buffy, angel, and the opposite of destiny
I’ve been thinking about Buffy. I have been playing along with gabrielleabelle ’s episode polls (highly recommended!), and they’ve really convinced me to give the first half of S2 a lot more credit than I have. Specifically, that the B/A “destined true love” is actually a story about choices and trust in the face of incomplete, and often incomprehensible, information. I think a lot of the one-off (non-Spike’n’Dru-based) early episodes of S2 get some flack because they don’t quite have the wide-eyed campy charm of S1, but they aren’t the emotional roller coaster of the later season. But every single one-shot episode explores relationships, gender, and sexuality in a way that is critical to the Buffy/Angel relationship generally, and in particular the apotheosis of Surprise/Innocence.
Seven out of those first twelve episodes are either setting up a crucial social issue which bears heavily on Buffy/Angel, or explicitly tells their story in advance. This also works better if you view Buffy/Angel, as I do, as not a straightforward teen love story but a subversive story about the power dynamic of the traditional heterosexual dating relationship taken to its logical conclusion. None of these episodes end particularly well, besides “Scoobies escape alive.” Some Assembly Required and Inca Mummy Girl are about the B/A relationship: where it is (SAR) and where it’s going (IMG). Reptile Boy and Halloween are an interrogation of the idea of courtship and romance. Ted and Bad Eggs contextualize B/A in the rough adult world of power discrepancies. That’s the problem with Destined True Love Forever - you already know how it works out, and it’s usually not good.
In Some Assembly Required, the dead guy insists that he wants, no, needs his perfect girl. It’s not his fault he’s this way - someone took his dead body and pieced it together enough to function the way it does - but he’s dangerous. There’s a girl who loves him even though he’s treated her dismissively, because she’s younger than he is and at times a little immature, but also because really, so is he. She’s going to save him from his lonely existence. And he doesn’t stop to think that it could result in someone’s death. That could be a description of Buffy/Angel through season 1, or it could be Cordelia/Football Zombie. This episode is basically a long, Frankenstein-ripoff “previously on” segment, except the Angel stand-in is a grotesque, hulking monster, and not the handsome young man Cordelia, and we the audience, have known.
Inca Mummy Girl isn’t particularly subtle about Ampata’s similarities to Buffy, but at the time we don’t know to look for her role as a reflection of the B/A relationship. SAR got us up to speed on the relationship; IMG works as a fast forward. Ampata can’t be physical with the boy she really cares about, or she’ll rip his life force right out of him; she’s a victim turned into a monster with an angelic face, who leaves a trail of bodies behind her but finds remorse in the end. Ampata is both Buffy and Angel here, and you want her vanquished even as you feel terrible for her fate.
Reptile Boy and Halloween both position Buffy as someone powerless and in need of protecting in a specifically gendered way. Buffy’s halfhearted wish to give up her Slayer strength to be a “proper lady” in Halloween looks bizarre if the episode comes in isolation, but coming just after Reptile Boy - where her own strength and instincts have let her down; and where Angel observably did enjoy coming to her rescue - it makes sense as a part of Buffy’s character development. She’s learning, on on the map of her world, where her strength will take her. It’s not necessarily too far a leap to say that the semblance of a normal relationship makes Buffy wish she weren’t the Slayer, though we generally know she enjoys her power and accepts that she’s been Chosen to protect.
Reptile Boy has a plot which depends heavily on the important ideas about Surprise/Innocence. The typical date rape scenario, for which the snake beneath the fraternity is barely a veil, is one in which the girls involved are almost uniformly blamed for their victimization, because of course their presence at a fraternity party calls their innocence into question. Why do these bad things continue to happen at this one house and they never get shut down? There might be some mojo coming from the snake, but it more likely is just the rape culture presumption that girls who enter Known Houses of Ill Repute aren’t worth looking too particularly hard for.
And this is where we get into Surprise/Innocence. Because to both Buffy and Angel - and therefore to the convergence of events which build to the loss of Angel’s soul - the first time they have sex together, and the first time Buffy has sex at all, is a part of this moment of perfect happiness. Now, it doesn’t say particularly nice things about Angel’s character, but it’s not unreasonable to guess that Buffy’s virginity is important to him (contrast Buffy with the hated whore Darla). This’ll be underlined for us later on in Becoming when Angel meets fifteen-year-old Buffy and becomes enamored with her immediately.
It’s crucial that Buffy and Angel never test their theory that “sex with Buffy” = “perfect happiness,” since there’s every chance that it wouldn’t actually, but rather, that the fact that they’ve had sex once fundamentally changes the nature of their relationship and their feelings towards each other. No, that’s not necessarily true, but it frequently is for teenagers, and we know in fact that it’s true for these two characters even before Angel loses his soul. The loss of one’s soul represents the loss of innocence caused by the gaining of knowledge. In this case specifically, the “loss” of female “virginity” (there are not enough contempt-quotes in the world for that particular social phenomenon). One mistake - telling one lie, having one drink, trusting one wrong boy, having sex just once - CAN RUIN EVERYTHING in the Buffyverse. And it can do so only because we believe it can ruin everything. If we didn’t write off and victim-blame women who are drugged and date raped/fed to a giant snake - because after all, having that one taste of the mature and forbidden means you’re asking for it - it would happen a lot less frequently. And if sex - specifically, a girl or woman’s first sexual encounter - wasn’t weighted with cataclysmic significance with society, it wouldn’t result in the fall of the Good Girl, the nice guy turning into a sleazeball, Angel losing his soul.
Angel/Buffy isn’t just a metaphor for relationships going bad on an individual level. They’re about what happens when ancient and repressive values (I do not for a minute think it is insignificant that Angel is a centuries-old Irish Catholic) come into contact with female sexual desire. Regarding sex with terror and awe (Willow: Wow. Buffy: Yeah… Willow: Wow.) doesn’t change decision-making about sex; it just increases the potentially frighteing consequences.
Halloween can be read as a reaction from Reptile Boy - Buffy presumed she was basically not vulnerable to people (and not unreasonably so, seeing as how she’s the Slayer) and that presumption was shattered (as her other presumptions of safety will be), and to deal with that, she retreats, and takes comfort in the rituals and performance of traditional femininity. She dresses impractically for a man, sits with her best friend and guesses his preferences (not her own). This fits into the context of their dating relationship because Angel is the one entity in her life, outside of herself, that is even capable of protecting her from the dangers that seek her out. She lets down her guard with him, and It Ends Badly. (Buffy: Well, i-it’s not our place to fight. Uh, surely some men will protect us!) Perception can affect reality, but can’t become context - Buffy doesn’t actually end up in a landed home with servants and men to protect her. Because her perception is wrong, her reality in the form of Spike will become that much more dangerous.
I was initially going to leave The Dark Age off this list, because I think it’s less interesting than the other episodes in this particular context, but suffice it to say, it doesn’t break this pattern. The Dark Age is about past evil coming back to haunt someone Buffy trusts, and coming very close to destroying everything around her. Giles and Jenny function as stand-ins for what the B/A relationship will become. Giles is a Watcher, a protector, a source of aid and comfort, but his history (which has been hinted at with Ethan; like Angel’s past has with Spike and Dru) has created a vulnerability in his goodness; a chink in his armor through which a demon can get in and take over. Seeing Angel’s inner demon wrestle with Giles’ demon is a heroic moment for the character on the surface, but it’s also a reminder that an equal danger lurks inside Angel himself.
Ted is a story which takes the facially perfect relationship - single mom finds Nice Guy with money who knows his way around the kitchen - and turns it inside out to tell an all-too-common story of control and abuse. Again, new and scary take on horror as metaphor on the first watch; mirror of B/A on the second (or…severalth, if you’re me). Ted’s mind games are eerily - and I’d argue deliberately - similar to Angelus’, and they have the same real-world inspiration. He worms his way into Buffy’s social circle. He makes her doubt herself. He isolates her. He turns her strength against her. He gets between Buffy and Joyce. Both Ted and Angelus are very clearly meant to be abusers. We learn that Buffy is susceptible to these particular mind games (as many if not most of us are; remember, abusers use them because they work), and it’ll be catastrophic. Ted does it now, but Buffy is ready for it because she is already suspicious of him, and she’s still caught off her guard. When Angelus does it, Buffy will have no such defenses. Buffy’s suspicion of Ted, through this lens, looks a lot like Xander’s hostility toward Angel. They’re both dismissed because their unease is attributed to jealousy, but they’re later shown to be reacting to a genuine threat, albeit one they weren’t entirely equipped to comprehend. The point of Ted is that suspicion, even when it hurts desperately, can be warranted; that even when nobody believes you and your whole world is threatened, what you have left is yourself.
Bad Eggs is a bit more complicated, but it revisits the issues dealt with in Reptile Boy. I joked in comments at gabrielleabelle’s Bad Eggs poll that it was a grand parable about the dangers of abstinence only sex education - this idea is admittedly slightly more entertaining after we’ve met the Mayor - but it’s also distinctly about not just sex itself, but the consequences of viewing sex as a step which can’t be undone and which must, definitively, have catastrophic consequences. Because the school makes the jump from sex to pregnancy to the egg project, they become vulnerable to the threat posed by the bad eggs. It’s a bit simplistic to look at the episode as just about sex. And this is reflected, directly, in Angel’s curse. Dick jokes aside, we know from AtS that sex itself doesn’t trigger Angel’s curse. It’s a combination of circumstances, which includes Angel’s conviction that sex must be deeply meaningful, and that the act of sex means he has won (and therefore deserves) Buffy’s love and trust. Buffy and Angel do love each other, of course, but it’s the assumption that sex and love are all-consuming partners that causes Angel to become perfectly happy and lose his soul.
This makes me give the show a lot more credit. The episodes that get so much flack - Some Assembly Required! Bad Eggs! - are actually quite important (mood-wise, not plot-wise) to setting up the major event of the season, which is then written off as an enormous anvil of a relationship story about some boys that turn bad on some girls after some sex. And it isn’t as neatly serialized as other seasons of the show are. The facets of the relationship are added in haphazardly, in no particular order, and maybe without any way to put them together beforehand, so it’s not the satisfying payoff of an arc climax so much as the unstable, untenable culmination of reasons it just can’t work. Then the heartbreak of Surprise/Innocence is so cataclysmic, and the execution so impressive, that it’s easy to forget everything that came before. But it has come before, over and over again, with the atemporal sureness of destiny. But while the B/A saga is a Shakespearean story, it’s not so much Romeo & Juliet as it is Macbeth. When you play with fire; when you act on the presumption that you know the future; and especially when you rely on magic and assume there’s no loophole, you spin your own destiny to its inevitable catastrophic conclusion.