My Heroes
Imagine two women. One’s blonde, early twenties, looking out in broad daylight at an open road with the beginning of the beginning of a smile on her face. The other is older, forty-something, still attractive, dark-haired. She’s raising her right hand, part of an impromtu inauguration ceremony set on a plane and even though it’s a still image you can see the effort it takes for her hand not to shake, her voice not to catch. She’s afraid.
The first of these is the closing image of the last episode of the last season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The world has been saved (again), the hellmouth (and her home town) destroyed and she’s finally taking a moment to appreciate the implications of being no longer the one girl of legend.
WILLOW: We changed the world. I can feel them, Buffy. All over. Slayers are awakening everywhere.
The second comes from midway through the 2003 miniseries that opened a revamped Battlestar Galactica. Laura Roslin, the former Secretary of Education is being sworn in as President of the twelve colonies after a geneocidal attack from a race of enemy robots (Cylons) has wiped out most of the human species and turned their home planets into radioactive wastelands.
Two very different women, two very different situations. And yet similar in that both women are going through a kind of personal singularity, an event after which nothing will be as it could possibly have been imagined to be in all the time leading up to it. In both cases, as well, there’s been a fundamental shift in their powers. Roslin held power before the Cylon attack directly, as a minor political figure, and more indirectly, as the President’s lover. Now, not only is her overt power much greater but the stakes are higher, life or death for the remaining human race rather than teachers’ wages and funding crises. Buffy, on the other hand, had no political power, the human authorities were quite unaware of her. What she had was the power of a hero to inspire and power over the demon world as an enforcer of the law (whatever that meant). The activation of hundreds of Slayers gave her a new kind of responsibility, to guide and organize all the newly empowered volunteers, while somewhat diluting her unique symbolic authority.
Buffy’s story, post -singularity, is only just starting to be told, Laura’s is three seasons in. I could wish, however, that President’s Roslin career and in particular the way power has changed her could be a model for Buffy’s. “Power corrupts” is axiomatic and like most axioms open to question. Corrupts who, corrupts how and is that all it does? I think “Power changes” would be a less didactic but more accurate and more interesting statement. Roslin has done things she would have never thought herself capable of, given the orders to abandon her own ships or even gun one down in order to escape Cylon attackers, allowed prisoners to be subjected to experimental drug treatments during interrogation, given her authority for reciprocal genocide of the Cylons (although the manoeuvre was sabotaged) and attempted to rig an election. She’s also survived internment and occupation, despite that issued a general pardon of all collaborators with the regime and is still in the later stages of her presidency prepared to listen to her (human) critics and change policy accordingly. She’s different, harder, stronger, older, wiser and while fighting the Cylons has made her more like them in some ways it hasn’t made her one of them, or certainly not into one of the kind of monsters she imagines them to be.
Joss Whedon is a sneaky writer. The new comic season began with Buffy and a troop of Slayers jumping out of a helicopter for a James Bond-style raid on some nefarious demonic goings on and continued to lay on the comic style activities, the secret base, the gianting of Dawn, the unlikely resurrections and unCGI-able magical creatures. Big lies are more believable and at first it appeared as though the change of style and setting were simple genre-appropriate. Buffy seemed herself, alternately thoughtful, loyal, resourceful and quippy but mid-way through the second four-part arc she began to feel a little off, to be flipping too abruptly between immature insouciance and existential abandonment. Schizo-Buffy is Buffy with something to hide and sure enough in two panels of the latest issue it transpires that the whole James Bond thing did have some basis in RealEconomik. She and a gang of her best Slayers robbed a bank.
There’s a great deal yet to be revealed about the circumstances of this lapse. Was it a one-off to enable a world saveage operation such as was shown in The Chain or a regular source of petty cash? Did Buffy plan and order the whole thing or was it agreed on by a larger group? Who knows about it, Xander? Giles? When Buffy said "the guys thought I might be a target," did they mean of Interpol? Who or what is giving them high tech equipment in exchange for gold bars?
Despite her refusal to take money from individuals, Buffy has always been a little cavalier about her treatment of corporate property when for Slaying purposes. She stole a rocket launcher, she blew up a school and then a whole town, she broke into restricted government institutions and had Willow hack into their mainframes. Moreover, since the fall of Sunnydale it seems she’s become aware of W&H, which is unlikely to have changed her opinion of corporations in any positive direction. She’s also been very prepared to take risks, following her instincts to let Spike go unchained, assuming her blood was equivalent to Dawn’s or ordering an immediate raid on Caleb central. Sometimes she makes mistakes (and suffers for them) whether sleeping with Angel or deciding General!Buffy was the only way to work with the Potentials. Major larceny is therefore believable but I think it’s a mistake comparable to Roslin’s attempt to rig the election and one made for similar reasons. It’s an act that may solve problems in the short term but the wider consequences are potentially disastrous. In particular the one Willow brought up about it creating new enemies and the precendent it sets to her troops when it becomes more widely known, which it inevitably will- she doesn’t fly under the radar anymore. It’s a mistake, like Roslin’s, of still thinking like a minor player whose actions will have only local effects. I hope it’s a mistake that, like Roslin, she can eventually come back from strengthened but time and much story remains still to pass.