Confessions of a Liberal Puritan

The 30 Day Buffy the TV Series Meme (snagged from shadowkat67 because as soon as I saw it I realized it had been far too long since I'd last talked about one of my very favoritest TV series and most-favorite-ever source of fanfic)

Day 1: Favorite Season of BtVS?

SEASON FIVE. Hopefully, the following long walk down memory lane will explain why:

Back in the Spring of 2000, I got way behind on my Buffy-watching towards the end of season 4, because the latter part of that season just wasn’t grabbing me as much – I had no sense of urgency to watch the episodes I’d taped and saved, though I certainly planned to watch and enjoy them sometime. However, I continued to record and save on VHS tape each new episode of season 5 without watching any of them (I didn’t want to watch it out of order, after all, and I still had those last 3 or 4 episodes of season 4 to watch first).

Then a Fall 2000 issue of TV Guide magazine (which actually used to contain fairly complete listings of everything that was on TV for the week, for any youngsters among you who think we used to subscribe to it in order to read the articles) came out with one of those goofy “Things we love about the current batch of TV shows” features, or some similar title, and fairly near the top of the list, next to a lovely picture of Spike, was the information that watching James Marsters play Spike as love-struck and mooning over Buffy was one of the authors’ very most favorite things. After the inevitable “WTF?” moment, I realized that this I had to see!

I hastily got together all the tapes on which I’d recorded the last couple of season 4 eps and all the season 5 episodes so far and watched them back to back, in order, over a single weekend. Long before I got to the final episode in my backlog (I think it was “Family” – or maybe even “Fool for Love”), I was hooked again, even more deeply than I had been during gut-wrenching season 2 (which was the only previous season during which I’d regarded BtVS as absolutely must-watch-NOW television, as opposed to good-stuff-to-save-and-watch-later-if-I-don't-have-time-now-and-maybe-write-a-research-paper-on-it-someday TV).

In addition to Spike making vampire puppy eyes at Buffy (though it was so much more complex and interesting than that description implies), there was Buffy trying to cope with being a big sister as well as a Slayer (and then having to become de facto mother to Dawn, after “The Body”), Xander growing up and discovering his skill for construction work, Anya working for Giles at The Magic Box (and the Slayer-and-Scoobies Clubhouse consequently moving out of Giles’ apartment living room, where it had resided somewhat uneasily during season 4, and into a more public, professional space like the old library had been), Spike practically becoming Dawn’s older-delinquent-half-brother or rock-musician-uncle (even if his motivation for protecting and indulging Dawn was mostly in order to win Buffy's favor), Riley bailing on Buffy (which I still consider fairly douche-y of him, even if he didn’t realize how heavily the odds were stacked against her just then, trying to cope with her mom’s illness and Glory, but I’d known he wasn’t the long-haul guy for her since season 4), Willow’s growing magical power (for good or for ill), and the devastating but theologically and psychologically satisfying conclusion with “The Gift.”

Season 5 was also the very first time that I saved every single episode on tape, rather than watching them once or twice and then recording over them. I knew without a doubt that I’d want to re-watch those episodes many times over.

Looking back ten years later, I now suspect that a big part of my love for season 5 was the underlying and very grown-up themes of family (families bound together by choice and willingness to go to the mat for one another) and vocation. Watching the first few seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 1997-99 as a thirty-something minister recently returned to students status in search of a PhD, I felt an emotional and intellectual joy in the idea of 'My High School Really IS the Gateway to Hell', and soon found that there was a whole lot more going on than just high school developmental issues and supernatural metaphors as a backdoor approach to addressing 'Stuff That's Too Touchy or Scary for Me to Talk About'. But the issues addressed still weren't necessarily my issues.

I recognized the family part of the BtVS season 5 equation at the time (and we had a lovely panel on that subject at the Atlanta "WriterCon" in 2006), but I think the vocation part took a while (say, 10 years or so) to dawn on me -- no pun intended.

Yet, so much of that season was about the characters finding their adult calling for the first time, or finding a new calling and purpose in the face of drastic life (or even unlife) changes.

For instance,

Anya in season 5 turned out to have a real flair for business and making money, once she got that job at the Magic Box (getting great satisfaction out of exactly those parts of the job that Giles didn't enjoy and wasn't good at), and it was her participation in the capitalist system, she noted, that finally made her feel connected to the human world -- more so than her relationship with Xander could do. She found a reason of her own, unrelated to her romantic connection, to feel like part of humanity again, instead of just thinking of herself as a former Vengeance Demon whose current humanity is a constant reminder of her lost power and purpose.

I've already briefly mentioned Xander's season 5 discovery of his carpentry and construction talents, above, so I'll let that suffice for now.

Giles, of course, takes over the Magic Box in season 5 partly as a way to make money, but mostly in order not to be as bored out of his skull as he was at times in season 4, when he was not only an ex-Watcher (according to the Council) but also a former high school librarian, currently unemployed. The Magic Box not only gave him something to do as a day job, but it also provided him with a training space for Buffy, allowing him to function and feel like a real Watcher again. And (as also noted above) the shop provided a more professional and public venue for Scooby meetings and research parties, allowing Giles to keep his personal life a little bit more private than when his living room was the de facto headquarters and Scooby Common Room.

Buffy's vocation as Slayer -- but even more as HERO (not exactly the same thing) -- was developed in a number of ways in season 5, including the reverse or shadow image of Buffy's sense of purpose which Riley seemed to reflect (made so explicit in Graham's words to Riley in "Out of My Mind" about having in effect gone from 'soldier with a mission' to 'boyfriend of the Slayer with a mission').

Since Riley had started his relationship with Buffy in season 4 by stressing their shared vocation as demon hunters ("Hush") and how extra compatible that ought to make them, finding a new mission of his own in Sunnydale, apart from Buffy's demon-slaying (so that he could be both professionally fulfilled and romantically involved) wasn't really an option for him, as hew saw it. Buffy already had the job Riley wanted, the job he'd sacrificed and worked so hard to train for and felt called to do, and she was inarguably much better at doing her job than he could ever hope to be. Riley couldn't adapt to or overcome that sense of being so close to but cut off from that particular mission (I think that bothered him far more than Buffy's supposed emotional distance even when they were physically together -- it wasn't her feelings he wanted to share, so much as her vocation, and being emotionally needed by her wasn't enough, when he was obsessed with how much she didn't need him to save the day on the battlefield), and so he left.

And then Quentin Travers and the Watchers Council came to town and tried to massively undermine Buffy's confidence in her Slayer skills (since, in spite of her amazingly successful track record as a Slayer, she wasn't doing it the way they would have taught her to).

Big mistake on their parts.

Instead of brow-beating Buffy into working for them, convincing her that she couldn't even walk to the corner store without their supervision, the Watchers' visit only served to clarify and sharpen Buffy's own sense of self and of her power over them (since without her participation their lives and jobs serve no purpose, have no meaning). Buffy is THE Slayer, and the Watchers either work for her, or they don't work at all in any meaningful sense of the word. Her vocation is hers alone, to be shared with those who've earned her trust as she sees fit, and she has no need for them to approve of her and tell her whether or not she's good enough to be who and what she is.

Powerful stuff. I kind of wish I could have seen this episode ("Checkpoint") ten years earlier, when I was a young pastor who thought that my value as a person and competence at my job was dependent on whether or not my parishioners and my older male colleagues on key Presbytery committees approved of me and liked me enough). Oh, well.

And then, of course, "The Gift" clarified once and for all that Buffy wasn't just a 'Slayer' in any traditional sense, but also an honest-to-God hero. When push really comes to shove, up on that rickety tower, Buffy realizes that she can give life, rather than only death, as she'd feared. Even apart from the fact that Buffy could be said to have given birth and life to Dawn in the first place, since Dawn was made from Buffy and the very blood that flowed in Dawn's veins was her unwitting 'birthday' present from Buffy, Buffy chooses to give Dawn the gift of continued life, realizing that 'death is my gift' didn't mean that she was 'just a killer, after all'. Giles' final words to Ben/Glory only confirmed what was already clear: Buffy was a true hero, and taking human life (even though by that time Ben was far from an 'innocent', having chosen to let others die in order to protect himself too many times) wasn't something she could do, or should have to do.

Talking about the development (for good and for ill) of Willow's vocation as an increasingly powerful witch in season 5 would take more time than I have, and has been better described elsewhere, so I'll push on to one final example.

Spike's season 5 journey can also be seen as a change of vocation, as much or more so than a change of romantic affections, I think. It starts with romantic feelings, one could argue, with Spike's 'nightmarish' realization at the end of the 4th episode ("Out of My Mind"), but then if we learned anything from "Fool for Love" it's that love (even in an often twisted form) has long been Spike's true 'profession' and purpose for existing.

Spike's passion for Drusilla was his avowed purpose and reason for being for a hundred years or more (with perhaps a dash of Oedipal issues thrown in, involving Angelus -- whose approval as mentor/father-figure/grand-'sire' he wanted to win, but whom Spike also wanted to best in every way possible in order to finally win all of 'Mommy' Dru's loyalty and affection for himself). Spike's interest in killing Slayers originally seemed rooted in strutting his stuff for Drusilla and proving to be a better bad-ass vampire than Angelus. And when he came to Sunnydale, Spike justified his intensive study of Buffy and the amount of time and energy he put into attempts to kill her on the grounds that Buffy was a threat to Drusilla, getting in the way of Drusilla's recovery.

After Drusilla left Spike and his attempts to woo her back with torture instead of magic had proven unsuccessful, he seems to have latched onto 'Kill Buffy!' as an end in itself (if not a full-time job, at the very least a time-consuming and expensive hobby). The more the chip in his head prevented him from physically fighting her (and also prevented Buffy from staking him, given his relatively helpless, 'impotent' state), the more Spike's focus on Buffy as his frustratingly out-of-reach and yet so very near-at-hand prey/nemesis seemed to grow.

Whether it was long-suppressed desires coming to the surface, or simply the metamorphosis of a too-often-thwarted desire to kill her into a desire that he could physically act upon (however unlikely he was to get the chance), or something else, Spike's conscious sense of what he wanted from Buffy underwent a dramatic change. However much he might hate her, himself, and especially this feeling he has for her, Spike puts even more of his focus on Buffy, gradually growing from attempts to earn her grateful smoochies through actions calculated to somehow put her in his debt or win something from her as his just reward to that honest admission to himself and (unknowingly) to her at the end of "Intervention" that her pain was more unbearable to him than his own, to the point where he'd let himself be tortured to death rather than subject her to more emotional pain than he could stand to see.

Instead of 'Kill Buffy!' or 'Win Buffy!', by the end of season 5 Spike's vocation and major purpose in his unlife had become 'Help Buffy, if only in order to see her hurt less!'. Arguably, anyway.

Okay, this has taken several hours longer than I'd planned, and it's only the first day. I think I'm going to have to skip over some of the rest of the days and just post on the ones I actually have a strong feeling about, or else the 30 days will last through next Christmas.

As a final note, I see that NONE of the days in this meme ask, "Which Season of Buffy First Inspired You to Read and/or Write BtVS Fanfic?" Too bad, too, because I could probably post another incredibly verbose essay on SEASON SIX as the answer to that one, most likely bringing in all that Good Enough Media Mother-Text stuff from my 2004 posts.

Oh, well . . . again!