Covering
unlabeled two-parter “Bad Girls” and “Consequences,” in which this river
becomes an ocean and hearts are thrown back on the floor.
I
now fully remember the virtues of season 3—while it digs deeply into authority
and institutions and their relationship to us as individuals, the deepening of
non-Buffy characters benefits the season as well, making things much more
complex. While season 2’s equivalents “Surprise” and “Innocence” are probably
more resonant and deeper, these feel so rich and complicated. Everyone has so
much more going on, giving them different levels and types of investment in
what begins as the gang blundering into a century-old feud between the Mayor
and corpulent demon Balthazar’s vampire cultists and ends with a dead
(supposed) civilian. And while Buffy remains key (she’s the main character,
after all), everyone’s reacting to her foil, Faith. So they think, anyway. It’s
actually all about themselves.
Before the unfortunate manslaughter,
the events of “Bad Girls” are a pretty direct reaction to the crumbling of
authority this season, which becomes critical when newly appointed Watcher
Wesley arrives, and I have to say, it’s breathtaking how much they manage to
make him suck, such that any natural sympathy we may have for someone trying to
awkwardly assimilate with the cool kids is instantly forgotten. He’s just
everything—officious, hide-bound, condescending, clueless, inept, stuffy,
naïve, and a coward on top of all that. While he unwisely dubs himself Buffy
and Faith’s “Commander,” his general suckitude leads pretty directly to the
increased recklessness from Faith, who takes Buffy along for the ride of
escalating misbehavior, basically reveling in the fact that no one can actually
tell them what to do. The misbehavior itself doesn’t actually lead to the dead
guy, they’re both more symptoms of the aforementioned recklessness.
“Consequences” rather ruthlessly
undercuts expectations. Faith’s hiding of the body lasts long enough for Buffy
to take a nap. Her pinning the blame on Buffy doesn’t even last a scene. The
episode, like everyone she knows, is forcing Faith to confront what she did, to
face the…uh…ramifications.
But no one is quite sure exactly how
they should handle Faith’s act, and they have a multitude of reasons and
motivations, and even roles in the story. While Willow and Xander had important
key scenes in the season 2 episodes, they were more than a little shackled to
Buffy. Really, the supportive best friend (probably too supportive in
hindsight) was sort of all Willow could be. Xander is preordained to be the
jealous jerk. But both have been allowed to branch out considerably in season
3, and are a bit better equipped to stand on their own in sustaining their own stories.
Willow resents Faith (and, for a change, offers the hardline perspective) for
both her role in Buffy’s life, but also the discovery of her role in Xander’s
life. And Xander believes he has a connection with Faith, because, well, he
does. Buffy doesn’t think so, though, being all too familiar with how Faith
talks about men. But how much of that is just because Buffy is not particularly
comfortable with Faith’s free-wheeling ways? And meanwhile, Giles struggles to
navigate his marginalized position, and so on, and so forth.
Wes’ actions take most of the blame
for pushing Faith to the dark side, and with good cause—getting arrested by the
Watcher’s Council was probably her worst-case scenario. Everyone plays a part,
though, because all the well-meaning interventions aren’t actually about Faith,
they’re about the intervener. Buffy’s a fearful, guilt-ridden mess, in a near
panic every time she tries to talk to Faith about what happened, while
insisting she understands what Faith is going through, even though it’s obvious
from their demeanors (if nothing else) that isn’t so.
It’s tough to separate how much of
Xander’s appeal to Faith is genuine belief they have a connection and how much
is the appeal of being her White Knight (I tend to think 50/50). For his
presumption he gets, well, sexually assaulted is probably going a bit too far,
but there is a sexual component to the assault she gives him. Regardless, any
connection he had with her he may have had (she was asking Buffy about him in
the beginning of “Bad Girls,” after all, though like a lot of things with
Faith, it isn’t clear why) is useless when he absurdly volunteers as a
character witness in court.
Despite the insistence that he was
getting somewhere with her, I think Angel actually comes off as the most ridiculous
here. His creepy paean to how great murder is does little but raise concerns as
to just how effective that soul is, it doesn’t speak at all to how we’ve see
Faith process things. Fortunately he pulls out of this tailspin, and may have
actually been achieving something by appealing to their shared negative view of
human nature and how Angel at least overcame that view by witnessing the
genuine decency of the Scooby Gang (he says “the people here,” but he really
can’t be talking about the people of Sunnydale at large), but Wes and the
Council toughs intrude before Faith can do much more than look skeptical.
But what does Faith think? She remains opaque
throughout, which ends up assisting everyone in hanging their own narratives
off her. And we’re included in that opacity, which is pretty off-putting given
how bad everyone on this show is at keeping their feelings more than a layer
below the surface. Instead, we subsist on scraps. At first, she attempts to put
the death in perspective—one accident balanced against the many, many lives
they’ve saved, which is of a piece with her philosophy that Slayer’s both are
and ought to be above the law (a philosophy Buffy finds appealing but rejects
after the death, even though it isn’t too far off from the more tempered
response of Giles that in the war against evil, tragic accidents happen. As
usual, Giles come off the best), but she quickly shuts down once Buffy’s terror
is clear. How much remorse was she feeling when she returns to the body, and
how much were her failings on her mind when she picked up the picture of Mayoral
Assistant Alan Finch she found? Was there something wrong with her all along
that drove her to the Mayor’s office?
I think she just decided if everyone
was going to treat her like the bad guy she might as well act the part.
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