extra line from the shooting script that @coraniaid found here I think reinforces this idea: "Then you come back and you didn't even ask about me. You just worried about whether I was mad at you." Willow doesn't want to direct blame or anger, she wants recognition, and is hurt that Buffy isn't thinking in those terms at all.)

And sure, Xander does express himself in a pretty blame-y way, but I don’t think he’s committed to being angry and blamey: from his perspective, he’s hurt that she gets back and immediately finds “nighthawk” funny, so he’s trying to half-jokily point out that they do surely deserve some credit for dealing with the situation which, hey by the way, she created. Like, I do think Xander is generally a fairly vindictive person but he does like Buffy a lot and I have to believe that there was a way that they could have had a conversation about the summer where Buffy would have given the kind of token apology between friends which is immediately accepted and forgiven and waved away because all it’s needed for is to signal recognition that a bad thing happened. And certainly that sort of conversation could have happened with Willow. The episode’s plot is about why that conversation doesn’t end up happening.

And note also that the bargain Buffy sees herself as making (I’ll make myself vulnerable after I receive a signal of sympathy, which I’m willing to earn by performing my duties and Getting Back to Normal) is one that is effectively validated by Joyce and Giles. They both make a point of hugging her or saying something nice as soon as they see her, they both encourage her to Get Back to Normal, they both signal that she doesn’t have to explain herself immediately (in fact they both sort of give the impression she might never have to, that they might be able to just “put all of this behind us”).

(That’s not to say that they’re flawless here: people have pointed out that Giles’s sweet little moment of relief is, though wonderfully acted, kept out of Buffy’s sight, and both of them are basically encouraging Buffy to keep repressing her feelings and ignoring her accumulated trauma and incipient depression (they do this for opposite reasons - Joyce doesn’t understand Buffy’s situation and Giles does understand, perhaps all too well, but has the wrong idea of how to deal with it). But they both recognise that Buffy is in great pain, and try their best to modulate their actions and reactions in ways that avoid causing her any more pain. Which is, I think, a reasonable minimum expectation for adults dealing with a teenager.)

But Willow and Xander don’t see or accept the emotional bargain Buffy is implicitly trying to strike. I think they’re trying to strike a different bargain: extend grateful recognition of what we’ve done in your absence, “kicking undead booty”, and then we’ll extend you sympathy and forgiveness.

But Buffy misinterprets the demand for recognition as specifically an attempt to impose blame, so she tries to deflect or defer it: as I said, I think she would be willing to accept blame if they first signalled that they’d be sympathetic, but they don’t because they want her to signal recognition first, so they’re stuck in a bad equilibrium where neither is happy and both feel like the other is rebuffing them and refusing to engage.

And I think partly this is just down to Xander and Willow being teenagers who are not very mature and who can see that Buffy is, in some vague sense, unhappy, but can’t properly grasp how deeply and severely. Partly though it’s also that they have a very different relationship to vampire slaying than she does.

For Buffy, slaying is something that turned up unwanted to disrupt her life, a life that had previously been basically happy, and which even before the series begins has forced her to 1) accept a degree of responsibility for the deaths of people she cares about (like her first watcher), and 2) accept misplaced blame from people she can’t explain herself to (like for getting kicked out of school), and which she nevertheless feels obligated to keep doing.

For Xander and Willow, slaying has, I think, pretty clearly been a positive thing in their lives, which they consequently and actively choose. At the beginning of the show they’re socially marginal and have home lives that seem lacklustre (in Willow’s case) or actively hostile and neglectful (in Xander’s). Involvement in vampire slaying gives them a sense of purpose, a friend group which, while small, has the allure of secret knowledge and prestige, and eventually attracts the most popular girl in school to start hanging out with them. It gives them an attentive and supportive adult figure (to different degrees, but in both cases more so than their parents - he likes Willow a lot, which seems to put him ahead of her supportive but inattentive parents, and he genially tolerates Xander, which unfortunately seems to put him ahead of Xander’s parents). It gives them a beautiful girl who they both immediately fall madly in love with (yes I am not accepting comments on this claim). There’s a sense in which it’s sort of… all they have. (More clearly so for Xander, but even though Willow has academic excellence and probably a bright professional future ahead of her, that’s not a very potent source of meaning in the here and now). It’s cool and sexy and exciting and so, as Willow will say later this season, “it’s a good fight, and I want in.”

There’s a part of Buffy that sees it that way too, and it’s going to become important when Faith arrives, but right now it’s buried under the part of her that sees slaying as a curse that’s forced her to live a life of endless murder and recriminations. So she has trouble consciously registering that Xander and Willow are proud of themselves and really want her recognition, rather than simply wanting her to take over the burden again so they don’t have to. She says don’t worry, I’ll get back to normal and she thinks she’s being a martyr and they think she’s telling them that they can never be more than hangers-on.

A caveat: I said I think she can’t consciously register that slaying is cool; I think she does subconsciously register it, and seeing that the others have taken over makes her feel subconsciously hurt because she has, slowly but surely, started to identify with her Slayerness and see it as a positive source of meaning, but she doesn’t particularly identify or understand that feeling until it comes out at the party, when everything breaks down.

And there’s a way in which throwing the party has a sort of logic to it. I mean, sure it’s an obviously bad idea, enormously rude to Joyce and cruel to Buffy, and I think that Willow and Xander are in denial about these facts. But on the level of pure id, it sort of works… they’re dissatisfied with Buffy saying “let’s just get back to normal”, so they escalate that idea to an extreme in order to destabilise it: “you want to act like nothing happened, sure let’s act like nothing happened.”

A mature adult would be able to simultaneously accept that 1) Buffy is obviously not ok with just acting like nothing happened, and 2) she needs to be able to grapple with stuff on her own timeline, not when we want her to. They’d see that her stated wishes and her underlying needs are different, but that both need to be respected. The Scoobies are not mature adults. They justify the decision to throw this dead woman’s party in different ways - Cordelia I think is just not thinking about it much at all, Oz isn’t too invested but feels comfortable reorienting things towards music and parties because that’s what he’s good at, Willow talks herself into it by focusing on Buffy’s explicit statements about doing normal fun kid stuff, even though on some level she must know that it’s not really what Buffy wants. Xander is… well I think he’s just letting himself go along with his resentment because he does that sometimes, because he’s a trash human a flawed teenager under difficult circumstances. And one of those flaws is vindictiveness.

And you know, if I’m allowed to attribute hidden inner conflicts to people to make then more realistic and sympathetic, then not only is Buffy thinking constantly about Kendra but never saying her name, but also Willow is thinking constantly about her spell to restore Angel’s soul because she really wants to know whether it works (and if it did she sort of wants the credit and recognition for that and if it didn’t she’ll feel guilty that she let down her best friend), and Xander is thinking constantly about his lie to Buffy being the last thing he said to her before she left and trying to externalise his guilt by blaming her and Joyce is thinking constantly about how “don’t even think about coming back” being the last thing she said to Buffy before she left and she wants to externalise that onto Giles and would have done so if he had arrived at the party and that’s part of why she invited him, but he’s not there so she externalises it by blaming Buffy and the language of “punishment” reflects that she feels guilty and doesn’t know how to handle it. And none of this is at all evidenced in the script but I maintain these are reasonable headcanons.

Anyway. The show’s thesis statement is “You can't just bury stuff, it’ll come right back up to get you”, in the sense that this is the line which, by means of a heavy-handed cut to zombies, is made to tie together the two plotlines. And in a way, I’ve suggested, it’s sort of apt. Everything difficult about what happened in “Becoming” and over the Summer is being buried, but it’s not being buried unilaterally by Buffy. It’s being buried because Buffy’s buying into the “get back to normal, establish sympathy and safety, then maybe I’ll be vulnerable” bargain, encouraged by Giles and Joyce, but Xander and Willow (with Oz and Cordelia as accomplices) are trying to push a “recognise what we’ve been through and accomplished, then we’ll extend sympathy” bargain, and neither side recognises this mismatch of bargains.

And so the difficult issues are buried by a bad equilibrium but the Scoobies are determined to destabilise this equilibrium and so instead of communicating sensitively with Buffy they “heighten the contradictions” of get-back-to-normal, like the worst sort of vulgar Marxists, and yeah, it works: Buffy concludes that “getting back to normal” doesn’t offer any prospect of escaping her ambient unhappiness, and so resorts to preparing to leave (I think it’s completely up in the air whether she would have done so, or threatened to do so as a way to express her unhappiness), and then they find her and the feelings all come out in the most hurtful and destructive way possible, in the least safe and supportive environment possible, and symbolic zombies burst in to try and kill everyone.

But. Well. The problem with vulgar Marxist accelerationism is that just because you destabilise a system and provoke political upheaval, there’s no guarantee that what emerges from that upheaval will be any better than before. It could easily be worse. And if I try to interpret the ending of this episode with as much psychological realism as possible, I’d have to say that that’s what happens here.

Because I think Xander and Willow get what they need: Buffy apologises, loudly and repeatedly, and even more in the final scene with Willow. She listens to Willow talk about her summer activities and lets her tease her and claim “moral superiority”, and because they are close friends it’s clear that Willow doesn’t want to hold anything against Buffy, she wants to forgive and move on, she just wants the recognition first.

But does Buffy get what she needs? I think it’s important to note two things. 1) during the big confrontation she repeatedly says thinks like “you don’t know”, “you wouldn’t understand”, “I couldn’t talk to you”, which connect apologising to being understood. I don’t think she’s unwilling to recognise the downsides of her leaving or to apologise for them, but she sees that as inseparable from explaining what she went through, sharing her experiences, getting them to recognise her pain. And she sees the latter as extremely hard and painful and uncertain of success (hence she wants to do it only under optimal conditions).

And 2) none of that happens. Nobody knows more about Angel now than they did at the beginning of the episode, nobody understands Buffy’s perspective or experiences more either. In fact, she’s received several statements suggesting that they actively won’t - Xander referring dismissively to her “boy troubles”, Cordelia confirming that she sees Angel’s murders as “basically [Buffy’s] fault”, Joyce suggesting that Buffy ran away to “punish” her, Willow drawing a comparison with her objectively much milder problems. Surely Buffy’s going to come away from this even more convinced that they’ll never understand her.

The horrible irony is that right at the moment when her friends are feeling good that they, like her, can (semi-)competently slay vampires, and her mother is embarking on a new, slayer-accepting lifestyle, they are confirming to her that she’ll always be, on some level, alone.

But don’t worry! There’s a happy ending, because of the catharsis of battling and defeating evil, and now everyone is smiling and hugging. I mean, let’s not worry about the fact that Pat is dead and that should really be a fairly huge issue at least for Joyce. Let’s not worry about the social or legal ramifications of this huge zombie-disrupted party. Even setting aside those basically extraneous problems, this is a very shallow catharsis: they cycled through arousal and impact and adrenaline and relaxation, and now they feel good and buzzy and connected. But has the “it” that nobody wanted to talk about been talked about? Has the buried stuff been exhumed? I think the Scoobies think yes, and don’t realise that they’ve actually retraumatised Buffy, and taught her that she can’t expect sympathy or understanding from them.

And so as I read it, the final scene with Buffy and Willow is just Buffy burying things again. She’s still pushing for “get back to normal”, and the thing is now that Willow and Xander feel sufficiently recognised (indeed, Willow’s moral superiority is “like a drug”) they’re happy to go along with that. Buffy smiles and jokes with Willow because at least they’re talking and at least Willow is being friendly now, and if she has to repress some horrible memories, and accept that she can’t expect Willow to understand her feelings or sympathise with her actions, so what? She’s already spent years having to hide her feelings and actions from people she cares about, sucking up their blame and judgement, surely there’s no harm in doing the same for another year. Surely this won’t lead to crippling suicidal depression.

So yeah. I think all the characters have understandable motivations, but that definitely doesn’t mean they’re all equally sympathetic or in the right. Buffy’s perspective reflects a succession of life-altering traumas which she struggles to even talk about; Willow and Xander’s perspective reflects, more than anything else, their failure to recognise this fact and appropriately weight it. And the outcome, which gives them what they want while moving Buffy further away from what she wants, is a product of them choosing to throw a party, a choice which is petulant at best and which they never seem to see as even slightly problematic. They do not come out of this episode seeming like good friends.

(Giles and Joyce I think come out looking mostly good but with some blind spots and lapses - really what we need to look at is whether they recognise the inadequacy of the seeming “resolution” at the end and how they relate to the ongoing “get back to normal” project. Which will have to be something we examine next week…)

So, yeah: that’s the story of what I headcanon was going on in this episode. Is it a good story? I’ve done my best to make it psychologically plausible and to populate it with intelligible and interesting characters. But is it a fun story? A rewarding story? A story I want to watch?

The funny thing is, I think it is a compelling story if seen in the larger context of the show. It’s a tragedy and a cautionary tale about repression and misunderstanding and people who care about each but aren’t mature enough to give each other what they need. It makes sense of why Buffy is so drawn to Faith but so ill-equipped to give her what she, in turn, will need. It's a rather uniquely high-school-vampire-slayers story, in how it ties together danger and trauma and choice and obligation (it wouldn't survive a simple switch to either professional Van Helsings or regular low-stakes high school stuff.) It helps set up “Faith, Hope, and Trick”, and “Revelations”, and season 6, and more.

(And it will be cathartic once I write the fix-it-fic scenes in the post-S3 summer where Buffy confronts Xander about his lie and Willow has been through enough personal growth to re-evaluate things and Faith and Buffy are close enough to bond over their shared experience of running away from a town they can’t bear to stay in. The catharsis will flow.)

But is it a good episode? No! None of this story appears on screen, though I think there’s strong but subtle evidence for some of how I’ve characterised people’s motivations. And the show never comes back to any of this to make clear that the reconciliation at the end was false and one-sided. Instead the ending is written exactly the way you’d expect if Buffy actually was in the wrong, unilaterally responsible for “burying” stuff and finally rightfully forced to face reality at the end.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

In the scene with her mom and the mask, I love the visual language of Buffy coming to this almost-closed door and not being willing to open it, just sort of slipping through quietly. Like she doesn’t feel entitled to touch or change anything yet. Later on in her dream of the school she slips through a door and it bangs shut behind her, because now she’s trapped and can’t escape again.

It does seem weird for Joyce to just bring art home but I think the idea is that they don’t have much storage space (in S4E01 she states crates of inventory in Buffy’s room) and if you’re storing something in your house why not hang it on the wall?

“Brighten up the room” “It’s angry at the room. It wants the room to suffer.” Funny, but also this reads as a superficial reaction in the moment but in retrospect is probably Slayer intuition?

I do not like that the only lore we get about Ovu Mobani is “it’s Nigerian”.

“Will you be Slaying?” “Only if they give me lip” is funny, but also Buffy your quips are working too well. You are quipping about everything (your first words to Xander are a quip about putting an eye out, your second words to Giles are a quip about finding your mom’s address) to pretend things are normal and you’re fine and you need to understand that your friends are a little bit emotionally stupid and may end up taking you at your word.

I sort of love “Nighthawk”. Let people have codenames! I actually wish we found out if the others have codenames. I figure they’re all equally silly. I’m half-inclined towards Willow calling herself “Scarlet Witch”, though I don’t actually think she’s into comic books. Oz might be “Dingo?” (I can imagine Xander suggesting “Nightwolf” and Willow telling him off because the wolf thing is a sensitive topic and not for making jokes about). I don’t know with Cordelia? I sort of like the idea of her just being called “Charisma”, because Cordelia would obviously identify with that trait despite not knowing that it’s her actress’s name.

“Mad? Just because you ran away and abandoned your post and your friends and your mom and made him lay awake every night worrying about you?” Xander is immediately being horrible but guys, you have trained him this way. You let him get away with playing everything off as a joke that he thinks he can just say any mean thing that comes into his head and it’s fine as long as it can be played off as a joke.

Six out of ten is better than half!

People before me have said how good Giles’s kitchen face-journey is, and it is.

Last episode Xander was trying to get Cordelia to be bait, but now it sort of seems like he’s been sent ahead of the others… maybe as bait?

Do crosses only work when vividly presented, or when the vampire presses themselves against them? I get the sense that they don’t repel just while being worn.

I don’t know what Cordelia’s talking about, everyone looks great in their leather jackets.

“Hey so you’re not wanted for murder any more.” Well thank god that whole incredibly emotional and also very interestingly complicated cluster of issues can be resolved with one line. >:^(

It’s very striking how much awkward silence there is from Willow in the early scenes, it’s easy to miss at first but I think it does add to this sense that she’s quietly struggling with some inner something. We just never really find out what it is. And unfortunately it means Xander dominates the conversation.

At the same time, her reasons for missing her meeting with Buffy are really obscure and never explained? I think the only explanation we get is “This isn't easy!”, which is not really an explanation.

Oz’s thing, in previous episodes, has sometimes been his perceptiveness (e.g. about Willow’s motivations for wanting to kiss him in “Innocence”) so his fun listicle about shindigs and hootenannies is like wildly and surprisingly tone-deaf. Between this and the secretly not graduating thing it’s been a bad couple of episodes for Oz being either sympathetic or intelligible.

Xander saying “what'll we talk about at a gathering anyway? ’So, Buffy, did you meet any nice pimps on your travels?” is such an odious thing to do say, and I can’t even tell if the vibe is more “haha maybe my best friend had to do survival sex work, serves her right” or “ha, my best friend was whoring it up doing survival sex work and I resent her for this”, or which would be worse. It genuinely makes it hard not to hate this character. *breathing exercise* He is a teenager who people keep dying around, he deserves patience and grace.

Joyce calling Buffy a superhero is actually sort of sweet. Her then saying “Is that the right term? I mean, it's not offensive, is it?” is 1) very funny, 2) really leaning onto the queer metaphor, and 3) reflective of a conservation we never really see but I wish we did, where they hash out what exactly slaying is - a job, a hobby, a curse, an affliction. And in fairness Buffy isn’t eager to have that conversation or really any conversation but I think that’s understandable. And I think Joyce is understanding!

Overall I think Joyce comes off well this episode. You can’t entirely blame her for what she says when she’s had schnapps, and her priority list seems to be “help Buffy get back to normal logistically (at school etc.); avoid causing her pain; try to understand her life better.” Which is I think a good priority list?

It is in some ways frustrating that her blaming Giles doesn’t come up again, but I think it’s a combination of 1) she probably has seen him make dozens of short-notice flights all over the country trying to find Buffy, and that counts for something, and 2) she’s prioritising a restoration of smooth normality over settling her scores, so she wants to welcome Giles because she wants Buffy to be happy (and not run away again). I sort of suspect that if Buffy had taken off again, she might have hit Giles extremely in the face.

These are completely out of order now but of course Snyder is doing his schtick well, “I have not only the right but the almost physical sensation of pleasure…”

“Stray cat who lost its way, we hope you find it.” Veiled metaphor for Buffy but also Joyce is so sweet for wanting to bury and send off the cat. Major milf moment, for me at least.

“That nasty little bigoted horrible rodent man” So the count of people who have called Snyder a rodent is now Joyce Summers and Sheila Martini.

“Do you like my mask? Isn’t it pretty? It raises the dead! Americans.” Is objectively hilarious because making fun of Americans is always funny, but which nationality exactly are we supposed to think would be more prudent in its handling of occult Nigerian artefacts? Surely not the British?

(To be clear, making fun of the British or the French is also always funny. Those are the main three nationalities who deserve no sympathy ever.)

“Just like riding a bloody bicycle” while hotwiring a car is also hilarious.

If the Watchers’ council can pay for Giles to fly all over the country, why can’t they pay for him and Buffy to have cell phones? Or even walkie-talkies!

(I’ve sort of said this before but my headcanon is that the Watcher’s council is an organisation that has a lot to work with, in terms of resources and connections and levers, but isn’t remotely well-organised because all its members are paranoid and/or insane to different degrees and in different et ways and their different definitions of secrecy make efficient communication impossible.)

If there's a time dilation of approximately 100 years/ 1 day between factory world/ our world, why has barely any time passed between when Lily enters and Buffy enters? I'd always chalked this up to Lily being concussed or disoriented when she lands, so she's not really mobile for a while. But honestly, I like @badwolfwho1's idea that the time dilation is momentarily paused while people are passing through the portals way, way more. Kudos on a great headcanon!!!

The sheer volume of homeless kids needed to fund this operation is staggering, how do they maintain this gig without anyone catching on? This one I mostly agree with and requires some mental gymnastics to work with. Logistically it doesn't make sense. The closest working explanation I can imagine is that there are multiple portals beyond the one we see leading into factory world and they're pulling in people from other places in addition to LA. Maybe even from other dimensions besides Earth.

What are they making in the factory and why do they need human slaves to build it? I think Ken tells us! "What is Hell but the total absence of hope? The substance, the tactile proof of despair." They're not really building anything, they're growing it. Farming and cultivating something they need via the cruelest methods they can devise - it's despair. They're harvesting the despair from their victims. In a universe where ghosts can feed off of sexual repression, or demons can read your future from a song, this makes perfect sense to me. @btvsfemslashenjoyer seems to have had a similar thought in parallel and I loved reading their ideas about it being tied to an Old One!

Why do they release the people after they've been worked nearly to death? See the previous note. If the cruelty is the point and whatever generates the most despair is the best option, it's much more advantageous for them to spit the humans back out when they can no longer work for two reasons. 1) If they're able to still suck more despair out of them post-release, what better way to do it than to free them when they've reached a point where they're too haunted by their experiences to enjoy life? I'm thinking of the astonishingly high rates of suicide among people released from prison in conjunction with finding out that Ricky does kill himself. It's pretty awful. I'd imagine a demon that thrives on despair would love it. 2) The other possibility, which could work in addition to this, is that Ken & co don't want people dying in their world because the other prisoners might come to see death as a form of release, give them something to hope for, and they can't have that. You only get to die after we've physically exhausted you, stripped you of your identity, and driven you mad - and by then death won't even matter to you.

Why does the portal conveniently close behind them? We have a near-canon explanation for this! "Blood starts it, and until the blood stops flowing, it'll never stop" (The Gift). Ken is the one pulling people into Hell. Ken is the leader of the demons we see there. The portal only closes after Ken is dead. To me, this positions Ken as the "key" of this world. His life force sustains the connection between worlds. Yes, yes, the timing doesn't quite work - if we were meant to make this connection, the portal should've closed immediately when Buffy bashed his head in. But, oh, I don't know, maybe Buffy's blow only partially caved his skull and he then bled out in the next couple minutes, or maybe his demon physiology meant that it wouldn't be immediately fatal! It doesn't sync up perfectly, but I think it mostly works pretty well.