Covering
from “Get It Done” to “Lies My Parents Told Me,” in which how could they use a
poor maiden so?
“Get
It Done” ends with Buffy proudly and defiantly proclaiming that no level of
power is worth the loss of her humanity. Moving. Or it might be if she hadn’t
earlier in the episode longed for Spike to return to his murderous ways and for
Willow to go back to slinging magic all over (even though she sort of has
been?) while proclaiming a despairing Potential who kills herself “weak” and
“stupid.” She might as well have taken the power up the Shadow Men offered,
there’s not a lot of humanity left to the character at the moment.
“Get It Done” continues the season’s
tradition of being a mess of muddled nonsense, but decides it should be really
ugly as well. I recall this War with the First garbage being really tough to
take back in the halcyon days of 2003, but in the here and now with hindsight,
it’s almost impossible not to see this story of an end-conditionless war
against an enemy who is planning…something as a laughable and poor reaction to
9/11, in ways the show is unable or unwilling to interrogate seriously—Xander barks
“jawohl” when Buffy proclaims herself the Decider, but that’s about the extent
of it. We meet Chloe first (and last) in an utterly embarrassing scene where
all the Potentials stand in rows doing “martial arts forms” on command, which we
are supposed to, I guess, think is bad ass and impressive despite how silly it
looks. The similarities between this performance and the pointless Watchers
test Buffy endured should strike us as strange, given how antithetical that
test was to Buffy’s way of doing things, but then again this is the episode
where she declares that her friends don’t mean shit to her unless they’re
useful and do exactly what she says. Anyway. Chloe fails to turn the same
direction everyone else does, so Kennedy berates her and calls her “maggot,”
which Kennedy thinks is extraordinarily cool. Don’t we just love this charming
new character? Anyway again, Chloe later turns up dead, having been driven to
suicide by the First. How did she end up with so much alone time in a mid-sized
house currently holding somewhere between 25 to 30 occupants? Good question,
but it remains a mystery. The First brings up the maggot business, but that’s
it. Buffy dubs Chloe weak, and no one pushes back against this, noting how
badly she was failed by Buffy handing her stupid training regimen over to an
idiot eager to live out Full Metal Jacket.
Can you tell I hated this episode? I hated this episode.
Next up is “Storyteller,” an episode
whose jaunty editing and fluid reality reminds me of nothing less than Farscape classic “Scratch n’ Sniff.” One
small problem, though—it’s an episode about Andrew, and Andrew has never been
funny, amusing, or interesting, and is certainly lacking in the depth to carry
this story that hinges on him honestly dealing with his actions. None of his
internal cut-aways are particularly funny, or especially enlightening, and
while the idea that the Hellmouth seal needs to be plugged up with honest tears
is fairly clever and evocative, the story has Buffy acting like a brutal
sociopath again to get there. I hated this episode, too.
Also continuing a season 7
tradition, “Lies My Parents Told Me” draws unflattering comparisons to a series
high episode, this time “Fool for Love.” Wood reveals his mommy issues, and for
the sake of thematic connection, Spike gets some mommy issues as well, giving
us a flashback to just before and after his death as William back in the 1880s.
Do we see anything cool? No. We do not. The flimsy excuse for this trip is that
the First has used memories of William’s mother as a trigger in the process of
brainwashing him, and I’m getting a headache from how often I have to say this
or something similar, but that’s not how brainwashing, which is made up, is
supposed to work. Anyway, after becoming a vampire, Spike decided to sire his
mother so she’d be healthy again, but she turns out to be really cruel and incest-y,
so he staked her. There is nothing to glean from this, and it adds exactly
nothing of value to Spike’s character, and it actually kind of muddies the
simple elegance of his origin as he tells it in “Fool for Love,” so I prefer to
pretend this episode didn’t exist. Besides, Spike’s conclusion is that his
mother loved him and it was the demon in her that said all the mean stuff
because that’s what vampires are is demons, which ignores that William as a
vampire acted out of love for his mother, so it seems he’d rather ignore this,
too. Whatever, there’s a decent chance he’s lying just so he can dig at Robin about
how his mommy didn’t love him because she didn’t stop being the Slayer. We are
meant to give this credence, as it’s supposed to emphasize the tragic, all-encompassing
solitude that is the Slayer’s existence, but it’s more than a little clumsy.
That same all-encompassing solitude
is supposed to be feeding Buffy’s Decider behavior, which by episode’s end has
seen her freezing out Giles and warning Wood she’ll let him die if he seeks vengeance
again. She’s talked a lot of game about how strong and useful Spike is, and
that’s quite true, but Giles is no less useful. And this only serves to
highlight why I find this bit so hard to swallow—despite all the talk of how
Buffy, as the Slayer, has to make the hard choices and the hard decisions, she
never actually makes any, or sacrifices anything, but she sure as shit expects
others to. She makes the hard choice that Giles needs to trust that Spike is
fine, the hard choice that Wood needs to fight alongside his mother’s killer,
that Spike and Willow need to imperil their souls and their minds, but when she
is called upon to sacrifice something to win the day, she doesn’t do it. She chastises
the Shadow Men for their cowardice, forcing someone else to fight. Granted,
Buffy is always on the front lines, but at this point there’s far more
commonality than difference between her and them.
Also, Spike telling Wood he’s
killing him of his own free will, and going
vamp-face, and going at his neck
before commercial, and then revealing after a long, drawn out scene that, no,
Spike didn’t actually kill Wood? That’s some bullshit cheap trickery, show,
fuck you.
Every hundred years, a little bird
comes and sharpens his beak on the diamond mountain…
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