More A Way Of Life… Look, this is just between you and me

Ten From Ten – Maximum Slayage

Originally posted 8th October 2002.  If there's one TV series that defined the early years of this here blog, it would be Buffy The Vampire Slayer.  It was a minor obsession that I shared with a number of people I knew at the time, and a very large number of posts here reference the series even after it ended.  I remember watching the final episode online one lunchtime at work the day after its US broadcast and posting a very spoiling summary at the request of some of my then regular readers.  I knew I wanted to include at least one TV post in this retrospective; I considered a West Wing or an Angel one.  I considered something random and one-off, but realistically, it was never NOT going to be Buffy.  Selecting the best to use was hard, but in the end I've settled on this overview of Season Six.

(Some spoilers for Buffy Season Six - nothing that hasn’t been covered elsewhere online or in print)

I’ve recently managed finally to see the final few episodes of Season Six, and I thought I’d offer a few observations on the year as a whole. There was a lot of comment (mostly online) about the series having finally lost it this year, and I’m going to beg to differ. Year six was definitely different than the ones that went before, but the same is true of each year. Imagine watching the pilot episode and being told that this same series would one day do episodes as varied and impressive as Hush, Restless, and Once More, With Feeling. Would you have believed it? Because I wouldn’t.

If anything, this year had more coherence than some of the previous ones - every episode added to the overall theme, even when it wasn’t clearly in the foreground. Doublemeat Palace is sometimes cited as the weakest episode, but even there there was ongoing attention to the various relationships and their participants, and attention to Buffy’s downward spiral and the effect of it on the people around her. After I first saw the season opener, I noted of Buffy’s return from the grave that “there were distinct suggestions that there will be ongoing ramifications“, and it turns out there were, for longer than people might have expected. In a sense, the pay-off for all the gloom and negativity that permeated the series was held in the fantastic scene in Gravewhere Buffy finally admits that she wants to be alive, and to be part of the world. I don’t think there’s a single thing wrong with a series actually taking the time to tell a story properly and make the character’s redemption really mean something. Redmption has been a theme of Buffy for as long as it’s been around, and it was absolutely present throughout this year. Willow, Dawn, Buffy, and even Jonathan all acheived it to some degree or another, while Warren showed himself to be irredeemable because he didn’t want rememption. (And on a sidenote, wasn’t the apparently buffoonish Warren a truly excellent illustration of ‘The Banality of Evil’? I know it’s not what Hannah Arendt originally meant by the phrase, but I think it fits Warren perfectly. All his big talk about world conquest basically masked a sad little man who couldn’t deal with the stronger women around him.)

For yet another year, the single most astonishing thing for me about Buffy is that the writing team Joss Whedon has assembled has pulled off another year of such consistency. It actually takes real conviction, especially in the high-impact, instant gratification world of television, to avoid the splashy, easy solutions, and take a more subtle route. A classic example this year was the point at which Buffy is led to believe that she was brought back ‘wrong’; that she’d been changed on some fundamental level. The easy plot devices would have taken that exact route - she’d become part-demon, or it wasn’t *really* Buffy who was back - but instead, she was just slightly ‘off’ physically, not anything that made a real difference. And that was the most devastating outcome of all, because she so desperately wanted and needed to have come back wrong, as a way of explaining the choices she’d made. Instead she had to face the fact that she was who she was, and had made mistakes that she had to deal with. For a fantasy series not to take the fantastic option takes absolute certainty on the part of the creators.

It parallels the situation with Tara late in Year Four and early in Year Five, when the audience had been led to believe that she was a bad guy, and possibly a demon. Ultimately, it turned out that she even thought she was one herself, but it was a lie that she’d been told by (the men in) her family to keep her malleable and afraid. Again, taking the non-fantastic route by depicting an abusive family situation was far more a challenge than doing yet another “trusted supporting character turns out to have a dark secret” schtick (Angel, Jenny Calendar, Oz, anyone?).

Mentioning Tara brings me on to the biggest gripe I have about Season Six, and that’s her departure from the series. I know that it was the only realistic trigger for the Willow-centric finale, but even so, I’ll really miss her.

That aside - I think the griping about this year was largely misplaced. It was different from last year, just as that year was different from the one before it, but it certainly wasn’t worse, and dramatically, creatively, and possibly morally, it was much better.