Awesomest Buffyverse Monsters (Part 2)
(Note: The LJ upgrade royally screwed me the first time I tried to post this. Sorry for any comments I might have deleted when I was finally able to undo the nightmare of abstract art that the update software spit out. Here's hoping that the second time's a charm.)
So, a few weeks back I listed the first 5 of m top 10 fave Buffyverse Monsters. Now, without further ado, here are my next three picks...
*Putincrab does the Dance of Monster Joy for your comments.
Okay, let's get cracking:
TED
Appears in:"Ted" (3.13) awkward moments at family functions broken homes
Quote:
"Right. 'It's just a game, do your own thing.' Well, I'm not wired that way."
Awesomeness:
First thing's first: Ted is Jack Fucking TripperJohnF'ingRitter.
Normally that would be enough to warrant a slot in this or any civilized list, but the character of Ted Buchanan smashes through the Rittersphere by providing some of the most heavy duty foreshadowing of any monster on the show. Not only does Ted continue to tug on the series-long thread of Buffy's fraught relationship with "artificial people" (Moloch, Sid the Dummy, Garland, Adam, April, the Buffybot, Sweet's Puppets, etc), but he also gives us some big clues about the effect that Buffy's absentee father issues have on her gradually evolving worldview, and acts as a sounding board for the other Scoobies' private yearnings as well. Xander responds instantly to the promise of a doting father-figure in his general vicinity, as a counterpoint to his actual father's abuse. Willow is drawn to Ted's technical savvy, sensing someone she can finally share her special interests and talents with. On the surface, Joyce's new boyfriend seems to be the answer to everyone's prayers.
But, unbeknownst to them, Ted is a Stepford Stepdad with a deadly design flaw: it can't adapt to new situations. Ted can only mechanically scroll through the archetypal responses that its dead creator believed should have kept his own shattered family together. This is because the robot has no real life experience - it only knows how it was "wired" by external forces. From what little we learn of its creator's own fate, this limitation may speak to the failures of both its programming and its programmer. We don't know for sure whether Ted's creator wanted the robot to mimic his own familial mistakes or to somehow "correct" them, but no matter the case, it seems that Ted did precisely what it was programmed to do: locate a divorced woman and insinuate itself into her life by charming those he can and intimidating (or eliminating) those he can't.
It all adds up to a dark and multi-layered joke about postmodern divorce and the awkward (and sometimes sinister) dating reality for divorcees with grown children. With a lesser actor, the whole experiment could have fallen flat on its face, but Ritter lends his tin-can monster a tangible 3rd dimension. There are moments where the creature appears to be genuinely frustrated, as though it labors to understand why anyone would want to deviate from the simplistic Utopia embedded in its programming. Ted might not possess self-awareness as we humans know it, but there is still something painfully human about becoming frustrated with the failure of our messy reality to resemble a streamlined ideal, and that frustration leading us to evil.
Buffy is briefly consumed with guilt when she thinks she's (however accidentally) killed Ted the Man, raising questions both for her and her friends about the responsibilty of a Slayer when dealing with fragile human life. She eventually finds her guilt alleviated when Ted the Monster is revealed, but, as with Warren's creation April, we are left wondering if there was something of a man inside the monster after all.
Fate:
Frying Pan to the noggin, Old-School-Style.
HOLDEN WEBSTER
Appears in:"Conversations with Dead People" (7.09) $100/hr therapy sessions confessional booths unexpected run-ins at restaurants, places of work, grocery checkout lines, etc.
Quote:
“I just think you're in some pain here-which I do kind of enjoy 'cause I'm evil now-but you should just ease up on yourself. It's not exactly like you have the patent on bad relationships."
Awesomeness:
Before I get going on the undiluted awesomeness of Holden Webster, a little something about season seven:
I get the sense that the final season of "Buffy" is a controversial one for fandom. While I love it dearly, I have often come across the reaction that it was conceptually strong but dramatically flawed. A few months back, I had an LJ convo with a fan, during which she lamented the lack of clues to Buffy's inner thoughts and perspectives throughout season seven. She read this reluctance of Buffy to lay herself emotionally bare in largely Doylist terms -- in other words, she claimed that the authors didn't let Buffy tell us how she viewed her life and her romantic relationships because a) they themselves did not know or b) they were afraid of rape-apologism blowback regarding the 'Seeing Red" bathroom scene with Spike. I still totally disagree with that reading - the way I see it, Buffy's emotional distance and growing tendency to bury her true feelings might be the most important angle of her series-long character arc. She never breaks the laws of in-universe gravity, because the struggle to close that emotional distance and self-actualize is the key to her Heroic Journey. In other words, it's elementary, my dear Watsonian!
With each new season, Buffy drifts further and further from self-connection, growing simultaneously more powerful and less willing to dwell on her own human fragility. She eventually starts to see herself as both more and less than human; outwardly frigid but filled with big, burning emotions that she would rather channel into her violent line of work than explore and accept. This is the tragic subtext of Buffy Summers' inner battle that occasionally becomes "text", as it does in episodes like "Restless", "Intervention", "The Weight of the World" and "Once More With Feeling."
Still, even on those rare occasions that Buffy gives her audience a comic book-y "thought balloon" to let us peek inside her emotional fortress, there's usually a fog of art on hand, to keep that inner portrait pleasantly elusive. Whether she's trapped by the poetic conventions of a song or within the abstract angles of a dream, we usually aren't handed a verbalized, left-brained summatio of Buffy Summer by Buffy Summers. Though she is surrounded by confidantes, they are increasingly distant and cagey, and it becomes rarer and rarer for Buffy to say, "I feel X about Y." By the seventh season, her heart is coated with so much scar tissue that it has become almost impossible for her to safely do so, especially when it comes to her romantic relationships.
Then along came Holden Webster.
Thinking back on that fandom debate, I guess it would have been much simpler to type "Holden Webster" and be done with it. A former Sunnydale High classmate and Sunnydale U Psych student, Holden was arguably able to elicit more infomation about Buffy's self-image and her view of her relationships in a single episode than Willow, Xander and Giles could in the previous three seasons combined. Although Buffy recalls Holden from high school (eventually, and barely), Holden is presented as that proverbial stranger who we can unburden our souls to, without fear of judgment or repurcussion.
While Buffy and Holden initially fall into a chummy repartee, their conversation quickly transforms into a rocky road, littered with landmines. It turns out that Buffy has been holding back quite a lot over the years, and isn't so pleased to have it tugged out of her by a wannabe-shrink like Holden. As their conversation deepens, though, we hear Buffy say things out loud that we somehow have always known, but have never heard confirmed in her own words. We hear that she blames her dad for her parents' divorce, and that it has deeply affected her outlook on romantic relationships. We hear that she still blames herself for the destructive arc of her relationship with Spike. We hear Buffy lament that emotions don't seem to have proper boundaries, or fit under tidy labels ('See, this is what I hate about you vampires. Sex and death and love and pain-it's all the same damn thing to you"). We learn that, even after her trip to heaven, Buffy is uncertain if there is a God ("Nothing solid.") Most importantly, we hear Buffy say aloud that she doesn't believe herself worthy of love, because love is something for human beings and she doesn't feel connected to humanity anymore. She feels that her power is a burden and a curse -not because of the responsibility that comes with it but because power makes you more singular, and therefore more alone
Through it all, Holden plays the part of the objective outsider to a tee. Though just back from the grave, he glides effortlessly into psychologist mode, posing outwardly innocent questions that provoke Buffy into making the kind of blunt self-assessments she would normally repress for the sake of others, or drown in snark and sarcasm. At one point, the monster in him uses this information as an opening for an attack, but one gets the sense that Holden is not wholly a monster... not yet, at least. As a newly minted vampire, he is still trying to understand what he has become, which lends his own sudden confessions and revelations a weirdly tragic edge. Holden gives off the impression of someone with "phantom limb" syndrome, who still can still feel some remnant of the appendage that was recently (and violently) taken from him by a hypnotized Spike. His lines are often darkly funny, reflecting the shared nihilism of all monsters, but laced with twinges of confusion and regret. For instance, when he apologetically says, "You opened up. It was really sweet. It made me want to bite you", it's funny, but it contains a hint of that undifferentiated emotional stew that Buffy complains about, and likely sees in herself.
The care Mutant Enemy took with constructing and casting this monster -a person from her past whom the hero only slightly remembers, and a confessor whom she knows will not survive to tell the tale- was obvious, and helped to make "Conversations with Dead People' one of the best episodes of the season. We're only given a few broad strokes of Holden's life before undeath, but even those are well-crafted and evocative. In the course of a few lines, Holden describes a journey from the world of Theater to the world of the Real. He begins in high school with the artistry of the playwright and IRL monster-fighter Václav Havel and the idealistic dreamer Pippin, then he "graduates" to a harder world of Psychotherapy and Tae Kwon Do. Finally he succumbs to the same sort of nihilism, apathy and evil that the heroic artists of his youth fought against.
Despite (or because of) the tragic arc of his transformation, there is something to be learned and gained from meeting him. Buffy opens up to Holden and, by extension, to us, leading us into the final slope of her character arc with her cards fully on the table. If the original purpose of a monster was to challenge our hero in a way that would expose her wounds and weaknesses and lay bare her soul, then Holden Webster might qualify as the most successful monster to ever appear on the show.
Fate:
Staked (Needed a few more years of Tae Kwon Do, I guess)
NORMAN PFISTER
Appears in:"What's My Line, Part One" (2.09) "What's My Line, Part Two" (2.10) my least favorite nightmares
Quote:
"Good day. I'm Norman Pfister with Blush Beautiful Skin Care and Cosmetics. I was wondering if I might interest you in some free samples?'"
Awesomeness:
.....
Did you know that the female of the species Mantis Religosa, or Praying Mantis, will often devour her mate's head during coitus? It's believed that this gory romantic overture is carried out in order to make the male ejaculate faster. The headless lover will continue the sex act to completion, at which point the female finishes her meal...
.....
Meanwhile, the male of the specie Cimex Lectularius, or Common Bed Bug, copulates by stabbing the abdomen of the female with its knife-like sex organ, then ejaculating semen into the wound. If the female survives the assault, his sperm travels through the bloodstream to fertilize her brood eggs...
.....
Have you ever almost stepped on a dead animal? A gray, pasted stain that used to be a squirrel, or a bird reduced to a web of dirty feathers and bones? You are walking along a sidewalk and the creature's body just suddenly materializes out of nowhere, an inch from your descending shoe. Something like an electric volt leaps through your body, because you almost touched death.
.....
What about something larger, like a pet dog? Like the bird or the squirrel, the body appears suddenly, and you recoil just the same, even though you know the dog was once loved by someone real. You don't know if dogs have souls or not, but this one's eyes are gone, the soul's windows obscenely smashed open by death. Pale, larval insects are wriggling out of the sockets.
.....
One hot summer day, I bought a pomegranate on a sudden whim. I'd had a foggy childhood memory of eating one, and of it being filled with a bright and refreshing sweetness. Excited to taste it again, I took it home and decided to eat it right away. When I cut the fruit in half, dozens of squirming aphids poured out. After the initial shock wore off, my first thought was "How did they get in there?"
And the next thought I had was, "Dear God, they were born there."
.....
Fate:
Stomped to death by Xander and Cordelia.
The final two monsters of my Top Ten have a murderous death grip on my heart -so much so that it's hard to know whether I should post them together or tackle them one at a time. Still, I have to admit that the three M.O.T.W's listed above are all only a razor's edge from the top spot themselves.
Please, if applicable, rant about some or all of them.
So, a few weeks back I listed the first 5 of m top 10 fave Buffyverse Monsters. Now, without further ado, here are my next three picks...
*Putincrab does the Dance of Monster Joy for your comments.
Okay, let's get cracking:
TED
Appears in:
Quote:
"Right. 'It's just a game, do your own thing.' Well, I'm not wired that way."
Awesomeness:
First thing's first: Ted is Jack Fucking TripperJohnF'ingRitter.
Normally that would be enough to warrant a slot in this or any civilized list, but the character of Ted Buchanan smashes through the Rittersphere by providing some of the most heavy duty foreshadowing of any monster on the show. Not only does Ted continue to tug on the series-long thread of Buffy's fraught relationship with "artificial people" (Moloch, Sid the Dummy, Garland, Adam, April, the Buffybot, Sweet's Puppets, etc), but he also gives us some big clues about the effect that Buffy's absentee father issues have on her gradually evolving worldview, and acts as a sounding board for the other Scoobies' private yearnings as well. Xander responds instantly to the promise of a doting father-figure in his general vicinity, as a counterpoint to his actual father's abuse. Willow is drawn to Ted's technical savvy, sensing someone she can finally share her special interests and talents with. On the surface, Joyce's new boyfriend seems to be the answer to everyone's prayers.
But, unbeknownst to them, Ted is a Stepford Stepdad with a deadly design flaw: it can't adapt to new situations. Ted can only mechanically scroll through the archetypal responses that its dead creator believed should have kept his own shattered family together. This is because the robot has no real life experience - it only knows how it was "wired" by external forces. From what little we learn of its creator's own fate, this limitation may speak to the failures of both its programming and its programmer. We don't know for sure whether Ted's creator wanted the robot to mimic his own familial mistakes or to somehow "correct" them, but no matter the case, it seems that Ted did precisely what it was programmed to do: locate a divorced woman and insinuate itself into her life by charming those he can and intimidating (or eliminating) those he can't.
It all adds up to a dark and multi-layered joke about postmodern divorce and the awkward (and sometimes sinister) dating reality for divorcees with grown children. With a lesser actor, the whole experiment could have fallen flat on its face, but Ritter lends his tin-can monster a tangible 3rd dimension. There are moments where the creature appears to be genuinely frustrated, as though it labors to understand why anyone would want to deviate from the simplistic Utopia embedded in its programming. Ted might not possess self-awareness as we humans know it, but there is still something painfully human about becoming frustrated with the failure of our messy reality to resemble a streamlined ideal, and that frustration leading us to evil.
Buffy is briefly consumed with guilt when she thinks she's (however accidentally) killed Ted the Man, raising questions both for her and her friends about the responsibilty of a Slayer when dealing with fragile human life. She eventually finds her guilt alleviated when Ted the Monster is revealed, but, as with Warren's creation April, we are left wondering if there was something of a man inside the monster after all.
Fate:
Frying Pan to the noggin, Old-School-Style.
HOLDEN WEBSTER
Appears in:
Quote:
“I just think you're in some pain here-which I do kind of enjoy 'cause I'm evil now-but you should just ease up on yourself. It's not exactly like you have the patent on bad relationships."
Awesomeness:
Before I get going on the undiluted awesomeness of Holden Webster, a little something about season seven:
I get the sense that the final season of "Buffy" is a controversial one for fandom. While I love it dearly, I have often come across the reaction that it was conceptually strong but dramatically flawed. A few months back, I had an LJ convo with a fan, during which she lamented the lack of clues to Buffy's inner thoughts and perspectives throughout season seven. She read this reluctance of Buffy to lay herself emotionally bare in largely Doylist terms -- in other words, she claimed that the authors didn't let Buffy tell us how she viewed her life and her romantic relationships because a) they themselves did not know or b) they were afraid of rape-apologism blowback regarding the 'Seeing Red" bathroom scene with Spike. I still totally disagree with that reading - the way I see it, Buffy's emotional distance and growing tendency to bury her true feelings might be the most important angle of her series-long character arc. She never breaks the laws of in-universe gravity, because the struggle to close that emotional distance and self-actualize is the key to her Heroic Journey. In other words, it's elementary, my dear Watsonian!
With each new season, Buffy drifts further and further from self-connection, growing simultaneously more powerful and less willing to dwell on her own human fragility. She eventually starts to see herself as both more and less than human; outwardly frigid but filled with big, burning emotions that she would rather channel into her violent line of work than explore and accept. This is the tragic subtext of Buffy Summers' inner battle that occasionally becomes "text", as it does in episodes like "Restless", "Intervention", "The Weight of the World" and "Once More With Feeling."
Still, even on those rare occasions that Buffy gives her audience a comic book-y "thought balloon" to let us peek inside her emotional fortress, there's usually a fog of art on hand, to keep that inner portrait pleasantly elusive. Whether she's trapped by the poetic conventions of a song or within the abstract angles of a dream, we usually aren't handed a verbalized, left-brained summatio of Buffy Summer by Buffy Summers. Though she is surrounded by confidantes, they are increasingly distant and cagey, and it becomes rarer and rarer for Buffy to say, "I feel X about Y." By the seventh season, her heart is coated with so much scar tissue that it has become almost impossible for her to safely do so, especially when it comes to her romantic relationships.
Then along came Holden Webster.
Thinking back on that fandom debate, I guess it would have been much simpler to type "Holden Webster" and be done with it. A former Sunnydale High classmate and Sunnydale U Psych student, Holden was arguably able to elicit more infomation about Buffy's self-image and her view of her relationships in a single episode than Willow, Xander and Giles could in the previous three seasons combined. Although Buffy recalls Holden from high school (eventually, and barely), Holden is presented as that proverbial stranger who we can unburden our souls to, without fear of judgment or repurcussion.
While Buffy and Holden initially fall into a chummy repartee, their conversation quickly transforms into a rocky road, littered with landmines. It turns out that Buffy has been holding back quite a lot over the years, and isn't so pleased to have it tugged out of her by a wannabe-shrink like Holden. As their conversation deepens, though, we hear Buffy say things out loud that we somehow have always known, but have never heard confirmed in her own words. We hear that she blames her dad for her parents' divorce, and that it has deeply affected her outlook on romantic relationships. We hear that she still blames herself for the destructive arc of her relationship with Spike. We hear Buffy lament that emotions don't seem to have proper boundaries, or fit under tidy labels ('See, this is what I hate about you vampires. Sex and death and love and pain-it's all the same damn thing to you"). We learn that, even after her trip to heaven, Buffy is uncertain if there is a God ("Nothing solid.") Most importantly, we hear Buffy say aloud that she doesn't believe herself worthy of love, because love is something for human beings and she doesn't feel connected to humanity anymore. She feels that her power is a burden and a curse -not because of the responsibility that comes with it but because power makes you more singular, and therefore more alone
Through it all, Holden plays the part of the objective outsider to a tee. Though just back from the grave, he glides effortlessly into psychologist mode, posing outwardly innocent questions that provoke Buffy into making the kind of blunt self-assessments she would normally repress for the sake of others, or drown in snark and sarcasm. At one point, the monster in him uses this information as an opening for an attack, but one gets the sense that Holden is not wholly a monster... not yet, at least. As a newly minted vampire, he is still trying to understand what he has become, which lends his own sudden confessions and revelations a weirdly tragic edge. Holden gives off the impression of someone with "phantom limb" syndrome, who still can still feel some remnant of the appendage that was recently (and violently) taken from him by a hypnotized Spike. His lines are often darkly funny, reflecting the shared nihilism of all monsters, but laced with twinges of confusion and regret. For instance, when he apologetically says, "You opened up. It was really sweet. It made me want to bite you", it's funny, but it contains a hint of that undifferentiated emotional stew that Buffy complains about, and likely sees in herself.
The care Mutant Enemy took with constructing and casting this monster -a person from her past whom the hero only slightly remembers, and a confessor whom she knows will not survive to tell the tale- was obvious, and helped to make "Conversations with Dead People' one of the best episodes of the season. We're only given a few broad strokes of Holden's life before undeath, but even those are well-crafted and evocative. In the course of a few lines, Holden describes a journey from the world of Theater to the world of the Real. He begins in high school with the artistry of the playwright and IRL monster-fighter Václav Havel and the idealistic dreamer Pippin, then he "graduates" to a harder world of Psychotherapy and Tae Kwon Do. Finally he succumbs to the same sort of nihilism, apathy and evil that the heroic artists of his youth fought against.
Despite (or because of) the tragic arc of his transformation, there is something to be learned and gained from meeting him. Buffy opens up to Holden and, by extension, to us, leading us into the final slope of her character arc with her cards fully on the table. If the original purpose of a monster was to challenge our hero in a way that would expose her wounds and weaknesses and lay bare her soul, then Holden Webster might qualify as the most successful monster to ever appear on the show.
Fate:
Staked (Needed a few more years of Tae Kwon Do, I guess)
NORMAN PFISTER
Appears in:
Quote:
"Good day. I'm Norman Pfister with Blush Beautiful Skin Care and Cosmetics. I was wondering if I might interest you in some free samples?'"
Awesomeness:
.....
Did you know that the female of the species Mantis Religosa, or Praying Mantis, will often devour her mate's head during coitus? It's believed that this gory romantic overture is carried out in order to make the male ejaculate faster. The headless lover will continue the sex act to completion, at which point the female finishes her meal...
.....
Meanwhile, the male of the specie Cimex Lectularius, or Common Bed Bug, copulates by stabbing the abdomen of the female with its knife-like sex organ, then ejaculating semen into the wound. If the female survives the assault, his sperm travels through the bloodstream to fertilize her brood eggs...
.....
Have you ever almost stepped on a dead animal? A gray, pasted stain that used to be a squirrel, or a bird reduced to a web of dirty feathers and bones? You are walking along a sidewalk and the creature's body just suddenly materializes out of nowhere, an inch from your descending shoe. Something like an electric volt leaps through your body, because you almost touched death.
.....
What about something larger, like a pet dog? Like the bird or the squirrel, the body appears suddenly, and you recoil just the same, even though you know the dog was once loved by someone real. You don't know if dogs have souls or not, but this one's eyes are gone, the soul's windows obscenely smashed open by death. Pale, larval insects are wriggling out of the sockets.
.....
One hot summer day, I bought a pomegranate on a sudden whim. I'd had a foggy childhood memory of eating one, and of it being filled with a bright and refreshing sweetness. Excited to taste it again, I took it home and decided to eat it right away. When I cut the fruit in half, dozens of squirming aphids poured out. After the initial shock wore off, my first thought was "How did they get in there?"
And the next thought I had was, "Dear God, they were born there."
.....
Fate:
Stomped to death by Xander and Cordelia.
The final two monsters of my Top Ten have a murderous death grip on my heart -so much so that it's hard to know whether I should post them together or tackle them one at a time. Still, I have to admit that the three M.O.T.W's listed above are all only a razor's edge from the top spot themselves.
Please, if applicable, rant about some or all of them.