Notes on Buffy 3.03: Faith, Hope and Trick
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.
Buffy 3.03 Faith, Hope and Trick, in which Faith and Angel Drop In.
There’s an alternate universe where the last ten seconds of this episode didn’t happen. In that universe, Buffy has bonded with Faith while fighting. From Faith, Buffy’s gotten the courage to deal with her baggage and let it go. She takes up with Scott Hope. With the Angel trauma confessed, the wedge between Buffy and the Scoobies is substantially reduced, and the series of steps that propel Faith to the mayor’s office never happen. But we do get the last ten seconds, and so in this universe we get Faith, Angel and the Mayor rather than Faith, Hope and Trick, and a Buffy who walks away with at least two more major wounds to add to her collection. With Angel back, the divisions between the Scoobies are exacerbated, and Faith gets caught in the cross-fire. It’s an extraordinary arc which this episode sets up up very neatly.
Faith. I need to be clear about this up front. Faith is responsible for her own choices. Full stop. You can come from a lousy background. You can be dealt some rotten cards. That still doesn’t force you to become evil. The reason I need to be clear about this is that I do want to spend a lot of time this season thinking about the rotten cards Faith got. She’s vulnerable in a particular way, and the situation between Buffy and the Scoobies will end up alienating her and isolating her. A lot of their issues land on Faith. She handles it very badly, and she has to own that. But if the bad cards weren’t dealt, Faith arguably gets a much better outcome.
We learn pretty much everything we need to know about Faith in her introductory episode. [Contrast that with Spike’s introduction last season, which didn’t begin to unfold who Spike was]. Faith is from the lower classes. Her Mom is dead. She’s a high school dropout. She’s failed as a slayer, unable to save her watcher. Faith has a lot of reason to think she’s a loser. And so she confronts life with bravado. She’s super cool, seems to be full of herself. It’s a front. She may charm the Scoobies and Giles and Scott and Joyce initially. But Faith falls apart easily when her past comes after her. We get the single most telling shot of Faith when Buffy looks out from the kitchen to see Faith wolfing down food. It plays as evidence of Faiths’ ‘living large’ persona. But it should be read as what it is. Faith is starving. For love. For a place. For a sense of herself. And quite literally for food. She is poor, not able to make the rent for her seedy motel room, let alone feed herself adequately.
When Faith is hanging out with Willow and Xander, she mentions that if she had friends like them in high school...well, she would still have dropped out, but she’d feel bad about it. She can’t drop the bravado enough not to joke, but the hint is that things might have been different with friends, which ties in with the importance of Buffy’s friends in her life.
One other thing we know about Faith is that she hasn't been a slayer very long. Kendra died in Becoming, so Faith has been a slayer exactly as long as Buffy had skipped town, three months maybe. So, not only does she have her failure to save her watcher weighing on her, she also doesn't have a long track record of success to fall back on to bolster her confidence. She has a few stories of successful fights with vamps, but that's it.
Faith/Buffy. Faith’s basic story is simple because the story is never about her. It’s all about Buffy. Faith enters the story as a mirror for Buffy, and as a partner in a dance that ends up being quite complicated.
The opening act has Buffy feeling immediately marginalized by Faith and resentful.
Even before we meet Faith, we see numerous references to Buffy being alone, the fifth wheel. Xander/Cordelia and Willow/Oz have to go through their uncoupling maneuvers before sitting down with her; couples are all over the place and each other at the Bronz; Buffy has to brush past Scott Hope on her way to rescue a girl from a vampire; on the way out there, Xander wonders if the purported vampire and victim are actually making out, and when they hear crashing sounds, Willow wonders out loud whether she should make similar sounds when making out with Oz. (Always insecure, that one.) Couples, couples, couples ... and Buffy. Her isolation is unmistakable, and that's even before considering the dreams she has of having killed Angel. Add this to the layers of insecurity she has following her less than warm welcome home in Deadman’s Party as the context for considering the effect Faith has on her.
The Scoobies are quick to make Faith the center of their attention. Joyce is is very impressed, as well. Even Giles is charmed. Buffy’s reaction is to be the sulky selfish kid whose sister is getting all the attention. Now, part of this is because Buffy is an only child and isn’t used to sharing the spotlight. She’s also the slayer and isn’t used to sharing that spotlight either. But I think we risk really exaggerating Buffy’s prima donna tendencies if we don’t attend to the circumstances. The Scoobies and Joyce have all just hastily buried their anger at Buffy in the wake of the zombie attack. Well, that anger didn’t go anywhere. And if you’re angry with slayer number one, you make a big deal of the new slayer in town. Both a bit as a replacement. And as a bit of punishment. Xander in particular seems to be choosing to make much of Faith precisely to make a point to Buffy. Even if this isn’t actually going on (and I think its very much in the mix -- agreed, note how he rudely cuts off Buffy to turn the conversation back to Faith), Buffy has every reason to fear that it’s going on. Her friends and her Mom were all very angry with her, and now they’ve got a bright new shiny slayer to be best pals with. Buffy has to fear that she’s suddenly expendable, and to the degree that she thinks that the position she does have with the Scoobies is largely related to her being the slayer, it’s perfectly natural for her to be distinctly unhappy at Faith’s arrival.
So the first note in the Buffy/Faith dynamic is that Buffy doesn’t want Faith to be there. Doesn’t want to let her into her life. This escalates into a near fight when Faith tries to establish a connection with Buffy by talking about Angel. Buffy bridles and immediately tells her that there will be no conversation about Angel. Angel is all for her and only her. We can see why Buffy wants to keep Angel as her emotional harbor. And we can also figure that Buffy isn’t ready to share anything about her deepest trauma to this new friend cum rival. But our first note is a bit of a tragedy, because Faith needs very much to be taken in as a friend. Faith reads Buffy’s secrecy as rejection and they nearly come to blows. The initial reactions are always there in the background. But in between there is much positive material.
Which takes us to our second note, which is that Buffy and Faith bond together over the fighting. In addition to the usual “he who sheds his blood with me today shall be my brother” sort of sentiment, we get them helping each other out at a more deep level. Faith has been running from her past, and her first instinct when confronted with it again is to run again. We could feel clever about noting the parallel between what Faith is doing here and Buffy’s story over the last two episodes. But Buffy herself draws the connection. And so, Buffy exhorts Faith to not give up and Faith comes through. Faith’s example gives Buffy the courage to go and tell Giles what really happened with Angel and Acathla. Faith’s role as a mirror is thus not just subtext, but text-text. That identification is helpful here. It will become less helpful when things go wonky.
There’s a parallel between Faith’s guilt over her Watcher’s death and Buffy’s guilt over Angel’s death. The problem, of course, is that Buffy’s former watcher and her Kakistos are one and the same, and so there’s no hope at catharsis the way there is for Faith. And while Faith has to contend with feeling responsible for her watcher’s death, Buffy really did kill Angel, and is (going by her dream) convinced that if Angel could speak to her, he would be damned, and righteously, angry. “I had to,” she says weakly, but it’s hard for her to own that. Another quick moment that reminds us the depths of her unresolved Angel issues: when Faith asks who Buffy’s toughest kill was, she pauses not to say Angel, and comes up with...the Three. Y’know, the vampires who led to Buffy and Angel’s first kiss. And the ones Buffy herself never killed.
While we’re on the subject of mirroring, we also get mirroring on the subject of the nature of being a slayer. By the end of the season, Faith will be seen as the fallen slayer and Buffy as the good slayer. But Buffy’s identification with Faith is going to make her end up wanting to reject parts of herself that remind her of Faith. Because while there are important differences between the two, they share a common slayer nature. In this episode, we get Faith’s remark that slaying always makes her hungry and horny. When the others look to Buffy to see if it’s true she says sometimes she wants a non-fat yogurt. But after their big fight with Kakistos, they look at each other and say they are both starving. It’s the first example we’ll get of Buffy denying some of the stronger instincts that go with being a slayer.
The other example this episode gives us is Buffy’s reaction to Faith taking her issues out on a vampire. It is, of course, exactly what Buffy did in Ted. And for the same reasons. (Snyder’s reaction to Buffy’s playing with his letter opener, when he mentions “violent tendencies,” is played as a joke, but it reminds us that there are real violent tendencies in Buffy.) It’s not clear in the episode if Buffy recognizes that Faith is just doing what she did. Though note that while they both have a slayer-based proclivity for using violence to work out their personal issues, Buffy had a real reason to be upset with Faith in this instance -- Faith didn’t have Buffy’s back and Buffy could have used her help. So it’s taking how Buffy was in Ted but adding in a note of irresponsibility. Notably, Faith also refuses to acknowledge that she did anything wrong afterwards. And thus we have foreshadowed Bad Girls/Consequences pretty much to a T.
Faith as an exploration of the “dark” side of slayers, the part that Buffy denies, starts from Faith’s very first scene: she is dancing sexily with a vampire, one who, like the vampire in the Bronze in Welcome to the Hellmouth, is wearing clothes a few decades out of date. Then the two go outside and she stakes him. It hints that attraction to vampires (with dance imagery!) is maybe natural for slayers. It also blurs predator and prey: was it Faith or the vampire who seduced the other, in order to go outside to kill them? It’s a side Buffy really doesn’t want to consider.
There is another dynamic that is established here and will play out through Season Eight. Buffy is the alpha slayer. She's been doing it the longest (she doesn’t hesitate to point this out to Faith), she's the one who has been in charge and Faith doesn't really challenge her for that. Faith is a beta and because she's not in charge, she'll have room to be less responsible.
Corollary to that, Faith -- despite seeming to replace Buffy socially -- is often absent from the team meetings and tete-a-tetes that take place within the group. Buffy still has Giles as a confidant and that gives her strength. Faith, despite her charms, plays the role of outsider and doesn't share confidences with anybody. This will make her paranoid about what's going on behind her back. She'll suspect the worst is being said of her (and she's often right about that), but she won't realize the good that's being said too. Buffy comes a long way within just this one episode to recognizing that her initial reaction to Faith is unfair and to give Faith credit for the obstacles she's had to overcome. But she says it only to Giles; it's a generosity of spirit that Faith doesn't hear directly, which will have consequences.
Also related to Buffy being the alpha and Faith the beta slayer is this: Buffy has died. Faith hasn’t. We’re reminded again and again in this episode: Cordelia mentions Buffy’s death, Buffy mentions the risk of getting killed to Faith, Buffy tells her mom that she died, and Buffy repeats to Faith again and again that the first rule of slaying is not to get killed. Faith’s existence as a slayer is tied to the two great traumas of Buffy’s young life: her own death at the hands of the Master, and Angel’s turning evil, which led to Kendra’s death at the hands of Angel’s creation Drusilla because Buffy fell for Angel’s trap. She’s walking proof of Buffy’s own failures. And so Faith’s encouragement of Buffy to have fun with slaying is especially painful for Buffy to hear, because she doesn’t have the luxury of not worrying about getting killed: she’s already been through it. (I guess this isn’t something you get a blase, “been there, done that” kind of attitude about). And she’s already had her heart broken by slaying and her calling. Seeing slaying as fun is far too difficult for her to even conceive, and it isn’t until she sees that Faith has been traumatized by her calling, too, that she can connect with her at all.
Scott Hope/ Angel. Scott is introduced as the potential new boyfriend. He’s cute, charming and up front. He risks rejection by Buffy, and handles it with grace when he ends up rejected. He explicitly refuses to play coy games, going so far as to say that lying is bad for the soul. Do I need to draw all the implied contrasts with Angel here? Meanwhile, Buffy can’t quite give Scott a chance, because she’s still absorbed in Angel. Her dream this episode is of him in the bronze accusing her of having sent him to hell, while the Scoobies look on absolutely clueless.
We also have the Claddagh ring, which features in the dream, and then -- how wildly improbably is this? -- turns up as a gift Scott bought for Buffy (even before a first date? I know the writers are taking some shortcuts here, but this makes him out to be creepy). Scott forthrightly admits he picked the thing up at a retro shop -- it's a trifle. And it gets me wondering: where did Angel get his ring? Was it really an heirloom from his people (what, had the demon who ruthlessly slaughtered his family to cut his connections with his human life kept little trinket mementos?), or had he too picked it up from a junk jewelry shop? And if so, where did he get the money? Was he pulling a season four Spike, and robbing passers-by by putting on his game face? (Probably this is just one of those areas where the verse doesn’t fully add up.) Angel has serious money. Fancy art objects, ancient weapons, etc. What the writers pull out of their arse is the claim that he’s in fact broke, so he can’t afford to pay Cordelia and Doyle decent salaries when he gets to AtS -- though I suppose they could say he blew his wad on Ming vases and that’s why he ends up broke. I guess then the question is how he got the money to raise himself up from living in the streets eating rats to building the objets d’art collection. Maybe he bought them while evil, and put them in storage when he got his soul, eventually having them shipped to Sunnydale.
I wonder how we would fold in the information from Conversations with Dead People that Scott, post-breakup, went around spreading rumours that Buffy was gay. Probably it’s just a joke. But it does hurt the presentation in retrospect of Scott as unwilling to lie or play games. Probably, it was just a joke and we should continue to read Scott’s openness as generally the real deal. Notably, Scott is Hope for a romantic life that isn’t bound by Angel. Hope quickly disappears from her life.
Giles and Confessions. Which brings us to the tragedy. Because at the end of the episode, Buffy has learned from Faith that you can’t just run from the past, but have to deal with it. And so she tells Giles what happened. Giles has been using a fact-finding mission for a spell to bind Acathla as an excuse to get Buffy to open up about really happened. Buffy seems to think it was cathartic, and she is able to go to Scott and say she really does want to give it a chance. Angel was a wedge between the Scoobies for a lot of reasons. One was that Buffy was keeping from them the depth of the tragedy that happened at the end of Becoming. Here at the end of the episode it seems like one wedge is being retired. (Lending weight to Maggie’s theory, Willow is present to hear what Buffy went through, and immediately apologizes for her role in what happened.) But Angel drops back in all feral and confused, and Buffy will be back to keeping secrets in the very next episode.
It's ironic that at first glance, Giles does not appear to be attentive to Buffy's emotional needs; he fails to acknowledge her reinstatement at school, which Buffy takes him to task for. It turns out that Giles is engaged in a much deeper project showing a very high degree of empathy and understanding that Buffy had been through a very, very serious trauma and that she needed a way to tell them. It is telling that it is Giles, the stuffy, unemotional librarian, who does this, and not Buffy's friends. Xander is still putting in the screws by going ga ga over Faith, and Willow is trying to make Buffy pretend to be all ga ga over Scott. (Buffy: I don't think I'm ready; Willow: What's stopping you? Audience: duh!). Giles’ lackluster greeting follows his other big project on Buffy’s behalf: getting her reinstated. Buffy doesn’t know about either project. It is interesting that Giles continues to hide the depths of his empathy from Buffy. It’s part of who Giles is to hide his emotions, granted, but Buffy still doesn’t know how much Giles cares, and she could use that knowledge right now. (When Buffy and Willow go to see Giles early in the episode, she wonders if he’s mad.) Maybe Giles just doesn’t want Buffy feeling like she owes him anything, and doesn’t want to damage the delicate professionalism of the Watcher/slayer relationship.
Giles and Faith. She thinks he’s hot! He’s charmed! Man oh man did BKV do his homework for NFFY. Right down to that liiiiittttlllle bit of subtext. Keep in mind though, that at the episode’s end, Giles is assigned to be Faith’s watcher. We’ll want to track how seriously he takes that job, in comparison to how seriously he takes the job of being Buffy’s watcher. That Giles and Faith have the tiniest bit of UST might be why Giles doesn’t take much of a paternal role with her. She seems more grown up, so he doesn’t recognize Faith’s emotional needs as clearly as he recognizes Buffy’s.
Willow and her Magic. Another episode in Willow showing an alarming interest in magic, and Giles failing to be sufficiently alarmed. This is the second episode where Willow describes some rather major things as ‘minor’ with things going rather terribly wrong. Last episode it was the revelation that she took out a city block of lights while trying to communicate with spirits. This time she set her bed on fire doing a fire out of ice spell. Giles expresses concern, but doesn’t really follow through on it.
While amusing, the fire out of ice line is very telling, because it shows that Willow, with all her smarts, didn't stop to think about the consequences of starting a fire on her bed. She shows herself willing to not only take risks, but to take stupid, needless risks. The magic is making her impulsive.
Giles’ lack of follow-through on Willow is particularly interesting as we get lots of reminders about how much attention Willow pays to Giles: she has noticed his clucking sounds, and when Buffy says “raise your hand if ‘ew’” to Faith’s mention of Giles’ attractiveness, Xander raises his hand and Willow just smiles broadly. Willow doesn’t mention her fire out of ice spell to Buffy, but to Giles, and she shifts from eagerly over-sharing about her magic to asking quickly if he’s mad. She’s clearly pining for Giles’ attention and seeking out his approval and guidance, but Giles holds back.
One other Willow note in contrast: there is the cute, charming scene where she can barely bring herself to step off campus because it's never been allowed before and she's worried that they may have changed the rules. Willow breaks rules -- serious rules -- all the time, but here she is paralyzed by this? The girl's perspective is whacked. I think the reason is that the rules Willow breaks all the time are either not clearly written (i.e. rules about magic), or can be rationalized away, either as not applying to her (i.e. “accidentally” decrypting codes from the city mainframe) or as being for good (i.e. helping to steal rocket launchers). There’s no way to rationalize students not being allowed to leave campus as not applying to her. Her lack of perspective is genuine though; Willow has no internal mechanism for distinguishing between arbitrary rules and important ones.
Buffy’s confession is actually a very revealing sequence for Willow as well. While Giles' trick is designed to get Buffy to let go the awful burden of an awful secret, he inadvertently catches Willow with the same trick. Willow is there when Buffy finally reveals that Angel was cured in the fatal moment before Buffy had to kill him. She recounts the story, step by agonizing step, and Willow finally gets the full import of what Buffy had been through. Up until this moment, Willow had either avoided Buffy, or awkwardly sought to encourage (coerce?) Buffy to just be happy and start dating again, but now she hears the full tragedy Buffy has been through. There are tears in her eyes. She gets it.
But then Buffy leaves, and something interesting happens. Willow switches gears and immediately turns to Giles to work on the spell. The magic! It will fix everything! Yeah, she really pounces on that spell. She can’t contend with guilt; she can’t contend with Buffy upset; she can’t contend with having screwed up. She wants to make things better. It’s not always a bad thing, and wanting to help do a spell that she thinks exists is admirable. But her M.O. of trying to fix things by magic after every screw up becomes darker and darker. The scene maps over very closely onto her reaction to finding out that Buffy was in heaven in OMWF, and her immediate attempt to use magic to make Buffy’s problem go away.
She’s still frowning and unhappy when she asks Giles to do the spell. But she has the faintest hint of a smile when Giles tells her there is no spell. It’s a bittersweet moment. She gets that her pushing Buffy to jump start her love life (and see the notes to I Only Have Eyes For You as to why I think she does this) was insensitive, and admires Giles’ perceptiveness in caring for Buffy far beyond her own. I think she’s happy to see Buffy dealing, too. But the emphasis on Willow’s own need for Giles hints that there’s some jealousy about his perceptiveness with Buffy, too.
Xander and his slayers. Xander is overtly (and overly) interested in Faith’s raunchy tales. Cordelia puts up with it. (Which we have to say is yet another measure of how much she loves the guy). Cordy even jokes that maybe she should dress up as a slayer and put a stake to Xander’s throat to see if it would turn him on. (Shades of Harmony/Spike.) And it turns out that slayers do turn Xander on -- though it ‘s not clear how he feels about it when they really do put a stake to his throat (metaphorically speaking). Cordelia really was always just a stop gap. (Xander’s slayer attraction will segue into his life as a demon magnet, with Cordy only sort of holding her spot because as much of a bitch as she can be, she’s not really dark the way slayers and demons can be dark. Season 3 covers the whole trajectory of Xander’s love life on this).
Joyce’s mothering. At the dinner, Joyce somewhat ignores Buffy to pay attention to Faith, and at first Buffy takes it as another rejection. But once they get into the kitchen, the real reason for Joyce’s interest is made clear: she really, really wants Faith to take over the slaying so that Buffy can be safe. It’s here that Joyce finds out, for the first time, that Buffy died and never told her. Joyce is caught in a difficult situation: she is trying to be supportive of who her daughter is (the coming out metaphor is still alive and well, when Joyce mentions the “slayer pride parade”) while making sure that her daughter continues to live. I think Joyce somewhat misses how important slaying is to Buffy’s identity, and maybe objectifies Faith a little bit in hoping that the unpleasant and dangerous aspects of Buffy can be siphoned off onto her. But it’s sort of understandable: Faith really, really seems to like slaying, and Buffy hasn’t shown much to Joyce of the side of her that enjoys slaying. Joyce gets a great moment with Snyder earlier in the episode.
The Big Picture. Mirroring Faith’s attack on Buffy’s inability to see the fun in her life is Trick’s attempting to get Kakistos to get out of a vengeance-style mindset. There’s a bit of a School Hard Spike vs. the Anointed One vibe to New World vampire Trick’s annoyance with Kakistos. The difference is that with Spike, everything was personal, whereas Trick is maybe the most impersonal big or little bad the show has given us, and fights against Kakistos’ personal vengeance crusade. Trick signals that the world is a bigger place than petty personal concerns, and hints at the expansion of the show’s conception of authority and society. The episode features another mention of the Mayor, and tells us that erstwhile top dog authority figures Giles and Snyder have organizations to answer to (the Watchers’ Council and the school board). (We get out first hint of Giles being on the outside of the Council’s good graces, as well; I like Pocochina’s take that field Watchers are, essentially, at the bottom of the Council ladder despite being apparently the most important, because, honestly, who would want that job?) It’s another instance (shortly after Anne) where capitalism is shown as a little bit demonic, when fast food is used repeatedly by Trick for human dining. Trick also gives us a textual acknowledgment of the homogeneous whiteness of Sunnydale, right in the episode where, with the introduction of Faith, class issues and socioeconomic issues come into play.
The episode fades out before fading in to show us Angel’s return. Next up is Beauty and the Beast, which does much to remind us of how dark the Bangel romance really is.
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.
Buffy 3.03 Faith, Hope and Trick, in which Faith and Angel Drop In.
There’s an alternate universe where the last ten seconds of this episode didn’t happen. In that universe, Buffy has bonded with Faith while fighting. From Faith, Buffy’s gotten the courage to deal with her baggage and let it go. She takes up with Scott Hope. With the Angel trauma confessed, the wedge between Buffy and the Scoobies is substantially reduced, and the series of steps that propel Faith to the mayor’s office never happen. But we do get the last ten seconds, and so in this universe we get Faith, Angel and the Mayor rather than Faith, Hope and Trick, and a Buffy who walks away with at least two more major wounds to add to her collection. With Angel back, the divisions between the Scoobies are exacerbated, and Faith gets caught in the cross-fire. It’s an extraordinary arc which this episode sets up up very neatly.
Faith. I need to be clear about this up front. Faith is responsible for her own choices. Full stop. You can come from a lousy background. You can be dealt some rotten cards. That still doesn’t force you to become evil. The reason I need to be clear about this is that I do want to spend a lot of time this season thinking about the rotten cards Faith got. She’s vulnerable in a particular way, and the situation between Buffy and the Scoobies will end up alienating her and isolating her. A lot of their issues land on Faith. She handles it very badly, and she has to own that. But if the bad cards weren’t dealt, Faith arguably gets a much better outcome.
We learn pretty much everything we need to know about Faith in her introductory episode. [Contrast that with Spike’s introduction last season, which didn’t begin to unfold who Spike was]. Faith is from the lower classes. Her Mom is dead. She’s a high school dropout. She’s failed as a slayer, unable to save her watcher. Faith has a lot of reason to think she’s a loser. And so she confronts life with bravado. She’s super cool, seems to be full of herself. It’s a front. She may charm the Scoobies and Giles and Scott and Joyce initially. But Faith falls apart easily when her past comes after her. We get the single most telling shot of Faith when Buffy looks out from the kitchen to see Faith wolfing down food. It plays as evidence of Faiths’ ‘living large’ persona. But it should be read as what it is. Faith is starving. For love. For a place. For a sense of herself. And quite literally for food. She is poor, not able to make the rent for her seedy motel room, let alone feed herself adequately.
When Faith is hanging out with Willow and Xander, she mentions that if she had friends like them in high school...well, she would still have dropped out, but she’d feel bad about it. She can’t drop the bravado enough not to joke, but the hint is that things might have been different with friends, which ties in with the importance of Buffy’s friends in her life.
One other thing we know about Faith is that she hasn't been a slayer very long. Kendra died in Becoming, so Faith has been a slayer exactly as long as Buffy had skipped town, three months maybe. So, not only does she have her failure to save her watcher weighing on her, she also doesn't have a long track record of success to fall back on to bolster her confidence. She has a few stories of successful fights with vamps, but that's it.
Faith/Buffy. Faith’s basic story is simple because the story is never about her. It’s all about Buffy. Faith enters the story as a mirror for Buffy, and as a partner in a dance that ends up being quite complicated.
The opening act has Buffy feeling immediately marginalized by Faith and resentful.
Even before we meet Faith, we see numerous references to Buffy being alone, the fifth wheel. Xander/Cordelia and Willow/Oz have to go through their uncoupling maneuvers before sitting down with her; couples are all over the place and each other at the Bronz; Buffy has to brush past Scott Hope on her way to rescue a girl from a vampire; on the way out there, Xander wonders if the purported vampire and victim are actually making out, and when they hear crashing sounds, Willow wonders out loud whether she should make similar sounds when making out with Oz. (Always insecure, that one.) Couples, couples, couples ... and Buffy. Her isolation is unmistakable, and that's even before considering the dreams she has of having killed Angel. Add this to the layers of insecurity she has following her less than warm welcome home in Deadman’s Party as the context for considering the effect Faith has on her.
The Scoobies are quick to make Faith the center of their attention. Joyce is is very impressed, as well. Even Giles is charmed. Buffy’s reaction is to be the sulky selfish kid whose sister is getting all the attention. Now, part of this is because Buffy is an only child and isn’t used to sharing the spotlight. She’s also the slayer and isn’t used to sharing that spotlight either. But I think we risk really exaggerating Buffy’s prima donna tendencies if we don’t attend to the circumstances. The Scoobies and Joyce have all just hastily buried their anger at Buffy in the wake of the zombie attack. Well, that anger didn’t go anywhere. And if you’re angry with slayer number one, you make a big deal of the new slayer in town. Both a bit as a replacement. And as a bit of punishment. Xander in particular seems to be choosing to make much of Faith precisely to make a point to Buffy. Even if this isn’t actually going on (and I think its very much in the mix -- agreed, note how he rudely cuts off Buffy to turn the conversation back to Faith), Buffy has every reason to fear that it’s going on. Her friends and her Mom were all very angry with her, and now they’ve got a bright new shiny slayer to be best pals with. Buffy has to fear that she’s suddenly expendable, and to the degree that she thinks that the position she does have with the Scoobies is largely related to her being the slayer, it’s perfectly natural for her to be distinctly unhappy at Faith’s arrival.
So the first note in the Buffy/Faith dynamic is that Buffy doesn’t want Faith to be there. Doesn’t want to let her into her life. This escalates into a near fight when Faith tries to establish a connection with Buffy by talking about Angel. Buffy bridles and immediately tells her that there will be no conversation about Angel. Angel is all for her and only her. We can see why Buffy wants to keep Angel as her emotional harbor. And we can also figure that Buffy isn’t ready to share anything about her deepest trauma to this new friend cum rival. But our first note is a bit of a tragedy, because Faith needs very much to be taken in as a friend. Faith reads Buffy’s secrecy as rejection and they nearly come to blows. The initial reactions are always there in the background. But in between there is much positive material.
Which takes us to our second note, which is that Buffy and Faith bond together over the fighting. In addition to the usual “he who sheds his blood with me today shall be my brother” sort of sentiment, we get them helping each other out at a more deep level. Faith has been running from her past, and her first instinct when confronted with it again is to run again. We could feel clever about noting the parallel between what Faith is doing here and Buffy’s story over the last two episodes. But Buffy herself draws the connection. And so, Buffy exhorts Faith to not give up and Faith comes through. Faith’s example gives Buffy the courage to go and tell Giles what really happened with Angel and Acathla. Faith’s role as a mirror is thus not just subtext, but text-text. That identification is helpful here. It will become less helpful when things go wonky.
There’s a parallel between Faith’s guilt over her Watcher’s death and Buffy’s guilt over Angel’s death. The problem, of course, is that Buffy’s former watcher and her Kakistos are one and the same, and so there’s no hope at catharsis the way there is for Faith. And while Faith has to contend with feeling responsible for her watcher’s death, Buffy really did kill Angel, and is (going by her dream) convinced that if Angel could speak to her, he would be damned, and righteously, angry. “I had to,” she says weakly, but it’s hard for her to own that. Another quick moment that reminds us the depths of her unresolved Angel issues: when Faith asks who Buffy’s toughest kill was, she pauses not to say Angel, and comes up with...the Three. Y’know, the vampires who led to Buffy and Angel’s first kiss. And the ones Buffy herself never killed.
While we’re on the subject of mirroring, we also get mirroring on the subject of the nature of being a slayer. By the end of the season, Faith will be seen as the fallen slayer and Buffy as the good slayer. But Buffy’s identification with Faith is going to make her end up wanting to reject parts of herself that remind her of Faith. Because while there are important differences between the two, they share a common slayer nature. In this episode, we get Faith’s remark that slaying always makes her hungry and horny. When the others look to Buffy to see if it’s true she says sometimes she wants a non-fat yogurt. But after their big fight with Kakistos, they look at each other and say they are both starving. It’s the first example we’ll get of Buffy denying some of the stronger instincts that go with being a slayer.
The other example this episode gives us is Buffy’s reaction to Faith taking her issues out on a vampire. It is, of course, exactly what Buffy did in Ted. And for the same reasons. (Snyder’s reaction to Buffy’s playing with his letter opener, when he mentions “violent tendencies,” is played as a joke, but it reminds us that there are real violent tendencies in Buffy.) It’s not clear in the episode if Buffy recognizes that Faith is just doing what she did. Though note that while they both have a slayer-based proclivity for using violence to work out their personal issues, Buffy had a real reason to be upset with Faith in this instance -- Faith didn’t have Buffy’s back and Buffy could have used her help. So it’s taking how Buffy was in Ted but adding in a note of irresponsibility. Notably, Faith also refuses to acknowledge that she did anything wrong afterwards. And thus we have foreshadowed Bad Girls/Consequences pretty much to a T.
Faith as an exploration of the “dark” side of slayers, the part that Buffy denies, starts from Faith’s very first scene: she is dancing sexily with a vampire, one who, like the vampire in the Bronze in Welcome to the Hellmouth, is wearing clothes a few decades out of date. Then the two go outside and she stakes him. It hints that attraction to vampires (with dance imagery!) is maybe natural for slayers. It also blurs predator and prey: was it Faith or the vampire who seduced the other, in order to go outside to kill them? It’s a side Buffy really doesn’t want to consider.
There is another dynamic that is established here and will play out through Season Eight. Buffy is the alpha slayer. She's been doing it the longest (she doesn’t hesitate to point this out to Faith), she's the one who has been in charge and Faith doesn't really challenge her for that. Faith is a beta and because she's not in charge, she'll have room to be less responsible.
Corollary to that, Faith -- despite seeming to replace Buffy socially -- is often absent from the team meetings and tete-a-tetes that take place within the group. Buffy still has Giles as a confidant and that gives her strength. Faith, despite her charms, plays the role of outsider and doesn't share confidences with anybody. This will make her paranoid about what's going on behind her back. She'll suspect the worst is being said of her (and she's often right about that), but she won't realize the good that's being said too. Buffy comes a long way within just this one episode to recognizing that her initial reaction to Faith is unfair and to give Faith credit for the obstacles she's had to overcome. But she says it only to Giles; it's a generosity of spirit that Faith doesn't hear directly, which will have consequences.
Also related to Buffy being the alpha and Faith the beta slayer is this: Buffy has died. Faith hasn’t. We’re reminded again and again in this episode: Cordelia mentions Buffy’s death, Buffy mentions the risk of getting killed to Faith, Buffy tells her mom that she died, and Buffy repeats to Faith again and again that the first rule of slaying is not to get killed. Faith’s existence as a slayer is tied to the two great traumas of Buffy’s young life: her own death at the hands of the Master, and Angel’s turning evil, which led to Kendra’s death at the hands of Angel’s creation Drusilla because Buffy fell for Angel’s trap. She’s walking proof of Buffy’s own failures. And so Faith’s encouragement of Buffy to have fun with slaying is especially painful for Buffy to hear, because she doesn’t have the luxury of not worrying about getting killed: she’s already been through it. (I guess this isn’t something you get a blase, “been there, done that” kind of attitude about). And she’s already had her heart broken by slaying and her calling. Seeing slaying as fun is far too difficult for her to even conceive, and it isn’t until she sees that Faith has been traumatized by her calling, too, that she can connect with her at all.
Scott Hope/ Angel. Scott is introduced as the potential new boyfriend. He’s cute, charming and up front. He risks rejection by Buffy, and handles it with grace when he ends up rejected. He explicitly refuses to play coy games, going so far as to say that lying is bad for the soul. Do I need to draw all the implied contrasts with Angel here? Meanwhile, Buffy can’t quite give Scott a chance, because she’s still absorbed in Angel. Her dream this episode is of him in the bronze accusing her of having sent him to hell, while the Scoobies look on absolutely clueless.
We also have the Claddagh ring, which features in the dream, and then -- how wildly improbably is this? -- turns up as a gift Scott bought for Buffy (even before a first date? I know the writers are taking some shortcuts here, but this makes him out to be creepy). Scott forthrightly admits he picked the thing up at a retro shop -- it's a trifle. And it gets me wondering: where did Angel get his ring? Was it really an heirloom from his people (what, had the demon who ruthlessly slaughtered his family to cut his connections with his human life kept little trinket mementos?), or had he too picked it up from a junk jewelry shop? And if so, where did he get the money? Was he pulling a season four Spike, and robbing passers-by by putting on his game face? (Probably this is just one of those areas where the verse doesn’t fully add up.) Angel has serious money. Fancy art objects, ancient weapons, etc. What the writers pull out of their arse is the claim that he’s in fact broke, so he can’t afford to pay Cordelia and Doyle decent salaries when he gets to AtS -- though I suppose they could say he blew his wad on Ming vases and that’s why he ends up broke. I guess then the question is how he got the money to raise himself up from living in the streets eating rats to building the objets d’art collection. Maybe he bought them while evil, and put them in storage when he got his soul, eventually having them shipped to Sunnydale.
I wonder how we would fold in the information from Conversations with Dead People that Scott, post-breakup, went around spreading rumours that Buffy was gay. Probably it’s just a joke. But it does hurt the presentation in retrospect of Scott as unwilling to lie or play games. Probably, it was just a joke and we should continue to read Scott’s openness as generally the real deal. Notably, Scott is Hope for a romantic life that isn’t bound by Angel. Hope quickly disappears from her life.
Giles and Confessions. Which brings us to the tragedy. Because at the end of the episode, Buffy has learned from Faith that you can’t just run from the past, but have to deal with it. And so she tells Giles what happened. Giles has been using a fact-finding mission for a spell to bind Acathla as an excuse to get Buffy to open up about really happened. Buffy seems to think it was cathartic, and she is able to go to Scott and say she really does want to give it a chance. Angel was a wedge between the Scoobies for a lot of reasons. One was that Buffy was keeping from them the depth of the tragedy that happened at the end of Becoming. Here at the end of the episode it seems like one wedge is being retired. (Lending weight to Maggie’s theory, Willow is present to hear what Buffy went through, and immediately apologizes for her role in what happened.) But Angel drops back in all feral and confused, and Buffy will be back to keeping secrets in the very next episode.
It's ironic that at first glance, Giles does not appear to be attentive to Buffy's emotional needs; he fails to acknowledge her reinstatement at school, which Buffy takes him to task for. It turns out that Giles is engaged in a much deeper project showing a very high degree of empathy and understanding that Buffy had been through a very, very serious trauma and that she needed a way to tell them. It is telling that it is Giles, the stuffy, unemotional librarian, who does this, and not Buffy's friends. Xander is still putting in the screws by going ga ga over Faith, and Willow is trying to make Buffy pretend to be all ga ga over Scott. (Buffy: I don't think I'm ready; Willow: What's stopping you? Audience: duh!). Giles’ lackluster greeting follows his other big project on Buffy’s behalf: getting her reinstated. Buffy doesn’t know about either project. It is interesting that Giles continues to hide the depths of his empathy from Buffy. It’s part of who Giles is to hide his emotions, granted, but Buffy still doesn’t know how much Giles cares, and she could use that knowledge right now. (When Buffy and Willow go to see Giles early in the episode, she wonders if he’s mad.) Maybe Giles just doesn’t want Buffy feeling like she owes him anything, and doesn’t want to damage the delicate professionalism of the Watcher/slayer relationship.
Giles and Faith. She thinks he’s hot! He’s charmed! Man oh man did BKV do his homework for NFFY. Right down to that liiiiittttlllle bit of subtext. Keep in mind though, that at the episode’s end, Giles is assigned to be Faith’s watcher. We’ll want to track how seriously he takes that job, in comparison to how seriously he takes the job of being Buffy’s watcher. That Giles and Faith have the tiniest bit of UST might be why Giles doesn’t take much of a paternal role with her. She seems more grown up, so he doesn’t recognize Faith’s emotional needs as clearly as he recognizes Buffy’s.
Willow and her Magic. Another episode in Willow showing an alarming interest in magic, and Giles failing to be sufficiently alarmed. This is the second episode where Willow describes some rather major things as ‘minor’ with things going rather terribly wrong. Last episode it was the revelation that she took out a city block of lights while trying to communicate with spirits. This time she set her bed on fire doing a fire out of ice spell. Giles expresses concern, but doesn’t really follow through on it.
While amusing, the fire out of ice line is very telling, because it shows that Willow, with all her smarts, didn't stop to think about the consequences of starting a fire on her bed. She shows herself willing to not only take risks, but to take stupid, needless risks. The magic is making her impulsive.
Giles’ lack of follow-through on Willow is particularly interesting as we get lots of reminders about how much attention Willow pays to Giles: she has noticed his clucking sounds, and when Buffy says “raise your hand if ‘ew’” to Faith’s mention of Giles’ attractiveness, Xander raises his hand and Willow just smiles broadly. Willow doesn’t mention her fire out of ice spell to Buffy, but to Giles, and she shifts from eagerly over-sharing about her magic to asking quickly if he’s mad. She’s clearly pining for Giles’ attention and seeking out his approval and guidance, but Giles holds back.
One other Willow note in contrast: there is the cute, charming scene where she can barely bring herself to step off campus because it's never been allowed before and she's worried that they may have changed the rules. Willow breaks rules -- serious rules -- all the time, but here she is paralyzed by this? The girl's perspective is whacked. I think the reason is that the rules Willow breaks all the time are either not clearly written (i.e. rules about magic), or can be rationalized away, either as not applying to her (i.e. “accidentally” decrypting codes from the city mainframe) or as being for good (i.e. helping to steal rocket launchers). There’s no way to rationalize students not being allowed to leave campus as not applying to her. Her lack of perspective is genuine though; Willow has no internal mechanism for distinguishing between arbitrary rules and important ones.
Buffy’s confession is actually a very revealing sequence for Willow as well. While Giles' trick is designed to get Buffy to let go the awful burden of an awful secret, he inadvertently catches Willow with the same trick. Willow is there when Buffy finally reveals that Angel was cured in the fatal moment before Buffy had to kill him. She recounts the story, step by agonizing step, and Willow finally gets the full import of what Buffy had been through. Up until this moment, Willow had either avoided Buffy, or awkwardly sought to encourage (coerce?) Buffy to just be happy and start dating again, but now she hears the full tragedy Buffy has been through. There are tears in her eyes. She gets it.
But then Buffy leaves, and something interesting happens. Willow switches gears and immediately turns to Giles to work on the spell. The magic! It will fix everything! Yeah, she really pounces on that spell. She can’t contend with guilt; she can’t contend with Buffy upset; she can’t contend with having screwed up. She wants to make things better. It’s not always a bad thing, and wanting to help do a spell that she thinks exists is admirable. But her M.O. of trying to fix things by magic after every screw up becomes darker and darker. The scene maps over very closely onto her reaction to finding out that Buffy was in heaven in OMWF, and her immediate attempt to use magic to make Buffy’s problem go away.
She’s still frowning and unhappy when she asks Giles to do the spell. But she has the faintest hint of a smile when Giles tells her there is no spell. It’s a bittersweet moment. She gets that her pushing Buffy to jump start her love life (and see the notes to I Only Have Eyes For You as to why I think she does this) was insensitive, and admires Giles’ perceptiveness in caring for Buffy far beyond her own. I think she’s happy to see Buffy dealing, too. But the emphasis on Willow’s own need for Giles hints that there’s some jealousy about his perceptiveness with Buffy, too.
Xander and his slayers. Xander is overtly (and overly) interested in Faith’s raunchy tales. Cordelia puts up with it. (Which we have to say is yet another measure of how much she loves the guy). Cordy even jokes that maybe she should dress up as a slayer and put a stake to Xander’s throat to see if it would turn him on. (Shades of Harmony/Spike.) And it turns out that slayers do turn Xander on -- though it ‘s not clear how he feels about it when they really do put a stake to his throat (metaphorically speaking). Cordelia really was always just a stop gap. (Xander’s slayer attraction will segue into his life as a demon magnet, with Cordy only sort of holding her spot because as much of a bitch as she can be, she’s not really dark the way slayers and demons can be dark. Season 3 covers the whole trajectory of Xander’s love life on this).
Joyce’s mothering. At the dinner, Joyce somewhat ignores Buffy to pay attention to Faith, and at first Buffy takes it as another rejection. But once they get into the kitchen, the real reason for Joyce’s interest is made clear: she really, really wants Faith to take over the slaying so that Buffy can be safe. It’s here that Joyce finds out, for the first time, that Buffy died and never told her. Joyce is caught in a difficult situation: she is trying to be supportive of who her daughter is (the coming out metaphor is still alive and well, when Joyce mentions the “slayer pride parade”) while making sure that her daughter continues to live. I think Joyce somewhat misses how important slaying is to Buffy’s identity, and maybe objectifies Faith a little bit in hoping that the unpleasant and dangerous aspects of Buffy can be siphoned off onto her. But it’s sort of understandable: Faith really, really seems to like slaying, and Buffy hasn’t shown much to Joyce of the side of her that enjoys slaying. Joyce gets a great moment with Snyder earlier in the episode.
The Big Picture. Mirroring Faith’s attack on Buffy’s inability to see the fun in her life is Trick’s attempting to get Kakistos to get out of a vengeance-style mindset. There’s a bit of a School Hard Spike vs. the Anointed One vibe to New World vampire Trick’s annoyance with Kakistos. The difference is that with Spike, everything was personal, whereas Trick is maybe the most impersonal big or little bad the show has given us, and fights against Kakistos’ personal vengeance crusade. Trick signals that the world is a bigger place than petty personal concerns, and hints at the expansion of the show’s conception of authority and society. The episode features another mention of the Mayor, and tells us that erstwhile top dog authority figures Giles and Snyder have organizations to answer to (the Watchers’ Council and the school board). (We get out first hint of Giles being on the outside of the Council’s good graces, as well; I like Pocochina’s take that field Watchers are, essentially, at the bottom of the Council ladder despite being apparently the most important, because, honestly, who would want that job?) It’s another instance (shortly after Anne) where capitalism is shown as a little bit demonic, when fast food is used repeatedly by Trick for human dining. Trick also gives us a textual acknowledgment of the homogeneous whiteness of Sunnydale, right in the episode where, with the introduction of Faith, class issues and socioeconomic issues come into play.
The episode fades out before fading in to show us Angel’s return. Next up is Beauty and the Beast, which does much to remind us of how dark the Bangel romance really is.