BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, SEASON SIX (2001-02)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological, sociological* 

Death Comes for the Vampire Slayer-- but not permanently. 

BARGAINING PT. 1-2 (F)-- In the wake of Buffy's demise, the Scoobies seek to keep up the crusade of slaying vampires and demons. They also try to keep Buffy's death secret from the rest of the world (not counting, I guess, the honking big headstone with her name on it), in part by using the Buffybot to fight alongside them, despite the robot's many cognitive limitations. After Giles returns to England, leaving the management of the magic store to Anya, Willow decides to perform a spell to bring the (buried) Slayer back to life, though both Spike and Dawn are left out of the loop. A gang of motorcycle-riding demons learns that the patrolling Slayer is just a robot, so they disable the bot and begin razing Sunnydale (no cops are ever seen trying to stop them). Willow, Xander, Tara and Anya commence the spell, but the demons interrupt them, forcing the Scoobies to scatter. Unbeknownst to the Scoobies, the spell works, and Buffy is restored, albeit in a buried coffin. She's forced to claw her way to the surface, and when she emerges, she seems distanced from reality. After lots of Sunnydale violence, the Scoobies, except for Spike, witness Buffy regain enough vigor to trash the demons, though the question of her recovery is still up for grabs.

AFTER LIFE (F)-- Spike finds out about Reborn Buffy and expresses his extreme displeasure with the group having messed with a magical resurrection. Buffy seems to be regaining her memories, but now everyone in the group experiences weird phenomena, thanks to a "hitchhiker demon" that crossed over to Earth by riding Buffy's spirit. The demon's good for a few creepy effects but it's mostly a time-killer. Once it's destroyed, Buffy confides the truth to Spike: her spirit was in some heaven-like realm that gave her feelings of peace and serenity. Her return to life is thus a torment to the heroine.

FLOODED (F)-- With Buffy's return to life comes all of the problems of being alive: principally, that it costs money, and the Summers family doesn't have any. On top of regular difficulties, Buffy has a glancing encounter with The Trio, the "Big Bads" of this season. One of them, Andrew, made his first appearance here, where he was revealed to be the brother of Tucker, the summoner of the hellhounds in "The Prom." The next, Warren, created the robot girl in "I Was Made to Love You" and the Buffybot, and the last is Jonathan, an uber-nerd seen in various previous episodes. The three of them combine their talents with magic and mad science with the aim of becoming supervillains (though they only want to conquer Sunnydale), and they plan to get rid of the Slayer even before committing their first major evil. A subplot regarding Willow's over-use of magic is further developed when Giles berates her for all the things that could've gone wrong with her spell; Willow's outrage at being questioned is a good foretaste of things to come. The episode ends with Buffy getting a call to meet with Angel, which event follows up Angel's having been informed of the resurrection in a Season 3 episode of ANGEL. Their meeting is not depicted in either show.

 LIFE SERIAL (F)-- Getting past the peculiar pun of the title, Buffy's new life becomes a series of disappointments in relation to education and employment. Meanwhile, the Trio start testing Buffy with various menaces to learn her weaknesses. Nerd jokes abound, Willow again shows more indications of magical obsession, and Buffy finds it easier to hang with Spike than with the Scoobies.

ALL THE WAY (F)-- Halloween comes to Sunnydale once more, but of course not all the evils take the night off. Xander reveals to the group that he and Anya are now engaged to be married, though in private the young man expresses doubts about the nuptials to Giles. (Buffy also expresses doubt about the union to Giles, though it's not clear for several episodes what the Slayer's objections are.)  Dawn makes plans to rendezvous with a girlfriend so that the two of them can neck with a couple of high-school boys in the park. However, both guys are vamps, and they have a bunch of bloodsucking friends, forcing Buffy, Spike and Giles to come to Dawn's rescue.     

ONCE MORE, WITH FEELING (G)-- All of Sunnydale is trapped in a "wacky Broadway nightmare," so that everyone, including the Scoobies, find themselves singing and dancing about their inner feelings, often regarding things they'd rather keep concealed. They even get invisible musical accompaniment, just as in musical theater and movies. A dancing demon named Sweet is responsible, though he can only work his magic if summoned. He initially thinks Dawn summoned him, and his price will be that she must join him in his hell-realm as his bride. (The true identity of the summoner is the episode's only flaw.) The unleashing of deep emotions endangers the romantic unions that musicals usually celebrate-- Xander and Anya, Willow and Tara-- though the greater menace is that surrendering totally to the emotional whirlwinds can cause one to spontaneously combust. And perhaps nothing better illustrates the series' trope of "hell is other people" than the song Giles sings to Buffy, about fearing that she's too dependent on him, a song that Buffy cannot or will not hear yet. This causes Giles to send his Slayer to face Sweet alone, and though he changes his mind later and all the Scoobies join together to rescue Dawn, the tumult in Buffy's mind leads to her to reveal to all of them the Big Truth: "I live in hell, 'cause I've been expelled, from Heaven." Sweet is defeated only because Spike, the only one in the group beyond ordinarily morality, saves Buffy-- thus paving the way for their romance, which is as doomed as all the others. I could do a separate essay just on the songs alone-- which combine existential despair and silly doggerel, and somehow make it work. 

TABULA RASA (G)-- How do you follow an act like "Once More With Feeling," which is all about hell being other people? Well, one might as well try a Divine Baggy-Pants Comedy-- though the comedy still comes from a place of tragedy. Tara is tempted to leave Willow after uncovering how Willow messed with Tara's memories. Willow swears not to perform any magic for a week, but almost immediately, magic junkie that she is, she sets a spell to make everyone forget their troubles. Instead, all of the Scoobies, including Spike, forget who they are, and try as best they can to re-construct their identities with raucous results. The external menace is a loan shark-- a literal shark-demon, that is-- trying to force Spike to pay a debt. But the memories must come back and have bad consequences for Tara and Willow and ambivalent ones for Buffy and Spike. Giles departs for England and does not return until late in season six.      

       

SMASHED/WRECKED (G)-- These episodes might as well have a Part 1/Part 2 label, because they're almost exclusively about (1) Willow's addiction to her magical "highs" even after Tara leaves her, and (2) Buffy's increasing attraction to Spike. "Smashed" begins with Willow using her increased powers to restore Amy-- changed into a rat in Season Two-- back to humanity. Though Amy's not a substitute for Tara, she encourages Willow to extreme behavior, setting her up for an even deeper spiral in "Wrecked." As for Spike, he makes the accidental discovery that though the chip in his head still keeps him from harming humans, Buffy's return from death has made her subtly different, so that Spike can hit her now without consequence. Since his past attempts to woo her with affection haven't worked, he resorts to calling forth her savage side by engaging her in fisticuffs. Buffy will later claim that her first intercourse with Spike was just her emotional reaction to losing Giles, but it's clear that she is drawn to his amoral roguishness but can only respect him (slightly) as a guy able to trade punches with her. The Trio starts another wacky plot. Dawn gets mixed up with Willow's descent as she foolishly takes the teen to a place that deals in dark magic. After incurring censure from Buffy, Xander and Dawn herself, Willow makes a sincere attempt to go "cold turkey." Though the parallels with drug addiction are obvious, the episode avoids falling into allegory thanks to the writers' appreciation of all the characters' existential problems.   

GONE (F)-- For some reason, the Three Dorks invent an invisibility ray. They accidentally turn it on Buffy, and though she doesn't know how her new unseeability happened, she takes great pleasure in feeling liberated from her immediate problems, much as Giles feared she would. Much as enspelled beer lowered her inhibitions, being invisible makes it easy for her to beard Spike in his lair and initiate sex with him. However, after sex, he kicks her to the curb, knowing that she's just using him. The Trio capture Willow and try to lure Buffy into a trap. They too become invisible. but not only can they not overcome the Invisible Slayer, all return to visible status and Buffy meets her "nemeses" for the first time. They escape but Warren has made a real attempt to kill Buffy. presaging his more ruthless acts later in the season.    

DOUBLEMEAT PALACE (P)-- This is the first subpar episode of Season Six, and its gimmick reminds me much of something from Season One. Willow continues to battle her desire for magical stimulation, with her college classes being barely referenced after "Wrecked"). Apparently, Buffy was paying bills with the remains of whatever resources Joyce left the two girls. But now Buffy's broke, and despite a generous donation from Giles, she has to take a humiliating day-job, that of food service at a burger franchise, the Doublemeat Palace. Everyone goes on about the secret ingredient, and when some employees disappear, Buffy comes to suspect that it just might be-- PEOPLE! But that would be too easy, and so the entity responsible for the missing employees is just another one of the many make-work menaces abiding in the Buffyverse. Spike, Xander and Anya all have minor roles, though Anya's "vengeance demon" BFF Halfrek shows up briefly. Amy, wanting to undo Willow's resolve to resist temptation, charges up her powers, but this development has no consequences except that Willow unfriends Amy.

DEAD THINGS (G)-- In "Smashed," Spike briefly encountered the Trio and coerced them into analyzing the functioning of his brain-chip, but this episode is the first one where he's directly affected by one of the dorks' eccentric schemes. Warren invents a brainwashing device, and all three dopes want to use the device to lure women into sleeping with them. Warren first targets his former girlfriend Katrina, who spurned him after learning about his pleasure-bot, and he successfully brings her back to the Trio's lair under dominion. However, his control wanes and when Katrina tries to leave, he kills her. Warren then gets the idea to undermine the Slayer's confidence by making her think herself guilty of Katrina's death. The plot works, and Buffy is as torn up at the thought of having killed an innocent as she was when Faith did so. Despite all the consequences to Buffy's friends and family, she heads for the police station to turn herself in. Spike blocks her, they fight, and Buffy tries to exorcise her self-disgust at sleeping with the vampire by beating him to a pulp. But Spike's interference keeps Buffy from confessing too soon, so that in the police station she hears an officer mention Katrina's name and realizes that this is a Trio plot. In this episode, Buffy confesses her dalliance with Spike to Tara and begs Tara not to shame Buffy by telling anyone else.

OLDER AND FAR AWAY (F)-- It's another story where the main characters are stuck in a "haunted house," but this one's pretty good, as well as giving viewers a vacation from the Trio. The Scoobies plan to hold a birthday party for Buffy at the Summers house, but Dawn is still alienated by the fact that Buffy almost left her behind in order to atone for "killing" an innocent. While speaking with a school guidance counselor, Dawn innocently wishes that everyone would have to stay at home forever. And this comes to pass, because the counselor is a disguised Halfrek, making trouble for humans out of a perverse concept of justice. The party ensues, with Xander inviting a handsome young guy to meet Buffy, and Tara in the same house with Willow for the first time in over a month. Spike crashes the party with a (harmless) demon-buddy. But Buffy's accidentally brought in an even more malefic menace than Halfrek: a nameless demon with a sword, able to pop in and out of floors or walls. Ultimately Buffy vanquishes the sword-demon and Halfrek is obliged to cancel the curse. Both the fight-scenes and Spike's attempts to woo Buffy in secret make this a good basic adventure.               

 

AS YOU WERE (F)-- While Willow continues to battle her addiction, Buffy gets some indirect aid to throw off her besotted fascination with Spike. Riley Finn comes to Sunnydale and invites Buffy to join him in a thrilling monster-slaying adventure, which invitation she eagerly accepts. But the big egg-laying monster has less impact on Buffy's life than the revelation that in the year of his absence, Riley's married another kickass female, name of Sam (Ivana Milicevic). Buffy also suffers humiliation when her ex witnesses her debasing herself with Spike, who happens to be involved (very improbably) with the plot to unleash egg-monsters on Sunnydale. Riley and Sam take their leave, and Buffy breaks it off with Spike-- though naturally things don't prove so simple.

HELL'S BELLS (F)-- I assume the "bells" of the title connote the wedding bells that the show seemed to be leading up to for most of the season re: Xander and Anya. This episode, nominated for three Emmys, often seems to play for broad comedy as the wedding day transpires, forcing together two undesirable groups of guests: Anya's demon buddies and Xander's gross relatives. But then Xander meets an uninvited guest who brings him a terrible vision of his future with Anya, and he leaves her at the altar. The guest's vision is fake, but it uncovers real demons in Xander's soul-- though he does make an effort to overcome them in the next episode.

NORMAL AGAIN (F)-- Technically this is a decently done melodrama, in which Buffy is poisoned by a Trio-summoned demon. She then begins alternating between her regular existence and a world in which she's stuck in an asylum and her physicians seek to convince her that her entire Slayer-identity is a psychotic fantasy. But despite the cant about Buffy being disgusted with herself due to her sleeping with Spike, the idea that she buys into the fantasy and almost kills her friends seems incredibly contrived. Of more interest is the fact that Xander returns and hopes to mend fences with Anya despite breaking her heart.

ENTROPY (G)-- Anya does not want to mend fences with Xander; she wants him to suffer supernatural vengeance. But neither she in her mortal form nor any of her demon-kindred can wish a dire fate on her ex-boyfriend. She makes numerous funny attempts to fool one of Xander's friends into making a wish to hurt him, but though they all sympathize with her broken heart, none of them will do the deed. She gets the bright idea to try the same routine on Spike, knowing that he regards Xander as a wanker. This doesn't work as Anya intends, but her dialogue with Spike leads to an interaction that, if anything, torments Xander in a basic, non-supernatural manner. As icing on the cake, all the Scoobies who didn't already know about Buffy's dalliance with Spike-- excepting only the absent Giles-- get the benefit of a big soap-operatic revelation scene. However, arguably the real meat of the episode is a prolonged conversation between Spike and Anya about how repressed and uptight the Scoobies are, which holds at least a grain of truth.     

SEEING RED // VILLAINS // TWO TO GO // GRAVE (G)-- And so at least we reach the four-episode conclusion of Season Six. Even though a lot of time is devoted to the inevitable breakup of Buffy and Spike, the writers have been building up to Willow's crisis since the earliest episodes.

SEEING RED boasts one of the archetypal scenes of male-female conflict in the series. A day or so after Spike slept with Anya, he shows up at the Summers house with the intention of rendering some apology. However, Buffy isn't having any, and Spike's lust for her overcomes all reason, as he deludes himself that he can make things right by forcing intimacy on her. The filmmakers avoid the usual action-trope of two super-beings going at one another in a big throw-down. Instead, Buffy can't seem to marshal her forces against his attack, just as if she were an ordinary female against an ordinary male, and only at the last moment does she get things together to kick him away. Not long after that, the Trio make another attempt at super-villainy, with Warren using a mystic talisman to make himself a powerhouse. However, Buffy gets some covert help from Jonathan, so that she defeats him, though he escapes and leaves his partners in the hands of police. However, later still Warren shows up at the Summers place, and uses a mundane pistol to shoot Buffy. He only wounds her, but his indiscriminate firing also kills Tara, mere hours after she and Willow reconciled.

In VILLAINS, Willow tries and fails to bring Tara back to life. She goes berserk with grief, intending to slaughter not only Tara's killer Warren but the other two members of the Trio as well. She stokes up her power by invading the magic shop and draining power from the arcane books. Warren finds out Willow's coming for him and takes measures to escape, while Andrew and Jonathan cool their heels in jail. Buffy, Xander and Anya attempt to save Warren but Willow first tortures and then kills him. Meanwhile, Spike, wanting to do something to change his monstrous nature, leaves Sunnydale 

The title TWO TO GO tells it all: the Scoobies endeavor to keep Willow from killing both Andrew and Jonathan by freeing the duo from jail and seeking to hide them. The two nerds are something less than cooperative, though Andrew is still the bigger villain of the two. The Scoobies take cover at the magic shop, but Dark Willow thunders in, and only a spell from Anya holds her in check. Willow transforms herself into a powerhouse via magic, not unlike what Warren did earlier, and she and Buffy throw down. Willow finally neutralizes both Anya and Buffy, setting things up for the cliffhanger return of Giles.

I'm not sure I get the meaning of the season finale's title GRAVE, except that after Willow has her magical duel with Giles and saps his mystically-endowed powers from him, she has grave intentions for the whole world. In short, she forgets about Andrew and Jonathan-- who later escape the Scoobies and flee the country-- and decides to bring an end to the world's endless pain by destroying the world. Only Xander can stop Willow's vengeance, and he does so in such a way that counters (but does not disprove) the theme of the season's first half-- that "hell is other people"-- with the theme that "other people are also the only redemption from hell."

And so ends what some might deem the BUFFY series' best season. My memories of Season Seven, the last roundup for the show, are not quite so salutary. But then, Six could not have provided any sort of closure, even an imperfect one, so Seven may turn out to be something of a "necessary evil."