Notes on Buffy 2.22: Becoming, Part II
Buffy 2.22 Becoming, Part II, In Which Buffy Drives a Stake Through Her Own Heart
So we come to the tremendous season finale. Whistler has called attention to the fact that it’s not what happens to us that matters, it’s what we do with it. Season 2 ends with Buffy’s defining moment. The rest of the series is really just an unfolding of what she does with it. And so we begin with:
Becoming Buffy. At the end of last season, Buffy made the ultimate sacrifice to save the world. This season she sacrifices her reason for wanting to live in the world. The opening of the season showed us what her sacrifice in Prophecy Girl had cost her. It’s the lead-in to Buffy’s suddenly passionate love for Angel. Whether it’s all fantasy or all true love or some mix, Buffy sees Angel as her only shot at being happy; her only shot at not being fundamentally alone. She’s prioritized Angel over the safety of others by leaving Angelus free to munch on the population and snap the occasional neck or two. But she won’t sacrifice the whole world for him. Epic operatic tragedy that, Buffy having to kill the love of her life to save the world from the apocalypse he started in just the moment he’s been restored to her. It’s an ending that earns its handkerchiefs.
It’s a bit hard to unpack a moment that so completely concentrates all of Buffy’s issues into a broiling stew of emotion. To do her duty, Buffy has to kill the one person who emotionally makes it possible for her to do her duty. How can a hero live as a human if her heroism requires her to give up everything that makes the world worth saving? Overlay that with the fact that the reason she had to sacrifice Angel, her emotional refuge, was because he turned on her and the world. Overlay that with Xander’s recriminations about her priorities and the fact that he is demanding that she save the world as a duty rather than as her gift to the world. Overlay that with her own guilt about the deaths Angel has already caused. Overlay that with the fact that she’s been cast out of human society at large--expelled from school, on the run from the police (i.e., turned on by the very society she is putting it all on the line to protect). Overlay that with the loss of her mother and her family. Overlay that with the loss of her mentor figure (Giles), who is no longer there to tell her what to do because of Angel. Overlay that with her one friend who supported her in wanting to get Angel back (Willow) has apparently turned on her too (“kick his ass”)--false or not. Overlay that with the fact that she’s just a day before discovered that the one other person who could understand what her life was like (Kendra) is dead. And, add to that, her one ally in this moment is a vampire she despises.
Buffy gets her big heroic moment in her fight with Angel when she stops his sword with her bare hands and answers his taunting question about what she has left with the single word, “me”. It all comes down to her alone to save the world. But her position also leaves her outside the world, standing over against it. Insofar as the world includes her friends and her family, she can’t be truly connected with any of them... because she’s the one who has to stand out in the cold making the huge personal sacrifices so that they can live.
Whistler tells us to notice what people do with their moments. What Buffy does is put on her overalls of shame and leave town without a word to anyone. There are no words for what this all is to her. But her departure just drives yet another wedge between her and the only folks who really are her corner. When she told Whistler she had nothing left to lose, she didn’t seem to include the Scoobies in her calculations. In an important way, she’s never had them, because they are the faces of the world that demands everything from Buffy. They remain friends going forward, but it is well worth remembering that essentially Buffy does not think they are really there for her. That’s her bottom line. And she’s not wrong about that. (I think she’s not 100% right about that either.) (This is a major topic going forward: the thing to unpack is how much they are there for Buffy as Buffy, and how much they are there for her because they need the Slayer. All things equal, they are pro-Buffy, but when the chips are down, when it’s Buffy vs. one of them, where does Buffy rate?) So the walls come up. And this is just the first ripple.
The other scene we should look at is less iconic, but it neatly summarizes the Plight of Buffy. Joyce has found out the Buffy is the Slayer and can’t accept that truth. In trying to convince Joyce to accept her and reality, Buffy makes a series of statements, one after the next, that encapsulate almost all the big issues she deals with:
“I’m sorry, Mom, but I don’t have time for this.” That’s Buffy’s constant problem. She may treat her friends and relations poorly, but quite often this is directly related to the fact that she can’t treat them well and save the world at the same time.
“Open your eyes, Mom. What do you think has been going on for the past two years? The fights, the weird occurrences. How many times have you washed blood out of my clothing, and you still haven’t figured it out?” We’ve talked before about Joyce’s denial. Buffy mixes that in with the very vivid, prosaic image that a consequence of slaying is blood and torn clothes. Being a slayer is no picnic.
“No, it doesn’t stop! It never stops! Do you think I chose to be like this? Do you have any idea how lonely it is, how dangerous? I would love to be upstairs watching TV or gossiping about boys or, God, even studying! But I have to save the world, again.” This speaks for itself: the lost carefree childhood and the bleak Sisyphean future she has no choice but to keep laboring at.
“I’m not crazy!” Equal parts Normal Again and the world’s lack of understanding and acceptance of her.
This is as concise a statement as you’ll find of what it means to be a Slayer. No wonder she staked so much on Angel
Buffy/Joyce. This is very true and well observed. I have to add that Joyce’s behaviour here in kicking Buffy out of the house is often described, understandably, as bad parenting. But from her perspective, she has finally found an explanation for what she’s thought for years was simply Buffy being a delinquent. She had to move cities because Buffy burned down the gym. She’s being told by the principal of her school that she’s a troublemaker. Even knowing that Ted was a robot, Buffy’s quick ease at kicking him down the stairs had to open some questions to which she could never get answers. And now the police say she’s a murderer. She should perhaps be more trusting of Buffy, but Buffy simply tells her nothing, and has told her nothing for years. Depending on whether we take the Normal Again retcon on board (see below), Joyce may deserve Buffy’s lack of faith. But it’s probably hard for her to see this, when she’s given so little actual dialogue from Buffy. “You can shut me out--I’m pretty much used to that,” as she said in Passion. And here, in a moment she’s asked to accept that vampires are real, that Buffy is a superhero, that she has been lying to her for years about it, that the police think that she’s responsible for a vampire killing, and that, apparently, the world is going to end if Buffy doesn’t run off at that moment.
The sad fact is that (besides some unfair condescension) Buffy does exactly what she should do under these circumstances; she really doesn’t have time to explain herself to her mother. But Joyce doesn’t see this. And so her threat of kicking Buffy out seems to me to be a last resort, a power play. She has sacrificed most--all?--of her personal life for Buffy. Telling Buffy to talk to her does nothing. Trying to appeal to what she is felt she’s owed does nothing. The only power she has is the power to give, or withhold, shelter. And desperately, she tries to exercise it.
The other power Joyce has to give is time, but she fails to heed Buffy’s plea and she withholds that as well, going straight to the ultimatum in the heat of the moment. Bad call there.
Speaking of bad calls, the other angle here is Giles’ instruction to Buffy not to tell Joyce about her calling. Joyce’s inability to process this revelation in the midst of a crisis is a direct consequence of having this bombshell drop in the midst of a crisis. If she had learned about it at some moment when Buffy wasn’t urgently running out the door to save the world (and, yes, Buffy does have at least some days like that), then she could have gone through her denial at a more leisurely pace.
While Giles’ motivation for the lie is reasonable enough (it might endanger Joyce in some way) we’ve already seen that ignorance has been no protection for her: Joyce has been bitten and drained once and almost attacked several other times. So how again was Joyce served by being lied to? And, really, did Giles really, plausibly think there was any way that Buffy’s freaky life could be kept a secret forever? He has casually accepted that more and more people know what Buffy is, and yet he has continued to take part in the charade for Joyce that Buffy is just a student and he is just a librarian. And, while this episode prominently displays the consequences on Giles of Buffy’s failure to kill Angel when she had the chance, we can see that Giles’ failure of judgment regarding Joyce has just cost Buffy her home.
Becoming Spike. As we briefly touched on in the notes to part one, Spike is the only one of the vampire/slayer quartet who gets no flashback at all in Becoming. His first becoming as a vampire was something that happened to him -- but we’re going to defer that story until season 5. The first we learn about Spike’s becoming are the set of choices he makes here. The major theme of Spike’s becoming is that he’s the wild card, the one who never does what anybody expects. He catches everyone off-guard with his move to ally with Buffy against Angel. Buffy was surprised; Angel was blind-sided; not even Drusilla saw it coming. As Buffy tells Willow, she’d never believe where her help was coming from in her final battle with Angel. His very entrance into the scene where he makes his offer to Buffy has him blazing in as a blur from off screen, decking the policeman about to arrest Buffy before we even see who it is that’s just arrived in all that blur.
Though I like to see Spike with rose-colored glasses, even I must admit that this is not a heroic move on his part. Spike has decided on what he wants and has calculated how best to get it. He’s not there to save Buffy. He’s only partly there to save the world. He’s mostly there to get Drusilla back (and probably to knock Angel down a peg or two). It is nonetheless the choice that launches him on his path to becoming a hero. It’s the reason Drusilla leaves him, prompting his return to his destiny in Sunnydale. And it’s a choice rooted in a character who as we saw in Lie to Me is capable of making choices other than evil, and who is fluid enough to see that an alliance with good is possible.
Let’s be clear about what Spike’s priorities are. When he tells Buffy that he likes the world, he’s not just making that up to cloak his real motive in wanting to ally with her. His reasons for liking the world are real reasons, ones he’s thought up. He’s not parroting it. All else equal, Spike would rather there be a world than not. But he cares about Drusilla more. So when Drusilla is his girl and wants to destroy the world, he goes along with that just fine. It’s only when Drusilla is Angel’s girl and wants to destroy the world that he stops to notice that world-destruction is a pretty bad idea. And even then, once he has Drusilla back in his arms, he’s not sufficiently worried about world-destruction to stick around and keep helping Buffy. Not a hero at all. But that liking the world is a seed for something. And even here, we get that pause when Spike sees that Buffy is about to be killed. He’d rather she not be killed. Not enough to do anything more about it. But still, it’s a seed. Spike helped to save the world. And he’s not going to walk away being sorry that the world was saved or that Buffy survived -- he wanted both those outcomes. We’ll see that little spark of interest in the good when Spike returns in season 4.
Angel v. Spike. So it’s worth pausing to compare our two vampires. Angel wants to destroy the world. Spike has already pointed out the irrationality of that desire. Angel’s not stupid. To find his motivation, consider that last we saw Angel he was scrubbing himself raw trying to get the feeling of love off of him in IOHEFY. Angel so hates love, he’d rather destroy everything than succumb to it. Both Spike and Angel prioritize love. It’s just that Spike prioritizes it as something he wants, and Angel prioritizes it as something to be avoided at all costs. That’s the essential difference between the two vampires and it drives their divergent trajectories. The surface impression of Angel as the good champion and Spike as the evil villain masks the truth of both of them. But this season cleverly tips its hand by having Angel be the one to set the apocalypse in motion, and Spike be the one to collaborate with Buffy to stop it.
There’s another hint of the Angel/Spike inversion in Whistler’s maddeningly opaque pronouncements. Whistler reveals that this was supposed to be Angel’s big day. He was going to be the one to stop Acathla, when in fact, he’s the one who activates Acathla. Whistler then tells Buffy the good news: “in the end, you’re always by yourself. You’re all you’ve got. That’s the point.” This would seem to be the sad and inescapable truth, and is old news to Buffy. But, in the very next scene, Spike makes his big appearance and shows that Buffy and Whistler were wrong. The Powers That Be thought Angel would be the hero, but Spike jumps in to take that role.
Spike/Dru. A little more on Spike’s move here. In this episode, he betrays Angel and Drusilla, striking out against Angel physically and then knocking Dru unconscious. He then drives away cuddling up to an unconscious Dru. Despite being consistently awful to him by carrying on with each other, Angel and Dru have been pretty forthright in the last few episodes. So the betrayal is interesting. If Spike were acting to save the world, of course it’s the right thing. But as Maggie established, that’s not his primary motivation. His primary motivation is to get Dru back. But he goes about expressing his affection for Dru by blatantly ignoring her wishes.
Now one can argue that Spike’s behaviour here toward Drusilla is justified under vampire logic. This is somewhat justified by Spike’s later claim in Lovers Walk that Dru would actually want him to tie her up and torture her. My response is that Drusilla’s awful cheating girlfriend-ness is actually something that could happen with humans as well, and while it’s reasonable to, say, dump someone for that it’s not okay for humans to respond by knocking them out and driving them to another city. As with Joyce, there’s an element here of desperation in Spike’s move, because he feels he has no other power in the relationship. But it is a mark against his understanding of love, where being with Dru is more important than her wishes, and leaving her is not an option. His cradling unconscious Dru as he drives away is a lovely image: it suggests to me that while Spike definitely prefers someone to choose to be with him consciously, he’ll take whatever he can get. It’s a long road before he’ll have real respect for both himself and the women he cares about.
Spuffy Foreshadowing. They naturally take to fighting together, with Spike punching out an attacking vampire before tossing him to Buffy to be staked. He picks up wordlessly on her attempt to lie to Joyce about what she’s really been doing. He sits in the living room with Joyce with the awkward air of a young man come a’ courtin’ (as the script describes the scene). And he really is concerned when he sees her about to be killed. The ‘retcon’ that he was already obsessed with Buffy does no violence to the story we have before us.
We also see the first instance of Buffy lying to the Scoobies about Spike’s good deeds. Here, she doesn’t reveal to Willow how she knows where Angel and Giles are.
Normal Again. While we’re on the subject of ‘retcons’ it’s worth briefly observing that Joyce’s cluelessness is a bit hard to square with the season 6 revelation that Buffy had been in a mental hospital because of her delusions of being a slayer. It’s possible to make arguments that Joyce is just in deep denial and that for some reason she makes no reference to the recurrence of Buffy’s vampire issues. But this isn’t the seamless retcon that Spike’s longstanding attraction to Buffy is.
Xander. I’d call this section becoming Xander if his actions in this episode had a permanent impact on his story. But instead, the issues involved in Xander’s infamous lie don’t explicitly surface until season 7 and then only in passing. Xander took his stand against Angel last episode. He acts on that stand by withholding information from Buffy as she went into battle. We can dress his lie up with motives about wanting to keep Buffy focused, etc. But we already know that there’s a personal motivation fueling his actions. Xander is the focus of Buffy’s tensions/difficulties with the Scoobies going forward through season 3. But when Angel leaves the show, that story line drops out and it does not seem to have long run repercussions on his relationship with Buffy. In season 3, though, we will still have much to say about the divisions among the Scoobies that center on Angel’s role in Buffy’s life.
My tentative theory on why Xander’s lie seems to evaporate as a story line is that there is a profound power shift that occurs between Xander and Buffy. He tried in Becoming 1 to lead a revolt against her leadership. He lost. Willow was appalled at him; Giles offended and angered. Without debating the merits of his arguments, they worked in concert on the resurrection spell he opposed and she wanted so badly. So, the Xander we see delivering the lie is a Xander who has lost the main war and is waging a rear-guard guerrilla action. To get to what he thinks is the right outcome, he has to resort to a ruse, to take what little scope of action is available to him in his diminished role as messenger boy. When Season 3 starts, however, the tables are reversed. Xander will again confront Buffy about running away, but this time he’ll have the support of Willow, Giles (to a certain extent) and even Joyce. Buffy will realize at that juncture that in order to keep her friends -- which is pretty much all that she has left -- she will be the one who has to make up to them. And that’s the way things will remain: in many important ways, Buffy will need her friends more than they need her -- at least, than they need her as Buffy vs. their need for her as the Slayer. From her position of social weakness, she won’t be able to hold Xander’s feet to the fire for his efforts to get Angel killed.
Good points, both. I think it’s a bit hard to explain what I think is going on with Xander--and why he’s Becoming here--without starting earlier in the episode. In When She Was Bad we discussed how Willow is in some senses a more real person to Xander than Buffy is. We see that again here. He hugs Buffy to protect her from the cops, and she jokes, “That was about equal parts protecting me and copping a feel, right?” The joke doesn’t exactly land: Buffy’s misjudging Xander’s emotional state, because he’s really not in a mood where his crush on Buffy enters into his mind. Willow is hurt. It’s Xander who called Willow’s parents (connection to their shared childhood); but he didn’t even think of calling Oz, who is a new element in her life (and competitor for attention). He has a few nice moments with Cordelia, with a kindness and mutual respect the two don’t normally. But it’s clear where his heart is: it’s with Willow.
In the hospital, Xander talks to Willow. He tells her how much he needs her and how much he misses her, appealing to their long friendship. He says he loves her. And she wakes up and calls Oz’ name. I nattered on at length in Inca Mummy Girl about how, emotionally, Xander and Willow represent some of the same thing to each other: it’s comfort and connection to their childhood. In this theory, Xander knew intuitively that Willow couldn’t provide what he needed in a relationship if he was going to grow up and move away from the child she knows him as. Well here the consequences finally sink in. He can’t both want to grow up (have a relationship without Willow) and hang onto everything from his childhood (his close relationship with Willow) at the same time. Willow as someone who would never leave Xander, who would always be there for him when he needed her, is a painful illusion to lose, especially with the knowledge that he sat by and watched as it happened. I think he’s still not particularly interested in her romantically, and has romantic needs that she can’t meet. But it hurts not to be Willow’s everything anymore (especially when he’s finally made his breakthrough admission that he loves her, and she responds by calling out Oz’s name. Ouch). That Willow refuses to listen to him (“resolve face!”) just hurts more.
So onto the lie. One of my favourite observations about Xander’s Lie comes from Spring Summers’ Spikecentricity reviews. When Xander shows up to help Buffy, he describes himself as a frightened guy with a rock. In the previous episode, Spike described Angel as just a guy with a rock [Acathla]. The parallel connects Xander to Angel in two ways: 1) it shows that Xander, like Angel, has real power at this moment-maybe even the power over whether the world survives; and 2) (my observation, not Spring’s) it shows that Xander’s power lies in the ability to use words (a lie, a ritual) to destroy. The fate of the world hangs in the balance, and the only possible contribution Xander can make is in acting as the gatekeeper for information that could lead to Angel’s salvation or death. In fact it’s a rather Watcher-ly moment, where the control of information is used to get what Xander believes is the good, world-saving outcome-he gives up trust in and emotional support of his friends, both Buffy and Willow. More to the point, he is taking the big risk that Buffy and Willow won’t forgive him if they found out about the fact that he lied. I don’t deny Xander’s petty reasons for wanting Angel dead, or at wanting to assert what little power he has. Even more damning, I think he has personal resentments against both Buffy and Willow as set up by the episode: there’s some resentment that Buffy nearly got Willow killed and resentment that Willow is moving on from him, that makes him willing to betray both of them. Simply put, at this moment he’s a mess. But I think he is consciously acting out of an impulse toward the mission, so great that he’s prioritizing it over his friendships. (If nothing else, this might explain the placement of Go Fish, which is in part about Xander taking a lot of agency in the mission, going undercover and all.) His reward for his attempt at Watcherly behaviour is that when he goes to save Giles’ life, he gets reminded again that Giles doesn’t particularly care for him. I’m glad you mentioned that little scene, because it’s a little detail that speaks volumes about where Xander stands in Giles’ eyes (and the fact that Xander knows it). I’m actually very agnostic on the question of whether the Lie was the right thing to do or not (as am I). The hurt comes later when the Lie is never confessed and hangs over things forever. It’s a great point that it drives an unnecessary wedge between Willow and Buffy. (Which actually makes for a third parallel with Angel, who almost reflexively drove wedges between friends.) I agree that Xander’s motives are not entirely selfish. But it is what’s going to become a steady refrain a decision born of mixed motives. We don’t know how he’d have analyzed the situation if he didn’t have all those personal considerations in play. Agreed on all counts. Honestly, fate of the world in the balance, I can forgive a lot. The biggest problem with Xander’s lie is that he never owns up to it, and it just continues to fester in Buffy’s mind. Obviously she never forgets it, or else she wouldn’t let it out in Selfless.
So what is the arc significance? As with Strudel I think the answer lies in the group dynamics. But I see it a bit differently. It’s true he’s got a lot of social power at the beginning of season three. But by the end of the season he’s lost most of it. How? In Revelations he tries to get Angel killed again, with a viciousness that I think is not unrelated to guilt about the lie here. He stops in order to save an unconscious Giles (a reference to the unconscious Giles in this episode) and eats crow about his behaviour to Buffy; he loses the moral high ground on Angel and never takes it back. Meanwhile, he gets Willow back after he thought he’d lost her, and as a result of his infidelity with her he loses both Willow and Cordelia. In a period of two episodes, Xander loses his feeling of having the moral high ground, his Angel vendetta, his position as Buffy’s right hand, his relationship with Cordelia and the closeness of his connection to Willow. Basically, everything in one fell swoop, and all of it has roots in this episode, in the hospital bed scene with Willow and the lie he told to Buffy. By The Zeppo, Xander is conscious of the fact that his social power has been almost entirely depleted. And in the series structure, an episode after his two-episode series of losses, Anya comes into town, and (arguably) the second act of his story begins.
Becoming Willow. We already covered this. Of note here is simply that Willow actually is seized by something when she does the spell to curse Angel, and that Cordelia and Oz are unclear whether it’s a good thing. The question gets obliquely raised in the Scooby conversation at the end of the episode. It’s so quietly done you’d never notice on first watch that Becoming represents a signal change for Willow as well, much less the radically dangerous change it turns out to be.
One element wasn’t discussed too much in the review to part I, so I’ll say it here: Willow’s spell is an attempt to fix something that’s wrong. Willow’s curse will make Angelus into Angel and make everything all better. It’s Willow’s first big attempt at fixing/healing with one grand gesture. That it ends in disaster foreshadows how Willow’s other such grand gestures will frequently go. She needs to come to terms with the fact that some things in the world can’t be fixed or healed, and certainly not through magical shortcuts. (nice point. This is actually a well-established facet of Willow’s personality, even pre-magic Willow. Prior to this, there have been several instances of Willow trying to will things to be good by wishing them to be so. The magic gives her a tool to take this wishing to a new level, but it seldom works as she wishes.)
On the Buffy/Willow front: there is real damage done to Buffy and Willow’s relationship by Xander’s lie, which can never exactly be repaired. Willow absolutely had some selfish reasons for doing the spell. But Buffy wanted the spell to be done in the previous episode--and besides, whatever Buffy wants or doesn’t want, an Angel with a soul is less likely to perform the ritual to end the world, so the ensoulment seems like a damn good plan. (Keep in mind, too, that Willow couldn’t know that closing Acathla would require sending Angel into hell.) So all well and good. But by failing to tell Buffy about Willow’s plan, and by actually indicating that Willow had the opposite message, Xander makes Buffy feel even more alone (Willow did want to help restore Angel, but now doesn’t), and makes Willow seem particularly cruel and capricious. Consider what it means, for Buffy to think that Willow performed the spell and not only didn’t bother trying to tell Buffy about it, but gave a specific message unrelated to it. It makes Buffy angrier at Willow and more disconnected. And since this misunderstanding is never cleared up, Buffy makes that much less sense to Willow as well.
While performing the spell, Willow has a bandage above her eye about where Spike’s scar is. After the spell, Willow is in a wheelchair, shortly after Spike so dramatically got out of one. I think this is the start of the paralleling of Spike and Willow that continues through the series, with the two on opposite tracks up until Grave. (They are also paralleled in season seven, but are somewhat more heading in the same direction there.) Here we see it begin: Willow, for mostly good but some selfish reasons, performs the spell that starts her on her journey into the dark; Spike, for mostly selfish but some good reasons, performs the act that starts him on his journey into the light. Two to Go/Grave are littered with references to Becoming, incidentally.
Giles. He’s a tough buzzard. I love the ‘tutu’ line. But he betrays the world for love. It’s a mirror of what Buffy’s been about all season long. I suspect this may have something to do with his compassion for Buffy on her return in season 3 when he’s the only person in her life to welcome her back with genuine concern for her.
Cordelia. In an episode full of horrible intra-Scoobie dynamics, I wanted to point out one of the better moments: Cordelia’s honest admission that she ran like a coward, and Buffy’s simple, but forgiving, reply that it was the right thing to do. It’s a nice connection. Cordelia’s simple, supportive offer to get coffee for Xander, and his gratefulness for it, is another such moment. It’s also a nice moment for Buffy since it’s a rare occasion on which she drops the snark and deals with Cordelia with respect. I think the detente between them is a measure of the gravity of the situation.
So that’s it for season 2. With the exception of Go Fish (which still sets up Xander’s commitment to the mission and thus sets up The Lie) and (possibly) Bad Eggs (which foregrounds the sexual component of B/A right before Surprise), there is no episode that’s not in service of the main arc. It’s a season that was plotted clearly from the start to land at that exquisitely painful moment when Buffy sacrifices her heart and begins the process of slowly turning to stone. Her fate was arguably not sealed, however. Had Angel not come back and had Faith not arrived, it’s possible that Buffy could have mourned her losses and moved on. It is time to turn to season 3 to chart just how it is that Buffy missed her chance to get past her Angel-trauma.
So we come to the tremendous season finale. Whistler has called attention to the fact that it’s not what happens to us that matters, it’s what we do with it. Season 2 ends with Buffy’s defining moment. The rest of the series is really just an unfolding of what she does with it. And so we begin with:
Becoming Buffy. At the end of last season, Buffy made the ultimate sacrifice to save the world. This season she sacrifices her reason for wanting to live in the world. The opening of the season showed us what her sacrifice in Prophecy Girl had cost her. It’s the lead-in to Buffy’s suddenly passionate love for Angel. Whether it’s all fantasy or all true love or some mix, Buffy sees Angel as her only shot at being happy; her only shot at not being fundamentally alone. She’s prioritized Angel over the safety of others by leaving Angelus free to munch on the population and snap the occasional neck or two. But she won’t sacrifice the whole world for him. Epic operatic tragedy that, Buffy having to kill the love of her life to save the world from the apocalypse he started in just the moment he’s been restored to her. It’s an ending that earns its handkerchiefs.
It’s a bit hard to unpack a moment that so completely concentrates all of Buffy’s issues into a broiling stew of emotion. To do her duty, Buffy has to kill the one person who emotionally makes it possible for her to do her duty. How can a hero live as a human if her heroism requires her to give up everything that makes the world worth saving? Overlay that with the fact that the reason she had to sacrifice Angel, her emotional refuge, was because he turned on her and the world. Overlay that with Xander’s recriminations about her priorities and the fact that he is demanding that she save the world as a duty rather than as her gift to the world. Overlay that with her own guilt about the deaths Angel has already caused. Overlay that with the fact that she’s been cast out of human society at large--expelled from school, on the run from the police (i.e., turned on by the very society she is putting it all on the line to protect). Overlay that with the loss of her mother and her family. Overlay that with the loss of her mentor figure (Giles), who is no longer there to tell her what to do because of Angel. Overlay that with her one friend who supported her in wanting to get Angel back (Willow) has apparently turned on her too (“kick his ass”)--false or not. Overlay that with the fact that she’s just a day before discovered that the one other person who could understand what her life was like (Kendra) is dead. And, add to that, her one ally in this moment is a vampire she despises.
Buffy gets her big heroic moment in her fight with Angel when she stops his sword with her bare hands and answers his taunting question about what she has left with the single word, “me”. It all comes down to her alone to save the world. But her position also leaves her outside the world, standing over against it. Insofar as the world includes her friends and her family, she can’t be truly connected with any of them... because she’s the one who has to stand out in the cold making the huge personal sacrifices so that they can live.
Whistler tells us to notice what people do with their moments. What Buffy does is put on her overalls of shame and leave town without a word to anyone. There are no words for what this all is to her. But her departure just drives yet another wedge between her and the only folks who really are her corner. When she told Whistler she had nothing left to lose, she didn’t seem to include the Scoobies in her calculations. In an important way, she’s never had them, because they are the faces of the world that demands everything from Buffy. They remain friends going forward, but it is well worth remembering that essentially Buffy does not think they are really there for her. That’s her bottom line. And she’s not wrong about that. (I think she’s not 100% right about that either.) (This is a major topic going forward: the thing to unpack is how much they are there for Buffy as Buffy, and how much they are there for her because they need the Slayer. All things equal, they are pro-Buffy, but when the chips are down, when it’s Buffy vs. one of them, where does Buffy rate?) So the walls come up. And this is just the first ripple.
The other scene we should look at is less iconic, but it neatly summarizes the Plight of Buffy. Joyce has found out the Buffy is the Slayer and can’t accept that truth. In trying to convince Joyce to accept her and reality, Buffy makes a series of statements, one after the next, that encapsulate almost all the big issues she deals with:
“I’m sorry, Mom, but I don’t have time for this.” That’s Buffy’s constant problem. She may treat her friends and relations poorly, but quite often this is directly related to the fact that she can’t treat them well and save the world at the same time.
“Open your eyes, Mom. What do you think has been going on for the past two years? The fights, the weird occurrences. How many times have you washed blood out of my clothing, and you still haven’t figured it out?” We’ve talked before about Joyce’s denial. Buffy mixes that in with the very vivid, prosaic image that a consequence of slaying is blood and torn clothes. Being a slayer is no picnic.
“No, it doesn’t stop! It never stops! Do you think I chose to be like this? Do you have any idea how lonely it is, how dangerous? I would love to be upstairs watching TV or gossiping about boys or, God, even studying! But I have to save the world, again.” This speaks for itself: the lost carefree childhood and the bleak Sisyphean future she has no choice but to keep laboring at.
“I’m not crazy!” Equal parts Normal Again and the world’s lack of understanding and acceptance of her.
This is as concise a statement as you’ll find of what it means to be a Slayer. No wonder she staked so much on Angel
Buffy/Joyce. This is very true and well observed. I have to add that Joyce’s behaviour here in kicking Buffy out of the house is often described, understandably, as bad parenting. But from her perspective, she has finally found an explanation for what she’s thought for years was simply Buffy being a delinquent. She had to move cities because Buffy burned down the gym. She’s being told by the principal of her school that she’s a troublemaker. Even knowing that Ted was a robot, Buffy’s quick ease at kicking him down the stairs had to open some questions to which she could never get answers. And now the police say she’s a murderer. She should perhaps be more trusting of Buffy, but Buffy simply tells her nothing, and has told her nothing for years. Depending on whether we take the Normal Again retcon on board (see below), Joyce may deserve Buffy’s lack of faith. But it’s probably hard for her to see this, when she’s given so little actual dialogue from Buffy. “You can shut me out--I’m pretty much used to that,” as she said in Passion. And here, in a moment she’s asked to accept that vampires are real, that Buffy is a superhero, that she has been lying to her for years about it, that the police think that she’s responsible for a vampire killing, and that, apparently, the world is going to end if Buffy doesn’t run off at that moment.
The sad fact is that (besides some unfair condescension) Buffy does exactly what she should do under these circumstances; she really doesn’t have time to explain herself to her mother. But Joyce doesn’t see this. And so her threat of kicking Buffy out seems to me to be a last resort, a power play. She has sacrificed most--all?--of her personal life for Buffy. Telling Buffy to talk to her does nothing. Trying to appeal to what she is felt she’s owed does nothing. The only power she has is the power to give, or withhold, shelter. And desperately, she tries to exercise it.
The other power Joyce has to give is time, but she fails to heed Buffy’s plea and she withholds that as well, going straight to the ultimatum in the heat of the moment. Bad call there.
Speaking of bad calls, the other angle here is Giles’ instruction to Buffy not to tell Joyce about her calling. Joyce’s inability to process this revelation in the midst of a crisis is a direct consequence of having this bombshell drop in the midst of a crisis. If she had learned about it at some moment when Buffy wasn’t urgently running out the door to save the world (and, yes, Buffy does have at least some days like that), then she could have gone through her denial at a more leisurely pace.
While Giles’ motivation for the lie is reasonable enough (it might endanger Joyce in some way) we’ve already seen that ignorance has been no protection for her: Joyce has been bitten and drained once and almost attacked several other times. So how again was Joyce served by being lied to? And, really, did Giles really, plausibly think there was any way that Buffy’s freaky life could be kept a secret forever? He has casually accepted that more and more people know what Buffy is, and yet he has continued to take part in the charade for Joyce that Buffy is just a student and he is just a librarian. And, while this episode prominently displays the consequences on Giles of Buffy’s failure to kill Angel when she had the chance, we can see that Giles’ failure of judgment regarding Joyce has just cost Buffy her home.
Becoming Spike. As we briefly touched on in the notes to part one, Spike is the only one of the vampire/slayer quartet who gets no flashback at all in Becoming. His first becoming as a vampire was something that happened to him -- but we’re going to defer that story until season 5. The first we learn about Spike’s becoming are the set of choices he makes here. The major theme of Spike’s becoming is that he’s the wild card, the one who never does what anybody expects. He catches everyone off-guard with his move to ally with Buffy against Angel. Buffy was surprised; Angel was blind-sided; not even Drusilla saw it coming. As Buffy tells Willow, she’d never believe where her help was coming from in her final battle with Angel. His very entrance into the scene where he makes his offer to Buffy has him blazing in as a blur from off screen, decking the policeman about to arrest Buffy before we even see who it is that’s just arrived in all that blur.
Though I like to see Spike with rose-colored glasses, even I must admit that this is not a heroic move on his part. Spike has decided on what he wants and has calculated how best to get it. He’s not there to save Buffy. He’s only partly there to save the world. He’s mostly there to get Drusilla back (and probably to knock Angel down a peg or two). It is nonetheless the choice that launches him on his path to becoming a hero. It’s the reason Drusilla leaves him, prompting his return to his destiny in Sunnydale. And it’s a choice rooted in a character who as we saw in Lie to Me is capable of making choices other than evil, and who is fluid enough to see that an alliance with good is possible.
Let’s be clear about what Spike’s priorities are. When he tells Buffy that he likes the world, he’s not just making that up to cloak his real motive in wanting to ally with her. His reasons for liking the world are real reasons, ones he’s thought up. He’s not parroting it. All else equal, Spike would rather there be a world than not. But he cares about Drusilla more. So when Drusilla is his girl and wants to destroy the world, he goes along with that just fine. It’s only when Drusilla is Angel’s girl and wants to destroy the world that he stops to notice that world-destruction is a pretty bad idea. And even then, once he has Drusilla back in his arms, he’s not sufficiently worried about world-destruction to stick around and keep helping Buffy. Not a hero at all. But that liking the world is a seed for something. And even here, we get that pause when Spike sees that Buffy is about to be killed. He’d rather she not be killed. Not enough to do anything more about it. But still, it’s a seed. Spike helped to save the world. And he’s not going to walk away being sorry that the world was saved or that Buffy survived -- he wanted both those outcomes. We’ll see that little spark of interest in the good when Spike returns in season 4.
Angel v. Spike. So it’s worth pausing to compare our two vampires. Angel wants to destroy the world. Spike has already pointed out the irrationality of that desire. Angel’s not stupid. To find his motivation, consider that last we saw Angel he was scrubbing himself raw trying to get the feeling of love off of him in IOHEFY. Angel so hates love, he’d rather destroy everything than succumb to it. Both Spike and Angel prioritize love. It’s just that Spike prioritizes it as something he wants, and Angel prioritizes it as something to be avoided at all costs. That’s the essential difference between the two vampires and it drives their divergent trajectories. The surface impression of Angel as the good champion and Spike as the evil villain masks the truth of both of them. But this season cleverly tips its hand by having Angel be the one to set the apocalypse in motion, and Spike be the one to collaborate with Buffy to stop it.
There’s another hint of the Angel/Spike inversion in Whistler’s maddeningly opaque pronouncements. Whistler reveals that this was supposed to be Angel’s big day. He was going to be the one to stop Acathla, when in fact, he’s the one who activates Acathla. Whistler then tells Buffy the good news: “in the end, you’re always by yourself. You’re all you’ve got. That’s the point.” This would seem to be the sad and inescapable truth, and is old news to Buffy. But, in the very next scene, Spike makes his big appearance and shows that Buffy and Whistler were wrong. The Powers That Be thought Angel would be the hero, but Spike jumps in to take that role.
Spike/Dru. A little more on Spike’s move here. In this episode, he betrays Angel and Drusilla, striking out against Angel physically and then knocking Dru unconscious. He then drives away cuddling up to an unconscious Dru. Despite being consistently awful to him by carrying on with each other, Angel and Dru have been pretty forthright in the last few episodes. So the betrayal is interesting. If Spike were acting to save the world, of course it’s the right thing. But as Maggie established, that’s not his primary motivation. His primary motivation is to get Dru back. But he goes about expressing his affection for Dru by blatantly ignoring her wishes.
Now one can argue that Spike’s behaviour here toward Drusilla is justified under vampire logic. This is somewhat justified by Spike’s later claim in Lovers Walk that Dru would actually want him to tie her up and torture her. My response is that Drusilla’s awful cheating girlfriend-ness is actually something that could happen with humans as well, and while it’s reasonable to, say, dump someone for that it’s not okay for humans to respond by knocking them out and driving them to another city. As with Joyce, there’s an element here of desperation in Spike’s move, because he feels he has no other power in the relationship. But it is a mark against his understanding of love, where being with Dru is more important than her wishes, and leaving her is not an option. His cradling unconscious Dru as he drives away is a lovely image: it suggests to me that while Spike definitely prefers someone to choose to be with him consciously, he’ll take whatever he can get. It’s a long road before he’ll have real respect for both himself and the women he cares about.
Spuffy Foreshadowing. They naturally take to fighting together, with Spike punching out an attacking vampire before tossing him to Buffy to be staked. He picks up wordlessly on her attempt to lie to Joyce about what she’s really been doing. He sits in the living room with Joyce with the awkward air of a young man come a’ courtin’ (as the script describes the scene). And he really is concerned when he sees her about to be killed. The ‘retcon’ that he was already obsessed with Buffy does no violence to the story we have before us.
We also see the first instance of Buffy lying to the Scoobies about Spike’s good deeds. Here, she doesn’t reveal to Willow how she knows where Angel and Giles are.
Normal Again. While we’re on the subject of ‘retcons’ it’s worth briefly observing that Joyce’s cluelessness is a bit hard to square with the season 6 revelation that Buffy had been in a mental hospital because of her delusions of being a slayer. It’s possible to make arguments that Joyce is just in deep denial and that for some reason she makes no reference to the recurrence of Buffy’s vampire issues. But this isn’t the seamless retcon that Spike’s longstanding attraction to Buffy is.
Xander. I’d call this section becoming Xander if his actions in this episode had a permanent impact on his story. But instead, the issues involved in Xander’s infamous lie don’t explicitly surface until season 7 and then only in passing. Xander took his stand against Angel last episode. He acts on that stand by withholding information from Buffy as she went into battle. We can dress his lie up with motives about wanting to keep Buffy focused, etc. But we already know that there’s a personal motivation fueling his actions. Xander is the focus of Buffy’s tensions/difficulties with the Scoobies going forward through season 3. But when Angel leaves the show, that story line drops out and it does not seem to have long run repercussions on his relationship with Buffy. In season 3, though, we will still have much to say about the divisions among the Scoobies that center on Angel’s role in Buffy’s life.
My tentative theory on why Xander’s lie seems to evaporate as a story line is that there is a profound power shift that occurs between Xander and Buffy. He tried in Becoming 1 to lead a revolt against her leadership. He lost. Willow was appalled at him; Giles offended and angered. Without debating the merits of his arguments, they worked in concert on the resurrection spell he opposed and she wanted so badly. So, the Xander we see delivering the lie is a Xander who has lost the main war and is waging a rear-guard guerrilla action. To get to what he thinks is the right outcome, he has to resort to a ruse, to take what little scope of action is available to him in his diminished role as messenger boy. When Season 3 starts, however, the tables are reversed. Xander will again confront Buffy about running away, but this time he’ll have the support of Willow, Giles (to a certain extent) and even Joyce. Buffy will realize at that juncture that in order to keep her friends -- which is pretty much all that she has left -- she will be the one who has to make up to them. And that’s the way things will remain: in many important ways, Buffy will need her friends more than they need her -- at least, than they need her as Buffy vs. their need for her as the Slayer. From her position of social weakness, she won’t be able to hold Xander’s feet to the fire for his efforts to get Angel killed.
Good points, both. I think it’s a bit hard to explain what I think is going on with Xander--and why he’s Becoming here--without starting earlier in the episode. In When She Was Bad we discussed how Willow is in some senses a more real person to Xander than Buffy is. We see that again here. He hugs Buffy to protect her from the cops, and she jokes, “That was about equal parts protecting me and copping a feel, right?” The joke doesn’t exactly land: Buffy’s misjudging Xander’s emotional state, because he’s really not in a mood where his crush on Buffy enters into his mind. Willow is hurt. It’s Xander who called Willow’s parents (connection to their shared childhood); but he didn’t even think of calling Oz, who is a new element in her life (and competitor for attention). He has a few nice moments with Cordelia, with a kindness and mutual respect the two don’t normally. But it’s clear where his heart is: it’s with Willow.
In the hospital, Xander talks to Willow. He tells her how much he needs her and how much he misses her, appealing to their long friendship. He says he loves her. And she wakes up and calls Oz’ name. I nattered on at length in Inca Mummy Girl about how, emotionally, Xander and Willow represent some of the same thing to each other: it’s comfort and connection to their childhood. In this theory, Xander knew intuitively that Willow couldn’t provide what he needed in a relationship if he was going to grow up and move away from the child she knows him as. Well here the consequences finally sink in. He can’t both want to grow up (have a relationship without Willow) and hang onto everything from his childhood (his close relationship with Willow) at the same time. Willow as someone who would never leave Xander, who would always be there for him when he needed her, is a painful illusion to lose, especially with the knowledge that he sat by and watched as it happened. I think he’s still not particularly interested in her romantically, and has romantic needs that she can’t meet. But it hurts not to be Willow’s everything anymore (especially when he’s finally made his breakthrough admission that he loves her, and she responds by calling out Oz’s name. Ouch). That Willow refuses to listen to him (“resolve face!”) just hurts more.
So onto the lie. One of my favourite observations about Xander’s Lie comes from Spring Summers’ Spikecentricity reviews. When Xander shows up to help Buffy, he describes himself as a frightened guy with a rock. In the previous episode, Spike described Angel as just a guy with a rock [Acathla]. The parallel connects Xander to Angel in two ways: 1) it shows that Xander, like Angel, has real power at this moment-maybe even the power over whether the world survives; and 2) (my observation, not Spring’s) it shows that Xander’s power lies in the ability to use words (a lie, a ritual) to destroy. The fate of the world hangs in the balance, and the only possible contribution Xander can make is in acting as the gatekeeper for information that could lead to Angel’s salvation or death. In fact it’s a rather Watcher-ly moment, where the control of information is used to get what Xander believes is the good, world-saving outcome-he gives up trust in and emotional support of his friends, both Buffy and Willow. More to the point, he is taking the big risk that Buffy and Willow won’t forgive him if they found out about the fact that he lied. I don’t deny Xander’s petty reasons for wanting Angel dead, or at wanting to assert what little power he has. Even more damning, I think he has personal resentments against both Buffy and Willow as set up by the episode: there’s some resentment that Buffy nearly got Willow killed and resentment that Willow is moving on from him, that makes him willing to betray both of them. Simply put, at this moment he’s a mess. But I think he is consciously acting out of an impulse toward the mission, so great that he’s prioritizing it over his friendships. (If nothing else, this might explain the placement of Go Fish, which is in part about Xander taking a lot of agency in the mission, going undercover and all.) His reward for his attempt at Watcherly behaviour is that when he goes to save Giles’ life, he gets reminded again that Giles doesn’t particularly care for him. I’m glad you mentioned that little scene, because it’s a little detail that speaks volumes about where Xander stands in Giles’ eyes (and the fact that Xander knows it). I’m actually very agnostic on the question of whether the Lie was the right thing to do or not (as am I). The hurt comes later when the Lie is never confessed and hangs over things forever. It’s a great point that it drives an unnecessary wedge between Willow and Buffy. (Which actually makes for a third parallel with Angel, who almost reflexively drove wedges between friends.) I agree that Xander’s motives are not entirely selfish. But it is what’s going to become a steady refrain a decision born of mixed motives. We don’t know how he’d have analyzed the situation if he didn’t have all those personal considerations in play. Agreed on all counts. Honestly, fate of the world in the balance, I can forgive a lot. The biggest problem with Xander’s lie is that he never owns up to it, and it just continues to fester in Buffy’s mind. Obviously she never forgets it, or else she wouldn’t let it out in Selfless.
So what is the arc significance? As with Strudel I think the answer lies in the group dynamics. But I see it a bit differently. It’s true he’s got a lot of social power at the beginning of season three. But by the end of the season he’s lost most of it. How? In Revelations he tries to get Angel killed again, with a viciousness that I think is not unrelated to guilt about the lie here. He stops in order to save an unconscious Giles (a reference to the unconscious Giles in this episode) and eats crow about his behaviour to Buffy; he loses the moral high ground on Angel and never takes it back. Meanwhile, he gets Willow back after he thought he’d lost her, and as a result of his infidelity with her he loses both Willow and Cordelia. In a period of two episodes, Xander loses his feeling of having the moral high ground, his Angel vendetta, his position as Buffy’s right hand, his relationship with Cordelia and the closeness of his connection to Willow. Basically, everything in one fell swoop, and all of it has roots in this episode, in the hospital bed scene with Willow and the lie he told to Buffy. By The Zeppo, Xander is conscious of the fact that his social power has been almost entirely depleted. And in the series structure, an episode after his two-episode series of losses, Anya comes into town, and (arguably) the second act of his story begins.
Becoming Willow. We already covered this. Of note here is simply that Willow actually is seized by something when she does the spell to curse Angel, and that Cordelia and Oz are unclear whether it’s a good thing. The question gets obliquely raised in the Scooby conversation at the end of the episode. It’s so quietly done you’d never notice on first watch that Becoming represents a signal change for Willow as well, much less the radically dangerous change it turns out to be.
One element wasn’t discussed too much in the review to part I, so I’ll say it here: Willow’s spell is an attempt to fix something that’s wrong. Willow’s curse will make Angelus into Angel and make everything all better. It’s Willow’s first big attempt at fixing/healing with one grand gesture. That it ends in disaster foreshadows how Willow’s other such grand gestures will frequently go. She needs to come to terms with the fact that some things in the world can’t be fixed or healed, and certainly not through magical shortcuts. (nice point. This is actually a well-established facet of Willow’s personality, even pre-magic Willow. Prior to this, there have been several instances of Willow trying to will things to be good by wishing them to be so. The magic gives her a tool to take this wishing to a new level, but it seldom works as she wishes.)
On the Buffy/Willow front: there is real damage done to Buffy and Willow’s relationship by Xander’s lie, which can never exactly be repaired. Willow absolutely had some selfish reasons for doing the spell. But Buffy wanted the spell to be done in the previous episode--and besides, whatever Buffy wants or doesn’t want, an Angel with a soul is less likely to perform the ritual to end the world, so the ensoulment seems like a damn good plan. (Keep in mind, too, that Willow couldn’t know that closing Acathla would require sending Angel into hell.) So all well and good. But by failing to tell Buffy about Willow’s plan, and by actually indicating that Willow had the opposite message, Xander makes Buffy feel even more alone (Willow did want to help restore Angel, but now doesn’t), and makes Willow seem particularly cruel and capricious. Consider what it means, for Buffy to think that Willow performed the spell and not only didn’t bother trying to tell Buffy about it, but gave a specific message unrelated to it. It makes Buffy angrier at Willow and more disconnected. And since this misunderstanding is never cleared up, Buffy makes that much less sense to Willow as well.
While performing the spell, Willow has a bandage above her eye about where Spike’s scar is. After the spell, Willow is in a wheelchair, shortly after Spike so dramatically got out of one. I think this is the start of the paralleling of Spike and Willow that continues through the series, with the two on opposite tracks up until Grave. (They are also paralleled in season seven, but are somewhat more heading in the same direction there.) Here we see it begin: Willow, for mostly good but some selfish reasons, performs the spell that starts her on her journey into the dark; Spike, for mostly selfish but some good reasons, performs the act that starts him on his journey into the light. Two to Go/Grave are littered with references to Becoming, incidentally.
Giles. He’s a tough buzzard. I love the ‘tutu’ line. But he betrays the world for love. It’s a mirror of what Buffy’s been about all season long. I suspect this may have something to do with his compassion for Buffy on her return in season 3 when he’s the only person in her life to welcome her back with genuine concern for her.
Cordelia. In an episode full of horrible intra-Scoobie dynamics, I wanted to point out one of the better moments: Cordelia’s honest admission that she ran like a coward, and Buffy’s simple, but forgiving, reply that it was the right thing to do. It’s a nice connection. Cordelia’s simple, supportive offer to get coffee for Xander, and his gratefulness for it, is another such moment. It’s also a nice moment for Buffy since it’s a rare occasion on which she drops the snark and deals with Cordelia with respect. I think the detente between them is a measure of the gravity of the situation.
So that’s it for season 2. With the exception of Go Fish (which still sets up Xander’s commitment to the mission and thus sets up The Lie) and (possibly) Bad Eggs (which foregrounds the sexual component of B/A right before Surprise), there is no episode that’s not in service of the main arc. It’s a season that was plotted clearly from the start to land at that exquisitely painful moment when Buffy sacrifices her heart and begins the process of slowly turning to stone. Her fate was arguably not sealed, however. Had Angel not come back and had Faith not arrived, it’s possible that Buffy could have mourned her losses and moved on. It is time to turn to season 3 to chart just how it is that Buffy missed her chance to get past her Angel-trauma.