Covering
from “Tabula Rasa” to “Gone,” in which the season blunders through one of its
more infamous stories.
Here
we go.
Way back in “Restless,” Xander’s
dream features talk of how he has to keep moving, like a shark, but without
fins. “And on land,” dream Spike helpfully notes. And lo, in “Tabula Rasa”
Spike’s demonic loan shark turns out to be a guy in a suit who has a shark
head. Get it? Because he’s a loan shark? Also the currency Spike owes him is
cats.
Isn’t it impressive foreshadowing?
“Tabula Rasa” is, I believe, one of
season 6’s more kindly thought-upon efforts, if you can’t tell already, I find
it rather lame and wan. It’s a return to the solid Buffy game of taking on new personas, and this time the new
personas are people who have no memory and are trying to piece things together.
And it’s funny, which is probably why it’s kindly thought upon. For my tastes,
though, it isn’t funny enough. Most of it is worth a chuckle—Buffy realizes
she’s “Joan the Vampire Slayer,” Spike decides he must be not a regular vampire
but a heroic vampire with a soul, Willow briefly thinks she’s with Xander and
hence straight. It’s all chuckle-worthy at best. The rest of it is people
sitting around asking “Who are you?” and “Who am I?” for far too long.
It’s also the episode where Giles
leaves, and having already gone on about why this is moronic and damaging to
the show’s 2nd most vital character, I won’t belabor that point
except to say here he tells Buffy of his plans and she raises some of the same
excellent points I did, while he sounds like Obi-Wan in Jedi telling Luke the huge ass lie he told was true from a certain
point of view—it would sound like wisdom, if only you could hear it over your
brain screaming “What a crock of shit!”
And it’s additionally when Tara
breaks up with Willow, a consequence of the latter toying with the former’s
memories to avoid a fight. Tara’s song wherein she discovered what Willow had
done to her was easily one of the musical’s highlights, and that Willow would
try the same trick again speaks strongly to the arrogance they’ve been building
in the character, the disastrous consequences a natural expansion. In
justifying Willow’s eventual heel-turn, it’s great.
And it was not to last.
Yes, it’s the infamously thin and
nonsensical Magic as Drugs storyline, where the issue isn’t so much that Willow
violated Tara’s mind, twice, but rather that she broke her promise to be magic abstinent
for a week. In the wake of the break up, she turns Amy human again, and they
run a bit wild, ending with them getting high at some sort of magical crack house,
until Willow hits rock bottom when she nearly hurts Dawn crashing a car while
high. On magic. But really, Magic as Drugs is just the cherry atop the
misguided misjudgment of “Smashed” and “Wrecked,” a pair of episodes that do
some real massive damage to the magic part of the show’s universe while also
continuing the season’s tradition of revealing things about characters that do
not align at all with how we’ve known them.
Basically, the scene at the Bronze
is obnoxious garbage. The use of magic here is weightless, candy-colored, twee
frivolity that was best left to Charmed.
Magic doesn’t seem dangerous, or elemental, or powerful here, it seems childish
and silly. Willow suddenly has God powers without cost or consequence, and
bafflingly so does Amy, who’s been a rat for three years due to her own miscast
spell (rat transmogrification seemed to be her only move at the time, by the
way). Rather than drawing ritual circles and casting out reagents in the hope
that dark energies could be wrangled for the light, they flick their fingers
and pink fairy dust comes out. It was deeply silly and anti-climactic last
season when Willow animated a rug to attack Glory, but at least it seemed sort
of scary and wrong. Willow says “open” and a car door opens, she says “drive”
and it starts—that’s right, she uses her powers to steal a car. Suddenly, magic
is both twee and banal. Then they go to Rack, who Amy knows all about from 3 years
ago even though she needed two helpers for a vague protection spell, and it all
just falls apart. We don’t even get the barest of jargon explaining what he
does to them or what they are doing—there’s no intent or utility in the magic
here, there’s nothing but Willow being a cartoonish junkie as she cackles and
speeds about high without hands on the wheel, and having the DTs the next day.
Somewhat meant to be parallel is
Buffy being drawn by depression and malaise into having self-destructive and
self-loathing sex with Spike—there’s a lot of pointed talk about compulsion and
doing something despite knowing its bad for you, so on, etc. I’ll admit, this
idea of enwrapping Buffy in a mutually abusive relationship is daring, and at
the moment it isn’t awful, even if they do make Spike extra smarmy and gross in
a way he has never been before. Issue is that both of these stories feel very
much like just some stuff that happens, not episodes of Buffy, despite the presence of Buffy, Willow, Xander, et all. There
isn’t the, ironic to say this, grounding element of a supernatural problem that
needs solving—in theory, the magic crack house is the supernatural problem, but
it doesn’t work at all in centering things.
Lastly, there is “Gone,” in which
Buffy accidentally becomes invisible, and has to fight the invisible Trio, who
are unveiled. Like “Tabula Rasa,” it’s a chuckle-worthy idea that never
elevates above that, and even gets a little creepy when she keeps invisibly
tweaking Spike in front of Xander. There’s an attempt to create a joke for the
ages in a fight that’s all whip-pans to invisible combatants, but it goes on a
bit too long. Mostly, I think this episode is notable for Willow taking offense
that Xander would think she had been unwise with magic again after she violated
his mind (and everyone else’s) trying to violate Buffy’s mind, having not
learned her lesson from trying to violate Tara’s mind.
Really, the memory spells should
have been the event horizon for Willow, but now they go unmentioned in favor of
the Rack stuff. And this, really, is the growing problem of the season—the show
doesn’t seem to realize what it’s doing to these characters.
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