Buffy, belatedly: "Conversations With Dead People"
I've just sent the latest vid out for second beta (to renenet, of course, and also tamarabass), and thus have a moment at last to post about "Conversations With Dead People."
I should start off by saying that I concur with a great deal of what Vonnie and her commenters had to say, so there's some overlap here. And now I'll quit disclaiming and transcribe my notes.
We now know, or can reasonably guess, a good deal more about the First Evil (or whatever you want to call it):
- It wants Willow out of the game -- preferably dead;
- It wants Buffy to kill Spike;
- It wants Dawn not to trust Buffy;
- It can manifest outside the high school basement;
- It can manifest as... possibly anyone, but at minimum as dead people/beings (which includes Dru and Spike, of course);
- It can manifest in multiple places simultaneously;
- It knows a LOT ("strong like an amazon").
Other notes on the First Evil:
- Its manifestation as Cassie rather than Tara may well have been necessitated by outside forces (like Amber Benson's availability), but it still adds (as jood points out) an interesting layer: the First Evil has no problem playing Warren, but it makes sense that it might have trouble impersonating Tara, especially to Willow and over the course of a long conversation. (Like Vonnie, I'm rather grateful that we saw Cassie rather than Tara in this ep; the sight of dear Tara being evil and turning inside out is something I'm happy to skip.)
- It didn't appear directly to Buffy. Again, this makes sense, especially if this is the First Evil we're dealing with; Buffy's faced it before and thus might be difficult to fool at all, regardless of what form it chose.
- It was very sneaky, making Dawn fight so hard to hear its message -- and keeping the message short.
General stuff:
- Poor Jonathan! It figures that he'd get offed right as our affection for him reached an all-time high.
- Makes sense to have no Xander or Anya -- they're haunted by a lot of things, but dead people wouldn't necessarily be tops on the list. If the ep had included Xander, I agree with whoever was saying that it would have made sense to have him interact with Jesse; on the other hand, I share the feelings of The Divine S. that not seeing Eric Balfour again was pretty much a plus, and the ep was plenty full as it was, so no complaints here. Also? Sign me up with the crowd that's hoping to see Xander as Spike's reluctant alibi next week.
- Webbs (or whatever we're calling the cutie-pie vamp!therapist) was a delight. Dartmouth psych major. Heh. I loved that he wasn't sure if his face had changed. I also loved that becoming evil didn't dampen his Dartmouth-psych-major-ness, and that at the same time the show was quite careful to establish that just because he's a charming and empathetic cutie-pie doesn't mean he's not connected to all evilness, or however he put it.
- Buffy's conversation with Webbs was marvelous. I thought it made perfect sense that she'd talk to him; completely aside from his being quite a good listener, she does have a well-established pattern of confessing to vampires. The weary way in which she said "I'm gonna win" made me ache for her. And I was very glad to hear her articulate and begin to take responsibility for the way she treated Spike last season.
- Andrew? is so. fucked. up.
And a little rambling...
Because I am a hermit, I don't have a sense of how hotly contested my assumptions about who was and wasn't a manifestation of the First Evil might be. (There's got to be a better way to phrase that sentence, but I'm not up to the task of revision at the moment.) In my reading, we've got the F.E. impersonating Warren, Cassie, Joyce, and Spike, but not Webbs. Here's my -- logic might be too strong a word:
- Warren -- well, we'd already seen the First Evil do Warren in the high school (in "Lessons"), so that one's a gimme.
- Cassie's clear enough by the end of the ep -- and I loved the way they managed this, by the way; during the commercial between Acts 2 and 3, S. and I agreed that it *could* be the F.E. but we were leaning against it because Cassie just seemed so... benign, and then we figured it out just a split-second before Willow did. Yeesh.
- Joyce is less clear-cut, but the parallel storylines and the overdetermined white-dress-and-glowiness have me convinced that this was just a particularly ugly trick to pull on poor Dawn. And hey -- go Dawnie with the casting-out spell!
- Spike's still got the chip, and it was pretty carefully established in "Help" that, yup, it still hurts when he hits people. So there's the obvious clue. Webbs said that Spike turned him, but all that tells us is that he was vampified by someone/something that identified itself as Spike to Webbs -- which, for my money, suggests even more strongly that it was only something that wants Spike dead. (Although I imagine there's an evilista slasher out there right now writing fic in which a slumming Webbs picks up Spike and they go have improbable sex and psychologically acute pillow talk before Spike gleefully drains his new boy toy.) I actually wouldn't put it past Spike to go suicidal (there's precedent) and decide to try to get Buffy to stake him -- but, again, chip. We've also got a couple of smaller hints: we don't hear Spike speak at all, but we do, as S. pointed out, have some very un-Spike-like body language. This wasn't swaggering demon Spike, or trying-to-be-sensitive-boyfriend-material Spike, or crazy William-esque Spike; this was a guy who shoves his hands in his pockets and shuffles along like he listens to Morrissey or something. Now, with some actors **cough*davidboreanaz*cough** I wouldn't consider this a viable clue. But with JM... yeah, I'm willing to trust it. And one last factor: like S., I just can't see any of the gang letting the crazy vampire drink alone.
- Webbs could, I suppose, have been another manifestation, but I doubt it. Too risky; why should the F.E. bother trying to fool the Slayer? Much easier to just make a whole bunch of vamps while in Spike's form on the assumption that at least one of the newbies will pass the info along.
renenet and I were planning a Season 7 mini-marathon during her visit last weekend, but got sidetracked by the Fellowship Of The Ring DVD -- which I don't at all regret; I just wish we could have done both. *sigh* Maybe I'll go work on some of the critical essays I've got underway -- get my head in order about past seasons before trying to do anything else with this one. The essay about the failure of individualism in the Buffyverse seems especially apropos, what with the F.E. clearly trying the time-honored strategy of splintering the gang. I do hope Willow tells everybody exactly what she saw and what it said, and that they put two and two together sooner rather than later...