The Mission is What Matters: Wesley Wyndam-Pryce (part 1?)
Wesley Wyndam-Pryce is an extremely popular character in the B/A-verse. This popularity seems to be acquired, though, through his journey into deep grayness and hot Lilah Morgan sex. I love Gray Wes as much as anyone. But I love him because he grows so shockingly and yet so naturally out of Geek Wes, who is my baby. Like Angel, the character’s future development on AtS is always within the man we see on BtVS, lurking well behind his (handsome, handsome) face. Like Angel - though even less purposefully - the foundations of his character show up during this prelude to his fascinating story on AtS. His particular mix of ruthlessness and insecurity, intellectualism and nerdy enthusiasm, shows up within days of his arrival in Sunnydale. Wesley’s vocation as a Watcher will follow him well after he parts ways with the Council, and while he doesn’t succeed, it’s not for lack of technical skill, dedication, or intelligence.
Wesley, Giles, and the Council
I’m not sure my interpretation of WWP makes sense without some explanation of my opinion on the Council. I have a theory (that I’ve never seen elsewhere, so your mileage probably varies) that the job of field watcher for the actual Slayer is kind of a Cruciamentum for Watchers. You live, you get to retire wherever you’d like. But I don’t see them paying out a whole lot of pensions.
It’s a shit job, no matter how you look at it, except for the dubious prestige of having your name on a Watcher’s Diary for future watchers to curse for your lack of detail. (Which young Wesley would love, to be remembered, to have his name listed among the officers in the fight against darkness, but it’s not actually that exciting.) You get shipped away from your home, to a place that you don’t know anything about - sure it could be Jamaica, but it could be Cleveland. Well, you do know one thing: the Slayer has been called there, so it’s going to be ridiculously dangerous. Once you get there, you have to adopt this kid that is (a) more powerful than you will ever be and (b) going to die, stat. That’s a no-win. If you don’t like kids….you have to deal with this fucking kid. If you can bond with a kid, you live every day with the miserable certainty that either or both of you are going to die soon.
There’s canon support for this as well. Look at the field watchers we know anything about. Nikki Wood’s watcher quit the Council once she died in order to raise her son. Giles is a flighty loose cannon, who was a straight-up bad wizard in the seventies (and Travers would have known about this).
The Council abandons its field watchers socially and strategically, as if their very proximity to the Slayer will contaminate the entire Council with sympathy for the girls. Giles isn’t invited to their retreats, they don’t even notify him when Gwendolyn Post goes rogue. He’s on his own. Wesley, while having done nothing except be born the scion Wyndam-Pryce, is actually asked for a code word when he calls the Council in Consequences - a code word they neglected to give him. This isn’t just pettiness, they are grossly negligent with their employees. How do they not think to look into the local government over the Hellmouth? Giles at least has the excuse of dealing with the nightly battle against darkness. The entire Council, with its own academic system behind it, has no such excuse.
But Wesley, clearly young and desperate for approval, would have begged his father for the chance to prove himself, and Dickhead Pryce (I forget his real name so we’ll go with Dickhead), with his “sink or swim, but here, hold these sandbags first” attitude, would have thrown him overboard. It’s fairly clear to that Wesley is really fucking young. I’d be shocked if he was more than a couple of years out of graduate school; while not canon, AD says he conceived of the character as “straight out of Watcher grad school.” Watchers are in the university system with everyone else (Giles’ time at Oxford is referenced throughout the series, and I don’t see the WC drawing attention to themselves by sending a bunch of older kids from the same school). So he’d be done his education around age 22 or 23. Even adding in some specialized Watcher post-post-graduate program, he’s at most 25 and almost certainly younger. And the Scoobies are 18. That’s not that big of an age difference! Remember your TAs from Poli Sci 101 who were completely out of their depth even with hungover freshmen? That’s Wesley. He’s basically Riley trying to run the Initiative. Except Forrest and Graham get guns and he doesn’t.
So there he is, completely out of his depth in a job that is basically fatal and horrible anyway, faced with a completely unprecedented situation. Two Slayers, one of whom was a basket case (and not one but two dead Watchers under her stolen Hot Topic belt) and the other who had survived her Cruciamentum to hate the Council. Neither of them are in any way controllable. In Sunnydale! Just in time for the foliage and seasonal apocalypse! From his first appearance to the close of AtS, WWP’s defining experience is being doomed to failure despite his best efforts.
Bad Girls humorously but accurately spotlights Wesley’s skill with and limitation by his conception of Watcher as dependent on “big old books.” He calculates a “mission scenario” for Faith and Buffy, planned for vacuum-sealed controlled circumstances, as if the future follows any logical, predictable pattern. He’s blunt and to the point during the debriefing with Buffy and Faith about the Illuminati, whereas Giles and Buffy would have fallen back on their personal relationship in which Buffy would have told him all about the evening’s slayage because she and Giles as much want as need to have the conversation. Wes jumps right to what he needs to know. But note that Buffy’s description of “swords” gets him going for the right book, and correctly guessing “one long, one short?”
He doesn’t know how to listen to those instincts when he’s not leaning on someone else’s knowledge, though. He actually does accurately suspect that there’s something supernatural afoot with the Deputy Mayor’s death. It’s an absurd moment, of course - it’s neither demon nor malice, just an unfortunate accident, and he’s staring the accidental killer in the face - but also shows that he does know what’s the what. He’s just so worried about being accepted, so sure that a Slayer is a machine of a warrior for good, and so focused on the goal, that he doesn’t know to read Buffy’s and Faith’s faces when he brings up the murder. Reading faces isn’t in the manual, because, not real useful with the bumpy set, and so Wes doesn’t follow through on his own completely accurate instincts.
The sadness of the character shows up as well. “They’ll get used to me,” he says dispassionately to Giles. Not learn to like or respect or even take orders. Just get used to him. Wesley has very high expectations for the Slayers; quite low hopes for himself. His lecturing of Giles about Giles’ relationship with Buffy is wrong, we know, but it springs from his inability to conceive of a close, trusting relationship, and his wistful envy of those who have one.
Wes isn’t the best fit for the Scoobies, true, but after AtS it’s pretty tough to overlook the fact that they were a terrible fit for him, as well. Wesley runs halfway across the world on a suicide mission to (a) prove himself to his fucking father and (b) get away from his fucking father. And where does he end up? Under the very nose of Giles, yet another father figure who hates him. It’ll become clear time and again on AtS that Wesley does much better when he is on his own, in charge, or working with partners than he is when working under someone’s supervision. (Since he only ever really works under Giles and then Angel, it’s impossible to tell if this is an issue with other men specifically because of his Daddy Issues, or if he’d always be nervous under the scrutiny of a direct superior.) Wesley’s pomposity, clumsiness, and retreat to theory are in no way incompatible with the self-styled rogue demon hunter who’s managed to track closely and yet elude an empath demon just a few short weeks later. He didn't change. He graduated.
It’s fitting, then, that Wesley has his first interactions with Angel in context of his contentious relationship with Giles, when he refuses to hand over the Amulet to oh, some dude. Angel gets a wonderful heroic moment when he gets to swoop in and save the Watchers from Balthazaar, as does Giles and his calmness in the face of the demon, but really, that’s a bit chilling. Giles’ casualness about being tortured to death is part putting on a show for Wes as both the young kid he has contempt for and the Council that ditched him, but also, what is Balthazaar going to do to him? Torture him to death? He’s been there. Because of Angel. Who Wes is just supposed to trust because Buffy said so at this point? Angel is good at this point, and making a conscious effort to act heroically, I’m not saying that he isn’t. (If I was saying that? YOU’D KNOW.) Wesley's suspicion would be misplaced. But he has a right to examine it. The characters are treating him as a useless appendage of Giles, but the foundations for his own becoming so much more are already there.
Wesley and Faith
The narrative roles of Faith and Wes interact in a far more interesting way than their respective roles as Slayer and Watcher. Faith, Buffy’s dark shadow, challenges the Scoobies to define themselves as governed while still feeling like rebels from the Council. Wesley, Giles’ comedic foil, balances out the spectrum in some ways, as the only person on screen who has never once challenged the Council’s party line.
And yet, Wes and Faith, even now, agree in a strange way on the role of the Slayer. While Giles and Buffy take the stance that Buffy (not Faith, crucially) must have a future besides Slaying, because she is the same as any other girl, Wesley insists on defining Buffy by her duty. Faith, too, defines herself and Buffy by their calling. We are better! Faith and Wes use this idea towards wildly different ends, but they both base their actions in the philosophy that the Slayer has rights and responsibilities that are fundamentally different from those of non-super humans. We don’t know this yet, but Wesley isn’t exactly adverse to the “want, take, have” theory of property rights himself, if it serves the mission. While he’ll have a higher standard for “want” than Faith does, he’ll also be more likely to go after singular priceless artifacts than a few daggers. Faith puts on a show of her extremes and Wes tucks them away under his hilariously stuffy clothing, but they swing past each other time and again. B can’t save the world in jail, as Faith reminds Buffy, and Faith can’t save Angel in jail, as Wes will tell Faith in a couple of years. I don’t think this was planned in the least, but it’s who these two characters are and always have been.
[EDIT 1/26/2011: It's worth comparing Consequences - where the Scoobies shutting Wesley out is a key factor in the Tragic Outcome - with Revelations, where the same happens with Faith. The parallel is especially interesting when you add in Gwendolyn Post, who of course was pretending to be exactly what Wesley is. I'd argue that the reason Post's cover worked so well was that she was pretending to be exactly what Faith needed throughout S3, which was someone to take an interest in her specifically, train her to be a Slayer (and therefore give her a place as Faith the Vampire Slayer, as opposed to being Buffy's subordinate) while staying out of her non-Slaying life. It's a huge part of Faith's rejection of Wes that she's been let down so massively before, by the only person she's trusted since her own Watcher was killed. Equally importantly, Wesley wasn't sent until after Giles was fired, reinforcing (not unreasonably) Faith's conviction that nobody prioritized her over Buffy. Faith's not wrong about that, but it's hardly Wesley's fault; he's the embodiment of the Council rather than a singular Watcher to everyone at this point.]
They’ll also show the same tendency to pull back and wrap around themselves when their unintentional mistakes in this arc brush up too close against the darkness within. Faith goes bad not with the killing of the Deputy Mayor, but because of it. It genuinely was an accident, and accidents, as Giles says calmly, do happen. But for Faith, who’s used fighting as a way to try to lose herself, recognizes that in her line of work there’s just too fine a line between reckless abandon and deadly failure. Buffy, certainly unintentionally, handles the incident in what ends up being the worst possible way, trying to force Faith to open up and recognize her predicament right away, emphasizing the seriousness of Faith’s mistake. Being a Slayer is not the same as being a killer…you killed a man…[you feel] dirty. That’s exactly how Faith feels, and hearing it is what drives Faith to the Mayor, where she will actually commit premeditated murder of a human civilian.
I think we’re supposed to think Angel is getting through to her and could have prevented her slide had Wesley not intervened as he was supposed to, but his talk about killing without remorse, even suggestions that she enjoyed staking the Deputy Mayor, are more of what Faith didn’t need to hear at the moment; both his poetic descriptions of the joys of deliberate murder and his emphasis of their similarities because of his past as the Scourge of Europe who’s now good suggest that she can have her brush with darkness and eventually be forced passively into being a superhero again. Wesley doesn’t have the advantage of knowing what Faith was about to do to Xander; he’s not the one who has all the facts and still tacks down the wrong path.
Wesley’s mistake is in trusting the Council to act effectively and ethically, the way he himself would, enough that he can be part of the organization. We, and the Scoobies, know from Helpless just how bad the Council is, and that the kidnappers are much more likely to kill Faith than to hand down the impartial judgment Wesley believes they will. He doesn’t understand how suspicious he should be towards them, just like Giles and Buffy didn’t really know until Helpless. And that’s a mistake. He should know enough to step back and look critically at the Watcher-Slayer power dynamic. But he’s not That One Guy who didn’t get it. None of them did. Wesley, to the best of his knowledge is doing what probably was the best thing for Faith - sending her off to get an “impartial” body to say that a mistake really is a mistake, go forth and work on your reflexes. That would have helped Faith far more than YOU ARE A KILLER! LET’S TALK ABOUT YOUR MURDERY FEELINGS. It would have helped her recognize Slayer rules besides “want, take, have” rather than jump right into her assumption that she’s failed as a Slayer, so she’s bad. Again, Wesley should have stepped out of the situation and thought it through as he’s perfectly capable of doing, but if his premises had been correct, his reasoning process was actually sound. A major theme of the season is individual over institution, so Wes doesn't fit, because he's aware of just how important institutions are to the well-being of individuals.
This all happens within a week of Wesley’s arrival in Sunnydale. And somehow he’s the one who let Faith go dark? The Scoobs will hold him accountable, Faith will hold him accountable, Wesley will carry the guilt of this failure around forever. And the Council will hold him accountable, even though he promptly and competently follows protocol in this particular worst case scenario. Unless, of course, protocol was just to put a bullet in Faith for her mistake. Of course, protocol won’t work because this is Buffy realizing that the rules for independence are different, but the Council doesn’t have reason to suspect Wesley of misfeasance. They’re the ones who sent an inept team in a rickety box to capture a Slayer. Wes will make the best, by-the-book decision he can using the information he has at hand. Wes is both Buffy’s and Giles’ scapegoat for Faith and the Council’s target of the blame they all bear, just as Faith bears the burden of projection about everyone’s unease with the power of the Slayer, but he’s quite possibly the least responsible party involved.
Wesley and Buffy
Wesley’s spine of iced steel won’t evidence itself during a physical confrontation for some time, but his cold ability to step back and assess a situation rationally is far more commendable than BtVS credits. He keeps his eye on the goal, and given that the goal is averting an apocalypse, Wes is a refreshing reminder that it’s not about glory. The unholy honor over reason treehouse club of Buffy and Angel is grossly immoral under these circumstances. Buffy’s plans work out, of course, because she’s the protagonist, but Wesley doesn’t know that. He’s rationally and ethically operating under the best set of information he has.
This is most obvious, of course, in Choices. Wesley is set up as a cartoonishly heartless man. Willow is captured! Surrounded by vampires! And Faith! And here he doesn’t want to give in to the Mayor’s demands?!?
Buffy: Are you made of human parts?
She’s actually dehumanizing him because he won’t negotiate with terrorists. Buffy’s lashing out is understandable, but she is lashing out at Wesley because of a plan he told her was a bad idea, because it was reckless and someone could get hurt. And honestly, his point of view is not unreasonable. Dramatic re-enactment:
WESLEY: Might I take a moment to calmly remind you that there are people in the world who are not your best friends? And they too are vulnerable to GIANT SNAKE TEETH?
BUFFY: I HATE YOU! YOU CAN’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO! YOU SUCK AND THE COUNCIL SUCKS AND I HAVE TO GO TO STATE SCHOOL BECAUSE YOU NEVER SEND CHILD SUPPORT!
Instead of delivering a well-deserved I told you so (because it was impractical, not because he wasn’t thinking it with his whole soul) Wesley takes it in stride. Once he sees that she won’t destroy the box, he insists that “we will find another way.” Given that they have muscle and firepower and not one but two trained wizards in the room, that’s really not all that outlandish a suggestion. They could open the box and destroy whatever was inside. They could make a replica. They could fake out the Mayor. They have to find another way. But Wesley suggests it, so they refuse to even consider “another way.” And Buffy knows she is being unreasonable.
Giles: Let’s deal with this rationally!
Buffy: Why are you taking his side?
Rationally thinking about ways to take a golden opportunity to prevent mass murder is taking Wesley’s side. Therefore it’s wrong. I like Buffy, but this is not homegirl’s finest hour.
Wesley can do those things because he has the necessary distance. What the Council did to Buffy in Helpless was morally egregious. But they weren’t wrong about Giles.
Narratively, of course, we have to get to the Ascension. Buffy has to tell the Council to suck it and find her own way - it is, after all, graduation. But the show wasn’t willing to go there with Giles, so Wesley has to be the butt monkey. Still, even after Buffy insists on letting the apocalypse carry on apace - because rationality is inherently wrong - after he is a broken man who’s lost the only job he’s trained for, who has become the failure his father always said he was, he still offers her whatever he can do at the Ascension. It’s not a job for Wes. It’s a calling. Mutiny is a great and terrible offense. But the mission is what matters.
Wesley’s act of enlisting for the battle of the Ascension is one of a warrior, but his weapons are intellectualism and ethics, and in the fiercely physical conflict on the Hellmouth, he must fall. Yes, it’s funny; yes, he’s still the embodiment of the Council, and they need to be not only exorcised from Buffy’s life but punished for their malfeasance towards her, failure for Faith, abandonment of Giles, and patriarchal mission. But against the show’s own conscious efforts, it also managed to create an engaging, sympathetic character, who earns the continuation of his story in Los Angeles.