Covering
“Graduation Day, Part 1” and “Graduation Day, Part 2,” in which the
synchronicity of events borders on predestination.
On
the subtle metaphor spectrum, the gang blowing up the school on graduation day
falls pretty heavily on the unsubtle end.
It’s also pretty delightful.
The final act of “Graduation Day”
may not have the operatic, tormented grandeur of “Becoming,” but it makes up
for that by being really fucking cool. I mean, it’s a battle! A full-blown
battle! With flame throwers and bowmen and multiple fronts! Things don’t end so
hot for Larry, or Harmony, or Snyder, but Jonathan makes a flying tackle and
Cordy stakes like a pro. Even well after all the poor LOTR imitators (stay tuned!) gave me some pretty hardcore battle
fatigue, this is still exciting as hell. One big factor is that the show didn’t
give the pre-battle speech to the hero, but the villain—the most thinly-veiled
threat-leaden commencement speech in history, complete with evil stare-down. “Some
people who should be here today aren’t. But we are.” Awesome.
That speech begs the question of
where the Mayor stands in the Buffy villain pantheon. In my memory, he was the
best. Or my favorite? More than likely, I didn’t make such a distinction. It’s
not like the Buffy rogues gallery overflows with greatness—when we’re talking “greatest”
of the season long antagonists, we’re really only talking the Whirlwind (that
is Angelus and Dru and Spike), and the Mayor. Anyway. Where does he stand now?
Well, he’s the most cleverly conceived, but the personal connection of Angelus
makes him the king.
I’ve seen the Mayor described as the
banality of evil, but this is a huge mischaracterization. The Mayor’s evil is not
banal, but he is banal in it—his belief in the power of milk and miniature golf
funny but creepy flourishes that give him a pretty memorable personality. He’s
a suitable mastermind figure, but also a rather odd one, as his villainous
scheme is basically in its endgame when we first meet him, and while the
Ascension is arcane enough to be mysterious and shocking, there isn’t actually
all that much to it—there aren’t really schemes to be peeled back like the
layers of an onion, and it falls to Anya to convey the horror of such an event
(mostly through the fact that she’s eager to flee it). But there is so much
else going on in the season, with the Council, with the love quadrangle, with
the returned Angel, with Faith (both before and with the Mayor), and it’s all
so good and interesting, the Ascension doesn’t feel thin at all.
There’s also, of course, his relationship with
Faith giving him depth. While it has a twisted similarity to Buffy’s relationship
with Giles, it’s a mistake to think of it as paternal love, even though he
certainly is grieving when Faith is in a coma, and Buffy exploits that
relationship to lure him to his downfall. No, while Wilkins probably thinks he
has a father’s love for Faith, he doesn’t—he’s too manipulative and emotionally
abusive. While he gives her the praise she loves and the stability she has long
desired, he’s constantly reminding her not only is it in his power to take that
all away, he’s always on the precipice of doing so. And, of course, he’s always
eager to compare her to Buffy.
It’s been asserted that Faith is
Buffy’s dark side (Buffy even once said she could have been Faith), but this is
another mischaracterization. Faith is Buffy’s foil, no doubt, but it gets just
a bit too counterfactual to get there. If
Buffy didn’t have Joyce, and if she
didn’t have Giles, and if she didn’t
have Willow and Xander and Oz, and if she
didn’t have Angel, and if she felt
there was no one she could really trust, and eventually you just have to say,
yeah, if this character were totally different then she might perhaps be this
different character. But Buffy is totally Faith’s light side.
All of those things you’d have to
take from Buffy to hypothetically make her Faith are things Faith wants, and
trying to get them for herself keeps leading her to fall under the thrall of
the Gwen Posts and Richard Wilkinses of the world. Her bitterness over Buffy’s privilege
comes up a lot in their confrontations. And the yearning for what Buffy has
hardens her against Buffy such that she seems almost eager to take what she has
away, particularly when that thing is Angel.
The Mayor’s final gambit to keep the
Scoobs occupied until he Ascends is to imperil Angel’s unlife, and it proves
way too effective, basically showing exactly why Buffy and Angel need to break
up. Buffy essentially goes crazy for a while, bringing any research or planning
to a screeching halt while she frets, resolving to kill Faith when she learns
the cure to his poison is Slayer blood, and then finally beating on Angel until
he drinks hers. For his part, well, Angel doesn’t drink until she’s dead.
Barely.
In the end, though, Buffy lets Angel
walk off into the smoke. She has to grow up sometime, and it may as well be on
graduation day. All our young leads show some level of their just-taking-root
maturity over the course of the episodes, but none more so than the Class of ’99,
who finally decide to stop letting the little blond girl save them all the time
and choose to do something for themselves.
Apex
Episode: This whole season is ridiculously strong, but I’m forcing myself
to pick, so…it’s either “The Zeppo” or “Doppelgangland.” The former is better
directed, the latter has Anya trying to get a beer…fuckit, I’m not picking, it’s
one of those.
Nadir
Episode: We’ll go with “Amends.”
Season
4 Costuming Theory Check-In: I’ve highlighted a few
excesses, but they are mere signs of things to come.
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