Mirror, Mirror: Life Serial and Dead Things revisited (BTVS)
A tip: Watch Life Serial and Dead Things in direct succession. It's a thrilling and creepy experience. I did it, mostly because of my rewakened Troika thirst (for which I blame both Andrastewhite and Warren). Now, normally I pair up Dead Things with Seeing Red in my head, and not just because they were both written by Steven DeKnight. But LS and DT mirror each other as well.
In both the Buffy A-plot and the Trio B-plot are barely connected on a physical level; there's only the briefest of physical contacts. And yet they're deeply intertwinned.
Life Serial is a comedy, basically the only pure comedy episode of season 6 (not that there aren't others with very funny elements, but I wouldn't call any of them comedy eps). Still, there is ample foreshadowing. The opening scene, in which Buffy returns home from her meeting with Angel she doesn't want to talk about, bringing home fried chicken to a company of friends and family which has eaten already, and with whom she's painfully out of tune, has its equivalent in the Dead Things scene where Buffy returns home from work and presumably a meeting with Spike, finding Dawn, Xander, Willow and Anya having fun. In the first instance, Dawn is only slightly miffed Buffy doesn't want to talk about what happened with Angel; by the time DT rolls along, the sisters are so estranged that Dawn reacts to Buffy's announcement that she wants to spend time with her at home by telling her she made other plans - "it's not like you're ever here". The Scoobies are supportive in both cases, but she doesn't really connect with them, either.
"It's like she's completely out of focus," Warren observes in LS about Buffy. Not unlike the Trio, who determinedly evade adulthood by trying the next cool thing, whichever that may be. Unlike the Trio, though, Buffy tries to deal with her life in ways that don't appear particularily appealing to her. She used to enjoy college (one of the scenes which always cause a lump in my throat is the teaser from Tough Love, where Buffy tells her English professor whose classes she liked that she'll have to quit), but now it seems to be, like so many aspects of her old life, a world beyond her reach. The method Warren chooses to test her, speeding up time so she's eternally left behind, is a good (and cruel) metaphor for this.
Jonathan's test also involves time, but not time passing too quickly; rather, he involves her in a time loop, time passing not at all and endlessly repeating itself. Which works at another metaphor for Buffy's season 6 emotional state. And not just hers.
It occurs to me, due to still having those fanfiction tendrils in my brain, that both tests comment on Warren and Jonathan respectively as well. Warren is the only one of the Trio whom to we know to have been at college, but he must have quit after I Was Made To Love You, roughly the same time Buffy quit for quite different reasons. He gave up whatever future he had planned for himself in favour of unemployed boredom and then the supervillain gig in Sunnydale. Left behind. And probably blames Buffy for it.
Jonathan, otoh, at this point has never left high school emotionally. (He will in the end, but not yet.) He's stuck in time, going through the same things again and again; trying to be accepted by the other kids (Cordelia, then the Scoobies, then he tries building his own circle with the Trio and ends up as the odd man out yet again). Trying for a short cut, the big dramatic gesture, or a spell, but never quite making it. At the time season 6 was broadcast, some people were surprised Jonathan went for the supervillain gig or even declared it out of character. I saw it as anything but. Having failed with his attempt to be a superhero in Superstar, Jonathan goes for the other extreme instead, but it's still the same time loop as he hasn't grasped what Buffy told him - that people aren't just "socks", or relationships something you can rewrite at your leisure.
This makes for some interesting ambivalance in Jonathan's feelings towards Buffy, btw. As Andraste put it, by the time of Life Serial, she's a fictional character for Andrew, no more real than a video game protagonist; for Warren, she's that but also a symbol of female power he has to destroy, and the person he increasingly blames for what's wrong with his life; but for Jonathan, she's Buffy Summers, the girl he had a crush on, and whom he gave the class protector award to. She's his heroine who repeatedly saved his life but also never let him be a part of hers, and doesn't notice him unless he's in extremis. So he first inserts himself in her life, and partly absorbs some of her identity, in Superstar; by Life Serial, he's proceeded to managing her life from without. He even worries at first he didn't make his test difficult enough for her, and then is proud his task was the toughest. Not coincidentally, it's Jonathan who has the last contact with Buffy in LS, the mock battle in which he used a glamour to create a demon for her to hit.
Now take Dead Things. Where time goes David Lynch at one point, to quote Buffy, and again it's courtesy of the Trio. (Andrew, probably, since the time distorting effect is caused by demons.) As opposed to time going too fast, or time repeating itself, now time splinters in all directions, into dozens of different fragments without ever becoming a true whole, and so does Buffy, who hits emotional rock bottom in this episode. Again, she's observed by the nerds, but we're no longer in Neverland, and they no longer can pretend she's acting out their personal video game. They don't set her up to score each other; they set her up for murder. Jonathan doesn't play a funny D&D-type demon anymore, he plays a girl who is dead already, and whose blood is on their collective hands. Faking death, running away and hiding after Buffy punched him doesn't leave a drunken Buffy and Spike being bemused, but Buffy tormented and Spike desperate. Buffy's outburst in LS about being dumb Buffy, freaky Buffy, who can't bear to be in anyone's company but in the one of a vampire she has to hate is funny, and we're amused; Buffy going to pieces and beating Spike up in an orgy of self-loathing is incredibly painful to watch. And yet there's a direct line from one to the other.
The ultimate consequence of the human-beings-as-game-characters attitude of the Trio is the cerebral dampener, and their plan to "make any woman we desire into our sex slave". Something that was on their schedule from their first season 6 episode (Flooded) onwards, but back then I doubt few people ever bothered to think the implication through. It was such a typical, amusing fanboy thing to wish. They wouldn't really. Would they? You betcha. Including Jonathan, who ought to know better post-Superstar but doesn't. And you have to wonder: if Warren had brought a random stranger to the lair, and the spell hadn't been broken, would Jonathan have objected at all afterwards? I don't think so.
(I do think he would have balked, at the last minute, if it had been Buffy, or Willow, or anyone he actually knew.)
But Warren brings home a real girl, dressed up as a Sleeping Beauty under a spell, who, in a ghastly parody of the fairy tale motif, wakes up after a kiss, not to life, but, as it turns out, to death. The infinitely fascinating and infinitely creepy thing about the Warren/Katrina scenes in DT is that Warren can go from an absolutely sincere and desperate "I missed you so... you never should have left me" to "get down on your knees" within seconds and mean both phrases. If Katrina had actually deigned to talk with him in the bar, would he have abandoned his cerebral dampener scheme and thrown it away as he threw the microphone in the glass to that the others couldn't listen in anymore? Who knows. But she doesn't listen, and so he basically transforms her into a toy. He rewrites her into someone who never WOULD have left him.
Warren's relationship with Katrina echoes several other relationships in this show, just as Warren himself can be seen as an echo, alter ego or complete contrast to several characters, not just one. There is the season 5 Buffy/Spike relationship up to Crush, and Katrina's angry words to Warren certainly echo Buffy's then. There is the season 6 Buffy/Spike relationship, but this time the positions are reversed, as they are in Buffy's dream. This dream, the first one since Restless, like all of Buffy's dreams, is trying to tell her something; in this case, she equates Spike with the victim, with Katrina whom she thinks she killed, and herself with Warren (something she will do consciously when awake near the end of the show). Buffy might have been the one tied up in reality, as her rubbing her wrists indicates, but she knows very well that emotionally, Spike is the one in chains, and so she sees him like this in her dream. Buffy's conflicted feelings about Spike, trying to see him as not real, as someone she can use, while simultanously "letting him in" (and I don't think she meant sexually here; the opening scene of DT is a rather obvious indication that Buffy feels connected to Spike but really doesn't want to), won't be resolved until the seventh season.
The strongest and most perverse and ingenious parallel, for me, to Warren/Katrina is Willow/Tara. Trying to rewrite your relationship to your liking, trying to control your lover's mind, not once, but twice when the first time doesn't work out, even the argument "I just wanted us to be back together" - it's frightening. Hence two sections of my Five Things Which Never Happened To Warren fic, so I won't delve into this at length again.
In Life Serial, the Troika b plot ends with Jonathan returning from his Buffy distraction and all three geeks being very satisfied and pleased with themselves to have pulled one over the Slayer. It's a scene played for laughs. On Buffy's end of things, it ends with Buffy sobering up, with a headache, after her drunken night with Spike, being counselled by Giles. It's a tender scene, and yet sad, because much as these two love each other, they don't really connect; Giles sees Buffy's acceptance of his help as yet another sign he will have to leave her, and she doesn't really tell him what is troubling her.
In Dead Things, the b plot, too, ends with Jonathan returning and the three stating they pulled one over the Slayer. They got away with it. And it couldn't be less amusing or more compelling to watch: Warren actually is pleased, and if he was borderline before, he definitely crossed the line now; Andrew thinks it's cool, his earlier shock having vanished, because Andrew is ever so good at rewriting things in his head to an acceptable story; Jonathan is horrified by all of them, including himself. He has lost his illusions and self-delusions for good. But all the horror and self-disgust is enough to actually do something about it (yet).
Meanwhile, Buffy's storyline ends with her being counselled again. Only it's not Giles, but Tara, and what happened in the night is way more serious than getting drunk. Or than the real life debt problem. The news Tara brings, that Buffy's resurrection did not alter her in any significant way, robs her of her last emotional delusion, that the entire relationship with Spike can be blamed on being "wrong". And she knows very well it's not as much a question of loving him, or not loving him, as of "using him - what's okay about that?" Buffy breaks down, and she does connect with Tara, as she didn't with Giles. Her "don't forgive me, please don't forgive me" is Buffy's self-loathing and horror summed up. But it's not quite enough to actually do something about it (yet).
In both the Buffy A-plot and the Trio B-plot are barely connected on a physical level; there's only the briefest of physical contacts. And yet they're deeply intertwinned.
Life Serial is a comedy, basically the only pure comedy episode of season 6 (not that there aren't others with very funny elements, but I wouldn't call any of them comedy eps). Still, there is ample foreshadowing. The opening scene, in which Buffy returns home from her meeting with Angel she doesn't want to talk about, bringing home fried chicken to a company of friends and family which has eaten already, and with whom she's painfully out of tune, has its equivalent in the Dead Things scene where Buffy returns home from work and presumably a meeting with Spike, finding Dawn, Xander, Willow and Anya having fun. In the first instance, Dawn is only slightly miffed Buffy doesn't want to talk about what happened with Angel; by the time DT rolls along, the sisters are so estranged that Dawn reacts to Buffy's announcement that she wants to spend time with her at home by telling her she made other plans - "it's not like you're ever here". The Scoobies are supportive in both cases, but she doesn't really connect with them, either.
"It's like she's completely out of focus," Warren observes in LS about Buffy. Not unlike the Trio, who determinedly evade adulthood by trying the next cool thing, whichever that may be. Unlike the Trio, though, Buffy tries to deal with her life in ways that don't appear particularily appealing to her. She used to enjoy college (one of the scenes which always cause a lump in my throat is the teaser from Tough Love, where Buffy tells her English professor whose classes she liked that she'll have to quit), but now it seems to be, like so many aspects of her old life, a world beyond her reach. The method Warren chooses to test her, speeding up time so she's eternally left behind, is a good (and cruel) metaphor for this.
Jonathan's test also involves time, but not time passing too quickly; rather, he involves her in a time loop, time passing not at all and endlessly repeating itself. Which works at another metaphor for Buffy's season 6 emotional state. And not just hers.
It occurs to me, due to still having those fanfiction tendrils in my brain, that both tests comment on Warren and Jonathan respectively as well. Warren is the only one of the Trio whom to we know to have been at college, but he must have quit after I Was Made To Love You, roughly the same time Buffy quit for quite different reasons. He gave up whatever future he had planned for himself in favour of unemployed boredom and then the supervillain gig in Sunnydale. Left behind. And probably blames Buffy for it.
Jonathan, otoh, at this point has never left high school emotionally. (He will in the end, but not yet.) He's stuck in time, going through the same things again and again; trying to be accepted by the other kids (Cordelia, then the Scoobies, then he tries building his own circle with the Trio and ends up as the odd man out yet again). Trying for a short cut, the big dramatic gesture, or a spell, but never quite making it. At the time season 6 was broadcast, some people were surprised Jonathan went for the supervillain gig or even declared it out of character. I saw it as anything but. Having failed with his attempt to be a superhero in Superstar, Jonathan goes for the other extreme instead, but it's still the same time loop as he hasn't grasped what Buffy told him - that people aren't just "socks", or relationships something you can rewrite at your leisure.
This makes for some interesting ambivalance in Jonathan's feelings towards Buffy, btw. As Andraste put it, by the time of Life Serial, she's a fictional character for Andrew, no more real than a video game protagonist; for Warren, she's that but also a symbol of female power he has to destroy, and the person he increasingly blames for what's wrong with his life; but for Jonathan, she's Buffy Summers, the girl he had a crush on, and whom he gave the class protector award to. She's his heroine who repeatedly saved his life but also never let him be a part of hers, and doesn't notice him unless he's in extremis. So he first inserts himself in her life, and partly absorbs some of her identity, in Superstar; by Life Serial, he's proceeded to managing her life from without. He even worries at first he didn't make his test difficult enough for her, and then is proud his task was the toughest. Not coincidentally, it's Jonathan who has the last contact with Buffy in LS, the mock battle in which he used a glamour to create a demon for her to hit.
Now take Dead Things. Where time goes David Lynch at one point, to quote Buffy, and again it's courtesy of the Trio. (Andrew, probably, since the time distorting effect is caused by demons.) As opposed to time going too fast, or time repeating itself, now time splinters in all directions, into dozens of different fragments without ever becoming a true whole, and so does Buffy, who hits emotional rock bottom in this episode. Again, she's observed by the nerds, but we're no longer in Neverland, and they no longer can pretend she's acting out their personal video game. They don't set her up to score each other; they set her up for murder. Jonathan doesn't play a funny D&D-type demon anymore, he plays a girl who is dead already, and whose blood is on their collective hands. Faking death, running away and hiding after Buffy punched him doesn't leave a drunken Buffy and Spike being bemused, but Buffy tormented and Spike desperate. Buffy's outburst in LS about being dumb Buffy, freaky Buffy, who can't bear to be in anyone's company but in the one of a vampire she has to hate is funny, and we're amused; Buffy going to pieces and beating Spike up in an orgy of self-loathing is incredibly painful to watch. And yet there's a direct line from one to the other.
The ultimate consequence of the human-beings-as-game-characters attitude of the Trio is the cerebral dampener, and their plan to "make any woman we desire into our sex slave". Something that was on their schedule from their first season 6 episode (Flooded) onwards, but back then I doubt few people ever bothered to think the implication through. It was such a typical, amusing fanboy thing to wish. They wouldn't really. Would they? You betcha. Including Jonathan, who ought to know better post-Superstar but doesn't. And you have to wonder: if Warren had brought a random stranger to the lair, and the spell hadn't been broken, would Jonathan have objected at all afterwards? I don't think so.
(I do think he would have balked, at the last minute, if it had been Buffy, or Willow, or anyone he actually knew.)
But Warren brings home a real girl, dressed up as a Sleeping Beauty under a spell, who, in a ghastly parody of the fairy tale motif, wakes up after a kiss, not to life, but, as it turns out, to death. The infinitely fascinating and infinitely creepy thing about the Warren/Katrina scenes in DT is that Warren can go from an absolutely sincere and desperate "I missed you so... you never should have left me" to "get down on your knees" within seconds and mean both phrases. If Katrina had actually deigned to talk with him in the bar, would he have abandoned his cerebral dampener scheme and thrown it away as he threw the microphone in the glass to that the others couldn't listen in anymore? Who knows. But she doesn't listen, and so he basically transforms her into a toy. He rewrites her into someone who never WOULD have left him.
Warren's relationship with Katrina echoes several other relationships in this show, just as Warren himself can be seen as an echo, alter ego or complete contrast to several characters, not just one. There is the season 5 Buffy/Spike relationship up to Crush, and Katrina's angry words to Warren certainly echo Buffy's then. There is the season 6 Buffy/Spike relationship, but this time the positions are reversed, as they are in Buffy's dream. This dream, the first one since Restless, like all of Buffy's dreams, is trying to tell her something; in this case, she equates Spike with the victim, with Katrina whom she thinks she killed, and herself with Warren (something she will do consciously when awake near the end of the show). Buffy might have been the one tied up in reality, as her rubbing her wrists indicates, but she knows very well that emotionally, Spike is the one in chains, and so she sees him like this in her dream. Buffy's conflicted feelings about Spike, trying to see him as not real, as someone she can use, while simultanously "letting him in" (and I don't think she meant sexually here; the opening scene of DT is a rather obvious indication that Buffy feels connected to Spike but really doesn't want to), won't be resolved until the seventh season.
The strongest and most perverse and ingenious parallel, for me, to Warren/Katrina is Willow/Tara. Trying to rewrite your relationship to your liking, trying to control your lover's mind, not once, but twice when the first time doesn't work out, even the argument "I just wanted us to be back together" - it's frightening. Hence two sections of my Five Things Which Never Happened To Warren fic, so I won't delve into this at length again.
In Life Serial, the Troika b plot ends with Jonathan returning from his Buffy distraction and all three geeks being very satisfied and pleased with themselves to have pulled one over the Slayer. It's a scene played for laughs. On Buffy's end of things, it ends with Buffy sobering up, with a headache, after her drunken night with Spike, being counselled by Giles. It's a tender scene, and yet sad, because much as these two love each other, they don't really connect; Giles sees Buffy's acceptance of his help as yet another sign he will have to leave her, and she doesn't really tell him what is troubling her.
In Dead Things, the b plot, too, ends with Jonathan returning and the three stating they pulled one over the Slayer. They got away with it. And it couldn't be less amusing or more compelling to watch: Warren actually is pleased, and if he was borderline before, he definitely crossed the line now; Andrew thinks it's cool, his earlier shock having vanished, because Andrew is ever so good at rewriting things in his head to an acceptable story; Jonathan is horrified by all of them, including himself. He has lost his illusions and self-delusions for good. But all the horror and self-disgust is enough to actually do something about it (yet).
Meanwhile, Buffy's storyline ends with her being counselled again. Only it's not Giles, but Tara, and what happened in the night is way more serious than getting drunk. Or than the real life debt problem. The news Tara brings, that Buffy's resurrection did not alter her in any significant way, robs her of her last emotional delusion, that the entire relationship with Spike can be blamed on being "wrong". And she knows very well it's not as much a question of loving him, or not loving him, as of "using him - what's okay about that?" Buffy breaks down, and she does connect with Tara, as she didn't with Giles. Her "don't forgive me, please don't forgive me" is Buffy's self-loathing and horror summed up. But it's not quite enough to actually do something about it (yet).