Notes on Buffy 2.12: Bad Eggs
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: Because the #39 comes out on Thursday, I'll be posting the notes to Surprise on Wednesday.
Buffy 2.12 Bad Eggs, In Which We Contemplate the View of Children as Parasites
I'm stretching hard to find much to say about this episode, and I hope my co-conspirators have a wealth of insight!!!
This is the last episode before the big turn of the season. In terms of the structure of the season, it feels like the weakest link. (Second weakest link, actually; Go Fish is weaker). The simple lesson is that sex has bad consequences. The second important lesson is how powerful and consuming the sex-drive can be. We could, if we wanted, take this as straight-up foreshadowing for the bad consequences sex is going to have in the very next episode.
Foreshadowing. Buffy and Angel can’t keep their hands off each other. They are too busy smooching to hunt down the Gorches. They are still smooching at the end of the episode when Buffy is grounded with Angel standing chastely outside the window. Buffy’s sexual attraction to Angel diminishes her ability to function as a slayer.
We also get a bit of foreshadowing of Spike’s role in the season finale, with Lyle Gorch temporarily teaming up with Buffy to defeat the big bad (the mother Bezoar). Like Spike, Lyle seems to be into the idea of fighting the slayer at the beginning of the episode. We also get a bit of foreshadowing of the final confrontation between Joyce and Buffy, when Buffy’s duties as a slayer cause her to fail to get her mother’s dress from the tailor. Buffy even tells Joyce point blank that she’s a slayer, though this time it’s taken as a joke. Still, Buffy ends up grounded at the end of the episode.
The Gorches give us a few more scraps to chew on. First, despite being demons, they are brothers who have stuck by each other for 100 years. While we know that vampire families can last as long as that, this one is interesting inasmuch as the relationship extends from their human lives. That human residual in the demon is something that we’ll spend a lot of time examining in Spike.
The second little tidbit is when Lyle runs away from Buffy the first time. She quips, “that’s the problem with vampires. They never call when they say they will.” It’s a throw-away joke, except for the fact that the first stage of Angelus’s torment of Buffy will be ... not calling her when he says he will.
The Gorches seem to know Angelus. The Wild Bunch reference that the Gorches themselves represent reminds us that “Angel” is the name of a character from The Wild Bunch, too. These (admittedly slight) hints remind us that Angel is like them. Buffy stops Lyle’s attempted seduction/killing of a young woman early in the episode, but is blind to Angel’s doing the same to her.
Joyce describes the dress Buffy wants to buy as being “like a streetwalker,” and Tector Gorch mentions that there aren’t many whores in town. It’s another mention of prostitutes (there was one in The Dark Age) leading up to Angel’s killing of a prostitute, and later description of Buffy as one, in Innocence.
Buffy/Angel. In addition to the build up to catastrophic sex, this episode introduces us to the fact (belief?) that Angel can’t be a parent. (This new little factoid is consistent with the non-life giving properties of vampires; no breath, just death). He asks whether Buffy has thought about the (for her with him, blighted) future, and she replies that when she does, all she sees is Angel. Angel replies that he knows the feeling. And they resume their frantic kissing as the camera pans down to a tombstone reading “In Loving Memory”. The relationship in a nutshell. Buffy isn’t thinking about how it makes sense. All she sees is Angel and it’s blinding her to everything else. She’s sixteen, and that is how sixteen sees the world. It’s not clear what Angel’s excuse is. He has a troubled look when she says this, and for a moment you think he’s going to say -- yet again -- how this is impossible. Yet he can’t even muster that before resuming the smoochies.
Beyond wondering what Angel’s excuse is for not facing Buffy’s future, the camera pan to the tombstone also asks what neither Buffy nor Angel ask about: his plans for the future. Just as her love for him is doomed, so is his for her. She’s not going to live forever like Darla, yet there’s no Arwen-style declarations of the willingness of the immortal Angel to share in the life and loss of a mortal Buffy. The epigraph on the tombstone (“in loving memory”) is trite when you contemplate a millenia of looking back on the certain death of his supposed Great Love.
Meanwhile, just as the smoochies are compromising Buffy’s effectiveness as a Slayer, Angel doesn’t step in to fill the void. He says he’ll hunt the Gorches himself, but isn’t seen again until he pops up outside Buffy’s window for another making out session.
This may be stating the obvious, but this is an episode about sex, with the central metaphor (such as it is) related to how powerful sex drives are. With this in mind, I think part of the point of this episode is to remind us, going into Surprise, that Buffy is a sixteen-year-old girl with raging hormones. There’s been a lot of discussion of why she latches onto Angel so tightly. But some of her grand passion doesn’t have to do with Angel or even the idea he represents. Some of it is simply her physical urges kicking in. There’s nothing wrong with wanting sex, but it’s natural to feel better about wanting sex as part of love rather than as a result of raging hormones. Buffy wants it to be all about the former when it’s really quite a mix. (Since the biological reason for sex is related to procreation and life, it’s a sad irony that it will lead her to devastation from her dead partner.) Angel, by contrast, is aware of his drive for sex and his more worrying drive toward murder, but needs the pleasant illusion of love even more to hide the reality of his conquest of a virginal high schooler from himself.
Xander/Cordelia. Buffy is blinded by her love but doesn’t know it. Xander wants the lights out precisely because he doesn’t want to see who he’s kissing. He and Cordelia take over the sex ed class discussion trading barbs at one another about their distaste for one another. It’s an interesting mirror to Buffy/Angel. Both couples are dragged along by passion. Buffy and Angel embrace it and imagine they are more together than they really are. Xander and Cordelia fight it and imagine that they are less together than they really are.
Sex is bad. The metaphor of the Mother Bezoar and her body-snatcher offspring is quite disturbing. Children are monsters who take over their parents and empty them of their personalities, turning them into servants who do their bidding. (The text of this week’s monster is the opposite though: the bezoar’s children are dedicated to the task of elevating the mother bezoar. The metaphor, in other words, is hard to follow in this episode.) (Fair enough, though the eggs themselves take over their “parents” in the denizens of Sunnydale.) All of that is in service of an inhuman impersonal drive to procreate. (Though the bezoar’s procreative strategy is so passionless as to barely reflect on the passions of the smooching couples). I suppose we could say that this is rather cynical commentary on the passions that have swept up Buffy/Angel and Xander/Cordelia. We are obsessed by love and sex, they are central to our stories. But at the end of the day we’re being fueled by basic instincts. The episode reminds us frequently of our physical, corporeal nature, of which the sex drive is an integral part. Xander forgets about his plan when he decides to eat his egg; Buffy and Joyce discuss thin and fat body types in the opening; a gas leak can be physically incapacitating. We can be slaves to our bodies.
I’d say that, more precisely, the theme here isn’t exactly that sex is bad, but rather that sex has consequences (setting aside the volatile question whether pregnancy is a “bad” consequence). Given that the text now says that Angel can’t literally have children, we are left to contemplate what kind of metaphorical children/consequences he will spawn. Having just watched these very creepy Bezoar spawn creeping about, the associations aren’t pretty.
If the metaphor is that sex has bad consequences, then we presumably are supposed to consider Buffy to be irresponsible for ignoring the consequences of her forbidden love for a vampire. But in this same episode, we have the irony of her mother punishing her, in the name of being irresponsible, when the source of Buffy’s supposed irresponsibility is being the slayer. Buffy undoubtedly makes a mistake with Angel; she has ignored the warning signs we see everywhere about Angelus. But, she is the sixteen year-old slayer, stuck in an impossible role, trying to find an impossible balance between her utterly divergent lives. And, whatever Angel’s intertwinement with Angelus, the fact remains that the lad has a soul, making him temporarily unique in the history of his kind. With that context, is she irresponsible for ignoring the consequences of loving an ensouled vampire when the specific consequences are so unforseeable? Or, is she merely doomed, like a character in a Greek tragedy? I’m going to go with both. She’s being irresponsible (willfully blind to the downside of dating a vampire), but what else is she going to do? It’s completely understandable.
My generous reading of this episode--which focuses on teenage hormones, Buffy & Joyce’s relationship, and the family ties of the Gorches--is about how all of these programmed biological urges--sexual attraction and blood ties--are overwhelming to individual choice. The bezoar’s children serve the bezoar and have no independent identities; the Sunnydale High students are taken over by their children and have no independent identities. Buffy’s choices are constrained by Joyce, and Joyce’s choices are constrained by Buffy; both feel trapped by the relationship, with Buffy grounded by Joyce’s apparently arbitrary edicts and Joyce having to switch towns because of Buffy’s apparently inexplicable behaviour problems. The scene where the two Gorches joyfully beat on each other is another cynical commentary on what these biologically-ordained relationships can do to us. Love and family as two people beating the hell of each other.
Interestingly, Buffy and Xander are themselves immune. Buffy’s slayer duties (or rather late night smooching with Angel) cause her to come home in time to see her egg hatch, given her the chance to slay it before it takes over her. Xander has long-since boiled his to make it easier to take care of, a choice which is connected to his own poor upbringing. (He says he boils the egg so Junior will have a thick skin, and one wonders if that’s not his own sense of how he’s coped with the boiling that’s happened to him at home). Buffy’s slayer duties are going to make it difficult for her to maintain a relationship going forward; Xander’s fears about his own upbringing and the effect it will have on him will lead him to call of his own wedding at the last minute. (Xander’s later decision to feed on his own young is particularly interesting in this context--Xander fears he will use his marriage and children for his own gain, destroying them in the process.) Willow, on the other hand, has no such obstacle and will be completely taken over by her relationship -- to the point where its impossible for her to function without it.
Both Buffy and Xander are “irresponsible” in this episode (Xander by choice, and Buffy because of her slaying duties), and that seems to be part of what protected them. Giles and Joyce are grownups, and Willow and Cordelia studious types. Arguably Xander’s knowledge of his own irresponsibility is what helps his immunity. This reminds me a little of Buffy’s line in What’s My Line that of course she’s immature because she has yet to mature; Buffy and Xander’s knowledge that they shouldn’t be too responsible arguably helps them in this episode.
Meanwhile, Giles and Joyce are briefly connected with Giles forcing a ‘child’ on Joyce, an inversion of Joyce having given birth to the girl who will ultimately function as Giles’ child. Last episode, Buffy deprived her mother of a mate and a chance for a life of her own. [Though let’s keep in mind that if Buffy hadn’t done that, Ted would have killed Joyce and she would have had even less life of her own. [Oh, absolutely. I’m thinking more of Buffy’s initial impulse to get rid of Ted even when there was no reason to think Ted was a threat. But you are right that in the event, it was best all around that it worked out the way it did.] Buffy is even somewhat aware of this--she is horrified at the prospect of being a single mother. Buffy’s choice at the end of Innocence to not slay Angel will deprive Giles of a mate and a chance for a life of his own. Both end up with lives centered around Buffy, with little left over for themselves. (This is especially the case for Giles as we see in season 4).
It occurs to me that Joyce’s somewhat over-the-top punishment of Buffy in this episode may be a displacement from her unresolved issues from Ted; consciously Joyce can’t hold what happened against Buffy, but subconsciously Buffy’s violent tendencies have scared her. And it makes some sense that Buffy shouldn’t get to date, since Joyce can’t. The lighter spin on this is that Joyce feels, understandably, the need to protect Buffy from dangerous men; her own recent experience with dangerous men makes her more actively concerned with preventing it. Joyce early on mistakes Buffy’s fighting Lyle as being about a boy, but later on Buffy’s night of hunting the Gorches turns out to be nothing but Angel-smooching. So while Joyce apparently punishes Buffy for her slayer duties, her instincts about Buffy sneaking out to make time with dangerous boys aren’t actually wrong. Of course, as the episode’s final shot shows, any of Joyce’s rules to protect Buffy are ineffective.
Scooby Dynamics. When the egg project is revealed, Willow immediately tries to suggest partnering with Xander, and Xander moves to partner with Cordelia, and, when rejected, another random woman in class. It’s a reminder that Willow’s still not over the idea of the two having a future together. She later picks up on the weird vibes between Xander and Cordelia, though she doesn’t yet recognize what they are. That the love triangle is now not B/X/W but C/X/W is emphasized when both Willow and Cordelia hit Xander while possessed by bezoars, and Cordelia comments that she didn’t want to be left out of the hitting. (You always hurt the one you love.)
Resonance. The demon eggs arrive right before Buffy and Angel have sex and serve as a symbol of their doomed relationship. We see demon eggs again in As You Were as a symbol of Buffy’s apparently doomed relationship with Spike, right before she breaks off their sexual relationship. (The AtS episode Expecting is also very similar to this one in plot and theme.)
Random complaint Every time I’ve seen this episode, I have the same problem. The bezoar is able to control its human hosts so finely that they act perfectly in character, fooling both Buffy and the audience. Then, the bezoar switches the human off and they become zombies, barely able to move or react to an emerging threat. How can the bezoar have Giles so thoroughly fool us and Joyce with all of his Giles-like charm, intelligence and personality, but then have Giles attack Buffy like the worst B-movie stumbling zombie? As with this week’s metaphor, the plot mechanics leave something to be desired. I remain curious what those bezoars were doing that first night, when they reached out their tendrils over Buffy’s face. (I thought that was a dream sequence; anything else defies minimum thresholds of rationality). Or why they left Buffy and Xander in a closet with some unhatched eggs, rather than just applying monsters directly when they were unconscious. I’m willing to count this episode as the series’ first true clunker.
And so the stage is now set for the big twist of Angel losing his soul. We’ve been told in countless ways that Angel will turn into a monster, but for most of us on the first watch through, the result of Surprise is a total surprise.