Notes on Buffy 3.02: Dead Man's Party
Standard disclaimer: I'll often speak of foreshadowing, but that doesn't mean I'm at all committing to the idea that there was some fixed design from the word go -- it's a short hand for talking about the resonances that end up in the text as it unspools.
Standard spoiler warning: The notes are written for folks who have seen all of BtVS and AtS. I'll be spoiling through the comics as well. Basically -- if you are a spoiler-phobe and haven't seen or read it all, read further at your own risk.
Standard Credits: I've written the material in black; Strudel (aka my Bro) writes in blue; local_max writes in purple. Or at least, that's what they've done when I finish editing and formatting.
Buffy 3.02 Dead Man’s Party, In Which Buffy’s Homecoming Celebration Becomes a Firing Squad
Joyce puts up a zombie summoning tribal mask to cheer up her bedroom, and Buffy notes immediately that far from being cheery, the mask is angry at the room. The metaphor is very thin, in an episode in which the Scoobies and Joyce welcome back Buffy with cheery smiles that are masks for a good deal of anger. The mask raises the dead and with it all of the buried anger at Buffy, but when the mask is destroyed, the cheerful masks are put back in place. The anger may be re-buried by the end of the episode, but as the season unfolds we find that it is not really gone.
The Cold Shoulder. As we’ll see below, the Scoobies and Joyce all have real grievances with Buffy. What they pointedly fail to do is simply articulate their anger towards Buffy. There are at least two reasons why they play it that way. First, they really are glad to see Buffy, and so they feel that the appropriate emotion should be one of welcome -- and they thus try to suppress their anger. Second, they might be afraid that if they express their anger, Buffy would just compound the injury by running away again. Indeed, when Buffy encounters the cold shoulder that is the first expression of their anger, she does go to her room to start packing.
A third (not unconnected) reason is that I think the Scoobies (and to a lesser extent Joyce) are simply hardening all their emotions around Buffy, with anger just part of the package. Some of this is from learning to adapt to life without Buffy. And there is real risk to opening themselves back up emotionally to Buffy, when she might up and leave again.
The anger first comes at Buffy in the form of a cold shoulder along with a disingenuousness about that cold shoulder. When Buffy asks to hang with them, Xander simply says he’s too busy. Willow makes a date, only to break it. They then organize a party to welcome Buffy home, but immediately look for ways to avoid interacting with her. Xander is even explicit about the reasons for doing so: conversation would simply turn into an expression of their anger, though none of the other Scoobies are tactless enough to say so out loud. Joyce does this by inviting her friend Pat. The Scoobies do it by converting the party into a hootenanny. Buffy tries to confront Willow about it, but Willow straight up lies, telling her there’s no problem, while being manifestly unwilling to actually talk to Buffy. We could say that the cold shoulder is a mirror of Buffy’s own tendency to shut people out of her life. In any case, the cold shoulder produces the entirely predictable result, Buffy decides to bail.
This finally leads to the open argument. Willow leads it off. Joyce picks it up. And Xander brings it home with the full escalation. Let’s take the issues up one at a time.
The Explosion. Willow leads with anger over Buffy not having let anyone know where she was, and about her having redefined their relationship. (The Scoobies had no choice in the matter). When Buffy says she was going through a lot, Willow has an opportunity to talk about how Buffy shuts her out. And she does, sort of. But it very quickly swerves to the real beef. Willow has had a lot of big stuff going on and Buffy wasn’t there for her. The tenor of this complaint along with the first one about the Scoobies not having a choice is an complaint about her status in the group and especially vis a vis Buffy. It’s all about Buffy. Buffy’s absence brought that home. Willow doesn’t like it at all. On the one hand, this is a fair complaint. Buffy does assume everything is about her. Willow is going through big changes. On the other hand, Buffy is dealing with issues that are orders of magnitude bigger than the ones confronting Willow. See our discussion in the notes to Becoming, Part II for a summary of everything that’s in play for Buffy. Suffice to say that Buffy’s problems are existential, while Willow’s are more like ordinary teenager, growing up stuff. It’s a situation that would be hard to adjudicate fairly -- to give Willow the weight she wants (and deserves) while retaining a sense of how much more staggering Buffy’s burdens are. In any case, this is the first big sounding of the set of issues that are going to haunt Buffy and Willow’s friendship going forward. It’s the underlying issue, erupting into anger because it is against the backdrop of a real sense of abandonment by her friend.
That abandonment is also punctuated by Buffy’s quick dismissal of Willow’s indicating that she’d like to know why Buffy left-“You wouldn’t understand.” Buffy’s not wrong that Willow wouldn’t. But it still hurts.
Willow’s desire for Buffy to be in her life, to help her with her dating woes and witchcraft, is tied to two big things. The first is that Buffy is one of the biggest reasons Willow found the nerve to explore both. The second is that Willow’s first major foray into witchcraft (while in a hospital bed because of a vamp attack from Angel) was done to help Buffy with her love life, which was what immediately preceded Buffy’s abandonment. It’s not that Willow didn’t have her own reasons for doing the spell for herself, but the reasons she was most conscious of were tied to Buffy. That she felt alone implies that she didn’t feel she could confide properly in Xander about either witchcraft or Oz, which makes sense given their disagreement over the Angel restoration spell and the still-alive unresolved feelings between Willow and Xander.
Willow is the least confrontational of the three major contributors to the argument. I think she may be the least angry. I think she’s also the most afraid of any confrontation in general, and the one who would feel guiltiest about not having the feelings of joy she should have on her friend’s return. Her cold shoulder is very focused on avoiding dealing with Buffy while trying to maintain a thin veneer of appearing to be Buffy’s friend. (Note her language to Buffy: “You were my best friend.”) She went up to Buffy’s room with a sad, guilty look on her face, right before discovering Buffy packing. Was she going to try to explain herself, open up a little to Buffy? In their argument, Willow does elide over Buffy’s trauma (and she doesn’t consider how much worse Buffy’s trauma might be than her own) to talk about her own issues, but she is the one to state explicitly that she wants to know why Buffy left. She and Buffy seem somewhat willing to connect before Joyce comes in. Does Willow’s switching to be more confrontational when Joyce shows up angrily show a tendency to get caught up in the emotions of others or simply an unwillingness to maintain a confrontation when she’s alone and not in the protection of a crowd? I think it’s a bit of both.
Joyce is angry that Buffy feels she can take off whenever she pleases. She then insists on having her meltdown in public. Again, the main first issue is about the hell it was for Joyce to not know where Buffy was, to not know if Buffy was alright. But behind that we get an airing of a different set of emotions. Buffy’s rejoinder to Joyce’s first outburst is that Joyce herself had told Buffy to leave. Joyce responds that it’s unfair for Buffy to have expected Joyce to be able to handle the situation, and that Buffy’s choice was excessively punitive. In other words, she’s especially angry because she feels guilty about her own role, and feels that although she was guilty of handling thing badly she did not deserve the scale of punishment Buffy inflicted on her. There’s an irony here because Buffy, of course, wasn’t doing this to punish Joyce. The gap between Joyce’s perception of what happened and the reality is that Buffy is much more central to Joyce’s life than Joyce is to Buffy’s. And that’s part of Joyce’s anger as well.
I want to step in to comment on Joyce’s behaviour in the episode proper. She doesn’t express too much outright affection for Buffy. What she does do is focus very strongly on her role as Buffy’s caretaker. She tries to give Buffy food; she wants to drive her around. She is clearly worried that Buffy might not come back when she goes out to see Willow and Xander. She spends much of her time focusing on Buffy’s schooling; she organizes a dinner in Buffy’s honour. None of this is what Buffy really wants. But Buffy does need someone to try their damnedest to get her into a school. At one point, Joyce pushes for Buffy to tell people about her calling; she’s convinced that the police and Snyder would make allowances for Buffy’s calling. I think she’s simply projecting her own wish that Buffy had told her about her calling before onto others, and trying to convince herself that her poor handling of Buffy was only a result of Buffy keeping her calling from her. And she does try to be supportive of Buffy being the slayer here, despite some worries about it (“will you be slaying?”). Joyce is upset, and tells Pat as much; but she is trying to do well by Buffy in the non-emotional parenting categories.
Xander is the harshest and most confrontational. He’s been that way from the start. When Buffy first encounters him in the alley he’s very remote. He doesn’t pretend to make a date with her the way Willow did. And he’s the one who insists on prolonging the public confrontation against Buffy. Buffy gets very upset with him saying that nobody understands what she was going through. Her anger on this is particularly visceral -- because Xander is a primary reason why Buffy couldn’t turn to the Scoobies for comfort. As Buffy tells him now. Xander wants to downplay Buffy’s problem as ‘boyfriend’ troubles, which completely misses everything that Angel is to Buffy. Cordy is brought on at this point to pretty much spell it out -- Buffy is a freak, Angel is freaky enough to be her boyfriend (to her credit, Cordelia is trying to help Buffy here, I think). Buffy’s appalled by the candid airing of her real issues. (Buffy’s quick assault on Cordelia for trying to help reminds us that at least some of Buffy’s alone-ness is her own doing. As insensitive as Cordelia is in her comments, her attempt to help was genuine, but Buffy is, understandably, too upset to see that.) But the episode does make clear that Xander himself is nowhere close to understanding what Angel means to Buffy. And that’s the heart of the rift in Scoobieville. They do not understand Buffy’s calling or what it costs her. And in this episode, they give her zero credit for having special concerns that contributed to her own (admittedly bad) choice to just run away.
It’s interesting how Xander starts his attack on Buffy through others. First, he raises how Buffy hurt Joyce, then Willow. This is similar to the way he has been forced to operate (see his lie about what Willow said to try to get Buffy to kill Angel for him). (He does this early in the episode too: he lets slip his anger when Buffy is about to knock on Giles’ door, but frames it as reasons Giles would be angry, not him.) When Buffy responds by saying, accurately, that he had made it impossible to talk to him, he stops hiding behind other’s grievances and goes on the attack directly. He says “Look. I'm sorry that your honey was a demon, but most girls don't hop a Greyhound over boy troubles.” Unpack that one: “Honey” is belittling, “demon” reduces Angel to one thing; “most girls” are what Buffy, fundamentally is not; “hop a Greyhound” makes an existential crisis look frivolous; and “boy troubles” hardly captures what it means when someone you love has betrayed you and you had to kill him (even granting Xander the incorrect belief that Angel’s soul wasn’t restored -- a topic Xander is foreclosing from being discussed -- he is still way, way off in his characterization). In other words, Xander is systematically deligitimizing Buffy’s entire experience. Thus, we have “Perspective Guy” failing to see how tainted his perspective is, while trying to annihilate Buffy’s perspective without even knowing what it was.
So why does Xander never make reference to his own feelings, and only to how Buffy hurt others or to why Buffy was simply wrong? Partly, I think Xander likes using others or his “perspective guy” “objective” take to express his feelings because it lets him feel he has the moral high ground; partly, I think his insecurities and feelings of worthlessness mean he doesn’t feel he can express anger on behalf of himself. Further, his harshness in arguing probably comes from the verbal (and probably physical) abuse of his upbringing. He’s learned how to go on the offensive in an argument, presumably the hard way.
While Willow and Joyce both make it clear that Buffy’s decision to leave hurt them, and are upset about an asymmetry in their relationship, Xander never does. But Xander’s relationship with Buffy has always been defined by asymmetry: he dug her, and she didn’t dig him. Following up on Strudel’s observation that his preoccupation with Cordelia has pushed Buffy out her thoughts, and my theory that Xander’s anger toward Buffy is comparable to post-breakup bitterness, note the way he flaunts his relationship with Cordelia in this episode. He can’t hang out with Buffy because he’s tied up with Cordelia. He makes out with Cordy in front of Buffy, rather than taking any time to talk to her. He was very happy to see Cordy in Anne so his feelings for her are real, but his goal here is, I think, to show Buffy how not into Buffy he is. His invocation of Angel contains some of the usual mix, with a hefty dose of jealousy.
Note how this scene resembles the Scoobies’ defection during the slayerette revolt in Season 7. It is noteworthy the way they choose to save their anger for the moment of maximum effect: all together they attack her, along with her mother (a role to be played by Dawn in Season 7), and in front of a crowd. This will get echoed again when they confront her with their knowledge of Angel’s return. It is an all-out, enveloping assault. Of course, by the time Empty Places has rolled around, the dynamic is different in other ways. It’ll definitely be interesting to trace what issues are still in play in season 7 and what issues have mutated or changed all together.
Indeed, the numbers game is very important; the argument just gets worse and worse from Buffy vs. Willow (manageable) to Buffy vs. Willow and Joyce (bad) to Buffy vs. everyone (terrible). They all fall into a mob mentality pretty quickly in a group, which is another of the season’s references to group dynamics and the power of community action. This is, of course, layered on top of the fact that the moment that incites the big argument is Buffy’s decision to start to run away again. It’s easy to see why the Scoobies and especially Joyce would read this runaway as frivolous and unconscionable. It feeds all their righteous indignation, and gives them all the feeling of having the moral high ground. (And from that vantage, they have no way of seeing how they have pushed her away.)
The confrontation is not remotely heading for any resolution, and instead seems to be about to escalate into violence, when the zombies who are the very thin metaphor for all these issues burst into the party. What follows is a big battle where the Scoobies have to band together to fight off the killer zombies. That deescalates the tension and they come together at the end as though nothing happened. It’s a clever irony. The episode is about the fact that issues that one tries to bury will rise up and haunt you, but its resolution comes when the Scoobies collectively decide to rebury their grievances. Landmines there still are, and they will explode again in Revelations.
Nighthawk. The Scoobies first meet Buffy when they’re in the process of trying to slay (i.e. trying to do “her job”). They don’t seem competent; Buffy needs to save them. This immediately puts the Scoobies at a power disadvantage: they are embarrassed to seem so helpless upon her return. As they knock on Giles’ door, Xander mentions Buffy abandoning her post. Once inside, Xander casually mentions that the Scoobies can continue slaying while Buffy settles in. Buffy responds that she wants to get back into the routine, including “slaying...you know, kid’s stuff.” She compliments them (somewhat patronizingly?) on their slaying outfit, and Willow brags that they’re killing 9/10 (well, 6/10) vamps. Later in the episode, Cordelia and Xander avoid talking to Buffy and focus instead on how sexy Xander the male slayer (“Nighthawk!”) is. During the big confrontation, Buffy throws Nighthawk, and by extension, the whole Scooby slaying venture, in Xander’s face as stupid.
The whole back and forth is really interesting. Xander is trying to establish that the Scoobies are self-sufficient, which fits in with his attempt to make the mission His Own toward the end of season two, with Go Fish and with the Lie. Willow seems to be bragging about it more to get Buffy’s attention and approval than anything else, but again she’s looking for validation that she can survive without Buffy. Buffy, while fairly polite about the gang’s attempts at slaying until provoked, doesn’t seem particularly impressed with their attempt, with the fruits of several months’ labour, which is kids’ stuff to Buffy. And while Xander’s obviously been cruel, there is some nastiness in the way she turns the geekiness of his attempt at slaying back on him in the big fight.
All this culminates in the mostly smooth zombie-fighting that goes on in the end. Buffy is the slayer and wins the fight. But Xander follows her orders unquestioningly and states that he has her back. The order that’s restored is one in which they all fight (even Joyce, who gets a taste of what Buffy’s life is like), with Buffy as the leader. It’s weird that part of the foundation for the gang really is violence against demons. But there is a genuine connection there centred around fighting, where both Buffy’s exceptionality and the Scoobies’ contributions to the fight matter, and they all move to protect each other and act with mutual respect. So their blowout is temporarily resolved as a result of their being reminded that they work well as a unit. But they remain at cross-purposes: Buffy want the Scoobies for emotional support, but where they want to support her/help her is in the fight. Buffy can save them, but they really want her to validate them as important.
Pat. The person who becomes the zombie demon incarnate, is Joyce’s friend Pat. The episode’s metaphor, as Maggie states, is about cheery smiles masking real anger. Pat is always cheery on the surface, with hostility underneath: but she makes passive-aggressive swipes at Buffy’s runaway status and nudges Joyce into admitting that she is unhappy with Buffy’s return. So Pat is the embodiment of the attitude that Buffy has to slay. Killing Pat apparently frees Buffy of the passive-aggressive cold shoulder Pat represents.
But not so fast. Pat seems like a bitch, certainly. But she was also Joyce’s only friend for several months. And she gets Joyce to admit real feelings. And Pat, unlike Ted, wasn’t actually a monster, until Joyce’s mask made her one. This hints that the real problem of the episode lies with Joyce (and the Scoobies), not with Pat. Buffy has slayed the thin mask Joyce was wearing. But in doing so, she has also deprived Joyce of her second (and last) onscreen friend outside Buffy’s circle, and makes her even more dependent on Buffy than she was before. I’m not suggesting this is in any way Buffy’s fault. But the rebuilding of Buffy/Joyce requires someone to be literally demonized. Note that Pat, the unfamiliar intruder in Buffy’s life, foreshadows in some respects the role Faith will play this season.
If the mask is a metaphor for anger, then Pat is the sacrifice for their collective failure to manage their anger towards Buffy.
Giles. Through all of this Giles has been the one trying to be most helpful. On Buffy’s return, he’s the one who is genuinely relieved, as we see in a touching private moment in his kitchen. Giles questions the choice to turn Buffy’s party into a hootenanny. Giles does the research on the zombie problem, and comes to the rescue. But he gets there too late to be of any real assistance. However, he does get to make up for that by being the one to force Snyder into letting Buffy back into school, in one of those rare but cool Ripper moments of his. (Earlier on, of course, he hotwired his own car, and described it as like riding a bloody bicycle.) Giles should have his own buried issues with Buffy. And we’ll want to track them going forward. There’s not a hint of them coming out here.
Giles continues researching the cat well into Buffy’s hootenanny. Buffy misses him, and asks Xander if Giles was supposed to be late; Giles’ non-appearance ends up making Buffy feel even lonelier and more unloved. It’s not Giles’ fault; he’s doing research and it turns out to be very important. But it also hints that how ever deep and powerful Giles’ feelings for Buffy are, they primarily express themselves in terms of his job as Buffy’s Watcher doing research. And this seems to me to dovetail nicely with Joyce providing guardianship and the Scoobies providing help in slaying zombies. They do help Buffy, but not in the way she most wants them to, in providing emotional support.
The Final Dynamic. The episode concludes with Buffy conceding the entire moral high ground to Willow, and by extension to the Scoobies. It’s a way of getting peace. And to the extent that the Scoobies do have a beef (and they do), it’s a real movement towards peace. But it comes at the expense of denying Buffy’s side of things. And so the seeds are sown for Buffy to keep Angel’s return a secret. Because the Scoobies have now doubled down on a dynamic that makes it impossible for Buffy to really share the profound pain of her calling with them. For the moment, the power in the Scooby dynamic rests on the side of Xander and Willow. Buffy is the one who is beholding to them.
What’s interesting about this is that in great part Willow and Xander’s doubling down, as you say, happened because they felt she had too much power over them. And in fact, in many respects, Buffy still does: like it or not, she is still at the centre of the group, and she (arguably) has the power to hurt them more by leaving than any individual one of her friends has to hurt her. Do not delete this point!!! It’s important.
The final dynamic, as you call it, is not surprising given the pre-explosion dynamic. Nobody really wants to hear what Buffy has been through. They inanely ask her about vacations in Belgium and let’s hear the dirt. Buffy tries to reach out to them, but they avoid her. Buffy tries to talk to Willow at the party and Willow, literally and metaphorically, can’t hear her. (I do think Willow was going to reach out to her before she found her packing and the anger and hurt returned.) Then they have their grand confrontation and it’s not clear that they hear her during all the recriminations. And in the end, Buffy grovels in order to restore the peace.
The question is, why? The Scoobies (and Joyce) fail to show any concern for Buffy as a person here. She is a target for their anger, which does show a connection, albeit a negatively expressed one, but they don’t make any moves before or after the confrontation to understand or relate to her, to reaffirm to her that they love her. They’ve missed the Slayer and it’s jolly good to have one handy when attacked by zombies, but did they miss Buffy? Buffy, meanwhile, knows that she missed them. Without them, she was in hell. As they need her as a slayer (and wait and see what happens when they get another slayer!), she needs them as a protection from being completely and utterly alone. I think from this point forward, we shouldn’t think of Buffy as having friends so much as Buffy having “friends.” She needs these people to take that role, and she’ll kowtow to them if that’s what it takes for them to deign to accept her back.
You asked whether they missed Buffy. But how much did Buffy miss them? I don’t want to overstate the case; obviously Buffy cares about her friends. She says she wanted to call every day. But Anne showed how important an absent Buffy still was to the Scoobies’ lives. Buffy was mentioned constantly. Buffy, by contrast, dreamed of Angel, and was sad about being entirely alone and friendless. She needs the Scoobies to protect her from being alone, certainly, but how deeply is Buffy attached to who they are as people? I’d say she is attached, but it’s not clear to me that Buffy needs Willow qua Willow and Xander qua Xander any more (or less for that matter) than Willow or Xander need Buffy qua Buffy. Which in a way perhaps means that I come to the same conclusion as you (that Xander and Willow are more needed as “friends” than as friends) through a different route. And as I’ve already indicated, I think the Scoobies (mistakenly) assume that the fact that Buffy was able to up and leave means that they care about her more than she cares about them. I think this is a fair point. We don’t see Buffy missing them, and there is the sense that they are primarily a device to keep her out of the void. But if we have some mutual objectification going on, the terms of it are very much stacked against Buffy. Their life without Buffy is happier than her life without them. So, we do see Buffy trying to reach across the divide, and of course, she is forced to hear their angry litany even as she struggles to get a word in. Agreed. Again, this is a numbers game, though. The situation in this episode is everyone (save Giles) vs. Buffy, so banded together the deck is stacked in their favour. If it were just a question of how Buffy would feel without (e.g.) Xander vs. how Xander would feel without Buffy, I’m not sure who would be at a disadvantage. (And we get to see Xander feeling like he is absolutely alone surrounded by friends in The Zeppo.) The Scoobies jockey around in their social standing vis a vis one another all the time. I do think it’s important to note that the person Buffy is mainly thinking about when she is away is Angel. He’s a big wedge between Buffy and the Scoobies on both sides.
Now, by contrast, I do think the Scoobies’ difficulty dealing with the real Buffy may partly indicate that their feelings for her, and attachment to her, are not as strong as they thought. Buffy is at least a little bit a symbol that they rally around, and symbols are supposed to be perfect.
Still, Willow states explicitly that she missed Buffy as a friend. There is a selfish element to her need for a friend, and certainly it’s particularly selfish that she can’t see how much pain Buffy’s in. But still, there is a need there that has nothing to do with Buffy’s slayerness. As far as the Scoobies’ and Joyce’s failure to ask about her or show her much affection, I think they are (as I’ve suggested above) too afraid to care, before the confrontation, and after the confrontation are too deeply invested in maintaining the less-than-stable new status quo. The final scene of the episode has Willow relishing the moral high ground she’s convinced/deluded herself she’s earned, but also has a genuinely affectionate sparring match with Buffy. And the very opening of the next episode has the Scoobies careful of Buffy’s emotional state and deciding to uncouple. There are real problems in Scoobyland, but there is friendship and affection and love there, too. Absolutely. It’s the nature of these notes to explore the buried darkness, but the tensions we examine by no means define the entire relationship. Indeed, it’s a measure of their bonds that they survive the really explosive emotional material that’s buried here.
Angel. Which brings us to Angel. We are reminded of why Buffy needs him so much. In this episode she dreams of him. She is walking alone at school, sensing that her friends have abandoned her. Dream Angel tells her she ought to be afraid of that. Her dream thus confirms that Buffy is likely to give a lot of ground in order to keep her friends. In addition, we get a shout-out to the dream-like/fantasy quality of Buffy’s love for Angel. She asks him if she’s dreaming, and he replies that he’s not the one to ask about that. Buffy and Angel have real reasons to be together, but those real reasons tend to make them both approach their relationship with romantic illusions.
The rift between Buffy and the Scoobies has been hastily reburied. But it’s a fault line. In the next episode, Faith, Hope and Trick, Faith comes onto the scene. Her tragedy is that a lot of the tensions around that fault line are going to be displaced onto her. And they will crush her.
Standard spoiler warning: The notes are written for folks who have seen all of BtVS and AtS. I'll be spoiling through the comics as well. Basically -- if you are a spoiler-phobe and haven't seen or read it all, read further at your own risk.
Standard Credits: I've written the material in black; Strudel (aka my Bro) writes in blue; local_max writes in purple. Or at least, that's what they've done when I finish editing and formatting.
Buffy 3.02 Dead Man’s Party, In Which Buffy’s Homecoming Celebration Becomes a Firing Squad
Joyce puts up a zombie summoning tribal mask to cheer up her bedroom, and Buffy notes immediately that far from being cheery, the mask is angry at the room. The metaphor is very thin, in an episode in which the Scoobies and Joyce welcome back Buffy with cheery smiles that are masks for a good deal of anger. The mask raises the dead and with it all of the buried anger at Buffy, but when the mask is destroyed, the cheerful masks are put back in place. The anger may be re-buried by the end of the episode, but as the season unfolds we find that it is not really gone.
The Cold Shoulder. As we’ll see below, the Scoobies and Joyce all have real grievances with Buffy. What they pointedly fail to do is simply articulate their anger towards Buffy. There are at least two reasons why they play it that way. First, they really are glad to see Buffy, and so they feel that the appropriate emotion should be one of welcome -- and they thus try to suppress their anger. Second, they might be afraid that if they express their anger, Buffy would just compound the injury by running away again. Indeed, when Buffy encounters the cold shoulder that is the first expression of their anger, she does go to her room to start packing.
A third (not unconnected) reason is that I think the Scoobies (and to a lesser extent Joyce) are simply hardening all their emotions around Buffy, with anger just part of the package. Some of this is from learning to adapt to life without Buffy. And there is real risk to opening themselves back up emotionally to Buffy, when she might up and leave again.
The anger first comes at Buffy in the form of a cold shoulder along with a disingenuousness about that cold shoulder. When Buffy asks to hang with them, Xander simply says he’s too busy. Willow makes a date, only to break it. They then organize a party to welcome Buffy home, but immediately look for ways to avoid interacting with her. Xander is even explicit about the reasons for doing so: conversation would simply turn into an expression of their anger, though none of the other Scoobies are tactless enough to say so out loud. Joyce does this by inviting her friend Pat. The Scoobies do it by converting the party into a hootenanny. Buffy tries to confront Willow about it, but Willow straight up lies, telling her there’s no problem, while being manifestly unwilling to actually talk to Buffy. We could say that the cold shoulder is a mirror of Buffy’s own tendency to shut people out of her life. In any case, the cold shoulder produces the entirely predictable result, Buffy decides to bail.
This finally leads to the open argument. Willow leads it off. Joyce picks it up. And Xander brings it home with the full escalation. Let’s take the issues up one at a time.
The Explosion. Willow leads with anger over Buffy not having let anyone know where she was, and about her having redefined their relationship. (The Scoobies had no choice in the matter). When Buffy says she was going through a lot, Willow has an opportunity to talk about how Buffy shuts her out. And she does, sort of. But it very quickly swerves to the real beef. Willow has had a lot of big stuff going on and Buffy wasn’t there for her. The tenor of this complaint along with the first one about the Scoobies not having a choice is an complaint about her status in the group and especially vis a vis Buffy. It’s all about Buffy. Buffy’s absence brought that home. Willow doesn’t like it at all. On the one hand, this is a fair complaint. Buffy does assume everything is about her. Willow is going through big changes. On the other hand, Buffy is dealing with issues that are orders of magnitude bigger than the ones confronting Willow. See our discussion in the notes to Becoming, Part II for a summary of everything that’s in play for Buffy. Suffice to say that Buffy’s problems are existential, while Willow’s are more like ordinary teenager, growing up stuff. It’s a situation that would be hard to adjudicate fairly -- to give Willow the weight she wants (and deserves) while retaining a sense of how much more staggering Buffy’s burdens are. In any case, this is the first big sounding of the set of issues that are going to haunt Buffy and Willow’s friendship going forward. It’s the underlying issue, erupting into anger because it is against the backdrop of a real sense of abandonment by her friend.
That abandonment is also punctuated by Buffy’s quick dismissal of Willow’s indicating that she’d like to know why Buffy left-“You wouldn’t understand.” Buffy’s not wrong that Willow wouldn’t. But it still hurts.
Willow’s desire for Buffy to be in her life, to help her with her dating woes and witchcraft, is tied to two big things. The first is that Buffy is one of the biggest reasons Willow found the nerve to explore both. The second is that Willow’s first major foray into witchcraft (while in a hospital bed because of a vamp attack from Angel) was done to help Buffy with her love life, which was what immediately preceded Buffy’s abandonment. It’s not that Willow didn’t have her own reasons for doing the spell for herself, but the reasons she was most conscious of were tied to Buffy. That she felt alone implies that she didn’t feel she could confide properly in Xander about either witchcraft or Oz, which makes sense given their disagreement over the Angel restoration spell and the still-alive unresolved feelings between Willow and Xander.
Willow is the least confrontational of the three major contributors to the argument. I think she may be the least angry. I think she’s also the most afraid of any confrontation in general, and the one who would feel guiltiest about not having the feelings of joy she should have on her friend’s return. Her cold shoulder is very focused on avoiding dealing with Buffy while trying to maintain a thin veneer of appearing to be Buffy’s friend. (Note her language to Buffy: “You were my best friend.”) She went up to Buffy’s room with a sad, guilty look on her face, right before discovering Buffy packing. Was she going to try to explain herself, open up a little to Buffy? In their argument, Willow does elide over Buffy’s trauma (and she doesn’t consider how much worse Buffy’s trauma might be than her own) to talk about her own issues, but she is the one to state explicitly that she wants to know why Buffy left. She and Buffy seem somewhat willing to connect before Joyce comes in. Does Willow’s switching to be more confrontational when Joyce shows up angrily show a tendency to get caught up in the emotions of others or simply an unwillingness to maintain a confrontation when she’s alone and not in the protection of a crowd? I think it’s a bit of both.
Joyce is angry that Buffy feels she can take off whenever she pleases. She then insists on having her meltdown in public. Again, the main first issue is about the hell it was for Joyce to not know where Buffy was, to not know if Buffy was alright. But behind that we get an airing of a different set of emotions. Buffy’s rejoinder to Joyce’s first outburst is that Joyce herself had told Buffy to leave. Joyce responds that it’s unfair for Buffy to have expected Joyce to be able to handle the situation, and that Buffy’s choice was excessively punitive. In other words, she’s especially angry because she feels guilty about her own role, and feels that although she was guilty of handling thing badly she did not deserve the scale of punishment Buffy inflicted on her. There’s an irony here because Buffy, of course, wasn’t doing this to punish Joyce. The gap between Joyce’s perception of what happened and the reality is that Buffy is much more central to Joyce’s life than Joyce is to Buffy’s. And that’s part of Joyce’s anger as well.
I want to step in to comment on Joyce’s behaviour in the episode proper. She doesn’t express too much outright affection for Buffy. What she does do is focus very strongly on her role as Buffy’s caretaker. She tries to give Buffy food; she wants to drive her around. She is clearly worried that Buffy might not come back when she goes out to see Willow and Xander. She spends much of her time focusing on Buffy’s schooling; she organizes a dinner in Buffy’s honour. None of this is what Buffy really wants. But Buffy does need someone to try their damnedest to get her into a school. At one point, Joyce pushes for Buffy to tell people about her calling; she’s convinced that the police and Snyder would make allowances for Buffy’s calling. I think she’s simply projecting her own wish that Buffy had told her about her calling before onto others, and trying to convince herself that her poor handling of Buffy was only a result of Buffy keeping her calling from her. And she does try to be supportive of Buffy being the slayer here, despite some worries about it (“will you be slaying?”). Joyce is upset, and tells Pat as much; but she is trying to do well by Buffy in the non-emotional parenting categories.
Xander is the harshest and most confrontational. He’s been that way from the start. When Buffy first encounters him in the alley he’s very remote. He doesn’t pretend to make a date with her the way Willow did. And he’s the one who insists on prolonging the public confrontation against Buffy. Buffy gets very upset with him saying that nobody understands what she was going through. Her anger on this is particularly visceral -- because Xander is a primary reason why Buffy couldn’t turn to the Scoobies for comfort. As Buffy tells him now. Xander wants to downplay Buffy’s problem as ‘boyfriend’ troubles, which completely misses everything that Angel is to Buffy. Cordy is brought on at this point to pretty much spell it out -- Buffy is a freak, Angel is freaky enough to be her boyfriend (to her credit, Cordelia is trying to help Buffy here, I think). Buffy’s appalled by the candid airing of her real issues. (Buffy’s quick assault on Cordelia for trying to help reminds us that at least some of Buffy’s alone-ness is her own doing. As insensitive as Cordelia is in her comments, her attempt to help was genuine, but Buffy is, understandably, too upset to see that.) But the episode does make clear that Xander himself is nowhere close to understanding what Angel means to Buffy. And that’s the heart of the rift in Scoobieville. They do not understand Buffy’s calling or what it costs her. And in this episode, they give her zero credit for having special concerns that contributed to her own (admittedly bad) choice to just run away.
It’s interesting how Xander starts his attack on Buffy through others. First, he raises how Buffy hurt Joyce, then Willow. This is similar to the way he has been forced to operate (see his lie about what Willow said to try to get Buffy to kill Angel for him). (He does this early in the episode too: he lets slip his anger when Buffy is about to knock on Giles’ door, but frames it as reasons Giles would be angry, not him.) When Buffy responds by saying, accurately, that he had made it impossible to talk to him, he stops hiding behind other’s grievances and goes on the attack directly. He says “Look. I'm sorry that your honey was a demon, but most girls don't hop a Greyhound over boy troubles.” Unpack that one: “Honey” is belittling, “demon” reduces Angel to one thing; “most girls” are what Buffy, fundamentally is not; “hop a Greyhound” makes an existential crisis look frivolous; and “boy troubles” hardly captures what it means when someone you love has betrayed you and you had to kill him (even granting Xander the incorrect belief that Angel’s soul wasn’t restored -- a topic Xander is foreclosing from being discussed -- he is still way, way off in his characterization). In other words, Xander is systematically deligitimizing Buffy’s entire experience. Thus, we have “Perspective Guy” failing to see how tainted his perspective is, while trying to annihilate Buffy’s perspective without even knowing what it was.
So why does Xander never make reference to his own feelings, and only to how Buffy hurt others or to why Buffy was simply wrong? Partly, I think Xander likes using others or his “perspective guy” “objective” take to express his feelings because it lets him feel he has the moral high ground; partly, I think his insecurities and feelings of worthlessness mean he doesn’t feel he can express anger on behalf of himself. Further, his harshness in arguing probably comes from the verbal (and probably physical) abuse of his upbringing. He’s learned how to go on the offensive in an argument, presumably the hard way.
While Willow and Joyce both make it clear that Buffy’s decision to leave hurt them, and are upset about an asymmetry in their relationship, Xander never does. But Xander’s relationship with Buffy has always been defined by asymmetry: he dug her, and she didn’t dig him. Following up on Strudel’s observation that his preoccupation with Cordelia has pushed Buffy out her thoughts, and my theory that Xander’s anger toward Buffy is comparable to post-breakup bitterness, note the way he flaunts his relationship with Cordelia in this episode. He can’t hang out with Buffy because he’s tied up with Cordelia. He makes out with Cordy in front of Buffy, rather than taking any time to talk to her. He was very happy to see Cordy in Anne so his feelings for her are real, but his goal here is, I think, to show Buffy how not into Buffy he is. His invocation of Angel contains some of the usual mix, with a hefty dose of jealousy.
Note how this scene resembles the Scoobies’ defection during the slayerette revolt in Season 7. It is noteworthy the way they choose to save their anger for the moment of maximum effect: all together they attack her, along with her mother (a role to be played by Dawn in Season 7), and in front of a crowd. This will get echoed again when they confront her with their knowledge of Angel’s return. It is an all-out, enveloping assault. Of course, by the time Empty Places has rolled around, the dynamic is different in other ways. It’ll definitely be interesting to trace what issues are still in play in season 7 and what issues have mutated or changed all together.
Indeed, the numbers game is very important; the argument just gets worse and worse from Buffy vs. Willow (manageable) to Buffy vs. Willow and Joyce (bad) to Buffy vs. everyone (terrible). They all fall into a mob mentality pretty quickly in a group, which is another of the season’s references to group dynamics and the power of community action. This is, of course, layered on top of the fact that the moment that incites the big argument is Buffy’s decision to start to run away again. It’s easy to see why the Scoobies and especially Joyce would read this runaway as frivolous and unconscionable. It feeds all their righteous indignation, and gives them all the feeling of having the moral high ground. (And from that vantage, they have no way of seeing how they have pushed her away.)
The confrontation is not remotely heading for any resolution, and instead seems to be about to escalate into violence, when the zombies who are the very thin metaphor for all these issues burst into the party. What follows is a big battle where the Scoobies have to band together to fight off the killer zombies. That deescalates the tension and they come together at the end as though nothing happened. It’s a clever irony. The episode is about the fact that issues that one tries to bury will rise up and haunt you, but its resolution comes when the Scoobies collectively decide to rebury their grievances. Landmines there still are, and they will explode again in Revelations.
Nighthawk. The Scoobies first meet Buffy when they’re in the process of trying to slay (i.e. trying to do “her job”). They don’t seem competent; Buffy needs to save them. This immediately puts the Scoobies at a power disadvantage: they are embarrassed to seem so helpless upon her return. As they knock on Giles’ door, Xander mentions Buffy abandoning her post. Once inside, Xander casually mentions that the Scoobies can continue slaying while Buffy settles in. Buffy responds that she wants to get back into the routine, including “slaying...you know, kid’s stuff.” She compliments them (somewhat patronizingly?) on their slaying outfit, and Willow brags that they’re killing 9/10 (well, 6/10) vamps. Later in the episode, Cordelia and Xander avoid talking to Buffy and focus instead on how sexy Xander the male slayer (“Nighthawk!”) is. During the big confrontation, Buffy throws Nighthawk, and by extension, the whole Scooby slaying venture, in Xander’s face as stupid.
The whole back and forth is really interesting. Xander is trying to establish that the Scoobies are self-sufficient, which fits in with his attempt to make the mission His Own toward the end of season two, with Go Fish and with the Lie. Willow seems to be bragging about it more to get Buffy’s attention and approval than anything else, but again she’s looking for validation that she can survive without Buffy. Buffy, while fairly polite about the gang’s attempts at slaying until provoked, doesn’t seem particularly impressed with their attempt, with the fruits of several months’ labour, which is kids’ stuff to Buffy. And while Xander’s obviously been cruel, there is some nastiness in the way she turns the geekiness of his attempt at slaying back on him in the big fight.
All this culminates in the mostly smooth zombie-fighting that goes on in the end. Buffy is the slayer and wins the fight. But Xander follows her orders unquestioningly and states that he has her back. The order that’s restored is one in which they all fight (even Joyce, who gets a taste of what Buffy’s life is like), with Buffy as the leader. It’s weird that part of the foundation for the gang really is violence against demons. But there is a genuine connection there centred around fighting, where both Buffy’s exceptionality and the Scoobies’ contributions to the fight matter, and they all move to protect each other and act with mutual respect. So their blowout is temporarily resolved as a result of their being reminded that they work well as a unit. But they remain at cross-purposes: Buffy want the Scoobies for emotional support, but where they want to support her/help her is in the fight. Buffy can save them, but they really want her to validate them as important.
Pat. The person who becomes the zombie demon incarnate, is Joyce’s friend Pat. The episode’s metaphor, as Maggie states, is about cheery smiles masking real anger. Pat is always cheery on the surface, with hostility underneath: but she makes passive-aggressive swipes at Buffy’s runaway status and nudges Joyce into admitting that she is unhappy with Buffy’s return. So Pat is the embodiment of the attitude that Buffy has to slay. Killing Pat apparently frees Buffy of the passive-aggressive cold shoulder Pat represents.
But not so fast. Pat seems like a bitch, certainly. But she was also Joyce’s only friend for several months. And she gets Joyce to admit real feelings. And Pat, unlike Ted, wasn’t actually a monster, until Joyce’s mask made her one. This hints that the real problem of the episode lies with Joyce (and the Scoobies), not with Pat. Buffy has slayed the thin mask Joyce was wearing. But in doing so, she has also deprived Joyce of her second (and last) onscreen friend outside Buffy’s circle, and makes her even more dependent on Buffy than she was before. I’m not suggesting this is in any way Buffy’s fault. But the rebuilding of Buffy/Joyce requires someone to be literally demonized. Note that Pat, the unfamiliar intruder in Buffy’s life, foreshadows in some respects the role Faith will play this season.
If the mask is a metaphor for anger, then Pat is the sacrifice for their collective failure to manage their anger towards Buffy.
Giles. Through all of this Giles has been the one trying to be most helpful. On Buffy’s return, he’s the one who is genuinely relieved, as we see in a touching private moment in his kitchen. Giles questions the choice to turn Buffy’s party into a hootenanny. Giles does the research on the zombie problem, and comes to the rescue. But he gets there too late to be of any real assistance. However, he does get to make up for that by being the one to force Snyder into letting Buffy back into school, in one of those rare but cool Ripper moments of his. (Earlier on, of course, he hotwired his own car, and described it as like riding a bloody bicycle.) Giles should have his own buried issues with Buffy. And we’ll want to track them going forward. There’s not a hint of them coming out here.
Giles continues researching the cat well into Buffy’s hootenanny. Buffy misses him, and asks Xander if Giles was supposed to be late; Giles’ non-appearance ends up making Buffy feel even lonelier and more unloved. It’s not Giles’ fault; he’s doing research and it turns out to be very important. But it also hints that how ever deep and powerful Giles’ feelings for Buffy are, they primarily express themselves in terms of his job as Buffy’s Watcher doing research. And this seems to me to dovetail nicely with Joyce providing guardianship and the Scoobies providing help in slaying zombies. They do help Buffy, but not in the way she most wants them to, in providing emotional support.
The Final Dynamic. The episode concludes with Buffy conceding the entire moral high ground to Willow, and by extension to the Scoobies. It’s a way of getting peace. And to the extent that the Scoobies do have a beef (and they do), it’s a real movement towards peace. But it comes at the expense of denying Buffy’s side of things. And so the seeds are sown for Buffy to keep Angel’s return a secret. Because the Scoobies have now doubled down on a dynamic that makes it impossible for Buffy to really share the profound pain of her calling with them. For the moment, the power in the Scooby dynamic rests on the side of Xander and Willow. Buffy is the one who is beholding to them.
What’s interesting about this is that in great part Willow and Xander’s doubling down, as you say, happened because they felt she had too much power over them. And in fact, in many respects, Buffy still does: like it or not, she is still at the centre of the group, and she (arguably) has the power to hurt them more by leaving than any individual one of her friends has to hurt her. Do not delete this point!!! It’s important.
The final dynamic, as you call it, is not surprising given the pre-explosion dynamic. Nobody really wants to hear what Buffy has been through. They inanely ask her about vacations in Belgium and let’s hear the dirt. Buffy tries to reach out to them, but they avoid her. Buffy tries to talk to Willow at the party and Willow, literally and metaphorically, can’t hear her. (I do think Willow was going to reach out to her before she found her packing and the anger and hurt returned.) Then they have their grand confrontation and it’s not clear that they hear her during all the recriminations. And in the end, Buffy grovels in order to restore the peace.
The question is, why? The Scoobies (and Joyce) fail to show any concern for Buffy as a person here. She is a target for their anger, which does show a connection, albeit a negatively expressed one, but they don’t make any moves before or after the confrontation to understand or relate to her, to reaffirm to her that they love her. They’ve missed the Slayer and it’s jolly good to have one handy when attacked by zombies, but did they miss Buffy? Buffy, meanwhile, knows that she missed them. Without them, she was in hell. As they need her as a slayer (and wait and see what happens when they get another slayer!), she needs them as a protection from being completely and utterly alone. I think from this point forward, we shouldn’t think of Buffy as having friends so much as Buffy having “friends.” She needs these people to take that role, and she’ll kowtow to them if that’s what it takes for them to deign to accept her back.
You asked whether they missed Buffy. But how much did Buffy miss them? I don’t want to overstate the case; obviously Buffy cares about her friends. She says she wanted to call every day. But Anne showed how important an absent Buffy still was to the Scoobies’ lives. Buffy was mentioned constantly. Buffy, by contrast, dreamed of Angel, and was sad about being entirely alone and friendless. She needs the Scoobies to protect her from being alone, certainly, but how deeply is Buffy attached to who they are as people? I’d say she is attached, but it’s not clear to me that Buffy needs Willow qua Willow and Xander qua Xander any more (or less for that matter) than Willow or Xander need Buffy qua Buffy. Which in a way perhaps means that I come to the same conclusion as you (that Xander and Willow are more needed as “friends” than as friends) through a different route. And as I’ve already indicated, I think the Scoobies (mistakenly) assume that the fact that Buffy was able to up and leave means that they care about her more than she cares about them. I think this is a fair point. We don’t see Buffy missing them, and there is the sense that they are primarily a device to keep her out of the void. But if we have some mutual objectification going on, the terms of it are very much stacked against Buffy. Their life without Buffy is happier than her life without them. So, we do see Buffy trying to reach across the divide, and of course, she is forced to hear their angry litany even as she struggles to get a word in. Agreed. Again, this is a numbers game, though. The situation in this episode is everyone (save Giles) vs. Buffy, so banded together the deck is stacked in their favour. If it were just a question of how Buffy would feel without (e.g.) Xander vs. how Xander would feel without Buffy, I’m not sure who would be at a disadvantage. (And we get to see Xander feeling like he is absolutely alone surrounded by friends in The Zeppo.) The Scoobies jockey around in their social standing vis a vis one another all the time. I do think it’s important to note that the person Buffy is mainly thinking about when she is away is Angel. He’s a big wedge between Buffy and the Scoobies on both sides.
Now, by contrast, I do think the Scoobies’ difficulty dealing with the real Buffy may partly indicate that their feelings for her, and attachment to her, are not as strong as they thought. Buffy is at least a little bit a symbol that they rally around, and symbols are supposed to be perfect.
Still, Willow states explicitly that she missed Buffy as a friend. There is a selfish element to her need for a friend, and certainly it’s particularly selfish that she can’t see how much pain Buffy’s in. But still, there is a need there that has nothing to do with Buffy’s slayerness. As far as the Scoobies’ and Joyce’s failure to ask about her or show her much affection, I think they are (as I’ve suggested above) too afraid to care, before the confrontation, and after the confrontation are too deeply invested in maintaining the less-than-stable new status quo. The final scene of the episode has Willow relishing the moral high ground she’s convinced/deluded herself she’s earned, but also has a genuinely affectionate sparring match with Buffy. And the very opening of the next episode has the Scoobies careful of Buffy’s emotional state and deciding to uncouple. There are real problems in Scoobyland, but there is friendship and affection and love there, too. Absolutely. It’s the nature of these notes to explore the buried darkness, but the tensions we examine by no means define the entire relationship. Indeed, it’s a measure of their bonds that they survive the really explosive emotional material that’s buried here.
Angel. Which brings us to Angel. We are reminded of why Buffy needs him so much. In this episode she dreams of him. She is walking alone at school, sensing that her friends have abandoned her. Dream Angel tells her she ought to be afraid of that. Her dream thus confirms that Buffy is likely to give a lot of ground in order to keep her friends. In addition, we get a shout-out to the dream-like/fantasy quality of Buffy’s love for Angel. She asks him if she’s dreaming, and he replies that he’s not the one to ask about that. Buffy and Angel have real reasons to be together, but those real reasons tend to make them both approach their relationship with romantic illusions.
The rift between Buffy and the Scoobies has been hastily reburied. But it’s a fault line. In the next episode, Faith, Hope and Trick, Faith comes onto the scene. Her tragedy is that a lot of the tensions around that fault line are going to be displaced onto her. And they will crush her.