Restless Revisited
Thalia_seawood last week reached Restless in her BTVS watching, and wrote some insightful reviews about it, which reminded me once more why this is my favourite BTVS episode, so I rewatched it, and am all aglow anew with the Restless love, and the BTVS love. merrymaia, who is also watching BTVS for the first time and is in early season 2, recently asked me which I prefer, BTVS or AtS, and I honestly can't say. I love both. I love them for their shared and for their differing qualities. One of the unique-to-BTVS things, imo, and a reason why I actually like the later Buffy seasons better than the early ones is that Joss really experimented with TV as a medium there in a way AtS or Firefly did not. (This is not meant as a criticism of either show - as I said, I love them dearly, and they have each unique stuff BTVS does not have.) My current theory why this is so is that BTVS was the show he got most comfortable with. Not his favourite (I think that would be Firefly). Not the one where he pushed the characters most. (AtS.) But the one he could relax and be playful with most, "playful" not meaning fluffyness but more of a Brother Grimm kind of playfulness - this is Joss, after all - and as a result we got the experimental episodes: Hush, Restless, The Body, Once More, With Feeling. I don't think they would have been possible over at AtS.
Each of these episodes manages to unite both the "concept" aspect (i.e. silence, dreams, immediate post-death reaction, musical) with continuity. You couldn't take them out of their place in the show and put them in an earlier or later season. Hush and Once More, With Feeling change relationships. The Body of course is about the most brutal change of all. Restless stands a bit apart in this regard; it is a coda to the fourth season and in fact the four seasons of BTVS so far, and foreshadows some later events, but by itself, it does not change the characters or their relationships. (Except, perhaps, by awakening Buffy's interest in the Slayer origin.) It's more of a summing up, and an affectionate yet acerbic analysis of the four main characters of the show through that most indefiniable medium of all, dreams.
Now, other shows have done shows that take place inside of characters' heads and feature some imaginative visualization of dreamscapes. The Very Long Night of Londo Mollari (Babylon 5, season 5) comes to mind, and I recall a Professionals episode where that was done for Doyle. Other shows have had impressive dream sequences (most recently the new BSG). Twin Peaks set a high standard for any dream sequences in the 80s. But I can't think of a show that did dreams so perfectly, that made you feel, yes, this is exactly what a dream is like.
As Kathyh said recently, the cinematography of Restless is actually better - in the sense of feeling more cinematic in parts - than the one of Serenity (which is a great film but still feels like tv transported to the big screen). Images like Buffy in the desert, or the playground sequence in Xander's dream have a lyrical beauty that stun me each time. The gorgeous music by Chris Beck aids and abets, of course, but that is part of the medium - the union of image and sound. Speaking of sound: given that razorsharp dialogue is Joss' trademark, it's all the more remarkable that he didn't ruin the atmosphere by letting the characters exchange said dialogue - you don't do that in dreams. (When Buffy gets back to using her usual sassy comebacks, she inevitably wakes up.) Instead, we get surreal dialogue and outbursts that nonetheless achieves a strange poetry and comes back to me again and again.
"I walk, I talk, I shop, I sneeze. I'm going to be a fireman if the flood rolls back."
"What was your name?" "Before Adam? Not a man among us can remember."
"It is the fable of the fox, and the less patient fox."
"You're a whipping boy raised by mongrels and set on a sacrifical stone."
"A watcher scoffs at gravity."
"Be back before Dawn."
and of course, the immortal
"I wear the cheese. It does not wear me."
The four dreams have been interpreted by many fans, and I wrote my own take years ago when I was still on an BTVS email list; but it's fun to revisit and look how my interpretations have changed or remained the same, now that the series is finished.
"I am very seldom naughty." Willow's self-loathing and insecurities are quite obvious here. They rank from the trivial - being unprepared in class would be a Willow nightmare - to the very serious: Willow fears to be "found out" throughout the dream, and when Buffy ripes her season 4 self away to reveal Willow from "Welcome to the Hellmouth", the season 1 pilot, complete with the "softer side of Sears" outfit, and that old self is mocked and ridiculed by all her friends, that scene from Wrecked comes to mind where she tells Buffy that she needs to be Superwillow, as nobody could love normal Willow. Less evident but there is Willow's passive-aggressiveness - she doesn't want to deal and confront, she avoids and hides throughout the dream, and the versions of her friends get increasingly unsympathetic. Xander displays a Jayne-like oafishness ("when I think of two women doing a spell, I go and do a spell of my own"), which is far out of proportion of Xander's actual reaction to Willow and Tara. Buffy is first a flapper from 20s Chicago and then, while she does save Willow at first, the one who humiliates and betrays Willow into revealing her old self. Tara and Oz flirt with each other in front of Willow. (Willow has this way of projecting her own feelings of guilt on others; see her actual reaction to Tara leaving her, the rant to Rat!Amy about Tara leaving "for no reason at all", as opposed to the mind violation Willow committed.)
The book Willow is trying to talk about in class is, wait for it, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. At the time, I remember people saw the title as a pun on Willow (the witch) coming out of the closet that past season through her lesbian relationship with Tara, and the lion as either Miss Kitty Fantastico, depicted in the dream, or the First Slayer who is stalking the Scoobies in this episode. My own take was and is that the Lewis novel is referenced because of its central cruxificion equivalent. Aslan dies in Edmund's place and for the people of Narnia, and returns. "This is my business," says Giles in his own dream about his relationship with Buffy, "blood of the lamb and all that". Buffy, of course, will take someone else's place and fulfill the classic Slayer's mission in dying for the people exactly a year later. And Willow, the witch, will bring her back, in pretty much the anti- Christian or Aslan resurrection due to its effects on Buffy.
Lastly, the way Willow's dream depicts feminine sexuality stands in contrast to the way Xander's does. Willow painting Sappho's Hymn to Aphrodite on Tara's nude back is a sensual image in a subtle and elegant way; compare this to Xander's fanboy depiction of Willow and Tara as porn lesbians dressed up in tiltallating clothes for his benefit. At the same time, all those red curtains and the fact Willow is interacting with Tara only when they're alone can be seen to indicate Willow still isn't comfortable with her relationship with Tara, but that's open to debate; my own take (based on Willow imagining Tara and Oz, her two loves, flirting with each other) would be that she's more afraid Tara would not love her if there were alternatives, and the safety she felt with Tara admiring only her and not knowing her friends.
Talk about insecurities, though. Everyone in Xander's dream tells him they're ahead of him, and he keeps ending up in the basement, the basement of his parents' home which he won't leave until episode 3 of season 5 and which symbolizes his sense of failure and fear he'll be trapped in repeating his father's life. "Are you sure it isn't comfort?'" Joyce asks when he says men want conquest, and of course he wants comfort, but is unable to get it. The entire Joyce encounter is amusing in its Mrs. Robinson-ness and allusion to the pilot - Xander makes a Freudian mistake when he says "I'd like you" instead of "I'd like to" to Joyce, just as the first thing he tells Buffy is "Can I have you?" instead of "Can I help you?" - but also, with Xander's repeated appellation of Joyce as "Buffy's Mom" throughout his dream and later when he wakes up a sign that what he wants is actually a mother as much as a lover. (Can't help but think of Anya's "grow up, Xander" in season 6.)
He wants a father, too - not his own, I mean - but has given up on Giles being that father. When Xander comes across the playground, he finds the triad he first encountered in Welcome to the Hellmouth - Slayer, Watcher, Vampire - but they're presented in a childlike manner, and Xander, who alone among the Scoobies at this point has a job and is watching the scene from another perspective, from his other self working a bit away as well - has to leave them behind. "Spike is like a son to me," Dream!Giles says cheerfully, and Xander replies, sounding wistful and lonely "I was into that for a while, but you've got to move forward".
(On another level, Spike in tweed clothes is pretty funny, and of course this is what probably inspired Rebbecca Rand Kirshner's use of him and Giles in Tabula Rasa in season 6.)
Most poignant, though, to me about this playground encounter is Xander's exchange with Buffy. He tells her he cannot protect her. (Of course, Buffy in most cases was the one to protect Xander physically, but he, see their first encounter in season 4, gave her emotional protection through his loyalty and belief in her.) "I'm way ahead of you, big brother," Buffy replies. "Brother?" Xander repeats, they look at each other, and the moment holds. Giles and Spike on the swings, Buffy in the sand, half in the desert, half in the playground, and Xander looking at her while also looking at Buffy and himself from another perspective. We're not hit over the head with one particular interpretation. My own? This is where even Xander's subconscious accepts that this is how Buffy sees him - as her brother. And that this is not a bad thing to be.
The entire Apocalpyse Now sequence in Xander's dream is both very funny - especially if you've seen Coppola's movie - and painful. I bet Armin Shimmerman had a blast, playing Snyder playing Marlon Brando as Kurtz. (And Joss even manages to light the scene exactly in the same way and achieve that trademark of Coppola's, leaving faces half in darkness or coming out of the shadows.) At its heart, though, this is scene has yet another male authority figure telling Xander he's nothing, he never will be, and is set just before he encounters the first and primal male authority to utter this judgment, his father, who transforms into the First Slayer before ripping his heart out.
"Are you ashamed of us?" he demands, and we already know - since season 3's Amends, to be precise - that yes, he is. Xander will leave his father's basement soon, but he won't really leave his father behind for a good long while, see Hell's Bell's. And this will rip his heart out.
The visual pun of the watch (= watcher) opens and closes Giles' dream sequence, which is the shortest of the four but nonetheless carries a lot. Giles trying to hypnotize Buffy with the watch points back to Helpless in season 3, but the memory of his betrayal there is transformed by the gentle way she laughs it away and does not give in. Next Buffy shows up as a child. (And this, btw, is a major reason why B/G as romantic pairing squicks me. No, they're not related, but she does see him as her father, and if he's not lying in his own head, he sees her as a child.) I already mentioned the significance of the "blood of the lamb" remark, which Giles declares to be his business when Olivia chides him for not going easy on Buffy. As Giles will tell the Buffybot after Buffy's death, his business, any Watcher's business, is eventually to lead his Slayer to her sacrificial death. And the closer he gets to her, the harder it will be.
Of course, Giles could have another life. The crypt sequence, with Olivia and the abandoned pram on the one hand and Spike (in black and white) on the other isn't, imo, so much about Olivia herself as what she symbolizes - Giles' presumed last chance at a non-supernatural life, perhaps. One with his own family, not an adopted one. He already knows he can't have it, but he's aware of having given it up. (Spike hiring himself "out as an attraction" perfectly conveys Giles' opinion of Spike's theatrical nature, of course.*g*)
As the mind of the Scoobies, Giles is the first one who comes up with an explanation of what is happening to them, and it comes to him in song. (I guess this might have been where it occured to Joss he could try his hands at a musical.) It's a sublime sequence, funny and creepy at the same time - Willow and Xander holding up lighters swaying in rhythm to Giles' song crack me up each time, and then even as I smile he follows the cable, and the First Slayer taking his scalp chills me each time, too. Composer Chris Beck has a cameo, and I think the band is Nerf Herder, right? In overall context of the show, Giles coming up with an explanation but not a solution pretty much defines his role.
In the course of season 4, Buffy drifted increasingly apart from her friends. "You lost them," Tara declares, presumably not just referring to what is going on in this episode. "No," says Buffy and shows why I love her, "I need to find them." That's my girl. The thing about Buffy is that in most cases - not always - she twists rules and laws and absolute negatives into something she can do.
Her dream harks back to the dreams she shared with Faith, the bed they made ("for whom?" asks Tara; in This Year's Girl, the answer was already given - "little sis, who is coming"), that number, 7-3-0. (730 days, I think, between Graduation Day when Buffy first hears it, to The Gift.) They're about not-contact - Joyce is behind a wall, and when Joyce suggests Buffy could tear it down, Buffy gets distracted by the sight of Xander, but she can't reach him or her other friends, either. Instead, she finds Riley and Adam, both acting as mirror images of each other. The Riley sequence reveals an unease about Riley and her relationship with him that Buffy, awake, would never admit to herself. He calls her "killer", twice. In season 5, she'll suggest to him that if she could divide herself, he could have a Buffy free of all the Slayer business, and doesn' t quite believe him when he reassures her he wants the complete Buffy, the Slayer as well as the girl. He's still a part of an organization alien to her and comfortable with it, plotting world domination. "The key instrument? Coffee makers that think," says Riley, and you can interpret that as a derogatory comment about women. Bear in mind that this isn't saying the real Riley is a macho. But it's fascinating that his dream image is, at what is arguably the high point of his and Buffy's relationship, when they're at their most committed to each other.
What stands out to me about this part of Buffy's dream, though, is her short dialogue with Adam - Adam sans makeup, and hence nearly unrecognizable.
Adam: Agression is a natural human tendency. Though you and I come by it another way.
The First Slayer appears behind Buffy.
Buffy: We're not demons.
Adam: Is that a fact?
Now flash forward to Get it Done in season 7. In her way, the First Slayer is what Adam is - a hybrid, artificially created, human endowed with demon powers to fight other demons, with no one having asked said hybrid whether he/she wanted to be. But, and Joss is always big on the concept, there is such a thing as choice, and will. Buffy uses her Slayer powers. She doesn't have to be used by them. In the end, it doesn't matter who created you, or why. The responsibility of how you use your powers is still yours.
When she finally talks to the First Slayer, the surreal poetry of the episode reaches its apex, both visually - the desert, and I love that the show will return to this as Buffy's inner landscape time and again, oh, and prefiguring the shots of River in Objects in Space and Serenity, we get quite a long focus on Buffy's feet, wandering through it, before the camera pulls up - and in dialoge. I already quoted Buffy's "I'll be a fireman when the flood rolls back" sentence. "We no longer sleep on a bed of bones," she tells the First Slayer. And changes the landscape from the First Slayer's - the desert - to her own - the living room, along with the speech patterns. What makes Buffy Buffy is her humanity as much as her powers, and her sarcastic quips are as much a part of herself as that darkness Dracula will remark on an episode later. She wakes up, for now. But, as Tara tells her, she has barely begun.
Each of these episodes manages to unite both the "concept" aspect (i.e. silence, dreams, immediate post-death reaction, musical) with continuity. You couldn't take them out of their place in the show and put them in an earlier or later season. Hush and Once More, With Feeling change relationships. The Body of course is about the most brutal change of all. Restless stands a bit apart in this regard; it is a coda to the fourth season and in fact the four seasons of BTVS so far, and foreshadows some later events, but by itself, it does not change the characters or their relationships. (Except, perhaps, by awakening Buffy's interest in the Slayer origin.) It's more of a summing up, and an affectionate yet acerbic analysis of the four main characters of the show through that most indefiniable medium of all, dreams.
Now, other shows have done shows that take place inside of characters' heads and feature some imaginative visualization of dreamscapes. The Very Long Night of Londo Mollari (Babylon 5, season 5) comes to mind, and I recall a Professionals episode where that was done for Doyle. Other shows have had impressive dream sequences (most recently the new BSG). Twin Peaks set a high standard for any dream sequences in the 80s. But I can't think of a show that did dreams so perfectly, that made you feel, yes, this is exactly what a dream is like.
As Kathyh said recently, the cinematography of Restless is actually better - in the sense of feeling more cinematic in parts - than the one of Serenity (which is a great film but still feels like tv transported to the big screen). Images like Buffy in the desert, or the playground sequence in Xander's dream have a lyrical beauty that stun me each time. The gorgeous music by Chris Beck aids and abets, of course, but that is part of the medium - the union of image and sound. Speaking of sound: given that razorsharp dialogue is Joss' trademark, it's all the more remarkable that he didn't ruin the atmosphere by letting the characters exchange said dialogue - you don't do that in dreams. (When Buffy gets back to using her usual sassy comebacks, she inevitably wakes up.) Instead, we get surreal dialogue and outbursts that nonetheless achieves a strange poetry and comes back to me again and again.
"I walk, I talk, I shop, I sneeze. I'm going to be a fireman if the flood rolls back."
"What was your name?" "Before Adam? Not a man among us can remember."
"It is the fable of the fox, and the less patient fox."
"You're a whipping boy raised by mongrels and set on a sacrifical stone."
"A watcher scoffs at gravity."
"Be back before Dawn."
and of course, the immortal
"I wear the cheese. It does not wear me."
The four dreams have been interpreted by many fans, and I wrote my own take years ago when I was still on an BTVS email list; but it's fun to revisit and look how my interpretations have changed or remained the same, now that the series is finished.
"I am very seldom naughty." Willow's self-loathing and insecurities are quite obvious here. They rank from the trivial - being unprepared in class would be a Willow nightmare - to the very serious: Willow fears to be "found out" throughout the dream, and when Buffy ripes her season 4 self away to reveal Willow from "Welcome to the Hellmouth", the season 1 pilot, complete with the "softer side of Sears" outfit, and that old self is mocked and ridiculed by all her friends, that scene from Wrecked comes to mind where she tells Buffy that she needs to be Superwillow, as nobody could love normal Willow. Less evident but there is Willow's passive-aggressiveness - she doesn't want to deal and confront, she avoids and hides throughout the dream, and the versions of her friends get increasingly unsympathetic. Xander displays a Jayne-like oafishness ("when I think of two women doing a spell, I go and do a spell of my own"), which is far out of proportion of Xander's actual reaction to Willow and Tara. Buffy is first a flapper from 20s Chicago and then, while she does save Willow at first, the one who humiliates and betrays Willow into revealing her old self. Tara and Oz flirt with each other in front of Willow. (Willow has this way of projecting her own feelings of guilt on others; see her actual reaction to Tara leaving her, the rant to Rat!Amy about Tara leaving "for no reason at all", as opposed to the mind violation Willow committed.)
The book Willow is trying to talk about in class is, wait for it, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. At the time, I remember people saw the title as a pun on Willow (the witch) coming out of the closet that past season through her lesbian relationship with Tara, and the lion as either Miss Kitty Fantastico, depicted in the dream, or the First Slayer who is stalking the Scoobies in this episode. My own take was and is that the Lewis novel is referenced because of its central cruxificion equivalent. Aslan dies in Edmund's place and for the people of Narnia, and returns. "This is my business," says Giles in his own dream about his relationship with Buffy, "blood of the lamb and all that". Buffy, of course, will take someone else's place and fulfill the classic Slayer's mission in dying for the people exactly a year later. And Willow, the witch, will bring her back, in pretty much the anti- Christian or Aslan resurrection due to its effects on Buffy.
Lastly, the way Willow's dream depicts feminine sexuality stands in contrast to the way Xander's does. Willow painting Sappho's Hymn to Aphrodite on Tara's nude back is a sensual image in a subtle and elegant way; compare this to Xander's fanboy depiction of Willow and Tara as porn lesbians dressed up in tiltallating clothes for his benefit. At the same time, all those red curtains and the fact Willow is interacting with Tara only when they're alone can be seen to indicate Willow still isn't comfortable with her relationship with Tara, but that's open to debate; my own take (based on Willow imagining Tara and Oz, her two loves, flirting with each other) would be that she's more afraid Tara would not love her if there were alternatives, and the safety she felt with Tara admiring only her and not knowing her friends.
Talk about insecurities, though. Everyone in Xander's dream tells him they're ahead of him, and he keeps ending up in the basement, the basement of his parents' home which he won't leave until episode 3 of season 5 and which symbolizes his sense of failure and fear he'll be trapped in repeating his father's life. "Are you sure it isn't comfort?'" Joyce asks when he says men want conquest, and of course he wants comfort, but is unable to get it. The entire Joyce encounter is amusing in its Mrs. Robinson-ness and allusion to the pilot - Xander makes a Freudian mistake when he says "I'd like you" instead of "I'd like to" to Joyce, just as the first thing he tells Buffy is "Can I have you?" instead of "Can I help you?" - but also, with Xander's repeated appellation of Joyce as "Buffy's Mom" throughout his dream and later when he wakes up a sign that what he wants is actually a mother as much as a lover. (Can't help but think of Anya's "grow up, Xander" in season 6.)
He wants a father, too - not his own, I mean - but has given up on Giles being that father. When Xander comes across the playground, he finds the triad he first encountered in Welcome to the Hellmouth - Slayer, Watcher, Vampire - but they're presented in a childlike manner, and Xander, who alone among the Scoobies at this point has a job and is watching the scene from another perspective, from his other self working a bit away as well - has to leave them behind. "Spike is like a son to me," Dream!Giles says cheerfully, and Xander replies, sounding wistful and lonely "I was into that for a while, but you've got to move forward".
(On another level, Spike in tweed clothes is pretty funny, and of course this is what probably inspired Rebbecca Rand Kirshner's use of him and Giles in Tabula Rasa in season 6.)
Most poignant, though, to me about this playground encounter is Xander's exchange with Buffy. He tells her he cannot protect her. (Of course, Buffy in most cases was the one to protect Xander physically, but he, see their first encounter in season 4, gave her emotional protection through his loyalty and belief in her.) "I'm way ahead of you, big brother," Buffy replies. "Brother?" Xander repeats, they look at each other, and the moment holds. Giles and Spike on the swings, Buffy in the sand, half in the desert, half in the playground, and Xander looking at her while also looking at Buffy and himself from another perspective. We're not hit over the head with one particular interpretation. My own? This is where even Xander's subconscious accepts that this is how Buffy sees him - as her brother. And that this is not a bad thing to be.
The entire Apocalpyse Now sequence in Xander's dream is both very funny - especially if you've seen Coppola's movie - and painful. I bet Armin Shimmerman had a blast, playing Snyder playing Marlon Brando as Kurtz. (And Joss even manages to light the scene exactly in the same way and achieve that trademark of Coppola's, leaving faces half in darkness or coming out of the shadows.) At its heart, though, this is scene has yet another male authority figure telling Xander he's nothing, he never will be, and is set just before he encounters the first and primal male authority to utter this judgment, his father, who transforms into the First Slayer before ripping his heart out.
"Are you ashamed of us?" he demands, and we already know - since season 3's Amends, to be precise - that yes, he is. Xander will leave his father's basement soon, but he won't really leave his father behind for a good long while, see Hell's Bell's. And this will rip his heart out.
The visual pun of the watch (= watcher) opens and closes Giles' dream sequence, which is the shortest of the four but nonetheless carries a lot. Giles trying to hypnotize Buffy with the watch points back to Helpless in season 3, but the memory of his betrayal there is transformed by the gentle way she laughs it away and does not give in. Next Buffy shows up as a child. (And this, btw, is a major reason why B/G as romantic pairing squicks me. No, they're not related, but she does see him as her father, and if he's not lying in his own head, he sees her as a child.) I already mentioned the significance of the "blood of the lamb" remark, which Giles declares to be his business when Olivia chides him for not going easy on Buffy. As Giles will tell the Buffybot after Buffy's death, his business, any Watcher's business, is eventually to lead his Slayer to her sacrificial death. And the closer he gets to her, the harder it will be.
Of course, Giles could have another life. The crypt sequence, with Olivia and the abandoned pram on the one hand and Spike (in black and white) on the other isn't, imo, so much about Olivia herself as what she symbolizes - Giles' presumed last chance at a non-supernatural life, perhaps. One with his own family, not an adopted one. He already knows he can't have it, but he's aware of having given it up. (Spike hiring himself "out as an attraction" perfectly conveys Giles' opinion of Spike's theatrical nature, of course.*g*)
As the mind of the Scoobies, Giles is the first one who comes up with an explanation of what is happening to them, and it comes to him in song. (I guess this might have been where it occured to Joss he could try his hands at a musical.) It's a sublime sequence, funny and creepy at the same time - Willow and Xander holding up lighters swaying in rhythm to Giles' song crack me up each time, and then even as I smile he follows the cable, and the First Slayer taking his scalp chills me each time, too. Composer Chris Beck has a cameo, and I think the band is Nerf Herder, right? In overall context of the show, Giles coming up with an explanation but not a solution pretty much defines his role.
In the course of season 4, Buffy drifted increasingly apart from her friends. "You lost them," Tara declares, presumably not just referring to what is going on in this episode. "No," says Buffy and shows why I love her, "I need to find them." That's my girl. The thing about Buffy is that in most cases - not always - she twists rules and laws and absolute negatives into something she can do.
Her dream harks back to the dreams she shared with Faith, the bed they made ("for whom?" asks Tara; in This Year's Girl, the answer was already given - "little sis, who is coming"), that number, 7-3-0. (730 days, I think, between Graduation Day when Buffy first hears it, to The Gift.) They're about not-contact - Joyce is behind a wall, and when Joyce suggests Buffy could tear it down, Buffy gets distracted by the sight of Xander, but she can't reach him or her other friends, either. Instead, she finds Riley and Adam, both acting as mirror images of each other. The Riley sequence reveals an unease about Riley and her relationship with him that Buffy, awake, would never admit to herself. He calls her "killer", twice. In season 5, she'll suggest to him that if she could divide herself, he could have a Buffy free of all the Slayer business, and doesn' t quite believe him when he reassures her he wants the complete Buffy, the Slayer as well as the girl. He's still a part of an organization alien to her and comfortable with it, plotting world domination. "The key instrument? Coffee makers that think," says Riley, and you can interpret that as a derogatory comment about women. Bear in mind that this isn't saying the real Riley is a macho. But it's fascinating that his dream image is, at what is arguably the high point of his and Buffy's relationship, when they're at their most committed to each other.
What stands out to me about this part of Buffy's dream, though, is her short dialogue with Adam - Adam sans makeup, and hence nearly unrecognizable.
Adam: Agression is a natural human tendency. Though you and I come by it another way.
The First Slayer appears behind Buffy.
Buffy: We're not demons.
Adam: Is that a fact?
Now flash forward to Get it Done in season 7. In her way, the First Slayer is what Adam is - a hybrid, artificially created, human endowed with demon powers to fight other demons, with no one having asked said hybrid whether he/she wanted to be. But, and Joss is always big on the concept, there is such a thing as choice, and will. Buffy uses her Slayer powers. She doesn't have to be used by them. In the end, it doesn't matter who created you, or why. The responsibility of how you use your powers is still yours.
When she finally talks to the First Slayer, the surreal poetry of the episode reaches its apex, both visually - the desert, and I love that the show will return to this as Buffy's inner landscape time and again, oh, and prefiguring the shots of River in Objects in Space and Serenity, we get quite a long focus on Buffy's feet, wandering through it, before the camera pulls up - and in dialoge. I already quoted Buffy's "I'll be a fireman when the flood rolls back" sentence. "We no longer sleep on a bed of bones," she tells the First Slayer. And changes the landscape from the First Slayer's - the desert - to her own - the living room, along with the speech patterns. What makes Buffy Buffy is her humanity as much as her powers, and her sarcastic quips are as much a part of herself as that darkness Dracula will remark on an episode later. She wakes up, for now. But, as Tara tells her, she has barely begun.