Meta on Season Six
I've been thinking. Never a good sign, you might say. This is the outcome of my thinkingness:
A couple of days ago I commented on a FaceBook page to do with Joss Whedon and was answered almost at once by a former pupil, Bart. (Now a man in his mid-twenties. Who allowed that to happen?) It turned into a discussion about Season Six (as so often these things do) It also made me think quite deeply about aspects of the season I hadn't really considered before.
I've loved S6 for a long time, even more so because I went through an extended and serious depression. I see the whole season as a metaphor for severe clinical depression. As such it is very strongly linked to the second half of S5; the season which seems so complete in itself, ending with Buffy's death, is to me simply the first half of the arc which deals with her depression and recovery.
If you have depression or have ever had it, you will know that one of the most difficult things to do is to explain what is wrong to kind outsiders, even loving family. In part this is because depression often hits worst when objective causes seem to be improving - that was certainly the case for me, and in some other instances I have been close to. So it is with Buffy. From Into the Woods onwards she loses almost everything and everyone who matters to her - her boyfriend, her mother, her sister, taken by Glory, even the focus of her friends - Willow is far more obsessed with Tara and Xander has Anya. She has a brief loss of control in Weight of the World, foreshadowing if there ever was any, but seems to pull herself together (hated phrase) in time to confront Glory. And then she dies; only a few days after Willow thought she had pulled her out of catatonia, Buffy willingly re-enters the state.
When Buffy returns it's almost impossible for her to deal with the world. She lacks affect - the ability to feel appropriate emotions. She is constantly pretending to herself and to her friends that she is grateful, eager to resume her life, happy to be alive. But we know the truth. So does Spike and, loving but soul-less, he tries to offer the fix he thinks would work for him - lots of sex, sweet words, playing at a relationship. She knows that what they have, what she won't even give a name to, is not what he thinks they have. Rejecting him is one of her earliest steps back to rejoining the world, but it isn't so simple. When you are fighting depression, one step back to every two forward is doing well - often it's two back for one forward. So Buffy, without the artificial prop of Spike's presence, dips even deeper, with Normal Again, seeing her entire world as wrong and destroying it to destroy the pain - or coming within inches of doing so. Spike is a reminder that she could take the easy option, keep on using him, allow him to think it means something, deceive her friends. She doesn't, because she chooses to start to get better, a huge step in her progress.
Meanwhile, Willow is following a parallel path. Yes, the magic=drug addiction metaphor is there, and depressingly crude at that, but there's more going on there than just addiction. To start with, Willow has suffered loss too. Not as bad, objectively, as Buffy has, but Tara was taken from her as brutally as Dawn was taken from Buffy - except that Willow had the daily care of what little was left of her, and a possible lifetime of such caring ahead of her. Magic saves the day - and then magic is the reason Tara leaves her, again. From Willow's perspective, life is confusing and deeply unfair. She saved her girlfriend by magic. She saved Buffy by magic. She even saved Dawn from being taken into care by her amazing robot-mending skills. She wasn't just important, she was essential to the group, 'Boss of Us'. And she lost that too when Buffy came back. Rational Willow wanted her back, wanted Buffy to be in charge, but the mechanisms of depression are far from rational. Willow can't cope, wants someone else to cope for her. Xander too - terrified of marriage, messing up appallingly, he sees everything around him falling apart, and nothing he can do makes it better. Indeed, his worst nightmares come true; he has always needed to be seen as a Man, and when Anya turns to Spike for comfort sex, the fact that she goes to a non-man puts him in the same category, as far as his invariably muddled emotions can interpret, anyway.
So S6 is dealing with problems as Joss so often does, by reflecting and refraction, the central problems explored in a range of ways which provide a commentary on each other and the main issue. However, there are things about S6 which are trickier to explain away. I quote from my friend Bart:
My biggest problems with S6 were the Trio, who I felt were an excellent opportunity thoroughly mishandled by constantly and inconsistently oscillating between being hilarious, ineffectual and creepy in a way that mostly seemed accidental, and the equating of magic to drugs, when it had been almost overtly linked to sexuality in previous seasons (and very effectively too). I appreciate that it is possible to become addicted to sex, but the drugs parallel (with the "dealer" figure for example) was a bad idea poorly handled (in my opinion of course).
I think we can agree that Rack adds little to the storytelling, except in providing yet another figure Willow can blame for her own issues. But the Trio? I'm not convinced. They provide essential comic relief in a dark season, but they themselves are part of the darkness, and particularly important in Willow's story - and not just because Warren murders Tara and becomes Willow's victim. (She steps over the line here every bit as much as Faith did by killing the deputy Mayor in S3, but this is a more complicated world now; nobody can afford the simple judgements that seemed so obvious back then.) No, the Trio fit in with quite a few themes - coming to terms with being oneself, not an imagined hero, the serious implications of certain fantasies, the misogyny embedded in certain aspects of nerd culture. Warren became a seriously unpleasant individual, in every way as bad as previous villains, even more so because he typified the banality of evil concept.
These young men are presented to us as eternal adolescents, but actually the same age as the human Scoobies, their identity as part of the class of '99 being made very clear by the inclusion of Jonathon. They, like the Scoobies, have the task all people in their late teens have to deal with - becoming an adult, finding an identity, coming to terms with not being a superstar. They have to find an identity and, like Willow, are too impatient to go through the long, tedious process of building one. "Let's be supervillains." "OK".
I'm going to quote Bart again here:
The Trio are a tough one. I have no problem with the ideas they embodied, but they a) too likeable (at first) and b) too ineffectual in the early period, to make for good villains. They were bumbling nerds who you mostly identified with (or I did anyway), but who also tended to suck. That they then managed, through this rather unlikely chain of events, to create a horrible revenge monster (in case anyone reads this who doesn't want it spoilered) out of a character we used to like, just didn't sit right with me. Killing off a character I liked in a random (and highly contrived) accident, using that to create another, more threatening villain which hadn't really been hinted at previously (bar one admittedly brilliant bit of semi-foreshadowing in Season 3) and then turning the show into a brief revenge flick all seemed really tonally out of place to me.
The point here, I feel is that nice guys do turn into nasty people. Nobody starts out life thinking of themselves as a jerk, but some people turn into jerks even so. And we see, step by step, how that happens - the losers are not losers when they are together. They can rejoice in their technical skills and arcane knowledge of films and TV which matter to them but not, as far as they know, to anyone else. Loners, they want to forge a sense of being part of something bigger. They need to feel adequate in the areas of life which peer pressure has marked out as important - making money, achieving targets, finding partners of the opposite sex. That need to feel adequate subtly shifts into a need to feel they excel. Warren goes the furthest down this dark path, and pays accordingly, but all three of them share that need to be not just good enough but actually important. When you are a child you assume all grown-ups are important - and when you get to be one it can be a shock to find out the truth. In this, as in so much else, the Trio echoes Willow - who also started off as nerdy in a sweet sort of way. You could draw a lot of parallels between Jonathon's increasing need for acceptance from Earshot to Superstar and Willow's need to be in control from advising Cordelia to hit the Deliver key through to riding that big truck.
We see the trio first as silly little boys who think life is a computer game or comic book. Their agreement about taking over the world shows they have no concept of what they are doing, let alone the implications. There continues to be a strain of that adolescent self-centredness throughout, even when the survivors are running away at the end. At the same time we, the audience, are increasingly aware of the sinister aspect - making a sex-doll robot becomes making a woman into a sex-doll robot, in ways that are not at all far from teenage fantasies ("Jane Eyre" shows the same process from a female perspective, arguably.) They are messing up in an adult world without the capacity to recognise it, which is why I find them very believable - I have seen so many teenagers zip between silly kids and dangerous predators/villains/victims. Sometimes all in the same kid. They are pretty much following an accelerated version of Willow's journey - arguably if she deserves redemption in S7, so does Andrew.
Everything gets darker through the season, which ends as it begins in a grave. In those final scenes we see all the human Scoobies fighting their way out of darkness into light - paralleled by Spike's journey through darkness to receive the light of his soul. Meanwhile Jonathan and Andrew drive on into darkness and away from our screens; when we next meet them in S7 they are in darkness again, in Mexico. Everything gets darker at some point for most late adolescents too; it might be the first setback, like missing the grades or the job you wanted, the first serious breakup, loss of a person or a role, finding out you aren't as good at something as you thought or enjoying what you are doing as much as you expected. Most of us get through this. It's a struggle, but we find our own way. When you are struggling with the very fact of being yourself, the day job oscillates from being to banal to be worth making an effort for and then to being too much effort even to start. This is what we see repeated by almost all the young or seeming young characters in S6. But with added demons, because it's this show - and nobody should ever, even for a moment, believe Marti's claim that they abandoned metaphor for this season.
ETA:
I want to be quite clear that I do feel Dark Willow is foreshadowed, right back to S1. It is Bart who claimed otherwise!
So, some of the reasons I love this season. Any comments?
A couple of days ago I commented on a FaceBook page to do with Joss Whedon and was answered almost at once by a former pupil, Bart. (Now a man in his mid-twenties. Who allowed that to happen?) It turned into a discussion about Season Six (as so often these things do) It also made me think quite deeply about aspects of the season I hadn't really considered before.
I've loved S6 for a long time, even more so because I went through an extended and serious depression. I see the whole season as a metaphor for severe clinical depression. As such it is very strongly linked to the second half of S5; the season which seems so complete in itself, ending with Buffy's death, is to me simply the first half of the arc which deals with her depression and recovery.
If you have depression or have ever had it, you will know that one of the most difficult things to do is to explain what is wrong to kind outsiders, even loving family. In part this is because depression often hits worst when objective causes seem to be improving - that was certainly the case for me, and in some other instances I have been close to. So it is with Buffy. From Into the Woods onwards she loses almost everything and everyone who matters to her - her boyfriend, her mother, her sister, taken by Glory, even the focus of her friends - Willow is far more obsessed with Tara and Xander has Anya. She has a brief loss of control in Weight of the World, foreshadowing if there ever was any, but seems to pull herself together (hated phrase) in time to confront Glory. And then she dies; only a few days after Willow thought she had pulled her out of catatonia, Buffy willingly re-enters the state.
When Buffy returns it's almost impossible for her to deal with the world. She lacks affect - the ability to feel appropriate emotions. She is constantly pretending to herself and to her friends that she is grateful, eager to resume her life, happy to be alive. But we know the truth. So does Spike and, loving but soul-less, he tries to offer the fix he thinks would work for him - lots of sex, sweet words, playing at a relationship. She knows that what they have, what she won't even give a name to, is not what he thinks they have. Rejecting him is one of her earliest steps back to rejoining the world, but it isn't so simple. When you are fighting depression, one step back to every two forward is doing well - often it's two back for one forward. So Buffy, without the artificial prop of Spike's presence, dips even deeper, with Normal Again, seeing her entire world as wrong and destroying it to destroy the pain - or coming within inches of doing so. Spike is a reminder that she could take the easy option, keep on using him, allow him to think it means something, deceive her friends. She doesn't, because she chooses to start to get better, a huge step in her progress.
Meanwhile, Willow is following a parallel path. Yes, the magic=drug addiction metaphor is there, and depressingly crude at that, but there's more going on there than just addiction. To start with, Willow has suffered loss too. Not as bad, objectively, as Buffy has, but Tara was taken from her as brutally as Dawn was taken from Buffy - except that Willow had the daily care of what little was left of her, and a possible lifetime of such caring ahead of her. Magic saves the day - and then magic is the reason Tara leaves her, again. From Willow's perspective, life is confusing and deeply unfair. She saved her girlfriend by magic. She saved Buffy by magic. She even saved Dawn from being taken into care by her amazing robot-mending skills. She wasn't just important, she was essential to the group, 'Boss of Us'. And she lost that too when Buffy came back. Rational Willow wanted her back, wanted Buffy to be in charge, but the mechanisms of depression are far from rational. Willow can't cope, wants someone else to cope for her. Xander too - terrified of marriage, messing up appallingly, he sees everything around him falling apart, and nothing he can do makes it better. Indeed, his worst nightmares come true; he has always needed to be seen as a Man, and when Anya turns to Spike for comfort sex, the fact that she goes to a non-man puts him in the same category, as far as his invariably muddled emotions can interpret, anyway.
So S6 is dealing with problems as Joss so often does, by reflecting and refraction, the central problems explored in a range of ways which provide a commentary on each other and the main issue. However, there are things about S6 which are trickier to explain away. I quote from my friend Bart:
My biggest problems with S6 were the Trio, who I felt were an excellent opportunity thoroughly mishandled by constantly and inconsistently oscillating between being hilarious, ineffectual and creepy in a way that mostly seemed accidental, and the equating of magic to drugs, when it had been almost overtly linked to sexuality in previous seasons (and very effectively too). I appreciate that it is possible to become addicted to sex, but the drugs parallel (with the "dealer" figure for example) was a bad idea poorly handled (in my opinion of course).
I think we can agree that Rack adds little to the storytelling, except in providing yet another figure Willow can blame for her own issues. But the Trio? I'm not convinced. They provide essential comic relief in a dark season, but they themselves are part of the darkness, and particularly important in Willow's story - and not just because Warren murders Tara and becomes Willow's victim. (She steps over the line here every bit as much as Faith did by killing the deputy Mayor in S3, but this is a more complicated world now; nobody can afford the simple judgements that seemed so obvious back then.) No, the Trio fit in with quite a few themes - coming to terms with being oneself, not an imagined hero, the serious implications of certain fantasies, the misogyny embedded in certain aspects of nerd culture. Warren became a seriously unpleasant individual, in every way as bad as previous villains, even more so because he typified the banality of evil concept.
These young men are presented to us as eternal adolescents, but actually the same age as the human Scoobies, their identity as part of the class of '99 being made very clear by the inclusion of Jonathon. They, like the Scoobies, have the task all people in their late teens have to deal with - becoming an adult, finding an identity, coming to terms with not being a superstar. They have to find an identity and, like Willow, are too impatient to go through the long, tedious process of building one. "Let's be supervillains." "OK".
I'm going to quote Bart again here:
The Trio are a tough one. I have no problem with the ideas they embodied, but they a) too likeable (at first) and b) too ineffectual in the early period, to make for good villains. They were bumbling nerds who you mostly identified with (or I did anyway), but who also tended to suck. That they then managed, through this rather unlikely chain of events, to create a horrible revenge monster (in case anyone reads this who doesn't want it spoilered) out of a character we used to like, just didn't sit right with me. Killing off a character I liked in a random (and highly contrived) accident, using that to create another, more threatening villain which hadn't really been hinted at previously (bar one admittedly brilliant bit of semi-foreshadowing in Season 3) and then turning the show into a brief revenge flick all seemed really tonally out of place to me.
The point here, I feel is that nice guys do turn into nasty people. Nobody starts out life thinking of themselves as a jerk, but some people turn into jerks even so. And we see, step by step, how that happens - the losers are not losers when they are together. They can rejoice in their technical skills and arcane knowledge of films and TV which matter to them but not, as far as they know, to anyone else. Loners, they want to forge a sense of being part of something bigger. They need to feel adequate in the areas of life which peer pressure has marked out as important - making money, achieving targets, finding partners of the opposite sex. That need to feel adequate subtly shifts into a need to feel they excel. Warren goes the furthest down this dark path, and pays accordingly, but all three of them share that need to be not just good enough but actually important. When you are a child you assume all grown-ups are important - and when you get to be one it can be a shock to find out the truth. In this, as in so much else, the Trio echoes Willow - who also started off as nerdy in a sweet sort of way. You could draw a lot of parallels between Jonathon's increasing need for acceptance from Earshot to Superstar and Willow's need to be in control from advising Cordelia to hit the Deliver key through to riding that big truck.
We see the trio first as silly little boys who think life is a computer game or comic book. Their agreement about taking over the world shows they have no concept of what they are doing, let alone the implications. There continues to be a strain of that adolescent self-centredness throughout, even when the survivors are running away at the end. At the same time we, the audience, are increasingly aware of the sinister aspect - making a sex-doll robot becomes making a woman into a sex-doll robot, in ways that are not at all far from teenage fantasies ("Jane Eyre" shows the same process from a female perspective, arguably.) They are messing up in an adult world without the capacity to recognise it, which is why I find them very believable - I have seen so many teenagers zip between silly kids and dangerous predators/villains/victims. Sometimes all in the same kid. They are pretty much following an accelerated version of Willow's journey - arguably if she deserves redemption in S7, so does Andrew.
Everything gets darker through the season, which ends as it begins in a grave. In those final scenes we see all the human Scoobies fighting their way out of darkness into light - paralleled by Spike's journey through darkness to receive the light of his soul. Meanwhile Jonathan and Andrew drive on into darkness and away from our screens; when we next meet them in S7 they are in darkness again, in Mexico. Everything gets darker at some point for most late adolescents too; it might be the first setback, like missing the grades or the job you wanted, the first serious breakup, loss of a person or a role, finding out you aren't as good at something as you thought or enjoying what you are doing as much as you expected. Most of us get through this. It's a struggle, but we find our own way. When you are struggling with the very fact of being yourself, the day job oscillates from being to banal to be worth making an effort for and then to being too much effort even to start. This is what we see repeated by almost all the young or seeming young characters in S6. But with added demons, because it's this show - and nobody should ever, even for a moment, believe Marti's claim that they abandoned metaphor for this season.
ETA:
I want to be quite clear that I do feel Dark Willow is foreshadowed, right back to S1. It is Bart who claimed otherwise!
So, some of the reasons I love this season. Any comments?