Covering “Passion,” in which…
Out
of respect, a line of silence and a gif:
I actually rather like this, and
think I should perhaps make it a tradition. Anyway, there will be a bit more
eulogizing later.
Death is much more than just an
important element of BtVS. Among some
fan circles, much of Whedon’s rep is built upon it. For many, that rep is as a
remorseless headsman, willing to ruthlessly cut down any character, at any
time, no matter how important. Get attached to no one, for they could meet
their end at any moment!
Eh. That’s way overblown, especially
when he gets mentioned in the company of George Martin, the Butcher of Westeros
(and sometimes Essos). I mean, that SHIELD guy was important? Come on. Even
Jenny, much as I thought she was cool, was only a guest character who never got
a story of her own. What he does do, at least for a while in BtVS, and to a lesser extent on Angel, is make death significant and
consequential. They are felt. Jenny’s sure is. This
is another thing I’ll be keeping an eye on, but I don’t think any other major
baddie will wound Buffy and the gang as deeply as Angelus does here, or come
more perilously close to destroying her—certainly, none will do it as richly.
There’s also a habit among fan
circles of playing silly transitive blame games, kicking fault up some chain of
events to shift who’s really responsible—you
know, like how because Batman doesn’t just kill the Joker, he is the one really responsible for Joker’s carnage.
It’s silliness I don’t buy, but I’m sure there are plenty out there that insist
Buffy is responsible for Jenny’s death on account that she couldn’t kill
Angelus. The situation is somewhat complicated though by, well, Angelus is a
vampire, and Buffy is the Slayer of vampires, and, as she acknowledges at the
end, she failed to slay him when she should have. Jenny’s murder isn’t Buffy’s
fault, but it is a consequence of her not doing her job, one that hurts the key
person in her life the most. It’s a sad irony that after cautioning
level-headedness in the face of Angelus’ escalation of creepy intimidation,
Giles is also the one prompted into reckless action, which for Buffy is the
worst case scenario. Actually harming or even killing anyone else would have
been painful, to be sure, but as she tells Giles, he is the one she can’t do
without.
Of course, Giles’ rage and Buffy’s
resolve invites a thorny question: did Jenny get fridged?
Shorthanded from comic writer Gail
Simone’s “women in refrigerators,” it’s generally agreed that fridging is when
a (usually female) character is murdered by an antagonist for the sake of tormenting
another (usually male) character, prompting their growth. The fridged character’s
death isn’t about them at all, it’s a prop off which another character can stoicly
hang rage, honor, failure, resolve—you know, man-feelings, the sort of thing
that is best processed in a monastery or a cabin or some other such hermitage. And
between Giles’ grief-fueled wrath and Buffy grimly declaring over graves she is
at last ready to face her enemies, there’s a lot of man-feelings going on (they’re
called man-feelings due to demographics, but women can have them, too), though
there is shock and weeping, too.
I pose this question because I’m
pretty sure, again when I was the lone wilderness voice, I may have felt she
had been. But that isn’t the case at all. Proper fridge victims have no role in
their own deaths, the villain targets them specifically to inflict pain on
someone else, and that isn’t the circumstance we see here—Angelus targets her
because she is dangerously close to restoring his soul, a project she has
undertaken in secret for her own motives (those motives, sure, are to make
things right with Giles and Buffy, but still, the motives are hers). What’s
kind of ingenious is that Angelus is able to hide all this by presenting her murder
as a fridging, an escalation of his campaign to torment Buffy by striking at
those around her.
Dramatically, Angelus had to do
something tangible eventually to emphasize that he really was no longer Angel
and that he really was evil. Any in the audience confused by the matter find
voice in the characters having trouble truly grasping the change—even Jenny
tries telling Angelus she has “good news,” in the vain hope there might be some
good left in him. And to emphasize that change, the group needed to be hurt.
Someone needed to die, someone more significant than Willow’s fish. Apparently,
the initial plan was for it to be Oz, which, had they gone with that set up,
almost certainly would have been a fridging. I picked up that factoid a few
places, and the claim was audience response to Oz changed that course, but the
idea is so strange I have a hard time believing it went that far (for one
thing, it’s not like Jenny wasn’t beloved—looking for gifs I went through about
a dozen Jenny-themed tumblrs). Obviously, however it would have happened, it
wouldn’t have been anything close to “Passion.” It’s hard to imagine a coldly
furious Willow bashing Angelus with a flaming bat.
It’s also hard to imagine this
hypothetical episode being as powerful, moving, sad, and mournful as “Passion,”
which really is amazing, even if it’s painful to lose a charming character and
her endearing relationship with Giles. Perhaps the saddest moments aren’t Buffy
clocking Giles and begging him to do something so reckless again, but Willow
haltingly filling in as the Computer teacher, all alone and very small, but,
like everyone, forced to continue on. Willow is the one simultaneously best a
soldiering on, but worst at hiding it, and she doesn’t notice the disc (3.5
inches, a real blast from the past), the one that hold the restoration spell,
fall from the desk. Jenny’s efforts may yet bear fruit
She won’t be able to enjoy them, though.
Miss Jenny Calendar, a name and a life she seemed to prefer to Janna of the
Kalderash, leaves the story here, and we can only hope wherever she ends up in BtVS’s complicated cosmography, Rupert
finds her there, and they take in the nitro-boosted funny cars once again.
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