BtVS: "Dirty Girls" / series-end speculations and hopes
While watching it, I thought this ep was great: creepsome, funny, flirty (Faith! Faith!), heartbreaking... and all with continuity! Hey, I'm watching BtVS! See Vonnie's review, whose enthusiasm covers pretty much everything I had to say on that front.
Thinking about it afterwards, my reaction has been somewhat more ambivalent -- not so much about the ep itself, which I'm still pretty sold on, as about the way it fits into the season's structure.
Plotwise, the introduction of Caleb at this point is, frankly, weird. The series has never introduced a brand-new major villain this late in the season before, and with good reason; it feels (at this point) merely convenient from a plot point of view (the show needs a corporeal villain to beat up and further demoralize Our Heroes). I want to stress the "at this point," because Joss & co. are completely capable of making this all hang together for me in retrospect; but right now, it feels more like stunt casting than anything else. Last season's Evil!Willow plotline certainly took the story in a new direction at the last minute, but that new direction had behind it a season's worth of Willow's growing power, and her struggles with magic; however one felt about the way those struggles were portrayed, they were very much a part of the season, and so that particular sudden turnaround was a logical extension of already-existing plot material rather than an introduction of wholly new material.
Thematically, of course, Caleb's much less weird. The show's been portraying and engaging with -- and Buffy has been fighting, literally -- assorted embodiments of sexism and misogyny for, let's see, about seven years now. In that sense, Caleb is just the latest, and one of the most creepily explicit / least metaphorical, in a long line of villains whose badness is all wrapped up with their misogyny. And the idea of "dirty girls" -- with its echo of "bad girls" -- goes back at least as far as mid-S3, and was explored pretty explicitly last season. But BtVS has always been at its best when theme and plot were fairly intertwined rather than working independently; I'd argue that the problems resulting from separation of theme and plot are what fuels a lot of the widespread discontent with S4 (including my own, and I rather liked that season). --and there's a much longer essay there that I am NOT going to get into just now.
I'm wondering, more than ever, what kind of resolution we're heading for in S7. As Vonnie pointed out, Buffy-the-General seems to be heading (as usual) for some sort of fall, to be followed by some sort of epiphany. So: what epiphany? I'm rooting for something about the relationship between individual and collective action.
The show has periodically reminded us that Slayers have usually fought alone; Buffy has been unusual, and possibly even unique, in being "the Chosen One... and her friends." Her training of the Potentials, however, has not taken advantage of those unusual experiences. Last night's fight with Caleb was really a series of individual attacks, which he repelled all too easily; serial individualism is not the same as teamwork. I'm interested in the dichotomy that's been set up between "talking about war" and "going to war," as if there are no other options. At the end of S4, we saw the Scoobies combine to form an uber-Slayer. Now they've got two Slayers and a herd of Potentials -- the entire remaining power of the Slayer line -- in one place; surely there's something they can do with that?
Thinking back to "Amends," I'm wondering if "war" as it's been thus far defined is really the way to go at all. The crux of "Amends" was, admittedly, personal rather than apocalyptic: would Angel dust himself or would he suck it up and deal? (Well, okay, maybe that was apocalyptic in and of itself for viewers who are more invested in Angel than I am.) Buffy tells Angel in the climactic scene, "Strong is fighting. It's hard, and it's painful, and it's every day." But she doesn't seem to mean physical fighting; that very scene, in which they *fight* the effects of The First Evil, has nothing to do with physical fighting. It has to do with tapping into inner strength, for one thing -- but also with connecting with others: "It's what we have to do, and we can do it together."
That's what I'd really like to see the last few episodes of the series explore. And that's what I'm hoping the fight in "Dirty Girls" was setting us up for.