“If we could live without passion, maybe we'd know some kind of peace. But we would be hollow. Empty rooms, shuttered and dank. Without passion, we'd truly be dead.”
- Angel, “Passion”
Good shows evolve. They discard their mistakes like vestigial limbs and rebuild themselves. They fortify their successful traits with renewed focus and offer new adaptations. Sometimes, we have the luxury of watching a show take an enormous leap forward. Watching two shows make that leap, at the same time, can make you go cross-eyed.
Not only do these adaptations show the qualitative success of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Season Two) and The X-Files (Season Three); they also showcase just how malleable horror on television can be. The former douses the detective stories and emphasizes its romantic melodrama. The latter pushes the boundaries of its comedy and tragedy. Both add generously to their mythos and deepen their characters.
Buffy announces its intentions at the very beginning of Season Two, when evil vampire lovers Spike (James Marsters) and Drusilla (Juliet Landau) dispose of the Season One villains as an afterthought. The new focus, they announce to the audience, is bizarre couples, and so we also get to see Xander and Cordelia (dork and airhead), Willow and newcomer Oz (nerd and rocker), and Giles and Jenny (Giles and anyone). And, of course, Buffy and Angel, whose Capulet-and-Montague subplot moves to the forefront.
The new wrinkle, this season, is the emergence of Angel’s demonic alter-ego, Angelus, who keeps the proto-Edward-Cullen coif and pallor and adds a layer of gleeful sadism. Freed from the mopery of Season One, Boreanaz emerges as a formidable talent, delighted by the chance to inflict whatever pain currently holds his interest. There’s a hint of the Joker in his awful brand of mischief, since he’s less interested in world domination, more interested in humiliating and breaking Buffy Summers.
This animosity ups the stakes for Buffy and energizes the season, which, despite a few misfires (“Ted,” “Killed By Death”) zooms through countless romantic entanglements, the potential for overblown drama tempered by the show’s buoyant sense of humor. In “What’s My Line,” Whedon backs the embrace between Xander and Cordelia with a triumphant orchestra. In “Phases,” Willow comforts Oz’s lycanthropic melancholy by noting, “Three days out of the month, I'm not much fun to be around either.”
Although much of the credit for Season Two’s advancement goes to Joss Whedon, praise must also go to Marti Noxon, who joined the show just in time to serve as writer for mid-season treat “What’s My Line?” and the haunting “I Only Have Eyes For You,” where two ghosts endlessly re-enact a murder-suicide that parallels the doomed romance between Angel and Buffy. The emotional climax of that episode pushes Sarah Michelle Gellar and David Boreanaz to impressive heights.
Their drama comes full circle in the finale, “Becoming,” which explains Angel’s origins, his former desires, and how tragic it is that a demon now wears his face. Some of the characters don’t see the tragedy. Giles loses perspective, and Xander’s eternally hateful of Angel, given how he carries his unrequited love for Buffy like an anvil in his backpack. But there is tragedy, and it’s genuine, and this new trait takes over Buffy, and twists the show from a traditional series into a treatise on the trials of love.
Two years before Buffy graduated from competent thrills into something more, The X-Files made a similar jump forward. Its previous two seasons offered promise and sometimes delivered to dizzying effect, as with Season One’s “Beyond the Sea” and Season Two’s “Duane Barry” arc, but Season Three is when the show finds its morbid, hilarious, bruised-but-never-beaten soul. Its new attitude of finding the absurd in the tragic, and the tragic in the absurd, can be traced back to story editor Darin Morgan.
His three episodes break from the uniform seriousness of previous seasons, offering a blend of sincerity, sadness and satire. “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” features Peter Boyle as a psychic disheartened by the predestination his power assumes. “War of the Coprophages” bitterly depicts excitable, fearful humans as the real bugs, scurrying at the first sign of distress. “Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space’” goes even further, undermining the inherent idea of the X-Files, suggesting that the series’ supernal mythology might be nothing more than a collision of the conflicting perspectives of lonely souls.
What these three episodes offer is humor that, by elevating the moment, emphasizes the depths of horror and despair, and other staff writers latched onto this ethos. Chris Carter’s attempt at levity resulted in the fascinating, if off-kilter, “Syzygy,” where a cosmic alignment produces very odd behavior from Mulder and Scully. Kim Newton’s ruminative script for “Quagmire” offers a wonderful segment where Scully, trapped on a rock in the middle of a lake, compare Mulder’s self-destructive questing to the madness of Captain Ahab:
Scully: “You're so... consumed by your personal vengeance against life, whether it be its inherent cruelties or its mysteries, that everything takes on a warped significance to your megalomaniacal cosmology.”
Mulder: “…Scully, are you coming on to me?”
That self-awareness came to threaten the show in later years, as the traditional horror elements became more and more exhausting. However, by allowing the heroes more time to examine their circumstances, and comment on their frustrations, and laugh off the essential unfairness of their lot (as they seek answers guaranteed to be debunked by superiors), Morgan (and Carter, and Gilligan, and the rest of the writing staff) granted new life to a show stuck in its niche.
Both Buffy and The X-Files subverted expectations by pushing for more honesty, more humor, and more heart. They took the threat of growing stagnant as an opportunity to rework their foundation and tell a better story. They might’ve lingered on their genre elements, and they could have survived. Instead, Carter and Whedon turned their enjoyable fantasies into more complex, rewarding stories. Or, to quote Spike in “School Hard”:
“From now on, we're gonna have a little less ritual, and a little more fun around here!”
RATINGS:
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season Two: A–
The X-Files, Season Three: A–
NOTE: Both programs are available, in their entirety, on Netflix Instant Watch, which is quickly replacing weed as America’s drug of choice.
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