Notes on Buffy 3.15: Consequences

[2maggie2]

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.

Comments

[gabrielleabelle]

Yay! Special extra edition!

Excellent, as usual. One part gave me pause, though:

Faith didn’t *want* to kill Finch. Buffy can’t possibly think that Faith did want to do it. I attribute Buffy’s jump to this thought to the time that Buffy did want to do whatever she wanted. With Ted.

I think the simpler explanation is Buffy associating it with the whole "Want. Take. Have." fiasco of Bad Girls. As is so eloquently laid out earlier in the notes: "On Buffy’s side, another reason for eliding the accidental nature of what happened is that the accident itself was a manifestation of the living large, “want, take, have” philosophy she was trying on. There is a nasty edge to all of that. "

Buffy's statement, "We help people! It doesn't mean we can do whatever we want." seems to me like a direct callback to that livin' large philosophy as this episode marks her rejection of it.

[2maggie2]

The extra edition will go up tomorrow night. We hope. Real life keeps insisting it needs attention

[fenderlove]

Giles decides he needs to play along with her lie rather than confront her with his knowledge of her lie, tempered with the limits of the wrong she is hiding. Why?

That was always one decision, among many made by various characters on the show, that I will never, ever understand.

[effulgentgirl]

Perhaps Giles is being conservative - he doesn't know that what actually went down is what Faith is accusing Buffy of with the players reversed. He may be worried that something much worse happened, and without knowing what, he might be afraid of taking the wrong approach.

[fenderlove]

It still doesn't make sense to me. Why behave in a way that makes it seem that Buffy's going to be in "trouble?" Why not just tell Faith that, if what she said is true, then it was an accident and things like that happen to Slayers from time to time? Why not just tell her what he later said to Buffy? If he would have done that, then Faith might have admitted the truth? Instead he acted like he was going to smack Buffy around with that authoritative bad daddy glare until Faith was out of earshot. It plays off as majorly weird and just not helpful to any situation.

[effulgentgirl]

You're right. I understand his not calling her bluff, but there's no reason to exaggerate his response to the lie.

If anything, that would make him less likely to trust/approach him in the future, if her crimes were worse (as he may have suspected). Which doesn't benefit any of them.

The consequences of existentialism

[sophist]

There's a terrific analysis of Faith’s behavior in this episode contained in The Existential Joss Whedon, ch. 3. Simplifying, and summarizing very briefly, the most important part of Sartre's philosophy was that people are always free to make choices. This remained true even if you were chained up as a slave. As Sartre recognized, the slave didn’t have good choices, but he still had them. He could, for example, rebel and be killed. Along with the freedom which required us to make choices came the concept of responsibility. We are responsible for making choices and for the consequences of our choices. If someone denies her responsibility, either by denying that she could choose or for the consequences of her choice, Sartre says that she is acting in what he called “bad faith”.When Faith denies that she feels guilt, when she hides the body, when she conceals her actions from Giles, she’s engaged in “bad faith

Re: The consequences of existentialism

[ceciliaj]

This makes all the conversations all the more fraught, and of course Faith's subsequent behavior (as you note) seems to confirm the worse interpretation both to the others and to her.

Maybe I'm misreading, but I interpreted these notes to be talking about the road not taken -- we know that Faith ultimately internalizes that interpretation, and acts based as if it were so, but things could have been different if someone had been able to reach her on her own terms, rather than projecting all over her. The point is also that such projection from all sides is to some extent inevitable in the social world, but if we're going on the theory that people are constantly making choices, then we can imagine a situation in which one of the scoobies had spoken more carefully, and released Faith from the dangerous spiral of moralizing black-white thinking.

Re: The consequences of existentialism

[sophist]

The way I see it, killing Finch needs to be seen in the sequence Buffy saw it, because it's Buffy's reaction which affects Faith the most and also sets the tone for the reaction of the others

Re: The consequences of existentialism

[ceciliaj]

Fair enough. I should have rephrased it as "what most intrigues me about the notes is" the road not taken :).

[aycheb]

In a review that claims to deal with Faith’s fall it’s strange that there’s no section devoted to her, no Faith of it. There’s a last minute caveat that going to the mayor was Faith’s choice but following paragraph after paragraph detailing what Buffy, Giles, Xander Angel and Wesley do to her and how that affects her with no analysis of how what Faith does affects their reactions to her it feels as if certain punches are being pulled. After all Faith had already decided to dump the body (just the body, she never gave it a name) some time before before Buffy came round in her Jackie O outfit and self-righteous speeches about Slayers not being killers.

As what American would call a liberal, I don’t have a problem with an analysis that considers the circumstances leading to delinquency rather than simply blaming it on individual character flaws but it still grates that this is so different from the approach that was taken in Ted. Just to take one example, these notes and the ones for Bad Girls repeatedly assert that Faith did was

[2maggie2]

Thank you for your comment.

[strudel2]

My point wasn't that Buffy was intrinsically different from Faith, but that the way this episode is told is designed to make it easy for us to draw distinctions between them. I agree that these characters aren't so easily reduced to simple cautious/reckless dichotomies. Buffy has the reckless in her, and Faith does come through with the responsibility, but for some reason, the writers very carefully framed Bad Girls to make it make sense that it was Faith, not Buffy, driving the stake into Finch's heart. It would have been more true to the characters and the difficulty of the situation, to make it more ambiguous, to raise the possibility that it was just Faith's bad luck to be the one who had to react when Finch popped out of the shadows. Writing Bad Girls that way would have made Buffy's ultimate reaction to Faith (Faith bad, me good) exponentially more problematic

[aycheb]

for some reason, the writers very carefully framed Bad Girls to make it make sense that it was Faith, not Buffy, driving the stake into Finch's heart. I disagree. What I saw was the writers very carefully framing Bad Girls to make it make sense that it was Faith driving the stake into Finch's heart. That it wasn't just something that happened , it was something she did. Legally she may not be culpable for her friendly fire but BtVS was never about legalities. It's about emotionalities, how would Faith feel

[2maggie2]

Yeah, Faith is definitely projecting onto them and that makes it virtually impossible for any of them to reach her.

[angearia]

Absolutely. Years of being powerless, isolated, and abused have taken their toll on Faith. And on top of that defensiveness, I wonder if there's a part of Faith that's recreating her formative experiences.

You know, that theory about how people who grow up in abusive situations seek to recreate the dysfunction in adulthood, if only because it's familiar. I wonder if Faith even knows at this point what it means to let someone in, to let them be close, to open up and trust them -- it's so much easier, so much more natural to believe that people think she's wrong and that they're against her. By believing that Buffy will be against her, she acts on that belief, further ensuring that Buffy will be against her further down the line. Faith's defensiveness plays out as self-fulfilling prophecy.