Notes on Buffy 3.08: Lovers Walk
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 3.08 Lovers Walk, in Which Spike Does Couples Counseling.
Last week we got all sorts of internal explosions. This week, hurricane Spike blows into town to finish the job -- setting in motion the events that expose Xander and Willow, and which force Buffy to realize just how much she’s been lying to herself about Angel. Somehow, though, the episode is far more interesting to me in the way it sets up Spike’s very long arc to come. But let’s first take care of business.
Xander/Willow. Like Buffy and Angel last week they struggle to fight off temptation. But with the impending doom scenario they give in and are caught in flagrante by Oz and Cordelia. The interesting move here is that the episode sets up both Oz and Cordelia as sympathetic and undeserving of the betrayal they are about to discover. Cordelia has put pictures of Xander in her locker, Oz gives Willow her pez witch. It’s an invitation to sympathize with the outsiders, both of whom love their respective Scoobies more than they are loved in return. (We also witness Oz and Cordy’s anguish at the possibility that their lovers may die, and they catch the two while in the process of trying to rescue them. Ouch.) When the show started, we sympathized with the Scoobies themselves as the marginalized outsiders. But now they are the ones who are wanted, and they are the ones with the power to reject and hurt. This is an interesting point. All their lives, Willow and Xander have been powerless. But key to both their arcs as the series goes on (especially Willow’s) is that they have never developed the skills for coping with the power to hurt other people, because, with the exception of each other, there never has been anyone that they could possibly hurt. This doesn’t excuse them, of course. Willow still thinks/fears that she’s powerless and thus harmless all the way to the end of season six.
Willow’s Spell. Willow spent season two trying to get over Xander, and the feelings of powerlessness that came from unrequited attraction. Now the attraction is requited, and she feels powerless once again. Both her and Xander want it to stop; they want to stay with their current partners and know their cheating is wrong. But I think she’s animated to stop the attraction in a way Xander isn’t, because she’s struggled with these feelings for so long, and her Xander-attraction is so tied up in the put-upon loserdom Willow sought to escape. Her attempts to police herself have failed, and in Revelations she ruled out talking to Buffy (who helped her get over Xander in season two) as an option for coping. So she turns to her go-to method to make herself powerful: magic.
Willow goes and gets supplies for a de-lusting spell. It’s her first spell on another human being. The end she desires is good. The means are terrible. She is explicitly denying Xander the ability to consent by lying to him about the spell she’s doing--and that she is lying to him suggests that she knows he wouldn’t approve. It ties in with her non-confrontational attitude, certainly, but it also shows remarkable hubris in thinking she knows better than he does what’s best for him (and them). That the de-lusting spell contains basically the same supplies and is effectively the same as a love spell (with which Xander has had some rather unpleasant experiences) illustrates how dark what Willow is doing: it’s something currently-evil dudes like Spike do, not good, sweet Willow. Once again, Willow lacks moral perspective. To stop herself from doing a bad thing (cheating), she does a worse thing, depriving Xander of his right to consent. Xander calls her on it, but he doesn’t really get through to her.
There’s a direct line between this and Willow’s claim, after Oz cheats on her with Veruca, that if she were a real witch she could make him stay with her; and her actually keeping Tara at her side with a spell in season six. Further, we see that Willow has zero confidence in her ability to deal with her own messy emotions. (I’m not sure confidence is the word. She just doesn’t like the pain.) (I don’t just mean the pain, though that’s part of it. She doesn’t think she can stop herself from giving into temptation with Xander. She has tried and failed to “stop herself” in the last few, and gave in to kiss in Revelations.) She tried to work through her lust, but couldn’t work through it fast enough, and so she tries, with desperation, to make it go away. She’ll try it with other emotions again and again.
The spell is stopped before it does any direct damage. But the spell is what gives Spike the idea to do a love spell, and leads directly to her and Xander’s capture. All Spike’s evil and he needs Willow to come up with the dark idea of doing a love spell. And so this episode starts paying off the series-long Willow/Spike parallels planted in Becoming. Spike and Willow both want to do a spell, but don’t end up doing one. Willow is “good” so her spell is to stop an unwanted relationship; Spike is “bad” so his spell is to maintain a relationship with someone who doesn’t want him. They’re on opposite trajectories. But note that while both technically decide to stop the spells of their own accord, Willow gets pushed into stopping by Xander, whereas Spike stops himself internally. Spike is heading for the light and powerless, and Willow is heading for the dark and powerful.
And this swap gets played out for us, on screen, in the Spike/Willow scene. Spike threatens to smash Willow’s face with a broken bottle and she pleads, weak and blubbery and teary-eyed, for him not to hurt her. That’s the season two versions of Spike and Willow. Then Spike lets his bluster fade and cries on Willow’s shoulder, and it’s after this, when he starts to get violent again, that Willow has the confidence to lay down the rules that there will be no having of any kind. Before their scene together Spike calls her “the little girl” (victim) to Xander; afterwards he calls her “the witch” (powerful) to Buffy. Victim-Willow will slowly recede from view, and by Choices Willow will stand up to Faith’s similar physical threat. It’s not a coincidence that this transition plays out in the episode that has her indulging her childhood crush on Xander for the last time.
Xander. He doesn’t try very hard to stop himself with Willow, does he? He suggests kissing her earlobe and tickling her. And it’s Xander who suggests going the bowling double date. I half suspect Xander, at this point, wants to get caught and is on some level deliberately sabotaging his relationship (as he will do with Anya). This episode follows Revelations, in which he more or less lost any chance at being Buffy’s right hand man and anything resembling the moral high ground. So I think maybe the pain of losing Buffy is making him more forceful in wanting to keep Willow by his side, and also making him less interested in his Buffy-replacement. I think one-two punch of betraying Buffy in Revelations and permanently screwing things up with Cordelia is what ends Buffy/Xander as the show’s possible endgame. That it happens in an episode full of Spuffy foreshadowing suggests that Spike, not Xander, is being primed to be the one to help Buffy with her Angel trauma. We get the image of Spike knocking Xander out in the episode where he knocks Xander out of the running for Buffy.
In this episode, he loses Cordelia and Willow in one fell swoop. He really has moved from (essentially) at the top of the social order to near the bottom, and this is what primes him to start seeing himself (with help from Cordelia) as the Zeppo.
Cordelia. Sympathy for her is particularly notched up since she ends up literally gored by what’s happened. It’s the flip-side of the social inversion, with the character who began the series at the top of the social ladder being the one who ends up physically wounded (not just at the bottom of the stairs, but painfully underneath them). Cordelia is certainly capable of cruelty. But she’s never put anyone in the hospital. (Although Cordelia as the number one bully holds some major responsibility for Marcie Ross, who ends up ostracized to the point of non-existence. We’ll have occasion to get back to Marcie next week.) Insofar as Cordelia is also an alter ego for Buffy, her impalement gives a visual image for the pain inflicted on Buffy by her friends. (Lest we go too far, recalling that Cordelia can certainly dish it out as well reminds us that so too can Buffy). In any case, Cordelia lies in the hospital and is set up for her pivotal role in the next episode.
Oz. There is some debate on fandom as to what Oz means when, after he gives Willow a Pez witch and she says she has nothing to give him, he says in an odd tone of voice, “Yeah, you do.” The darker read is that Oz is expecting some kind of sexual favours in return for his affections (a little candy from the Pez witch?). My instinct was always to read Oz as mostly being sweet, but there is an edge, a subtle pressure there. I think it’s inconclusive. I just screened this episode for newbies, and they thought he was talking about sex as well. But I think Amends puts paid to that reading. If Oz is talking about sex in Lover’s Walk, it’s actual loving, connecting sex, not I’m a guy just trying to score sex. My own understanding of that line has always been sweet: “you’re just you and that’s what you give to me.”
Watcher Watch. Seeing Buffy’s SAT scores, Giles, while preparing to go on a Watcher’s retreat, expresses hope that Buffy might leave the Hellmouth someday. Maybe Faith could take over. Oh could she, then? If Giles has made any effort to console Faith over the betrayal from Post, or to see whether Faith’s mind had been poisoned by her, we don’t hear about it. And Faith, so desperate to be included in meetings, is now being prospectively volunteered in absentia for a four-year mission on the Hellmouth while Buffy gets an education. There’s a hint of classism in here, since of course Faith didn’t go to high school, let alone college. Presumably Giles would actually talk to Faith before making any plans (“we’ll discuss it”), but it’s a sign of his devotion to Buffy to the exclusion of Faith that he tells Buffy of the possibility before even talking to Faith.
Giles asks Buffy with some hesitation if she’s going to see Angel. He’s accepted Angel as a fact of life, but certainly doesn’t like it. Which brings us to:
Buffy/Angel. Somehow Buffy convinced everyone at the end of Revelations to trust that she and Angel would never get groiny. (I want to reiterate how remarkable this is. Once again, I think it’s simply that the gang knows that they can’t actually force Buffy to do anything, and so have no option but to continue trusting her.) She’s been self-deceived on this point. Like Xander and Willow who could at times pull back and not kiss (as at the top of this episode), Buffy and Angel seemed to be headed on a spiral to more. They are prevented from succumbing to their temptation and betraying the world by Spike, who points out the obvious to them in that oft-quoted speech of his. Angel still wants to risk it, believing they’ll have the strength to control themselves, but Buffy calls it quits. After Spike’s truth-telling she can’t deceive herself about what she’s doing anymore. Alas, this epiphany will last all of one episode, and ultimately it’s going to be Angel who finds the strength to walk away. The episode does lay bare some interesting aspects to their relationship, which we’ll discuss further below.
Buffy in Sunnydale. The teaser sets up the possibility that Buffy might leave Sunnydale, and along the way sets up an interesting contrast between Cordelia and Spike. Cordelia, ever Buffy’s entirely-human alter ego, tells Buffy hopefully that Buffy’s high SAT scores can allow her to “leave and never come back!” Cut to Spike, who is closely associated with Buffy’s pain-loving, slayer side, muttering “Home, sweet home.” Cordy and Spike both have lovers cheat on them in that damned factory in Sunnydale. (And maybe, just maybe, the parallel runs deeper: did Xander end up makin’ out with a chaos-causing witch because Cordy wasn’t demon enough for him?) But they react in opposite ways: Cordy refuses to be love’s bitch and she dumps Xander, and then after an eventual reconciliation with him gets out of town before the beginning of season four. Spike continues pining for Dru, and to return to Sunnydale, the place where he had his heart broken, around the beginning of season four. Cordy moves on and Spike stays.
And so I think whatever normal girl is left in Buffy wants to escape from her trauma and recognizes that Angel and Sunnydale will never let her be happy in any traditional way. But Buffy’s recent stab at Cordeliaesque normal-girl stuff (in Homecoming) went badly. And ultimately Cordelia will be gone at the end of the season, by which point Buffy will have accepted/decided that she’ll never be a normal girl (and so Cordelia no longer serves any purpose in Buffy’s story). I’m sort of with you until here. Buffy hasn’t given up her dream of normalcy. That’s what Riley is all about. She wants to be normal, but I think think that even with Riley the signposts of normalcy have moved pretty far from (say) Scott Hope. She dates him for two episodes before discovering he’s part of the Initiative, and then she hopes that the Initiative will help her be “normal” by being in a mostly-humans-based organization associated with slaying. That she could not be the slayer is pretty much a non-issue.
In contrast, her slayer and her emotional (“love’s bitch”) side wants to hold on to both the town and to her lover. Right now she is anchored to Sunnydale because she’s anchored to Angel. But the tragedy is that it will end up working in reverse. She’s anchored to Sunnydale by her duty, and so she becomes anchored to her Angel trauma. We get foreshadowing of that in the way every part of the town reminds Spike of Dru. We also get foreshadowing for the fact that Spike and Buffy’s relationship will deal with the wounds that Angel and Dru inflicted on both of them. How does S/B help Spike deal with his Drusilla trauma? The best I can come up with is that it’s his second shot at a woman who loves Angel more than him. But Buffy still does love Angel more than him at the end. Maybe we can say that what Spike learns is how to roll with it. In Spike’s case I don’t mean romantic wounds. Drusilla killed Spike in 1880, and moreover killed the goodness in Spike. It’s through Buffy that Spike finds a way to reignite his spark of goodness. I’d say, too, that Spike doesn’t have much chance of getting over his “love’s bitch” obsession with any woman while he’s stuck in the soulless arrested-development state; his inspiration to get a soul, related to his relationship with Buffy, is the thing that allows him to grow.
That’s all interesting. Here would be my spin. Buffy has a chance to leave Sunnydale to go to college which is a normal part of growing up. But she would strongly rather stay in Sunnydale with Angel, a choice which would not involve her growing up (or past her Angel dreams). She’s going to double-down on this regression towards the end of the season when she starts in with little-girl voiced love talk with Angel and Buffy + Angel 4eva doodles. Cordelia will leave town in season 4, and end up in LA with Angel -- in a relationship that will cause her to grow a great deal, and in that sense she represents the road not taken. (Though life with Angel didn’t turn out so well for Cordelia, either.) By contrast, in season 4, Buffy will try to acknowledge her human side by dating Riley and going to college. But she’s dating Riley as a human substitute for Angel, and she’s going to a college in her hometown. Her ‘moving on’ in season 4 is thus against the backdrop of her reluctance to grow up. Spike’s drunken return to Sunnydale looks like a similar refusal to grow up. But while most of his childish ravings are about Drusilla and wanting to be back with her (i.e. in stasis again), Dru booted him because of his thing for the slayer which is going to lead to some considerable growing up. Which brings us to the main event:
Spike. I usually argue that Spike’s big arc formally starts in next season’s Harsh Light of Day. But a case can be made that it starts here. First, Spike signals his arrival back in town by knocking down the Sunnydale sign, calling back his entrance in School Hard. He will never again knock that sign down on his way into town, saving the third and final knock down for his grand heroic exit in Chosen. If we look at it that way, we can appreciate the portrait of Spike drawn here -- because it’s a measure of how far he has to go. In this episode, Spike is a drunken, self-involved lout, capable of enormous violence, much of it directed towards women. He’s unapologetically evil, and while he’s resourceful and insightful he’s also capable of being quite stupid.
Second, the juxtaposition of Angel at his apogee of goodness and Spike at his nadir serves to create images of the two characters than mask the inversion that happens over the rest of the shows’ run (both BtVS and AtS). Angel is the wise, self-possessed alpha hero. Spike is the foolish, bumbling beta villain. The trick of Spike’s arc is that he will become the hero that Angel appears to be, while Angel himself struggles with his grayness. Yet Spike will always look like the foolish beta, often seen as a villain long after he’s stopped being one. We see this all laid out in the scene where Spike goes to the mansion and spies on Angel. Angel is there reading La Nausée, Sartre’s book on existentialism, in French. He’s a deep man with deep concerns, pondering the meaning of his existence. Spike drunkenly curses at Angel before passing out in the courtyard, only to catch fire when the sun rises. The contrast between the two couldn’t be starker.
Virtually everything in that scene will be reversed. Spike, who is on the outside looking in, will be inside as soon as Pangs, with Angel taking up the position of the one who peers through windows. Spike’s hand catches fire here, and will do so again when he’s dying to save the world, a feat Angel never managed. In doing so Spike will have discovered a meaning or purpose in his life without long nights brooding by the fire over Sartre.
We also get a few other glimpses of the kernels of real difference between the two. First, Spike likes people and things human, whereas Angel pretty much shuns both. It’s hard to be evil when you enjoy the company of the people you hurt and it’s hard to be good if you really don’t like the people you are supposed to be helping. Second, Spike pronounces himself love’s bitch, staking his identity on something other than his own ego. Angel, in the same scene, reveals just a bit of ego as he jibes Spike about Drusilla’s fickleness (with the reminder that Dru chose Angel over Spike). Angel often puts down rivals in exactly this way -- rubbing it in that Darla loved him more than Lindsey and that Buffy loved him more than Spike. (It’s true even when the rival is his son: his fantasy in Awakening includes Connor acknowledging that Cordelia loved Angel more than him.) He’s thus the exact opposite of being love’s bitch. But that desire to maintain his alpha position is precisely what blinds him to his own weaknesses and thus allows him to go astray on a fairly regular basis
Joyce and Spike/Angel. Because hiding the truth from everyone worked so well last week, Buffy has decided not to fill Joyce in about Angel’s return, because she wouldn’t be able to deal. The consequences is that Joyce doesn’t have any information to figure out that Spike is the threat while Angel it the vampire with a soul. Joyce may have given Buffy reason to distrust her, but keeping Joyce in the dark actually endangers her, so that it remains terribly irresponsible for Buffy to keep her locked out of new developments. The handling here is comic, in comparison to the darker take in Revelations.
Joyce’s view of Spike as good and Angel as bad is based on what Buffy has not told her. But to an extent it actually reflects something real. Angel and Joyce never do get along, and Joyce will eventually convince Angel to leave in The Prom. But Spike and Joyce, on each encounter, are more amicable than the last. They were violently opposed in School Hard, were silent with each other in Becoming, and in this episode are up to having a real conversation--although Spike shuts her down the moment she tries to talk about herself, so that it’s only one-way. In Checkpoint they actually make a connection via the television show Passions, in Crush Spike bonds with Joyce like any suitor, and in Forever he brings flowers for her. That the two actually do have some sort of a connection establishes that Spike actually has more interest, and more connection, to Buffy’s human side than Angel ever does. Spike and Angel are both attracted to Buffy’s slayer half, but it’s Spike who actually lets his affections spill over to all of her.
Good point, which reminds me that we also see Joyce with all her college pamphlets, very much attached to a slayer-free version of her daughter. In other words, Spike is more open to Buffy’s totality than even her own mother. I’d say that Joyce wants a slayer-free version of her daughter, but she does implicitly accept Spike, if not Angel, which is a hint that she may be able to accept the slayer side to a degree. It’s interesting that Spike is put in opposition to (and as a threat to) Xander and Willow--and while he makes some connection to Willow he makes none to Xander at all, here--but not to Joyce; so Spike, too, connects with some parts of Buffy’s “human” side but not others.
Bangel to Spuffy. We also get a chance to compare and contrast Buffy’s relationship with the two vampires in her life. She loves Angel with everything she is. Yet in this very episode they are emphatically not communicating. When the prospect of college comes up, Buffy goes to Angel wanting him to tell her he wants her to stay in town. But since she won’t say that (thereby making the first move to establish them as a romantic couple), Angel says he thinks she should leave. Neither wants to be the first to admit that they want to be together. (They are both evidently in training for the Passive Olympics). We are reminded of how much has happened between them and how much they are NOT dealing with it. In season 7, Spike and Buffy won’t use a lot of words either. But we can see them dealing with the mutually inflicted wounds of season 6, moving to a place of real trust and caring between them. The scene of Angel reading Sartre reminds us both that Buffy couldn’t care less about high culture (whereas Angel’s decor screams sophistication) and that Buffy is ignoring the rather profound existential problems Angel is facing (perhaps because her teen-aged self is blind to it). Spike and Buffy, on the other hand, can swap pop culture references all day, and have occasions of genuine empathy with each other. Thus, although Buffy emphatically hearts Angel in a way she never will Spike, she and Angel are never really actually close. This episode happens to give us a strong glimpse of that.
Although Spike arrives in Sunnydale when Buffy and Angel are going strong, we also see some of the seeds for future Spuffy planted. First, per Fool For Love, we now know that Drusilla dumped Spike because of Buffy. Spike is in massive denial about this, and part of his brutish violence can be understood as a reaction to Drusilla’s claim he was going soft (especially around Buffy). So, given that Spike got dumped because of Buffy, what prompts him to return to Sunnydale? Some of the blurbs for the episode describe Spike as coming back in order to get Willow to perform a love spell so he can get Dru back. But, in fact, Spike only gets that idea when he overhears that Willow does love spells. Until then Spike was focusing on getting revenge on Angel. Why Angel?
Well, first Angel had an affair with Drusilla, which is grounds enough for Spike to be angry. But worse, that affair prompted Spike’s alliance with Buffy in the first place. Spike wants to stop his reasoning at this point, thus blaming everything on Angel. But it’s not the total of what happened to him last season. Spike really didn’t want the world to end -- another reflection of his basic liking for humans and things human. And it’s just possible that part of Spike’s nascent attraction to Buffy is related to the fact that she fights for the world not against it. In other words, it’s her light that attracts him. With that in mind, Spike’s anger at Angel takes another dimension. Angel not only stole Dru from him, Angel also has Buffy. And this might explain why Spike is so quick to see where things stand between Buffy and Angel. A latent romantic interest of his own makes him more observant.
Meanwhile, we get Buffy saying no fewer than three (very gratuitous) times that she really can’t stand Spike. Certainly she’s got plenty of reason to dislike him. But one gets a feeling that she doth protest a bit too much. Spike’s the one who can name the joy that comes from a good fight. Insofar as Buffy is in denial about that she vents her hatred of Spike. And maybe, just maybe, there’s some basic attraction that she’s interested in denying as well. That said, Spike’s pity ditty about the homeless guy he and Dru ate is a measure of how spectacularly inappropriate Spike is for Buffy, and another measure of the distance that must be traversed.
The two also really can read each other quite well. Spike knows that the thing that will save his life is that he has Buffy’s friends as bargaining chips. And Buffy knows instinctively that Spike has her friends locked up at the factory. To his credit, Angel acts as restraint/superego on Buffy here--he is what prevents her from staking Spike at this moment. I can’t help but think that some element is his own lack of desire to see Spike killed. I agree. I’m even pretty sure that Angel thinks Willow and Xander are in the factory, too. His instinct was to protect Drusilla in season 2 and Spike here. It’s interesting that this protective instinct coexists with his rivalry. Spike is family and Angel wants to protect him, thus freeing him to go kill more people. Angel needs to hide that with “good” reasons. And he needs to reiterate his superiority.
I’m not sure Buffy is really ready to stake Spike, even absent Angel’s restraint and the supposed need to keep him alive to save Xander and Willow. She talks the talk, but she doesn’t seem to have much conviction, and, at the end, after Spike has acknowledged that X/W were in the factory, she makes no move whatsoever to go after him. It also seems quite natural when the three of them band together to fight off the Mayor’s welcoming committee. Spike is people now to Buffy. Maybe not good people, but people.
No Man’s Land. But to traverse that terrain, Spike has to go through the no-man’s land between demon and human. He’s already there. He tells Willow that Drusilla thinks he’s not demon enough, in a scene when he’s being far too demonic to ever warrant being taken in by humans. As Spike leaves, he turns and says “love’s a funny thing.” It is, indeed. And although Spike is off to torture Drusilla into liking him again, that will only be a brief hiatus from Spike’s long journey from demon to human in which he is no where at home.
Perhaps Spike going back to Dru for a last hurrah is a bit of a set-up for the last hurrah of Bangel, which begins in Amends. But before that, we need to go back to Cordelia’s trauma and imagine a world without Buffy. Next up: The Wish.
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 3.08 Lovers Walk, in Which Spike Does Couples Counseling.
Last week we got all sorts of internal explosions. This week, hurricane Spike blows into town to finish the job -- setting in motion the events that expose Xander and Willow, and which force Buffy to realize just how much she’s been lying to herself about Angel. Somehow, though, the episode is far more interesting to me in the way it sets up Spike’s very long arc to come. But let’s first take care of business.
Xander/Willow. Like Buffy and Angel last week they struggle to fight off temptation. But with the impending doom scenario they give in and are caught in flagrante by Oz and Cordelia. The interesting move here is that the episode sets up both Oz and Cordelia as sympathetic and undeserving of the betrayal they are about to discover. Cordelia has put pictures of Xander in her locker, Oz gives Willow her pez witch. It’s an invitation to sympathize with the outsiders, both of whom love their respective Scoobies more than they are loved in return. (We also witness Oz and Cordy’s anguish at the possibility that their lovers may die, and they catch the two while in the process of trying to rescue them. Ouch.) When the show started, we sympathized with the Scoobies themselves as the marginalized outsiders. But now they are the ones who are wanted, and they are the ones with the power to reject and hurt. This is an interesting point. All their lives, Willow and Xander have been powerless. But key to both their arcs as the series goes on (especially Willow’s) is that they have never developed the skills for coping with the power to hurt other people, because, with the exception of each other, there never has been anyone that they could possibly hurt. This doesn’t excuse them, of course. Willow still thinks/fears that she’s powerless and thus harmless all the way to the end of season six.
Willow’s Spell. Willow spent season two trying to get over Xander, and the feelings of powerlessness that came from unrequited attraction. Now the attraction is requited, and she feels powerless once again. Both her and Xander want it to stop; they want to stay with their current partners and know their cheating is wrong. But I think she’s animated to stop the attraction in a way Xander isn’t, because she’s struggled with these feelings for so long, and her Xander-attraction is so tied up in the put-upon loserdom Willow sought to escape. Her attempts to police herself have failed, and in Revelations she ruled out talking to Buffy (who helped her get over Xander in season two) as an option for coping. So she turns to her go-to method to make herself powerful: magic.
Willow goes and gets supplies for a de-lusting spell. It’s her first spell on another human being. The end she desires is good. The means are terrible. She is explicitly denying Xander the ability to consent by lying to him about the spell she’s doing--and that she is lying to him suggests that she knows he wouldn’t approve. It ties in with her non-confrontational attitude, certainly, but it also shows remarkable hubris in thinking she knows better than he does what’s best for him (and them). That the de-lusting spell contains basically the same supplies and is effectively the same as a love spell (with which Xander has had some rather unpleasant experiences) illustrates how dark what Willow is doing: it’s something currently-evil dudes like Spike do, not good, sweet Willow. Once again, Willow lacks moral perspective. To stop herself from doing a bad thing (cheating), she does a worse thing, depriving Xander of his right to consent. Xander calls her on it, but he doesn’t really get through to her.
There’s a direct line between this and Willow’s claim, after Oz cheats on her with Veruca, that if she were a real witch she could make him stay with her; and her actually keeping Tara at her side with a spell in season six. Further, we see that Willow has zero confidence in her ability to deal with her own messy emotions. (I’m not sure confidence is the word. She just doesn’t like the pain.) (I don’t just mean the pain, though that’s part of it. She doesn’t think she can stop herself from giving into temptation with Xander. She has tried and failed to “stop herself” in the last few, and gave in to kiss in Revelations.) She tried to work through her lust, but couldn’t work through it fast enough, and so she tries, with desperation, to make it go away. She’ll try it with other emotions again and again.
The spell is stopped before it does any direct damage. But the spell is what gives Spike the idea to do a love spell, and leads directly to her and Xander’s capture. All Spike’s evil and he needs Willow to come up with the dark idea of doing a love spell. And so this episode starts paying off the series-long Willow/Spike parallels planted in Becoming. Spike and Willow both want to do a spell, but don’t end up doing one. Willow is “good” so her spell is to stop an unwanted relationship; Spike is “bad” so his spell is to maintain a relationship with someone who doesn’t want him. They’re on opposite trajectories. But note that while both technically decide to stop the spells of their own accord, Willow gets pushed into stopping by Xander, whereas Spike stops himself internally. Spike is heading for the light and powerless, and Willow is heading for the dark and powerful.
And this swap gets played out for us, on screen, in the Spike/Willow scene. Spike threatens to smash Willow’s face with a broken bottle and she pleads, weak and blubbery and teary-eyed, for him not to hurt her. That’s the season two versions of Spike and Willow. Then Spike lets his bluster fade and cries on Willow’s shoulder, and it’s after this, when he starts to get violent again, that Willow has the confidence to lay down the rules that there will be no having of any kind. Before their scene together Spike calls her “the little girl” (victim) to Xander; afterwards he calls her “the witch” (powerful) to Buffy. Victim-Willow will slowly recede from view, and by Choices Willow will stand up to Faith’s similar physical threat. It’s not a coincidence that this transition plays out in the episode that has her indulging her childhood crush on Xander for the last time.
Xander. He doesn’t try very hard to stop himself with Willow, does he? He suggests kissing her earlobe and tickling her. And it’s Xander who suggests going the bowling double date. I half suspect Xander, at this point, wants to get caught and is on some level deliberately sabotaging his relationship (as he will do with Anya). This episode follows Revelations, in which he more or less lost any chance at being Buffy’s right hand man and anything resembling the moral high ground. So I think maybe the pain of losing Buffy is making him more forceful in wanting to keep Willow by his side, and also making him less interested in his Buffy-replacement. I think one-two punch of betraying Buffy in Revelations and permanently screwing things up with Cordelia is what ends Buffy/Xander as the show’s possible endgame. That it happens in an episode full of Spuffy foreshadowing suggests that Spike, not Xander, is being primed to be the one to help Buffy with her Angel trauma. We get the image of Spike knocking Xander out in the episode where he knocks Xander out of the running for Buffy.
In this episode, he loses Cordelia and Willow in one fell swoop. He really has moved from (essentially) at the top of the social order to near the bottom, and this is what primes him to start seeing himself (with help from Cordelia) as the Zeppo.
Cordelia. Sympathy for her is particularly notched up since she ends up literally gored by what’s happened. It’s the flip-side of the social inversion, with the character who began the series at the top of the social ladder being the one who ends up physically wounded (not just at the bottom of the stairs, but painfully underneath them). Cordelia is certainly capable of cruelty. But she’s never put anyone in the hospital. (Although Cordelia as the number one bully holds some major responsibility for Marcie Ross, who ends up ostracized to the point of non-existence. We’ll have occasion to get back to Marcie next week.) Insofar as Cordelia is also an alter ego for Buffy, her impalement gives a visual image for the pain inflicted on Buffy by her friends. (Lest we go too far, recalling that Cordelia can certainly dish it out as well reminds us that so too can Buffy). In any case, Cordelia lies in the hospital and is set up for her pivotal role in the next episode.
Oz. There is some debate on fandom as to what Oz means when, after he gives Willow a Pez witch and she says she has nothing to give him, he says in an odd tone of voice, “Yeah, you do.” The darker read is that Oz is expecting some kind of sexual favours in return for his affections (a little candy from the Pez witch?). My instinct was always to read Oz as mostly being sweet, but there is an edge, a subtle pressure there. I think it’s inconclusive. I just screened this episode for newbies, and they thought he was talking about sex as well. But I think Amends puts paid to that reading. If Oz is talking about sex in Lover’s Walk, it’s actual loving, connecting sex, not I’m a guy just trying to score sex. My own understanding of that line has always been sweet: “you’re just you and that’s what you give to me.”
Watcher Watch. Seeing Buffy’s SAT scores, Giles, while preparing to go on a Watcher’s retreat, expresses hope that Buffy might leave the Hellmouth someday. Maybe Faith could take over. Oh could she, then? If Giles has made any effort to console Faith over the betrayal from Post, or to see whether Faith’s mind had been poisoned by her, we don’t hear about it. And Faith, so desperate to be included in meetings, is now being prospectively volunteered in absentia for a four-year mission on the Hellmouth while Buffy gets an education. There’s a hint of classism in here, since of course Faith didn’t go to high school, let alone college. Presumably Giles would actually talk to Faith before making any plans (“we’ll discuss it”), but it’s a sign of his devotion to Buffy to the exclusion of Faith that he tells Buffy of the possibility before even talking to Faith.
Giles asks Buffy with some hesitation if she’s going to see Angel. He’s accepted Angel as a fact of life, but certainly doesn’t like it. Which brings us to:
Buffy/Angel. Somehow Buffy convinced everyone at the end of Revelations to trust that she and Angel would never get groiny. (I want to reiterate how remarkable this is. Once again, I think it’s simply that the gang knows that they can’t actually force Buffy to do anything, and so have no option but to continue trusting her.) She’s been self-deceived on this point. Like Xander and Willow who could at times pull back and not kiss (as at the top of this episode), Buffy and Angel seemed to be headed on a spiral to more. They are prevented from succumbing to their temptation and betraying the world by Spike, who points out the obvious to them in that oft-quoted speech of his. Angel still wants to risk it, believing they’ll have the strength to control themselves, but Buffy calls it quits. After Spike’s truth-telling she can’t deceive herself about what she’s doing anymore. Alas, this epiphany will last all of one episode, and ultimately it’s going to be Angel who finds the strength to walk away. The episode does lay bare some interesting aspects to their relationship, which we’ll discuss further below.
Buffy in Sunnydale. The teaser sets up the possibility that Buffy might leave Sunnydale, and along the way sets up an interesting contrast between Cordelia and Spike. Cordelia, ever Buffy’s entirely-human alter ego, tells Buffy hopefully that Buffy’s high SAT scores can allow her to “leave and never come back!” Cut to Spike, who is closely associated with Buffy’s pain-loving, slayer side, muttering “Home, sweet home.” Cordy and Spike both have lovers cheat on them in that damned factory in Sunnydale. (And maybe, just maybe, the parallel runs deeper: did Xander end up makin’ out with a chaos-causing witch because Cordy wasn’t demon enough for him?) But they react in opposite ways: Cordy refuses to be love’s bitch and she dumps Xander, and then after an eventual reconciliation with him gets out of town before the beginning of season four. Spike continues pining for Dru, and to return to Sunnydale, the place where he had his heart broken, around the beginning of season four. Cordy moves on and Spike stays.
And so I think whatever normal girl is left in Buffy wants to escape from her trauma and recognizes that Angel and Sunnydale will never let her be happy in any traditional way. But Buffy’s recent stab at Cordeliaesque normal-girl stuff (in Homecoming) went badly. And ultimately Cordelia will be gone at the end of the season, by which point Buffy will have accepted/decided that she’ll never be a normal girl (and so Cordelia no longer serves any purpose in Buffy’s story). I’m sort of with you until here. Buffy hasn’t given up her dream of normalcy. That’s what Riley is all about. She wants to be normal, but I think think that even with Riley the signposts of normalcy have moved pretty far from (say) Scott Hope. She dates him for two episodes before discovering he’s part of the Initiative, and then she hopes that the Initiative will help her be “normal” by being in a mostly-humans-based organization associated with slaying. That she could not be the slayer is pretty much a non-issue.
In contrast, her slayer and her emotional (“love’s bitch”) side wants to hold on to both the town and to her lover. Right now she is anchored to Sunnydale because she’s anchored to Angel. But the tragedy is that it will end up working in reverse. She’s anchored to Sunnydale by her duty, and so she becomes anchored to her Angel trauma. We get foreshadowing of that in the way every part of the town reminds Spike of Dru. We also get foreshadowing for the fact that Spike and Buffy’s relationship will deal with the wounds that Angel and Dru inflicted on both of them. How does S/B help Spike deal with his Drusilla trauma? The best I can come up with is that it’s his second shot at a woman who loves Angel more than him. But Buffy still does love Angel more than him at the end. Maybe we can say that what Spike learns is how to roll with it. In Spike’s case I don’t mean romantic wounds. Drusilla killed Spike in 1880, and moreover killed the goodness in Spike. It’s through Buffy that Spike finds a way to reignite his spark of goodness. I’d say, too, that Spike doesn’t have much chance of getting over his “love’s bitch” obsession with any woman while he’s stuck in the soulless arrested-development state; his inspiration to get a soul, related to his relationship with Buffy, is the thing that allows him to grow.
That’s all interesting. Here would be my spin. Buffy has a chance to leave Sunnydale to go to college which is a normal part of growing up. But she would strongly rather stay in Sunnydale with Angel, a choice which would not involve her growing up (or past her Angel dreams). She’s going to double-down on this regression towards the end of the season when she starts in with little-girl voiced love talk with Angel and Buffy + Angel 4eva doodles. Cordelia will leave town in season 4, and end up in LA with Angel -- in a relationship that will cause her to grow a great deal, and in that sense she represents the road not taken. (Though life with Angel didn’t turn out so well for Cordelia, either.) By contrast, in season 4, Buffy will try to acknowledge her human side by dating Riley and going to college. But she’s dating Riley as a human substitute for Angel, and she’s going to a college in her hometown. Her ‘moving on’ in season 4 is thus against the backdrop of her reluctance to grow up. Spike’s drunken return to Sunnydale looks like a similar refusal to grow up. But while most of his childish ravings are about Drusilla and wanting to be back with her (i.e. in stasis again), Dru booted him because of his thing for the slayer which is going to lead to some considerable growing up. Which brings us to the main event:
Spike. I usually argue that Spike’s big arc formally starts in next season’s Harsh Light of Day. But a case can be made that it starts here. First, Spike signals his arrival back in town by knocking down the Sunnydale sign, calling back his entrance in School Hard. He will never again knock that sign down on his way into town, saving the third and final knock down for his grand heroic exit in Chosen. If we look at it that way, we can appreciate the portrait of Spike drawn here -- because it’s a measure of how far he has to go. In this episode, Spike is a drunken, self-involved lout, capable of enormous violence, much of it directed towards women. He’s unapologetically evil, and while he’s resourceful and insightful he’s also capable of being quite stupid.
Second, the juxtaposition of Angel at his apogee of goodness and Spike at his nadir serves to create images of the two characters than mask the inversion that happens over the rest of the shows’ run (both BtVS and AtS). Angel is the wise, self-possessed alpha hero. Spike is the foolish, bumbling beta villain. The trick of Spike’s arc is that he will become the hero that Angel appears to be, while Angel himself struggles with his grayness. Yet Spike will always look like the foolish beta, often seen as a villain long after he’s stopped being one. We see this all laid out in the scene where Spike goes to the mansion and spies on Angel. Angel is there reading La Nausée, Sartre’s book on existentialism, in French. He’s a deep man with deep concerns, pondering the meaning of his existence. Spike drunkenly curses at Angel before passing out in the courtyard, only to catch fire when the sun rises. The contrast between the two couldn’t be starker.
Virtually everything in that scene will be reversed. Spike, who is on the outside looking in, will be inside as soon as Pangs, with Angel taking up the position of the one who peers through windows. Spike’s hand catches fire here, and will do so again when he’s dying to save the world, a feat Angel never managed. In doing so Spike will have discovered a meaning or purpose in his life without long nights brooding by the fire over Sartre.
We also get a few other glimpses of the kernels of real difference between the two. First, Spike likes people and things human, whereas Angel pretty much shuns both. It’s hard to be evil when you enjoy the company of the people you hurt and it’s hard to be good if you really don’t like the people you are supposed to be helping. Second, Spike pronounces himself love’s bitch, staking his identity on something other than his own ego. Angel, in the same scene, reveals just a bit of ego as he jibes Spike about Drusilla’s fickleness (with the reminder that Dru chose Angel over Spike). Angel often puts down rivals in exactly this way -- rubbing it in that Darla loved him more than Lindsey and that Buffy loved him more than Spike. (It’s true even when the rival is his son: his fantasy in Awakening includes Connor acknowledging that Cordelia loved Angel more than him.) He’s thus the exact opposite of being love’s bitch. But that desire to maintain his alpha position is precisely what blinds him to his own weaknesses and thus allows him to go astray on a fairly regular basis
Joyce and Spike/Angel. Because hiding the truth from everyone worked so well last week, Buffy has decided not to fill Joyce in about Angel’s return, because she wouldn’t be able to deal. The consequences is that Joyce doesn’t have any information to figure out that Spike is the threat while Angel it the vampire with a soul. Joyce may have given Buffy reason to distrust her, but keeping Joyce in the dark actually endangers her, so that it remains terribly irresponsible for Buffy to keep her locked out of new developments. The handling here is comic, in comparison to the darker take in Revelations.
Joyce’s view of Spike as good and Angel as bad is based on what Buffy has not told her. But to an extent it actually reflects something real. Angel and Joyce never do get along, and Joyce will eventually convince Angel to leave in The Prom. But Spike and Joyce, on each encounter, are more amicable than the last. They were violently opposed in School Hard, were silent with each other in Becoming, and in this episode are up to having a real conversation--although Spike shuts her down the moment she tries to talk about herself, so that it’s only one-way. In Checkpoint they actually make a connection via the television show Passions, in Crush Spike bonds with Joyce like any suitor, and in Forever he brings flowers for her. That the two actually do have some sort of a connection establishes that Spike actually has more interest, and more connection, to Buffy’s human side than Angel ever does. Spike and Angel are both attracted to Buffy’s slayer half, but it’s Spike who actually lets his affections spill over to all of her.
Good point, which reminds me that we also see Joyce with all her college pamphlets, very much attached to a slayer-free version of her daughter. In other words, Spike is more open to Buffy’s totality than even her own mother. I’d say that Joyce wants a slayer-free version of her daughter, but she does implicitly accept Spike, if not Angel, which is a hint that she may be able to accept the slayer side to a degree. It’s interesting that Spike is put in opposition to (and as a threat to) Xander and Willow--and while he makes some connection to Willow he makes none to Xander at all, here--but not to Joyce; so Spike, too, connects with some parts of Buffy’s “human” side but not others.
Bangel to Spuffy. We also get a chance to compare and contrast Buffy’s relationship with the two vampires in her life. She loves Angel with everything she is. Yet in this very episode they are emphatically not communicating. When the prospect of college comes up, Buffy goes to Angel wanting him to tell her he wants her to stay in town. But since she won’t say that (thereby making the first move to establish them as a romantic couple), Angel says he thinks she should leave. Neither wants to be the first to admit that they want to be together. (They are both evidently in training for the Passive Olympics). We are reminded of how much has happened between them and how much they are NOT dealing with it. In season 7, Spike and Buffy won’t use a lot of words either. But we can see them dealing with the mutually inflicted wounds of season 6, moving to a place of real trust and caring between them. The scene of Angel reading Sartre reminds us both that Buffy couldn’t care less about high culture (whereas Angel’s decor screams sophistication) and that Buffy is ignoring the rather profound existential problems Angel is facing (perhaps because her teen-aged self is blind to it). Spike and Buffy, on the other hand, can swap pop culture references all day, and have occasions of genuine empathy with each other. Thus, although Buffy emphatically hearts Angel in a way she never will Spike, she and Angel are never really actually close. This episode happens to give us a strong glimpse of that.
Although Spike arrives in Sunnydale when Buffy and Angel are going strong, we also see some of the seeds for future Spuffy planted. First, per Fool For Love, we now know that Drusilla dumped Spike because of Buffy. Spike is in massive denial about this, and part of his brutish violence can be understood as a reaction to Drusilla’s claim he was going soft (especially around Buffy). So, given that Spike got dumped because of Buffy, what prompts him to return to Sunnydale? Some of the blurbs for the episode describe Spike as coming back in order to get Willow to perform a love spell so he can get Dru back. But, in fact, Spike only gets that idea when he overhears that Willow does love spells. Until then Spike was focusing on getting revenge on Angel. Why Angel?
Well, first Angel had an affair with Drusilla, which is grounds enough for Spike to be angry. But worse, that affair prompted Spike’s alliance with Buffy in the first place. Spike wants to stop his reasoning at this point, thus blaming everything on Angel. But it’s not the total of what happened to him last season. Spike really didn’t want the world to end -- another reflection of his basic liking for humans and things human. And it’s just possible that part of Spike’s nascent attraction to Buffy is related to the fact that she fights for the world not against it. In other words, it’s her light that attracts him. With that in mind, Spike’s anger at Angel takes another dimension. Angel not only stole Dru from him, Angel also has Buffy. And this might explain why Spike is so quick to see where things stand between Buffy and Angel. A latent romantic interest of his own makes him more observant.
Meanwhile, we get Buffy saying no fewer than three (very gratuitous) times that she really can’t stand Spike. Certainly she’s got plenty of reason to dislike him. But one gets a feeling that she doth protest a bit too much. Spike’s the one who can name the joy that comes from a good fight. Insofar as Buffy is in denial about that she vents her hatred of Spike. And maybe, just maybe, there’s some basic attraction that she’s interested in denying as well. That said, Spike’s pity ditty about the homeless guy he and Dru ate is a measure of how spectacularly inappropriate Spike is for Buffy, and another measure of the distance that must be traversed.
The two also really can read each other quite well. Spike knows that the thing that will save his life is that he has Buffy’s friends as bargaining chips. And Buffy knows instinctively that Spike has her friends locked up at the factory. To his credit, Angel acts as restraint/superego on Buffy here--he is what prevents her from staking Spike at this moment. I can’t help but think that some element is his own lack of desire to see Spike killed. I agree. I’m even pretty sure that Angel thinks Willow and Xander are in the factory, too. His instinct was to protect Drusilla in season 2 and Spike here. It’s interesting that this protective instinct coexists with his rivalry. Spike is family and Angel wants to protect him, thus freeing him to go kill more people. Angel needs to hide that with “good” reasons. And he needs to reiterate his superiority.
I’m not sure Buffy is really ready to stake Spike, even absent Angel’s restraint and the supposed need to keep him alive to save Xander and Willow. She talks the talk, but she doesn’t seem to have much conviction, and, at the end, after Spike has acknowledged that X/W were in the factory, she makes no move whatsoever to go after him. It also seems quite natural when the three of them band together to fight off the Mayor’s welcoming committee. Spike is people now to Buffy. Maybe not good people, but people.
No Man’s Land. But to traverse that terrain, Spike has to go through the no-man’s land between demon and human. He’s already there. He tells Willow that Drusilla thinks he’s not demon enough, in a scene when he’s being far too demonic to ever warrant being taken in by humans. As Spike leaves, he turns and says “love’s a funny thing.” It is, indeed. And although Spike is off to torture Drusilla into liking him again, that will only be a brief hiatus from Spike’s long journey from demon to human in which he is no where at home.
Perhaps Spike going back to Dru for a last hurrah is a bit of a set-up for the last hurrah of Bangel, which begins in Amends. But before that, we need to go back to Cordelia’s trauma and imagine a world without Buffy. Next up: The Wish.