Covering
from “Beneath You” to “Help,” in which this isn’t exactly Friday Night Lights.
“I
keep coming back because I’ve been with these characters so long” is a common
refrain when a show is in a downturn. But what do you do when those characters
have become something utterly unlike what made me love them?
Willow’s stuck talking like she has
a wicked head cold, talking about energy, and connection, and Gaia. Spike’s
being a theatrically crazy, delivering lines simultaneously over and under
written, too expository and too meaningless. Xander’s just there. These
episodes look like they should be fun and enjoyable and full of drama. Anya
turned a guy into a demon worm! Spike’s soul is revealed! Willow returns!
Demonic cults wander the halls, and tragedy strikes! And yet nothing hits.
Spike and Anya in a barroom brawl, that should be great. Instead, it just is.
“Beneath You” tells basically the
only story to be told with Anya as a vengeance demon (Anya does something that
needs to be fixed), but it really is just there to clue Buffy in on Spike’s
condition. This is perhaps why the bar brawl doesn’t elicit the right response
(that and the fact that the scene is mostly everyone explaining their tormented
sexual histories with each other), because the centerpiece is Anya noticing his
soul and commenting on it, yet not actually commenting on it. I hate hate hate
scenes like this, where a character says things like “You have it. How did you do it?” without just saying what the fuck it is because it’s not the right time to say.
Obviously, there needed to be
ramifications of Spike becoming ensouled—his self-harming scratches over his
heart, which he says is where he tried to “tear it out” (I let that one slide), is a great example. But his
insanity, as it’s written, is obnoxious nonsense, especially if it’s supposed
to be him consumed with guilt (honestly, it isn’t all that clear). His constant
dialogue about “the Girl,” referring to Buffy, is just annoying, especially as
he recaps stuff we already know or could at least intuit, less drawing a line
between him getting his soul back and his assault on Buffy and more scribbling
a big black line with a black marker held in a closed fist between them.
“Same Time, Same Place” benefits
from having a creepy villain. Gnarl’s pretty cool, and his sing-song fairy-tale
dialogue actually works. The foundational idea of the episode itself—no one can
see Willow and she cannot see them—is interesting enough. But.
You know, the Scoobs have always
been quite forgiving among their own, sometimes straining credulity a bit in
the process, most especially last season when an episode pointed out that
everyone just shrugged off Buffy going nuts and trying to kill them all. But
Willow well and truly crossed a line last season, and unlike when Angelus tried
to do something similar, well, the show quite simply didn’t do a good enough
job establishing that Dark Willow (a term the show itself never employs) was
sufficiently distinct from Willow in the same way Angel is different from
Angelus, or that they were that distinct at all, really. The show’s pretty
cavalier about Willow’s attempt to annihilate all of creation—Angel at least
got his soul back and spent a few centuries in hell, Willow spent summer abroad
(though given how congested she sounds, maybe she’s had really bad allergies
the whole time).
There are all sorts of ways the Dark
Willow story could have gone, but they went with one where she tried to destroy
the world, not accidentally or as an unexpected consequence of an unwise course
of action, but because, magic drug addled or not, she decided it needed destroying.
Hard as it may have been, I think she should have had to permanently leave the
Scoobs in the wake of that, whether that means dying or something else, to show
there were still consequences. What I actually think is they shouldn’t have
done that story the way they did at all, but this is what we have, and in what
we have, it seems ridiculous for Buffy, Xander, and Dawn to be waiting at the
airport with a “Welcome Home Willow” sign after she tried to burn the Earth to
a crisp, and the fact that the crisis of the episode is instigated by Willow subconsciously magicing up the
situation, which gets brushed off with a “guess I still have a long way to go”
or somesuch, it’s just…a good baddie can only gloss over so much in an episode.
Finally, we have “Help,” an episode
I seem to think is fondly remembered, by and large, features Buffy, while
acclimating to her quasi-counselor job, meeting a troubled girl named Cass who
can tell the future.
Cass.
She knows the future.
Clever.
Anyway, the really ill-fitting part
of “Help” is how the show tries on harsh social realism, as Buffy meets with
the abused, neglected, depressed, horny, and at risk. The show’s trying, but it’s
an incredibly awkward fit. While the show has always dealt with the youth and
their issues, and has often done so well, those issues were pretty general, and
well, to be frank, from a pretty privileged perspective. It’s trafficked in thin
supernatural metaphors, and focused on things like first loves and deciding
which college to go to. I don’t quite trust it to do right by the Latino kid
who keeps insisting he doesn’t want to talk in a way that signals he clearly
wants to, so instead Buffy focuses on saving the blonde white girl. Admittedly,
Cass says she’s going to die on Friday, but, you know, it’s kind of hard not to
notice.
Cass is made to elicit emotion—small
and fragile looking, but philosophical and resigned to a certain fate with a
noble grace, which is why I don’t think this episode works all that well,
because she’s so transparently manipulative even before she delivers a speech
very like the sort Buffy used to deliver about how she just wants to go to
dances and do her homework and be normal while the plaintive piano music
plaints on plaintively in the background. Anyway, Buffy saves her from being
sacrificed in a demonic ritual on Friday night by eternal high school bully the
Oldest Home Improvement Kid (ranking his bully performances: Tokyo Drift then Veronica Mars then this), only for her to drop dead of a vague
heart issue. It’s not exactly Mr. Prezbo at Tilghman Middle, in no small part
because Buffy doesn’t learn to do what she can for every student instead of
trying to save just one, she’s just sad about it (or maybe she does learn, I’ll
admit I sort of tuned out for a bit).
As for the bully, he gets bit by a
demon, and Buffy dismisses him with “My office hours are 9 to 4.” Buffy has
never taken a gentle hand with bad guys, and the bully is especially odious,
but this seems both excessively callous and even reckless to leave someone,
however evil, wounded by a demon to bleed to death.
The road before me sure isn’t
getting any shorter.
No comments:
Post a Comment