From: "macha" <macha@ntl.sympatico.ca>
 To: <Bloody_Awful@yahoogroups.com>
 Sent: Wednesday, October 16, 2002 11:51 PM
 Subject: [Bloody_Awful] on buffy, compassion, forgiveness, joy, and season 6


 the slayer, though doggedly determined to walk, talk, shop, sneeze, and become a
 firemen when the floods roll back, nevertheless does not walk in this world
 (Buffy and the First Slayer, BtVS 4.22 Restless, written by Joss Whedon). and
 when she is remote, she is usually patrolling along the ramparts of eternity.
 because she is a mythic figure incarnated as a small blonde girl in school in a
 sunlit city:

 In every dream you have great power. In every dream you fight them.... No slayer
 has ever turned her back on her duty.
 (Urkonn to Melaka Fray, Fray #2 "The Calling", written by Joss Whedon.)

 called at fifteen, she has now died at least twice, been replaced as Slayer at
 least twice, and still she cannot rest: she can no longer understand why she is
 here, but the answer seems to be that she still has a purpose in the world that
 has not yet been revealed. caught, from her point of view, in some endless loop
 of eternal return dictated by some nameless Powers That Be, she inhabits a world
 she can never truly be part of. because she cannot seem to die, she finds it
 difficult to really live.

 Buffy: Trust me, it won't help.
 Sweet: Oh, that's gloomy.
 (BtVS 6.07 Once More, With Feeling, written by Joss Whedon)

 she has given to the darkness the lives of people she has loved. the friends she
 called to the fight because she could not bear to be alone are mortal, and they
 have themselves been damaged by their decision to fight with her. she cannot
 protect her sister, whom she was mystically sworn to protect with her life and
 then asked to kill in order to save the world, from the dangers of proximity to
 the Hellmouth and to the Slayer herself. but still she does her duty.

 though she fears little in the way of antagonists any more, having bested a god
 and known the plural of the word apocalypse, she continues to fear the darkness
 in herself. she has lost her truest anchors to the world, her mother and her
 Watcher. she is afraid to love, when everything around her dies. the only person
 who can understand her even a little is a souled vampire, who at least knows
 what it's like to have to claw your way out of your grave, but the last time she
 went for that particular option it didnt end well.

 last year after her second death and forced return, she gradually came back to
 life, but it was a hard journey. she has lost too many of the ties to the world
 that were her only useful grounding. though she continues to try to reach out
 past that to the people who love her, she can't risk adding to that list: she
 doesnt even believe any response she makes is appropriate any more, which
 contributes to her seeming remote. and she believes herself, falsely, to have
 lost the ability to love, which she herself viewed as the most important part of
 her. secretly she continues to fear that death, not love, is her gift, and that
 a slayer is just a killer after all. but still she does her duty.

 last year, in the depths of despair, she kept her feelings from her friends and
 retreated largely because she could not share with them the feeling that they
 had wrongly played god by returning her to a world she thought she was done
 with, and which seemed not to want her anyway. only Spike, who loved her
 unconditionally and understood the unjoys of resurrection, seemed to be able to
 help a little, for a while. but when she initiated with him a physical
 relationship, because he was the only person she could connect to and the only
 person she could touch without destroying them and, sadly, the only person on
 whom she could safely vent all that suppressed rage, she lost her only remaining
 anchor, and in a metaphorical kind of a way her soul. although he tried to
 continue to help her, and even let her vent on the understanding that she needed
 to do it somehow, she couldnt seem to use him without objectifying him, and
 therefore she could no longer accept him as a confidant or as a friend (much
 less as a lover in the true sense). he became meat, and neither of them could
 accept that. when she stopped sleeping with him, it was the first step to
 working her way out of the morass she was in, and she even made some tentative
 steps towards a healthy relationship: she apologized to William for using him in
 As You Were and tried to explain why she had to stop even though he wasnt
 complaining, she admitted she had some feelings for him in Hell's Bells, and she
 even tried to explain to him at the beginning of the bathroom scene in Seeing
 Red why what she called love was not the same thing as what he called love. at
 this point, although their relationship was certainly dysfunctional, mostly
 because she was treating him badly and shutting him out but also because he
 could not back off at her request, the bedrock on which their interaction rested
 was the one truth on which they both agreed:

 S: You think I could do that.
 B: Yeah, righteous indignation is absolutely the way to go here, 'cause you
 don't kill or lie or steal or manipulate...
 S (quiet): I. don't. Hurt. You.
 B: I know.
 (BtVS 6.18 Entropy, written by Drew Z. Greenberg)

 and then there followed immediately after the bathroom scene, the AR: not an
 Attempted Rape, technically, but certainly an Almost Rape. as horrifying to
 Spike as it was to Buffy, because in that moment he saw that the monster inside
 him could never be trusted, not by him, and not by Buffy, and he had destroyed
 forever the one certainty they shared ("I. Don't. Hurt. You.").

 so Spike was gone. and Tara died, the only one of her friends she could talk to,
 collateral damage from an assault on Buffy, and so in some sense her fault.

 Willow: How could she hide something like this from me?
 Tara: I think she was afraid of the look you'd get on your face. Kinda like the
 one you're wearing now.
 Willow: Oh no, I'm not - I'm just trying to understand.
 Tara: So is she.
 (BtVS 6.19 Seeing Red, written by Steven DeKnight)

 and Willow became something unrecognizably evil, and Buffy might have had, might
 still have in fact, to kill her best friend. and then Xander had to save the
 world, because Buffy ran fresh out of hopeful platitudes she didnt believe any
 more.

 but during this period, Buffy did begin to feel alive again at last. In Normal
 Again, with her mother's encouragement (although, amusingly, as usual to her
 mother's surprise) she made a free choice to live as The Chosen One, for really
 the first time, although she had to 'leave' her family to do it. she chose to
 let her friends in more, to tell them a bit about what she's feeling and doing,
 even if they don't approve. she made a pact with Dawn to train her and let her
 stand as a member of the Scoobies. she began to take her job as surrogate 'mom'
 way more seriously. she rejoined the world. she doesnt always feel she has
 something to sing about, but she's trying.

 and she isnt reneging on those promises this season, much. so far she's plucky
 Buffy, trying to help and still after all remarkably human. it's true that she
 didnt tell the Scoobies Spike had returned, but only because she obviously hasnt
 decided what to do about him yet (and you can't really blame her for not
 necessarily wanting their input on that subject, either). she isnt certain what
 she feels, she isnt certain what Spike has become, she's afraid to get close to
 him physically because of the AR, if she tries to help she's gonna have to
 acknowledge some responsibility for him she won't later be able to back away
 from, and he really could be, especially if he's a madman, too dangerous for the
 Slayer, pledged to protect "this sorry world", to let live. just like Willow is.
 the pathos of the situation as of Help (BtVS 7.04), is that i think both Willow
 and X-Spike understand and accept the enormity of this: it's Buffy that can't
 accept it, inasmuch as she loves them. she's already lost too much, too many,
 too often, and sometimes by her own hand. even so, and despite the risk, buffy
 is working at connecting. she's trying to help Willow. she's trying to help the
 students. she is helping Dawn. and i think this week she's decided to help
 Spike.

 Love is pain and the Slayer forges strength from pain. Love. Give. Forgive. Risk
 the pain. It is your nature.
 (Spirit Guide in the guise of First Slayer to Buffy, BtVS 5.17 Intervention,
 written by Jane Espenson)

 season 6 was a really rough season for Buffy, as it was for the show. it was
 risky to spend a season showing The Hero's Return from Death. it's hard for the
 hero to despair, to retreat, to disconnect, to walk underwater instead of on top
 of it, and still connect with people who need to believe in heroes. so the feet
 of clay thing is really hard to pull off. it was brave of ME to try it, it was
 brave of Sarah to play it, and it was vitally important to the whole seven?-year
 story they are telling: because she's human, and she's damaged, and even so
 she's still out there doing her impossible job. along the way, a lot of mistakes
 were made, by both the show and the character. i can even list a few: Joss
 trusted his writers too far, because they did not entirely understand either his
 characters (and the evidence of their arguments around the story conferences
 showed on the screen), or the particular journey they were making (don't get me
 started on the botching of the central metaphor of the dark willow arc), or how
 to properly pace episode and series and character arcs. and UPN may have
 contributed to the general feeling of poor standards by leaving two months in
 the middle with only two new episodes to fill them, given that they were the two
 worst episodes of the season. in these respects at least, they overreached
 themselves. hubris, a fine classical concept. and there were other things,
 questionable things, we could argue one way or another: the characterization of
 Xander, the dreadfully poor use of Dawn, Spike in the balcony scene, and Buffy's
 job spring to mind. and the humor was unevenly applied, and often unfunny,
 another pacing problem that made me wonder how much of the humor over the years
 was attributable strictly to Joss's last pass at the scripts.

 but sometimes risk is necessary. a man's reach should exceed his grasp, and all
 that. it's a good idea to step back sometimes and look at the whole of Buffy the
 Vampire Slayer as a single piece of art that we are privileged to be around to
 witness. the buffyverse today is already a panopticon of 194 episodes,
 remarkably seamless. you can set out any two episodes randomly and, juxtaposed,
 they continue to resonate in a variety of interesting ways: so they are not
 linearly based, but they're amazingly rich. it's an extraordinary achievement.
 there are visual images in there as good as anything that's ever been done in
 film, scenes that reach so far and meet their marks in a way that live theatre
 hardly ever does. and it continues to set the bar for itself so far beyond
 anything else on conventional television that it's absurd. so when it fails, it
 fails big like it does everything else. we sit here every week and we criticize
 the clothes, the action, the PC value, the characters, the actors, the writing,
 the direction, and the general prognosis, and sometimes it's too easy to forget
 that we do it not because we hate the whole thing but because we care about it
 so passionately. it's art. it moves us. even its levels have levels. it's a
 wonder, it really is, larger than life. joss, the acting generally, the writing,
 the characters, all of it, have painted indelibly on a medium that's generally
 considered the lowest common denominator in terms of "the arts", politically
 opium for the masses. instead the buffyverse dreams in archetypes and then
 confounds us with characters and situations so blindly real, and beyond that so
 utterly TRUE, that we cannot believe they don't belong to us, but are intended
 to ... save the world maybe <g>. myself, i want it to end when they want it to;
 truthfully, i don't want it to end at all. i'll be tuning in as long as they
 feel they've still got people to portray, and stories to tell. its still all
 about risk, for ME, the actors, the characters, the season: it's about the
 necessity of accepting risk in order to live.

 so my take on season 6 is this. it's not universally beloved at this point in
 time. and i understand why. it was really sombre in tone. it made some mistakes.
 it had no heroes. it took the characters, and the storyline, places the audience
 preferred not to go. it was dark, and difficult, and uncompromising.... it was
 hard work to stay with, it was hard going for Buffy, underwater and drowning. it
 was really hard work for Sarah, to maintain continuity and take it up just a
 notch every week, and manage to still make, for instance, a five-word speech
 (i'm thinking of "You're right. Thank you. Goodbye.") stand in for the seven
 years of history it covered and closed.

 and to my mind the season was magnificent. although i think BtVS does not
 consist of a set of episodes, but rather a collection of scenes, i count at
 least six episodes last year that were pretty much perfect: and that's more than
 i count for any other season. and beyond that six there were scenes that were
 the utmost in riveting, visceral television (one of them was Buffy and Spike
 bringing down the house in Smashed): as Spike said afterwards, it was a bloody
 revelation. the central storyline, an archetypal journey in which the hero was
 returned from the underworld and then gradually returned to life, classically
 structured as a postmodern Stations of the Cross, was beautifully written, and
 Sarah's performance in it was perfectly nuanced to show a subtle but definite
 advance towards life over the course of an entire season, with not a false note
 in it. and although Buffy was occasionally unlikeable, she was never (in my
 book, anyway) unlovable in the hardest journey she'll ever take. could there be
 anything more difficult for an actor to carry off? and could it be harder for an
 actor, used to being the hero beloved, to play? nobody should have to live in
 such pain, but still Buffy (tried to do) her duty. only Spike tried to rescue
 her from the underworld she was still half-stuck in; her friends barely noticed.
 she couldnt explain to them what she was feeling, because they thought it was
 swell of them to have pulled her out of there and her own role in it was just to
 look properly grateful. the Buffy who loved was betrayed by those who claimed to
 love her. nothing she did seemed to make any difference. the functioning working
 family they all formed after Buffy died dissolved as soon as she returned.
 trying to live again, trying to feel and function and protect them all at the
 same time, she went through too many motions and made some huge mistakes. even
 her role as Slayer seemed to have lost its meaning, fruitless, no fruit for
 Buffy. Buffy, in short, had a seriously hard time. was it depressing? yeah, in
 fact it was pretty depressing for Buffy. and she couldnt exactly get outside
 help, realistically or metaphorically. it was the hardest battle she ever
 fought. and she won in the end: she made her hero's entrance rising from beneath
 the stairs in her very own basement at the end of Normal Again, at the end of
 that hero's journey, and she had made her choices and she was whole. will she
 ever be the lollipop Buffy of Hemery High before she was called, or even the
 Buffy of Season 1, again? of course not. she was then a child; now she's a
 woman. she doesnt inhabit that comfortingly black and white world of the
 Watcher's Handbook any more, and that's because she lives in the real world of
 hard choices and moral complexity. and too much has happened to her. her scars
 may be internal, but they are real whether she picks at the scabs or not. she
 has never allowed herself to become either as hardened or as indifferent as
 Buffy from Cleveland in The Wish, and that's one of her greatest achievvvvments.
 she still cares, she still tries, and on good days she even dares to hope. will
 she ever get the happiness she truly deserves? i dont know, happiness isnt
 really the lot of heroes, is it? not to mention the evil imagination of one Joss
 Whedon. but she's still in there pitching, trying to reach out, trying to help.
 she has so much strength she's giving it away. and still she does her duty.

 i just know that once upon a time i wanted the story to end with a final battle,
 and i knew that probably meant the death of the hero. but now i think the hero
 has died enough, thanks very much. now... it is not my story to tell, but i hope
 for her to survive that final battle, with whatever it takes to make her happy,
 because she will unequivocally deserve it. she has graduated from Class
 Protector to World Protector, and kept her sanity against all odds, and even
 more remarkably kept her humanity. i want for her both the survival and the
 happy, and would supplicate any number of Powers that Be if i could on her
 behalf, partly because she herself doesnt believe in her heart anymore that
 that's a possible outcome. so where she has lost hope i do the hoping for her in
 both incarnations, MacroBuffy and MicroBuffy, in her mythic journey and in the
 realworld of the buffyverse. i hope she becomes a fireman when the floods roll
 back. i wish for her the love she has given the world, someone that can stand
 with her and share her life fully, someone she doesnt have to hold back with or
 hold out on. i wish her joy with the family she created, with her sister and her
 friends to guard her back if she must continue to slay. and babies, plenty of
 babies (i've got a theory...), just because i like to imagine her shifting the
 youngest to the other hip while engaged in slaying, and in the intervals
 training the lot of them up to meet the world squarely, on their own terms, just
 as she does, no matter what they have to face. i wish her the life she gave up,
 rather than the death she settled for. because, in jossian terms, by the gods
 she's earned it. and how can we do other than to love her, and forgive her, and
 wish her joy?

 Giles: It's, uh... You're...
 Buffy: A miracle?
 Giles. Yes. But then, I always thought so.
 (BtVS 6.04 Flooded, written by Douglas Petrie and Jane Espenson)

 macha
 sullied, but still unspoiled