Buffy: One problem may be fixed in new season

I've seen every episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. For the first 5 seasons I've seen each episode at least twice. But in the last couple of years my enthusiasm for the show has seriously waned and I don't try to catch the re-runs. I keep tuning in hopng it gets better and that it regains some of the things I loved about the earlier years.

So what has gone wrong? BVS has lost good cast members, moved to progressively worse settings (high school to college to the local chicken sandwich joint) which provided less of the raw material needed to drive plots, and has become too weighed down with a painful joyless view of life.

At the start the show had a very strong and interesting cast. Buffy just wanted to be a teenager and left Giles baffled. Angel showed up as a mysterious cool figure in the first episode. Darla was a great sophisticated evil vampire. The high school was a great setting because it made it easy to bring on lots of other figures both youthful and adult. Since it was on the hell mouth it was also a great setting for all sorts of supernatural goings-on The high school setting was especially great because Buffy could be saving the kids and the school while almost all the adults were either oblivious or trying to hide what was going in. Plus, since teens in real life feel like what they are going thru is incredibly serious and important the ability of teens to actually fight total evil rather than just fight for better positions in their social groups allowed teen and former teen viewers to fantasize about a youth lived where what one did really mattered.

Since the kids almost all had parents that they lived with (a few maladjusted kids like Faith were exceptions) the parents were always available for great humour about the proverbial generation gap and the gap in understanding and in priorities. On this theme the show demonstrated a great deal of irreverence. It had no problem with showing how parents in modern suburbia can get whipped up into a frenzy of fear about some non-existent danger (South Park does this too) while the parents were simultaneously oblivious to real threats that Buffy's gang were fighting. Joyce Summers mouthed platitudes from pop psychology in her lectures to her daughter while Buffy was putting her life at risk saving the world and experiencing personal tragedies. When Buffy had to kill her boyfriend just after he got his soul back it was a tragedy of classical dimensions.

Of course Buffy's gang had to graduate from high school eventually. The events leading up to the graduation culminating with the destruction of the school (necessitated by the need to kill the mayor after he ascended and became a dragon) were very well orchestrated. But Angel had to leave in order to start his own TV series. So there went one great character. Plus, Faith went into a coma and the mayor and the school principal died.

Buffy went off to college. College wasn't as funny as high school. Riley wasn't as interesting as Angel. The show became a little more serious but still had its irreverent moments. Buffy's soulless roommate from another universe as the roommate from hell was quite well done. Faith did come out of her coma and spice things up for a while. There was even a great moment where Faith was in Buffy's body and was in the airport and became inspired to try to be like Buffy and returned to fight the bad guys in the church. Buffy's mom died (bad idea). The Initiative made for good opportunities to make fun of out-of-control secret government. But other opportunities were lost here. The various college subjects and the politically correct pablum spewed by stereotypical professors in each subject could have been grist for the humour mill. Buffy could have gotten off many seemingly ignorant but common sensical and funny replies to what professors told her. Student political group leaders motivated more by the desire to be important than an understanding of their causes could have provided a great contrast to our hero Buffy who was really battling something worth fighting about.

The climax of The Initiative was well done. But the show seemed to lack a driving force after that. Glory showed up and she was a great character who was incredibly well cast. The idea of a narcisstic ("What about me?!") Goddess who was hip to modern culture while at the same time being an ancient threat to the existence of our universe was brilliant. She was funny. She was cutting. She was easy to like and loath at the same time. But the death of Buffy's mom, the departure of Riley, and Buffy's withdrawal from college were all causing a decay of the larger context of the show.

Buffy's sister showed up too. I don't think the relationship between them has been very well developed. Once Buffy's mom died I think our hero should have done a better job of emotionally supporting Dawn. That Buffy is capable of understanding and more importantly empathising with her sister is demonstrated in a very moving sequence in Dawn's bedroom after Buffy has has discovered who Dawn really is and Buffy accepts Dawn's emotional need to make Buffy a janitor in an imaginary club where Dawn is President:

Buffy: I just had a bad day.
Dawn: Well, join the club.
Buffy: Can I be president?
Dawn: I'm president. You can be the janitor.
Buffy: Okay.

When Buffy then brushes Dawn's hair it seems to me an act of understanding and compassion for her emotionally less mature little sister. Buffy does this sort of thing too rarely. She is close enough to Dawn in age and yet at the same time so much richer in experience. Buffy should demonstrate a lot more understanding and emotional skill in her handling of her little sister.

Buffy had to die in her fight to stop Glory in order to fix the hole in the fabric of the universe. But why? If people can be dead for months and be brought back to life then at some point it begins to seem that no event or struggle has permanent effects and no battles are ever really won or lost. BVS is in danger of becoming another X Files. Also, the episode that shows Buffy as a schizophrenic living in a mental hospital imagining that she is a Vampire Slayer was a BAD idea. Hey Joss Whedon, hey Marti Noxon, do you want us to take the show seriously? Do you want us to imagine that it is possible for there to be such a thing as a vampire slayer? To get sucked into the fantasy and root for the characters? Well then don't pop the bubble.

So anyway, a new season started and then Buffy got brought back to life. At this point the show was so tired (and Buffy so unhappy) that an affair between Buffy and Spike became a logical next step. Now, I know that Gwen Stefani sings "Why do the good girls always go for the bad boys?" but blech! Being a heterosexual male I can't say how the female viewers see Spike. I think he does a great job playing his role (and even as a sleezy Jaguar Pride leader in Andromeda Ascendant). But what did this relationship do for this show? It showed that a girl who is feeling down can stuck in a bad relationship. Well, yeah, okay. But it just wasn't that interesting.

The show became too inwardly focused on the three pairs of relationships of its major characters: Willow and Tara, Buffy and Spike, and Xander and Anya. Buffy's job in a fast food joint just didn't provide much context to inspire the writers. Okay, one old lady working there was some kind of monster. So what.

One other complaint: Making magic into something addictive provided an opportunity to portray Willow as essentially a dangerous substance abuser who became a threat to herself and her friends. Certainly there are obvious parallels with conventional drug substance abuse in the real world. So the writers were able to do a lot with it. But the end result was that Willow had to kick the magic habit. Therefore good witches lending support to Buffy in her fight against evil are no longer in the cards. This sort of plot development can limit the longer term possibilities for the show.

The show has become less witty, too serious, with too small a cast of interesting recurring characters, and too ingrown.

But wait, there is hope. Here we are in the end of the summer of 2002 and the previews for the new season are hinting that Buffy is going back to college. Well, good idea. Buffy needs to be in social settings with lots of other people and with reasons to interact with them. Putting her in college at least creates the potential for plotlines as good as the earlier years of the show. Lets hope the producers and writers can come up with some good ways to play off of the college setting.

The show should make some plots out of something she hears in an ancient Mesopotamian history class or in an aberrant psychology class. There are many different types of personality types that could be portrayed in demons or vampires. How about an evil vampire with an obsessive compulsive disorder? Or a good demon with Tourette's Syndrome?

Buffy could be sitting in an English literature or Middle Ages mythology class where the professor and students are making fun of the fears that the people of the Middle Ages about supernatural creatures and Buffy could rush to defend the reasonableness of their fears and then could she get made fun of by her classmates. At some later point in an episode Buffy could save the prof or some of the students from one of those Middle Ages creatures that were supposedly all just one big myth. A great twist would be for Buffy to save only the Prof when no students are around to see it and then the next day in class when the students start making fun of Buffy (expecting the Prof to join in) the Prof could switch and come up with some lame rationalisation for taking Buffy's side.

So college could easily be made a great springboard for countless excellent Buffy plots. As a long time Buffy fan I sincerely hope that this turns out to be the case.

Posted by Randall Parker at September 03, 2002 04:30 PM