Obviously, I’ve gone into these two shows – one of them the most influential piece of fiction since 1997 – with some preconceptions. One of them was that season six of Buffy is at best deeply flawed because it turns magic into a heavy-handed metaphor for drug addiction, and I must sadly admit I’m with the majority on this. Aside from the fact that I believe these people to have even less experience with drug addiction than I do, it puts the show’s usual use of metaphor into perspective; in all those “here is a Teen Issue with Magic” stories, the banal situation exaggerated with magic is a jumping off point for the unique reactions of our unique characters. To put it another way, they face a universal problem and react in a specific way.
Willow’s struggle with magic addiction makes the character more generic. This story might be factually true – again, not a drug addict, though I would easily describe myself as addicted to caffeine and social media – but it’s not a particularly compelling story, and I have to really stretch to connect it to the idea of Willow. Let me think it over – she’s hardworking and disciplined, and that can spill over easily into addiction as a kind of relief. Ugh, no, the way it plays out just doesn’t feel right. If it did happen, it wouldn’t happen in this way. On top of that, the way the characters treat it feels embarrassing, paternalistic, and most of all ineffective; it plays more like an out-of-touch PSA than a story.
Angel goes alongside Buffy in terms of Whedon projects that peaked in season two and had a followup season that was great, but still lesser than what came before. The most frustrating thing across the Buffyverse is how the villains take up so much of our time doing nothing for the first half of a season, something which presumably comes from economic necessity; the actor is paid as a recurring guest or something, which requires a certain number of episodes that exceeds the number actually needed for the story (or, perhaps, the writers are afraid we’ll forget about the villain o’ the week). The Mayor made this setup work by being very funny (“Thank you, Mr Trick, that was very thoughtful of you.”) and Glory made it work through both being very funny and having a totally bonkers mystery with totally bonkers answers.
Angel generally has less of an issue with this, because the villains over at Wolfram & Hart are given their own lives and social groups and infighting; smaller agendas that advance and fail. While it manages to avoid this overall, you have two frustrating situations: Darla just kind of hanging out for a while, teasing us with her pregnancy but not actually doing anything, while the Timeshifter falls squarely within that “dramatically doing nothing” villain role. Don’t get me wrong, he is the show’s funniest example of a demon what who talks like a regular person – he’s fairly casual but never off-topic.
That said, it picks way the fuck up about halfway through.
On my article about Buffy Season Five I asked what Xander did that was so bad, to which beloved Soluter Persia gave me two incidents: “Kick his ass” from the season two finale (and checking up indicates this is widely considered his nadir as a character) and his leaving Anya at the altar here. I very much kept that in mind moving through this season, and I think it’s quite revealing of how character and willing suspension of disbelief play into – and, more importantly do not play into – how we and I interpret fiction. There are two schools of thought when it comes to interpreting stories, and I’ll use the TV Tropes names and definitions for them: Watsonian, in which everything we are seeing is real and we are looking through a window into another reality, and Doylist, in which everything is put there by the author for a specific purpose (these are named, of course, for the Sherlock Holmes character and author). Proponents of each tend to take their stance as a given and, like they do with many academic concepts, defend their perspective as the obvious correct answer to the point of religious fervour.
I take a Doylist stance with the big picture. What is the overall intention of the project? Why did the author make this? What do they want me to take from it? When I watch Monster, I’m watching real people in an extreme situation and I want to find out what happens to them. When I’m watching Futurama, I’m watching cardboard cutouts be funny (and occasionally sentimental). After that, I could be seen as Watsonian. It’s like hopping through the multiverse – you tell me what the rules of this universe are, I’ll follow them wherever they go, and the rules themselves are less important than that we follow them consistently. I have to believe in the present action as an extension of the rules of the universe.
(I like to think of this as an extension of my belief in empathy. It’s fun to try and see the rules that people govern themselves by; it’s nice to see the catharsis people feel when they find where those rules go. I was not put on this earth to stop people getting to that point.)
(Also, this ends up making me significantly less impressed by character competence than other people. I recall people being wildly impressed when Harry Dresden resurrected a T-Rex and rode it into battle, something that required only an author willing to grant it to him. I’m significantly more impressed by schemes that result from complex plotting; both clever use of tools within the narrative and Rube Goldberg tricks.)
This relates to Buffy in that I am equally as annoyed at Xander leaving Anya at the altar, but because it strikes me as bad writing that’s out of character. Xander’s deal is that he’s the Guy Who Does His Job (You Must Be The Other Guy), and his journey is of realising that in retrospect. He desperately wanted to be Buffy – to be the Chosen One hero who commits the Cool Deeds and Heroic Sacrifices – but what he’s actually good at is the regularness of everyday life, represented best by carpentry but shown in things like his friendship with Dawn. The simple maintenance of existence.
Xander shouldn’t be getting cold feet heading into his wedding, especially at this point in his life. At worst, he should be nervous, perhaps overcompensating, only to realise that actually he’s doing all the basic stuff right and trying to ornament it when he should be allowing it to happen on its own. I argue that the guy who rebuilt Buffy’s house after it was smashed in, admitting with a half-embarrassed expression that he’s the guy you call for this, would be the picture of emotional stability through something like a wedding. I have felt that Whedon’s reputation for torturing his characters – exacerbated by his stated belief that ‘happy people make boring television’ – is exaggerated, but this betrayal of character is the one place I feel that’s true.
By contrast, “kick his ass” is indefensible. Xander did that because he wanted to.
I’m very rarely surprised by fiction anymore. It’s not that I perfectly predict every single plot device used, but I usually pick up on foreshadowing and I usually find how a story turns out to accurately conform to my expectations of that story about ten or fifteen minutes in. This doesn’t affect my ability to enjoy things; I would prefer to be surprised but I accept that there are pleasures outside it, and it’s possible to expand my understanding of the world without pulling the rug from under me the way shows often did when I was a kid. I’ve found that the best way to recreate that sense of surprise is to write my own stories and follow them wherever they go.
So you can imagine my delight when season three of Angel shocked me.
As a character concept, Holtz didn’t really come out of nowhere – he’s simply a new expression of someone from Angel’s past as Angelus coming for revenge. Angel is long reconciled to his evil past and that he won’t submit to punishment for the principle of the thing and he won’t let it get in the way of him doing good now and yadda yadda yadda. Holtz stands out in that his humour is much, much drier than anyone else up until now; he never makes a joke about Angel or the murder of his family, and he often acts as the straight man to the absurdity of others.
It’s once Wesley tries kidnapping Angel’s son that things start getting interesting. I knew Conor gets sent to a demon dimension where he’d grow up into Peter Campbell, and I assumed this would be Wesley’s plan; instead, it’s actually a result of his plan failing, and quite badly. Angel setting up a gag of seeming to forgive Wesley only to attempt to kill him was a little more predictable; Whedon loves setting up gags of people seeming to act nobly only to fall to baser instincts, and in this case I understood.
The climax of this plot, in which Angel and Holtz come to an understanding and even a sense of mutual forgiveness? That is what shocked me. Holtz tells Angel – in a performance from Keith Szarabajka that suggests years of contemplation to the point of total certainty – that not only has he taken Angel’s chance to be a father, but he feels the full weight of having done something that evil. It’s not quite inner conflict; it’s “I have done the exact amount of evil that you deserve”. Holtz has genuinely done a great evil and feels the weight of that. I’m usually unimpressed by people who claim they’d do great evil for the sake of great good because I doubt they feel the weight of doing evil. I know Holtz feels that weight here.
Angel, in turn, accepts this. He hated Holtz, he hated losing his son, but he realises this is exactly what he did to Holtz. This is his actions coming back upon him. From there, they make peace. Holtz will do no more to Angel; Angel will not pursue Holtz in retaliation. Each will leave the other alone. This is both the ultimate expression of punitive justice and an example of how rarely it’s actually accomplished.
Like, I get putting someone in a position where they won’t hurt people anymore, even if you have to kill them to achieve that. I get wanting to feel safe from someone who hurt you. I even get wanting to make your victimiser feel the way you felt. What I don’t understand is the pursuit of revenge as an abstract concept. It’s not a goal that can be quantified; famously, ‘an eye for an eye’ came about as a way of stopping unnecessary bloodshed as people just kept escalating conflicts. After a certain point, the enactment of justice is just getting over the fact that someone did something bad to you. Seeing that process on a vampire show and almost nowhere else is… surprising.
The main thing I love about dramatic structure is getting to see what comes after the obvious. When your story is built around cause-and-effect and you get past the initial burst of inspiration – which you usually will very quickly – you stop trying to bullshit or impress the audience and are forced to try and function in the world you made. You stop trying to control everything and you get to watch your understanding of the universe play out; it’s as if your foot has pushed the pedal to the floor and your hands are off the wheel and anything can happen.
Outside of both Xander and Willow, that’s where most of Buffy’s sixth season lives. My favourite aspect of this is the Trio; they have a thrown-together sensibility both in- and out-of-universe. It feels as if the writers decided, okay, let’s pull these three lesser characters (one of whom was actually off-screen until now) and make ‘em our main villains this year. In turn, the Trio themselves don’t really seem to have a strong idea of what it is they want beyond being supervillains.
Now, most of the time, uncertainty in a character is a recipe for disaster; see Jack Sparrow in the Pirates Of The Caribbean sequels, see the first two Matrix sequels. But the writers here use very basic storytelling techniques to find good stories. The Trio end up being years ahead of their time in showing male nerd resentment; the show initially finds comedy in the three characters jockeying for power and status amongst each other (and sometimes people outside the group) when they really ought to be concentrating on the task at hand, but with time they each end up revealing different elements of themselves.
Warren gets the meatiest role as the guy who really does just want power over other people; one pleasure of this season is seeing Adam Busch grow from a weak actor as he finds Warren’s sociopathy and desperation. His arc reminds me of how nerd culture has collectively discovered that some people weren’t ostracised because they liked nerd shit, they were ostracised because they bullied people and acted superior to everyone. Adam wants a found family; Tom Lenk plays him as queer and possibly in love with Warren, with the important part being that he’s loyal to a fault. Again; this matches commentary on geek culture people have been making for two decades now.
(Lenk also gets exactly one great moment where Adam gets to be genuinely sinister)
Finally, there’s Jonathan. I assume the reason he gets to be ‘the sympathetic one who only wants to like himself’ at least partially because he has had the most development outside of his role in the sixth season, having had multiple heart-to-hearts with Buffy over the years; it must also come down to the fact that Danny Strong comes off the most sympathetic of all of them; he’s self-pitying a lot, but he also sincerely connects with people in a way the other two don’t.
The Trio’s story ends up playing out the most organically; they actually break up about two-thirds of the way through, not as a deliberate change in the status quo but because their alliance simply wasn’t sustainable. It stands with the way a lot of the subcultures based around male resentment tend to fall apart ineffectually because they can’t actually articulate what they want in any practical way, especially in contrast to feminist groups.
From a technical standpoint, Darla is one of the most interesting characters in the Buffyverse, because technically she’s a bad character – even offensively so. On a fundamental dramatic level, I couldn’t tell you what Darla actually wants. Partially this is down to her transforming so frequently; a vampire, a human, a vampire with a soul. But it’s mainly because the writers are treating her as a plot device rather than a character; she is whatever she needs to be to get the plot moving.
I would go so far as to say she’s the fullest articulation of the innate sexism in Whedon’s writing. She exists not as a figure to be identified with, but as someone for the male protagonist to act upon. When she’s a human, she’s a victim for Angel to try and save. When she’s a vampire, she’s a symbol of temptation. Hell, she literally becomes a container for his son’s body and then dies! She goes through every single image of Woman As Tool For Men in a row.
And yet, I think she works. I think she’s the single best demonstration of vampire-as-horror the Buffyverse ever did. Vampires on this show are generally meatsacks for our heroes to beat the piss out of; Druscilla talks funny, but that’s basically ornamentation for a scary meatsack. Spike is fully a person – he commits great evil and he likes bullying, but he’s also capable of compassion, empathy, and even evil that’s driven by a gaping need to connect to another person. Harmony comes back and ends up being the closest to what Darla is doing, revealing that under her bubbly cheer she fundamentally doesn’t see people as people.
Darla manages to convey genuine monstrousness in human form. The writers are helped enormously by Julie Benz’s incredible performance; she expands on David Boreanez’s reveal of Angelus back in season two of Buffy, as if her body is being piloted by an entirely different being. She revels in the suffering of human beings; all other creatures in the world exist to slake her thirst.
In a way, it’s almost like indulging in Whedon’s misogyny in this particular case and in this particular way let him get to something much more interesting – much bigger than even the concept of women. It helps, of course, that we have someone like Cordelia who has been floating around for six seasons as well – a woman who was kind of a bully and kind of annoying and still kind of shallow, but isn’t actually a bad person the way that Darla is Absolute Evil. In an ideal world, Whedon could have exorcised whatever lingering negative feelings he had towards women; obviously, that did not happen.
I’m not sure how I feel or what I think about the Spike and Buffy ‘romance’. I knew watching it that I was looking at something honest, I just didn’t know who was talking to me. To pull something back from earlier in the essay, I couldn’t work out the Doylist big picture; I knew heading in that Spike would attempt to rape Buffy (though I was under the mistaken impression that he went through with it instead of pulling back) and I’d heard that Whedon had less of a hand on the wheel this season, focusing on Angel and letting Marti Noxin oversee things.
Watching their story play out was one of those wonderful moments where I’m incredibly uncomfortable but can’t articulate why. Buffy’s story this season is that she’s managed to outlive her life by far; at the start of the season, the Scoobies manage to pull her out of heaven, and now everyday life is completely unbearable suffering to her. This works as a metaphor for a show that was bought up by a different network and extended beyond its natural life; it also works as a metaphor for achieving your life’s work and having to work out what comes next.
Certainly, I found a lot to relate to; if Xander is the Guy Who Does His Job, Buffy is the Other Guy. Her role in the world is very specific and does not conform to society’s standards. Angel gets at what it’s like to not have the same chemical reactions in your brain as most of humanity; Buffy in this season gets at what it’s like to have niche talents in a social structure that sees no use for them. Buffy’s sense of humour, natural authoritarianism, sensitivity to the emotions of others, and Slayer training end up making her feel like a complete fool trying to apply for work; very Xander-like moment actually in how they don’t actually get in her way in successfully getting one of her jobs.
Whedon’s work is inarguably the product of a bully. Not just in the sense that he has literally been accused of bullying, but in that Whedon characters, as a rule, will take the first chance to dig the knife into someone. No mistake, immoral act, or less-than-perfect look will be allowed to exist without some kind of cutting remark from somebody. It gets me most in how you can generally assume your average citizen of Sunnydale, wandering into our view for exactly one scene, is ready to roast anyone’s ass for literally anything.
That reaches apotheosis here. Buffy is out of her element, sensitive, feeling attacked from all corners, and afraid of making the slightest mistake. Everyone around her seems to have their shit together, gets exhausted by every error around them, and is judging her (silently and otherwise) for every move she makes. The show suggests that Buffy is turning to Spike, not because she cares about him in particular, but because sex is the only thing that makes her feel any positive emotion in the middle of all that.
I suppose the plotline made me uncomfortable because it seemed at first glance to be saying that women chase bad boys because they’re innately driven to them, and this felt honest enough and specific enough in detail to be coming from a woman describing her own experience. I don’t think people are stupid for wanting things; desire is the basis of the greatest artform conceived, after all. This felt at first like someone trying to dismiss the very thing that makes her human, and that bothered me. Thankfully, it was about something more interesting than that.