Buffy the Vampire Slayer went from being a show I had no interest in seeing to one of my favorite shows of all time. Back when it aired, I thought the promos looked awful. The X-Files as interpreted by Saturday morning TNBC. It didn't help that I was in my mid-teens, and that's an important time for guys to act like "men." I certainly had no time for a show on the WB about a girl named Buffy. In fact, the great trick of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is that it looks like a joke, plays with that joke, and then stabs you in the heart when your guard is down ("Passion," "The Body," this season's "Dirty Girls"). The heart-stabby quotient rises as the series goes on, but even the seventh season seeks balance. The creators make room for lighter episodes like "Him" and "Storyteller," and they resurrect the cheery sight of Sunnydale High School.
Being that this is Buffy, the new school houses an evil, and just any evil, but the First Evil. Despite its incorporeal nature, the First can assume the form of dead people and manipulate the living to its will. The concept is a smart one, since this is the closest the show ever gets to exploring the banality of real-world evil (excepting Warren Mears in Season Six). What is real-world evil? People. People who listen to the siren song of greed and power and eventually believe it to be the right pursuit (spoilers for life: it's not). In execution, however, the impotence of the First makes for a dramatically limp first half to the season. Certainly there's none of the drive of Spike in Season Two or Glory in Season Five, both of whom came out swinging. Thankfully, the show brings in Nathan Filion as Caleb, a misogynist emissary of the First, and he evokes warm memories of Mayor Wilkins with his clean-cut, ain't-I-reasonable brand of villainy.
As always, Buffy offers a master class in serial television. Barring finale lead-ins and two-parters, each episode is a self-contained mystery and another step down the path of the season, and each season reflects a new complication in Buffy's life. Season Two is about her losing both her virginity and her faith in a partner. Season Five is about her moving beyond her mother (and becoming a sort of one herself). Season Seven has Buffy become a fully-adult woman, and, without getting graphic, there's something suggestive about her finding a magical ax in a stone instead of a sword. Swords pierce. Axes cleave. Season Seven also makes Buffy a general to nervous troops (a group of Slayer "potentials"), but this is less successful. Not only because it leads to an overabundance of rally-the-troops speeches (and an odd rebellion in "Empty Places"), but because the show works better on a smaller scale, with the core group plus one or two (Faith in Season Three, Dawn in Season Five). None of the girls, least of all the abrasive Kennedy (Iyari Ramon), carry much sympathy. In fact the only new protagonist to hold his own is D. B. Woodside as Principal Wood.
One of the recurring (minor) problems I've had with Buffy is that, along with borrowing the best of supernatural fiction, the show also borrowed one of the worst tropes: a weird latent racism. In both the absence of non-white characters, and in the occasional presentation of minorities as fundamentally "other." Kendra the Slayer, back in Season Two, was notable mostly for her outsized Jamaican accent and her quick death. The First Slayer (a thousands-year-old mirage) is inevitably tribal in appearance, given her origin, but she's still a reminder that the show's stacked with whites. The show also carries hints of anglophilia (its affection for Giles and Spike) that recall the English veneration of H. P. "I'm Profoundly Racist" Lovecraft. Season Seven alleviates this with Principal Wood. He is strong, direct, and in on the whole joke of Buffy, which is that everyone's admirably casual about dealing with the supernatural, Gods, and apocalypses.
This casualness leads into another key point, one I've made before that bears repeating. The show's almost never frightening. For a show with "vampire" in its title, Buffy has little interest in scaring the viewer. It worked with Victorian monster tropes in the beginning, but Season Two swung into Anne Rice dark romance, and as more and more monsters intruded in this world, the show evolved into straight-up fantasy. However, this progression fits with the show's goals of juxtaposing Buffy's maturity with the world's increasing complexity, and part of the fun is watching demons cease to be monolithic and evil. Anya (Emma Caulfield) begins her run as a vengeance demon before joining the "Scooby Gang." Season Seven has the side-character Clem (James Charles Leary), a kindly floppy-eared demon whose kitten diet is more regrettable than monstrous. And, of course, there's Spike.
This casualness leads into another key point, one I've made before that bears repeating. The show's almost never frightening. For a show with "vampire" in its title, Buffy has little interest in scaring the viewer. It worked with Victorian monster tropes in the beginning, but Season Two swung into Anne Rice dark romance, and as more and more monsters intruded in this world, the show evolved into straight-up fantasy. However, this progression fits with the show's goals of juxtaposing Buffy's maturity with the world's increasing complexity, and part of the fun is watching demons cease to be monolithic and evil. Anya (Emma Caulfield) begins her run as a vengeance demon before joining the "Scooby Gang." Season Seven has the side-character Clem (James Charles Leary), a kindly floppy-eared demon whose kitten diet is more regrettable than monstrous. And, of course, there's Spike.
If there's someone with an arc to equal Buffy's, it's Spike, who began as an energetic rebel yell to the Master...before he joined the team, fell for Buffy, and regained his soul. He's the yang to her yin, Dionysus to her Apollo. However, this leads into an issue that the show never really explains: just how human are vampires? The show initially wants us to think that vampires are demon-infested cadavers. However, Season Two hints that vampires also carry some of the emotions and information of their body's former owner. Even then, why exactly is a vampire psychoanalyzing Buffy in Season Seven's "Conversations With Dead People" instead of killing her? What does it mean to say Angel can get his soul "back"? What is a "soul" in this universe? Buffy the Vampire Slayer never clarifies if vampires are (a) people with a severe affliction or (b) demons with some unfortunate human symptoms. This is less of a deal-breaker and more of a head-scratcher, but given that the word "vampire" is right there on the tin, some clarification would be nice.
Technically, Season Seven isn't the end of the story. There's a season eight and a season nine of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. They're in comic book form, authored and supervised by Joss Whedon, which probably means they're as honorable a continuation as the show could hope for. I don't care. I don't want them. Season Seven ends an arc that began with the first episode and continued and grew and found time along the way for mummy girls and teenage werewolves and robot girlfriends and a shared dream about slices of cheese. I spent a hundred hours of my life watching Buffy and her friends evolve from children into adults, and even when I didn't love the show, I still loved them. Xander and Giles, Willow and Spike. And Buffy. The finale is a fitting capstone to her story. What a pleasure that I can enjoy this show now. What a bummer that I couldn't enjoy this show when it aired. I need to track down fifteen-year-old me and kick him in the balls.
RATING: B+
Former Buffyverse Reviews:
Buffy, Season Six: B / Angel, Season Three: B+
Buffy, Season Five: A / Angel, Season Two: B-
Buffy, Season Four: B / Angel, Season One: B-
Buffy, Season Six: B / Angel, Season Three: B+
Buffy, Season Five: A / Angel, Season Two: B-
Buffy, Season Four: B / Angel, Season One: B-
If you love Buffy and it's amazingness, you'll love this actress April Washko. Reminds me of SMG & Eliza together, with some JLove. Buffy season 2 was boss, yo. Angelus?? Rad.
ReplyDeleteTo be fair, I always felt the lack of answers about how ''human'' a vampire can be was part of the increasing complexity of Buffy's world you mention. It didn't seem as though the Watchers' Council had ever really bothered to find out much about vampires other than how to kill them, so the Scooby Gang were sort of sailing into uncharted waters by even asking the question.
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