Notes on Buffy 2.11: Ted
Standard disclaimer: I'll often speak of foreshadowing, but that doesn't mean I'm at all committing to the idea that there was some fixed design from the word go -- it's a short hand for talking about the resonances that end up in the text as it unspools.
Standard spoiler warning: The notes are written for folks who have seen all of BtVS and AtS. I'll be spoiling through the comics as well. Basically -- if you are a spoiler-phobe and haven't seen or read it all, read further at your own risk.
Standard Credits: I've written the material in black; Strudel (aka my Bro) writes in blue; local_max writes in purple. Or at least, that's what they've done when I finish editing and formatting!
Scheduling Note: Thursday is Thanksgiving. We'll post again one week from today! (And alas, the one week's wait is paid off with ... Bad Eggs.)
Buffy 2.11: Ted, In Which Buffy Slays a Really Obnoxious Robot
Another dense episode. Ted is centered on a question of the metaphor of slaying, walking right up to the problems at the heart of the way the metaphor works. At the same time, it develops the theme of Buffy’s uniqueness and what it means to her.
Meta. In the special notes to Lie to Me, I discussed the problem of the way the metaphor of slaying works. It’s fine for Buffy to slay abstractions standing in for life’s problems. It’s not fine for Buffy to actually kill the actual people those abstractions stand for. Ted brings this problem home with a vengeance. The cue music when Buffy first comes into the house and meets Ted is ominous, as though she’s about to find a demon. Instead it’s just Ted. Buffy takes an instant dislike to him. As she spells out to Angel, she really wants her Dad to be back with them, and she’s not going to be happy with any new man in Joyce’s life. Moreover, this new man is charming her friends as well. (The way he’s liked by everybody but Buffy foreshadow’s Faith’s entrance in Faith, Hope and a Trick). This is our first (second, don’t forget Kendra) clear glimpse of how much Buffy likes being the only and how much she doesn’t want to share. In short, Buffy has two powerful reasons to dislike Ted and want him gone. Two powerful reasons to want to demonize him.
The episode spends a long time dwelling on this problem -- with the reveal that Ted actually is an evil patriarchal homicidal robot coming quite late. Buffy’s instant reaction to the emotional turmoil caused by the possibility that her Mom might be with a man other than Buffy’s father is to go out and pummel a vampire so fiercely that even Giles is taken aback by it. In a later scene, she storms out of the house in search of demons to slay and sits out there calling them wishing they’d come. Slaying as a metaphor for dealing with life’s difficulties.* Right there. Giles even hangs a lantern on it telling Buffy that the subtext is rapidly becoming text, in response to her thinly disguised rant about ‘vampires’ (really Ted).
*In case we haven’t mentioned this before, it becomes increasingly obvious as the series progresses how violence is a catharsis for the Buffster. This will lead her down some nasty paths.
Buffy *wants* there to be something evil about Ted. When he shows a bit of darkness at miniature golf, both Xander and Willow tell her that some of life’s problems can’t be slain. They just have to be dealt with. As Xander puts it, being an overbearing patriarch is not a slayable offense. In a nutshell, it’s fine for Buffy to go out and slay her ‘demons’ every night, so long as they remain abstract. It’s not so fine for Buffy to want to actually slay the human embodiments of those problems. The impulse to demonize people we are at odds with is on full display here.
There are a few occasions in the early acts of the episode, before the bedroom scene when Ted hits Buffy, that are very suspect. His obsession with rules is worrying. His threat of physical violence terrible. That he has made plans to marry Joyce without her consent frightening, and so on. The Ted we’re presented before the reveal is not a good man, and Buffy does see a dark side that Joyce is oblivious to. But unfortunately, bad men aren’t slayable. There’s a few uncomfortable parallels between Buffy and Ted: both want Joyce to themselves; both spy on the other (at Ted’s work vs. in Buffy’s home). Ted’s violations are worse, but they’re no less human in nature than Buffy’s. Note also a few lines early in the episode that have dark connotations later on, as when Buffy says “so put me in jail” to Joyce about her cheating in golf, and, more significantly, her joking threat to Xander (“Can you say sucking chest wound?”) when he doesn’t take her suspicions about Ted seriously. Buffy could give Xander a chest wound if she wanted to. To me this is exactly what’s so gripping about the episode. Ted really is a problem. But as you say, all his failings are human failings. Buffy can slay the Master as a metaphor for slaying overbearing patriarchal men. But she can’t slay an actual overbearing patriarchal S.O.B. even if he’s borderline criminal.
The episode walks right up to the cliff of this problem. When Ted finally hits her, Buffy is oh so happy about it. She hauls off and hits him back. Not enough to keep him down. He makes another move against her which she throws off easily. And then, while thinking he is fully human, she goes after him with full slayer power, heedless of her mother’s cries for her to stop it, and she doesn’t stop until she’s sent Ted toppling down the stairs to his apparent death. From the moment she starts that lethal assault, Ted is powerless to stop her. It takes multiple kicks from Buffy to get him tumbling down those stairs. She didn’t have to keep going. But she did. (Indeed, from the moment Joyce arrives as a witness, Ted is unable to counter anything Buffy throws at him. He does nothing to show that he is a continuing threat.)
It is far too early in the show’s run for Buffy to truly be saddled with a human death. The last quarter of the episode resurrects Ted and reveals him to be an evil and totally slay-worthy robot. There are two moves to bring Buffy back to the right side of the line that she crossed as she kicked Ted down the hallway toward his fatal fall. First, Buffy instantly takes full responsibility. Her mother tries to cover for her, but Buffy volunteers the truth to the authorities. Her friends try to excuse her by assuming she knew he was evil or at least intuited it. She completely owns what she was about. Xander tells her she wouldn’t hurt an innocent unless... and Buffy finishes for him, unless he was dating her mother. Second, but far more problematically, we see Buffy’s early instincts about Ted be vindicated. Since Buffy has always had very good intuition about these things we can say that deep down she knew that he was an evil non-human thing she could slay. The reason this is problematic is that the first half of the episode has very clearly established that Buffy is being driven by her emotions on this. Not her slayer intuitions. Or at a minimum, the episode blends them so seamlessly, it’s really hard to rest assured that it was all slayer intuition. If it had been, she’d have been far more dispassionate about the whole thing. Also, given how quickly Buffy lets go of her guilt when she discovers that he is a robot, it’s hard to believe that she was 100% sure he was a robot when she ‘killed’ him, because prior to that discovery, Buffy is awash in abject guilt. She even wears her overalls of shame to school.
Does Buffy’s vindication undermine the show’s boldness in showing how tempting and dangerous it can be to convert the metaphor of slaying abstractions into a metaphor for demonizing people we dislike? I think the balance of the episode works. For nearly three-quarters of the episode we are confronting Buffy’s desire to demonize Ted so she can slay him and be rid of the problem. The neat resolution happens with a rush at the end. And they hang a lantern on that ending by having the episode morph into an overly pat lesson about the evils (!!) of patriarchy, and the dangers of thinking Daddy knows best. Just as Buffy wants to forget about the whole Ted thing, so too does the episode move to ‘forget’ what it’s really been about. We get a comforting interweaving of Giles slaying a vampire and Buffy battling an evil Ted to tidy things back up the way they were. But of course nothing swept under the Scooby rug stays there, and the question about the dark side of slaying will revisit us with a vengeance in season 3.
There’s a parallel between Buffy/Joyce and Giles/Jenny which runs throughout the episode. Cordelia hangs a lantern on this when she compares Buffy’s guilt over Ted to Giles’ guilt over Eyghon’s victims. Both Joyce and Jenny have been hurt by Buffy and Giles’ actions related to said guilt. Jenny’s rebuff of Giles’ attempt to see how she is doing is repeated very similarly in Joyce’s rebuff of Buffy’s attempt to help her with cleaning, where she tries to apologize for what happened with Ted. Jenny and Joyce both make some moves towards forgiveness (Joyce goes to talk to Buffy, Jenny to seek Giles out in the graveyard). And then in the final act, Buffy and Giles’ ability to fight and protect Joyce/Jenny from Ted/the vampire rushes their forgiveness along. The vampire even uses the word “lady,” an echo of Ted’s “little lady” refrain. The parallel between the two stories highlights the cathartic nature of the show’s violence for its characters (as Strudel pointed out earlier), and allows the characters, at times, to get over traumatic events and disagreements much faster than in real life. (See also: Dead Man’s Party.) But as Maggie says above, we shouldn’t let ourselves be fooled by the neat resolution. That the next episode has major Buffy and Joyce conflict without apparent setup undermines the ease with which everything is resolved here.
In terms of the show’s storytelling, there’s one more crucial pattern to note: tragedy is repeated as farce. Ted is initially frightening and threatening, and his first “death” is devastating drama. His second death is played largely for laughs. Ted is somehow less of an imposing dramatic figure when he’s malfunctioning. Even the musical score is radically different. But Ted hasn’t changed much, really; it’s just our perception that has. The genre flip is worth keeping in mind, because it’s something the show does often.
Slayer/human relations. In addition to foreshadowing the dangers of slayer strength vis a vis humans, we get Cordelia articulating the principle that slayers might not be subject to the same rules as other humans. It seems jarring at this stage of Buffy’s life, where she’s still pursuing an ordinary human life with slaying as a sort of sideline. But the more and more Buffy becomes the slayer, the more salient this question will become.
This is not an insignificant question for Cordelia, future champion of the Powers That Be, either. (“Angel. There are no people like us.”) In season four of AtS, Jasmine-Cordelia (who I believe shares some traits with Cordy, though obviously not all) emphasizes repeatedly to Connor how the rules don’t and should not apply to them. On a character level, Cordelia is used to being “in power” and naturally empathizes with whoever is in power (c.f. her perception of Marie Antoinette), so her inability to understand the need to keep power in check makes sense.
Foreshadowing. The main work of this episode is to signal that our heroine is a complicated mix of good and bad motives. If What’s My Line wanted to say that Buffy’s strength as a slayer was that she has a personal life, this episode signals it’s not quite that simple. Buffy might misuse her power for personal reasons. Having established that we are set up for Buffy’s fatal choice to NOT exercise her slayer power for personal reasons at the end of Innocence. In addition we get another iteration of the ‘boyfriend revealed to be a monster’ them that’s been hit several times already this season. Ted is even a manipulative seductive bastard when courting Joyce, so we could say that he serves as a dark mirror for Angel and his manner of ‘courtship’. Ted’s appearance in Buffy’s room, reading her diary, is reminiscent of Angel, especially in Angel (the episode).
I think it goes further than those surface (but not insignificant) comparisons. Ted is an artificial construct. He’s a robot based on a man who used to exist, and his programming leads him inevitably toward recreating and destroying the original relationship that Ted once had, “forever.” I think this loop that Ted’s in comments on both Buffy and Angel’s arcs. Angel is an artificial construct because of his curse, of which one line of code will be activated, leading to disaster, in Surprise. Once he loses his soul, he will try to make Buffy into another of his victims (like Drusilla), just as Ted tries to make Joyce another of his “wives.” The general M.O. of recreating and destroying an original relationship fits with Angel generally: he killed his blood family when he became a vampire, lost his vamp family, and his human family on AtS goes rather badly.
Yet another parallel: Just as Angel is set up by circumstances to be the “key” (see last week’s post) to reconcile Buffy’s impossible dual-existence, Ted is set up by circumstances to be Joyce’s “key.” As she declares (I believe just a scene after Angel tells Buffy there’s nothing worse than being alone), it’s not like there are a lot of men knocking down the door of an older, single mom. And so much about him seems perfect: the secure job, the Norman Rockwell sincerity, the cooking. He’s the apparent answer to her dreams. Only, he isn’t. Just like Angel doesn’t quite turn out to be the answer to Buffy’s needs, Ted turns out to be a monster.
On Buffy’s side, there is a key exchange, when Buffy tells Angel that the one person who she would like to date her mother is her father. Buffy judges all potential boyfriends for her mom against her father’s standard. In Conversations with Dead People, she will suggest that her father set the standard for Buffy’s own relationships. That she’s saying this to Angel, her older sometimes-protector-figure boyfriend, hints at the way Buffy will end up seeing all her future relationships in terms set by Angel. This connects Buffy back to Ted, as when she’s with Spike in season six she will fall back on many patterns that Angel sets this year. Moreover, there are suggestions in the text that the original, open-hearted Buffy is destroyed by Becoming, and never entirely recovers. To some extent, pre-Becoming Buffy is the original Ted, and post-Becoming Buffy is the walking, talking, nonliving robot based on the original. Max, you had me up to this last line. Season Six Buffy may be a non-living robot, but Ted isn’t really the model for her experience. She was dragged back from the dead, while Ted did all the dragging for himself. It’s certainly not a perfect analogy between Ted and Buffy. But there’s two Teds to consider. Human Ted did the dragging, which, agreed, pre-Becoming Buffy didn’t do. But Robot-Ted is just following his programming--he didn’t choose to be brought back--and that’s where the parallel with Buffy lies. I’ll specify too that it’s not just season six where Buffy’s a “robot,” though that’s where it’s most obvious--Buffy’s heart being shut down is hinted at repeatedly post-Becoming.
Finally, and tragically, the episode’s B plot is about Giles and Jenny who reunite after their post-Dark Age separation. Buffy’s mother loses the only serious boyfriend she’ll ever have on the show in the same episode when Buffy’s father figure gets back together with the only serious girlfriend he’ll ever have on the show. And it is Buffy’s romance with her own ‘Ted’ that destroys Jenny. Buffy susses out the evilness of her mother’s boyfriend, while remaining blind to the darkness in her own, and it’s Giles who will pay the highest price for that. (The episode also reminds us just how high that price is, with Angel telling Buffy how terrible it is to be alone in life.)
Ooh, ooh, hey guys! I got one more cool piece of foreshadowing. When Ted finds her diary, he threatens Buffy with the prospect that, if anybody were to see it, she’d spend the rest of her youth locked in a mental ward. That’s a nice hint of the joys to come in Normal Again one of my nominees for best episode in the series. That’s not a trivial bit of foreshadowing -- Normal Again also comes at the question of the metaphor and what it means, albeit from a very different angle. Agree it’s one of the best episodes of the series. Normal Again also examines the possibility of the use of a slayer power against other humans, where she tries to feed her friends and sister to a demon. Note also that, in Normal Again, Buffy knocks Xander out with a frying pan, just as she does to Robot-Ted here. And we’ll have to wait four more seasons before debating all this at tremendous length.
And since all roads lead toward the big finish, note the specific foreshadowing for the end of Becoming and particular after Buffy “kills” Ted: she is overburdened with guilt, alienated from her mother, under police investigation, and deals with this by cutting herself off from Giles and the Scoobies. Don’t forget the overalls of shame!
Watcher Watch. Giles doesn’t handle the crisis particularly well. He does not make a huge effort to reach out to Buffy after she killed Ted. Instead, he tells the Scoobies that it is hard to deal with the guilt of having killed a human. The only ‘help’ Giles has to offer Buffy is to go out on patrol since she isn’t up to it. Fortunately for all concerned, Buffy didn’t kill an actual human, and thus didn’t need Giles guidance.. Next season, Giles will get another chance to deal with a slayer who has killed an actual human.
In Giles’ defense, he tries to reach out to her with as much sincere concern as he’s yet shown. Buffy, however, is too far down in her guilt to accept the gesture, and Giles (as he was with Jenny) too easily lets himself be rejected. Since we know that Jenny is his one big shot at love in the entire series, it’s poignant to me that Giles is twice rebuffed in the same episode when he tries to go to the women he cares about with his sad dog eyes. The parallel further tells me that, for Giles, his effort to reach out to Buffy was huge. Unfortunately, it was huge, Giles-style.
Giles going out on patrolling is still a big deal, violating his original Watcher training. (“A slayer slays, a Watcher...trains,” as he said back in Welcome to the Hellmouth.) In Anne, we find that it’s the Scoobies and not Giles who takes up the mantle. Speaking of....
Helping Buffy. After Buffy apparently kills Ted, Giles heads off to patrol, while Willow, Xander and Cordelia work on trying to find evidence against Ted. We’ve seen the Scoobies and especially Willow stepping up as leaders (as opposed to followers) a few times recently, but it’s almost always when Buffy or Giles are incapacitated (c.f. Halloween, The Dark Age); in this case both are indisposed from investigating Ted. And they do very well. It’s noteworthy that the Scoobies are working not towards helping with slaying, but towards helping clear Buffy of her crime. It’s a good example of how the Scoobies (at their best) work to help Buffy-the-person, while Giles (at his best) helps with Buffy-the-slayer.
Buffy/Angel. Angel makes only a brief appearance, when Buffy goes over to nurse him in his recovery from the events of What’s My Line. He gets to listen to Buffy rant about Ted with poorly concealed impatience, but he then gently calls her on it, reminding her that Joyce has a right to a life. He then turns the conversation into the direction he usually wants it to go, asking her to kiss him. It’s a bit of a mixed bag. He’s not much engaged in the issues that concern Buffy; he’d rather snog. On the other hand, he offers her genuinely good advice.
Willow. I love her geek out at the possibility of getting a souped up computer from Ted. That’s the comedic turn. A bit more ominously we have Willow admiring Ted for his brilliance and expressing a desire to see what makes his robots tick. Buffy tells her that she should use her powers for good, and Willow just replies that she wants to learn stuff. On a deeper level, Willow’s ultimate power grab is motivated by something similar to Ted. Ted didn’t want mortality to rob him of his love, so he used his dark powers for grotesque reenactments of his marriage. Tara’s death -- and Willow’s refusal to accept it -- is the thing that pushes Willow over the edge. Absolutely. There’s also a parallel between the way Ted uses drugged cookies to control and please others and Willow’s later use of magic (specifically memory spells for others, and drug-magic for herself) to do the same. The parallels between Willow and the original Ted suggest the rich vein of parallels between Willow and that other expert in robotics (and misogynist) in season six.
Looking on the brighter side (as if we had just eaten one of Ted’s mini-pizzas)...
Willow again gets to save the day this time by making the connection between Xander’s cookie and his mood swing. She saves the day with chemistry, to which she later compares magic.
Xander. Xander leads with his heart in this episode. He swings from enthusing about Ted at the beginning of the episode to being 100% sure that Ted must be evil since Buffy killed him. The enthusiasm for Ted turns out to be because of Ted’s drugs, but in both instances the salient point is that Xander sees what he wants to see. At first he wants to see Ted as wonderful -- the positive male role model he’s lacking. Later he wants to see him as a villain, because that’s preferable to seeing Buffy as a murderer. In the latter he mirrors Buffy’s stance towards Ted all episode long. That they both get what they want shouldn’t blind us to the fact that they wanted it to be so before they knew it was so. I think that’s a bit of an aggressive reading of Xander’s wish to see a positive role model, but, hey, it’s a really cool point that way, so I’ll be quiet now... If you want to read Xander’s fanboying of Ted in terms of wanting to see a positive male role model, it makes sense that he’s the one to find Ted’s wives, since it’s in Hell’s Bells where Xander’s attempt to remake himself into the kind of man he’d admire falls apart.
Xander asks about Angel here fairly genuinely, and after getting a look from Buffy, jokingly adds, “Pretend I care.” It’s another indication (like What’s My Line’s “Angel’s our friend! Except I don’t like him,” though that episode also contained Xander noting that Angel got major neck in his day) that Xander is letting go of his animosity towards Angel and is in part putting on a show of it for continuity’s sake. His inappropriate but affectionate joke about Buffy playing naughty nursemaid to Angel is another example. This has been going on for a while, but I think some of his decreased jealousy in this episode has something to do with starting to move on from Buffy with Cordelia. Xander doesn’t really take the Angel-hate mantle back up again until after the soul loss.
Cordelia. Starting with The Dark Age, she’s been explicit about wanting to be a member of the team. By Ted, she’s functioning in that role. Participating in the Scooby meeting about what to do about Buffy’s problem with Ted. She even goes off to do a bit of research about Ted’s personal life, and accompanies the Scoobies on their mission to Ted’s house. This is the first episode where Xander tries to be nice to Cordelia, though they are both still mostly pretending to be disgusted by their mutual attraction to each other. (I can’t help but notice that Xander is nice to Cordy immediately after munching on one of Ted’s cookies; one wonders if it actually takes a drug to get one of these two to be nice to the other.) These two observations about Cordelia are not unrelated. Xander is the main reason she’s gotten involved with the gang. Very commendably, Cordelia asks Giles if he wants her help patrolling, which has nothing to do with Xander. I love how Cordy and Xander giggle at each other at the episode’s end when they spy Giles and Jenny kissing--they really do like each other, and seem to enjoy having a naughty secret, despite their ostensible disgust.
I also like Cordelia’s helping by observing that the rug doesn’t match the decor at Ted’s.
Spike and Dru. In the teaser we get an argument between Willow and Xander about Captain and Tennille, with Xander arguing that Tennille was obviously in charge and the captain was just her puppet. Willow doesn’t think the captain is the sort who would let himself get used. Spike and Dru in a nutshell. (Also Willow and Xander in a nutshell. When not blinded by his own issues, Xander has insight into group dynamics and is very aware of strong women. Willow idealizes “good people” too much, and she hides from deeper truths.) We could squint and say the teaser is setting us up for Drusilla to be the bigger bad. (Squint? What’s My Line ended with Drusilla rising with Spike’s limp body in her arms. She’s already the bigger bad.) But I mostly like it for the mirror it gives to the ‘romance’ between Spike and Dru.
Thus ends the portion of the season devoted to setting the stage for the big turn to come at Surprise/Innocence. But before we get to those episodes, we get the filler episode which is Bad Eggs.