Covering
from “Forever” to “Tough Love,” in which things go back to abnormal.
Joyce
was a significant enough character that I can’t really blame the show for
devoting two episodes to mourning her passing, especially since “The Body”
forced everyone to do so like they inhabited our mundane universe. In
“Forever,” the supernatural returns, our vampires pop in to share their
thoughts (Angel returns to town simply to console Buffy, while Spike gets
busted trying to anonymously leave flowers for Joyce, for whom he seemed to
have some genuine affection—she did try to find him mini-marshmallows, after
all), and options only available to denizens of such a fantastical universe get
considered. After the unconventional artiness of “The Body,” “Forever” is how
we’re used to Buffy characters
mourning—fighting demonic monsters and attempting to raise the dead.
The majority of the mourning falls
upon the (most) immature shoulders of Dawn, enabled in her reckless,
ill-advised plan to violate the natural order of the universe a little bit by
Willow and a lot by Spike. And as far as such things go, it’s a pretty good
examination of our youngest character’s grief, and Buffy’s as well, and how
neither of them think they can continue without Joyce. Problem being, and this
is pretty consistently the problem with Dawn, we just don’t care about her like
any of the others. We can’t—the fundamental fact remains that we don’t have any
accrued history with Dawn, and the one chord she usually gets to play (whining,
crying, petulance, and screeching) have been real impediments in getting us to
care. Buffy not questioning anything about Dawn’s existence says, I still
think, says something laudable about her, but the choice to have everyone else
follow suit really leaves Dawn just sort of pointless. They’re pretending they
can just give her the sort of story they’d give any other character, and they
can’t. We’re always aware that Dawn’s memories are fabrications within the
already fabricated fictional word, we know the mother Dawn is mourning was not
her mother at all, and while there could have been some potent resonance in
considering if Dawn’s feelings are “real,” the show hasn’t done the work to let
us do so, it just sort of ignores the question beyond a line or two of
dialogue. I want to like “Forever,” but ultimately can’t.
Ok, I’ve put it off for long enough.
Time to rip the scab off. Glory.
I’ve been praising Spike’s knack for
sharing a nugget of incisive truth, and true to form he’s the one who hones in
on Glory’s biggest problem. Rising to his mid-torture mockery, Glory asserts
that she is a god, and still shining her on, Spike responds “God of what, bad
home perms?”
And that’s the biggest problem—there’s
nothing particularly godly about Glory in her mien, demeanor, bearing,
appearance, affect, or anything, really. The finery she drapes herself in seems
insufficiently fine for a deity, her diction and thinking insufficiently lofty
and alien, and, well, while her minions go on about her unearthly beauty, her
beauty is merely earthly and, if I can be a pig about it, is outshone by most
other actresses in the cast. She has worshippers, but they are neither
impressive nor especially competent. There is no pantheon around her, and while
you’d think she’d draw the attention of enemies out there in the multiverse,
only the very silly Knights of Byzantium actually care. All her godliness ends
up meaning is that she needs to be punched harder. Instead of anything
interesting, they just came up with more arcane rules about her that needed to
be explained, and here it’s the Buffy-bot’s time to shine, summing up everything
important about Glory—“She’s a god. She wants the Key.” Apparently Whedon
himself has declared Adam the most boring baddie, but you know what? Adam
telling Spike that parts of him were a Boy Scout was way better than any of the
scenes with the minions fawning over Glory while she screeches about the Key
and otherwise does nothing.
At last, in “Intervention” and
“Tough Love,” she does something. She sends her idiot worshipper minions out to
spy on everyone in broad daylight, and then at night they mistakenly conclude
Spike is the Key, since the Buffy-bot is so intent on him (Buffy herself is off
in the desert, learning Death is Her Gift). This is dumb, but at least gives us
the chance to enjoy Spike telling Glory exactly what we’re all thinking, and
seems to display his valor to something of Buffy’s satisfaction (which she
gleans from a fairly baffling plan wherein she pretends to be the Buffy-bot,
which…”I guess?” is the best you can say about it). Infuriated by this failure,
Glory takes a more active role in the hunt for the Key.
Her godly intellect leads her to
Tara. Because she’s “the newest.”
See what I’m talking about? Christ.
At least the minions were misled by evidence when they came to such a stupid
conclusion.
“Tough Love” represents a Rubicon
for both the season and the show. For the season, this comes when Tara,
brain-sucked and sent home by a doctor who still fails to think anything is odd
about this affliction, identifies Dawn as the Key to Glory, because Glory rips
the wall off their dorm room while Dawn and Buffy are visiting, and the light
causes Tara to go on about how Dawn is energy and can you tell this is really
fucking contrived? Because even by the generous standards I allow this show, it’s
really fucking contrived.
What happens to Tara leads Willow to
strike back, especially when Buffy advocates restraint and caution, and so Willow
juices up on magic and picks a fight with Glory. This is a pretty huge shift in
the show’s treatment of magic into something far splashier and flashier. Granted,
the shift has been gradually building, but the moment Willow floated in on
Glory and started hucking Chain Lightning like an 11th level Wizard
(or 8th level Evoker), there was no going back. It’s the end of
Horror magic—evocative, subtle, insidious, dangerous—into Fantasy magic—showy, bold,
useful, a different sort of dangerous. The show is a far cry from Amy’s mom
stealing her body at this point. Trouble is, this is still a show operating on
a fairly limited budget, and most of Willow’s spells come off as goofy rather than
either impressive or disconcerting. She breaks a window at Glory, levitates
some daggers at her, and turns a rug into a snake to wrap around her ankle—not
even an attempt at Power Word: Kill, Time Stop, or Meteor Swarm. It’s pretty
ironic that everything Willow got from a book called Darkest Magic feels far less dark and frightening than Amy trying
to turn everyone into rats.
But that’s going to be the way of
the show from now on.
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