Buffy’s sixth
season is almost universally considered the worst season of any Joss Whedon
series period; at the time, few fans could find anything redemptive about it,
and in hindsight, it actually looks worse. What makes it look even worse in
retrospect is how little the world of the supernatural has to do with so much
of the horrors of the season – all they do is essentially magnify, if not
completely destroy, almost every bond fans had come to love about Buffy for
the last five years.
Perhaps we should
have been clued in from the beginning of the season when the remainder of the Scoobies
decide to bring Buffy back from the dead after nearly six months in the ground,
with little if any consideration for the consequences. Willow, who is now the
de facto leader of the gang, brooks no argument saying that Buffy must have
spent the last several months in a hell dimension. The resurrection spell does
work – but Buffy comes back to life in her grave (we see her decaying corpse
become whole) and she has to dig herself out of her coffin. She spends the
opening episodes essentially as a zombie. Then in the third episode, Buffy lies
to her friends and tells them she was in hell – and then confides to Spike at
the end of the episode that she was at peace – “I think I was in heaven.” This inability
to deal with reality commands all of her actions for the remainder of Season
Six and increasingly drives a wedge between her and her friends.
They are, for the
record, doing a pretty good job destroying themselves. In a more unbelievable
storyline Willow is increasingly becoming ‘addicted’ to dark magic and using spells
to manipulate her friends. This causes her girlfriend Tara to break up with her
a third of the way through the season, and actually causes her to go even
deeper into addiction. (‘Smashed’ – an episode where Willow essentially spend
in a magical crack house – was considered the creative nadir of the season. I’d
argue it was a feature of the season, not a bug.) Many of the gang continue to
have trouble trusting Willow from that point forward.
Xander and Anya, in
the meantime, who have been a couple for the past two seasons get engaged and
plan to get married. Anya is a former vengeance demon, so the wedding plans
are, problematic, to say the least, but the couple seems to be doing fine until
their wedding day, when a demon, taking the version of a future Xander shows himself
to Xander, and shows him a vision of the future where the two of them are in a
horrible marriage ultimately hating each other. Even when the demon is exposed
as a fraud, Xander still ends up dumping Anya at the altar. Xander’s home life has
always been the most troubled of the Scooby Gang, and its made very clear that
Xander’s father has been abusive to his mother and to Xander himself. The writer’s
try to show that Xander is afraid of what he will become but it still speaks of
sloppy writing above all else. Anya reacts by become a vengeance demon again,
and even worse having sex with Spike on a closed circuit feed that the rest of
the Scoobies see.
By this time, Buffy’s
life has completely deteriorated. Her mother died the previous season, her
father has essentially abandoned her and Dawn, and by this point Giles has
returned to England. (At least this part of the story was outside the writers
control: Anthony Stewart Head had tired of playing Giles and was no longer a
series regular.) Combined with her emotional numbness from coming back from
heaven, Buffy begins having destructive sex with Spike, the vampire she utterly
loathes because it’s the only way she can feel anything. When she tries to
terminate the relationship, Spike becomes frantic and nearly rapes her on the
Summers bathroom floor. Between this, the ‘villains’ of Season Six work a spell
on her to make Buffy believe that her entire life in Sunnydale is a delusion
and that in order to go back to ‘normal’, she must kill all her friends and
sister – which she comes perilous near to doing.
The villains, for
the record, are universally considered the weakest in the history of the
series: three minor characters who had been nerds in high school who, on pure
impulse, decide to ‘take over Sunnydale.” They are completely incompetent at
what they do and have no clear aim, but it soon becomes clear one of them –
Warren – is worse than the other two and murders a woman who broke up with him.
Jonathan (Danny Strong) who’s never been fully committed to the mission, more
or less turns against him near the end of the season.
This leads to
perhaps by far the worst arc of the miserable season. Tara and Willow have
gotten back together. Xander attempts to reconcile with Buffy. Then Warren
shows up with a gun, determined to kill Buffy for ruining his plan. He shoots
her, but a stray bullet ends up hitting Tara, and she dies. The death of one of
the few purely good characters, as well as the only gay regular on the series,
is still something fans have not forgiven Whedon for. Even worse is the fact
that Willow effectively becomes ‘Dark Willow’, tracks down Warren, and right in
front of Buffy, effectively flays him alive. Attempting to stop her from
killing the other two, Buffy and Willow end up fighting each other with her
nearly killing her. Giles emerges to try and stop her, and Willow drains him of
his magic – leading her to, complete spur of the moment, to destroy the world.
Now (spoiler) she
is stopped by the pleas of her best friend Xander, in what is admittedly one of
the show’s greatest moments. But honestly, everything in the last ten minutes
of the seasons seems completely ham-handed, especially Buffy’s remarkable
regaining of her will to live and her decision to become a better sister to Dawn.
Everything about Season Six is miserable,
and it seems Joss Whedon and his writers limited the supernatural element in
regard to the character’s misery and made the ‘Big Bad’ so utterly powerless to
basically send a message that all the supernatural power in the world will
still get their ass kicked by the real world.
The seventh season
is an improvement, but not by much. Willow returns to Sunnydale having been ‘healed’
by Giles, but there are no consequences for her actions, legal or
otherwise. Anya stops being a vengeance
demon but seems tangential to the Scoobies from that point on. Sunnydale High,
which was famously blown up at the end of Season 3, has been completely rebuilt
by the beginning of the season – just in time for Dawn to matriculate there,
and Buffy to take a job as guidance counselor. But all this normality is
essentially being done while the writers are essentially tearing down the
mythology of the series.
‘Potentials’ - young girls who have the possibility of
being Slayers – are being murdered across the globe. (The fact that there’s never
been a hint of this through the series to this point is actually the least of
the problems of the mythos.) By the time Sunnydale learns of this, the Watchers’
Council has been decimated and the home offices in London have blown up. When
Giles returns with a few stray girls at the halfway point of the season, we are
finally told of the threat – ‘The First Evil’.
Now, we were introduced
to the First Evil in a Season 3 episode and told fundamentally that this was
the source of all evil and was impossible to be killed. Buffy dealt with at the
time as a tangential threat, and because the series knew that there wasn’t much
to be done with this, moved on. The First Evil is now engaged in a plan to eliminate the Slayer line,
finishing up with Faith and Buffy and then destroy the world. The thing is, by
this point the characters have been dealing with the apocalypse on a yearly
basis (it’s practically a running gag by this point) so its hard to see how
this threat (which is incorporeal and at most seems able to shift its form into
the dead) is somehow more serious than all the ones have come before. The
writers try to up the stakes by saying that the First Evil can not be killed.
What the writers never even try to do is explain why, after having been dormant
for millennia, the First Evil is moving now or even what happened to make the
threat more obvious. The First Evil may have been planning longer, but there’s
nothing to make us think that’s it more dangerous than any of the Big Bads it
almost casually takes the form of throughout the season. I think the overall
explanation is simple: everybody knew at some point this was going to be the
final season and they just wanted to make it as big an ending as possible. But
you’d think after writing for seven years, they’d have worked through it by
now.
And at the end of
the day, Whedon and his writers aren’t really interested in that threat – they’re
still interested in tearing up the foundations they’ve spent the last seven
years building. In the final third of the series, Giles is led to believe by Principal
Wood that Spike – who has been in control of the First for much of the season –
must be put down. Without talking to Buffy, he tries to do so and when she
finds out, the betrayal is so great that there is a wedge driven between them
that is never quite healed.
In the next episode
Faith (Eliza Dushku) is driven back to Sunnydale by Willow (I’ll get to that in
the next part) to help with the fight against the first. Considering the two of
them never got along and the last three times they met, they tried to kill each
other – this is not a warm reunion. But there are bigger problems: Caleb (Nathan
Fillion) the vessel for the First has shown up in Sunnydale. A fundamentalist
preacher who believes women are the source of all evil, Buffy underestimates
him when she leads her troops into battle. They pay a high price; several
potentials are killed and Xander loses an eye.
There’s a
definitely fissure among the Scoobies at this point; the next time Buffy tries
to order them into battle, there is an open revolt and the entire group –
including Dawn – orders her out of the Summers house and on the streets, which
by this time have been essentially overrun by the forces of darkness. I still
have no idea why this happened, by the penultimate episode, Buffy’s back in
charge as if nothing has gone wrong. I think it was just another reason for
Joss to drive another wedge between the group.
By this time, it’s
almost inconsequential that almost every other human resident of Sunnydale –
and quite a bit of the demon population – has vacated the town in a mass
exodus. The fact that for the entirety of the series nobody in the general
population of Sunnydale seemed aware of everything going on but somehow all
simultaneously decided to leave everything they owned behind is just
overlooked; the fact that the few family members the Scoobies have all leave as
well is completely ignored. The implication, I guess, is that by now the
Scoobies are essentially a family, but this would mean more if Whedon and
company hadn’t spent the last two years essentially driving them apart.
Of course, the real
reason why everybody in Sunnydale has left is made very clear in ‘Chosen’ the series
finale. In an effort to take the fight to the First, Buffy leads her troops for
one final, definitive battle in which she has decided to utterly change the
rules. With the help of Willow, she has decided to open the Slayer Line “In
every generation, a Slayer is born because a bunch of men decided thousands of
years ago made up that rule.” In what seemed to be the ultimate victory over
the patriarchy, the most powerful woman on the show broke that rule, and now
any girl who can be the Slayer will be the Slayer.’
I’m not going to
lie: the last fifteen minutes of the series are extraordinary. Watching women
across the world, many of them being bullied or harassed at the time, suddenly
gaining strength is incredible. Seeing one of the weakest potential smiling and
saying: “This is gonna be fun,” was brilliant. Watching Spike the ultimate
sacrifice to save mankind, was excellent. (Of course, if you’d watched the
final season of Angel you know it was temporary – and definitely not
planned by Whedon) . And watching the last school bus drive out of Sunnydale as
the Hellmouth closed for good – taking the entire town of Sunnydale with it –
was the finale we all wanted. And if the
final shot of the series where Dawn asks Buffy: “What do we do now?” with a
pure smile appearing on Buffy’s face as she realizes for the first time in
years she can actually consider this question, is beautiful.
But I’m not going to lie, a lot of this is negated by
two factors, one of which occurred later on, the other that was going on
simultaneously. The first would involve a new set of comics, authorized by
Whedon and the show. The second was the storyline that was going on Angel which
came to its climax the same week as Buffy.
The final two
seasons of Buffy had been dark, no question – but there were people like
me who fundamentally thought that the last season had basically redeemed the
show. But even if you were willing to ignore all of the ways the show was
fundamentally destroying the characters we’d loved for seven years, it was a
lot harder to ignore the message that Whedon and his writers were sending us in
the final episode of Season 4 of Angel. I will make that message
fundamentally clear in the next story in this series, in which it becomes
crystal clear that Whedon’s treatment of his characters pales to his vision for
humanity as a whole.
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