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Sunday, September 30, 2007

And This Is My Off-Ramp*

*Words of Cordelia Chase in her last appearance on Angel before her death.

It's time for my confession. I think everyone I know knows that I'm a huge Buffy fan. I'm not sure anyone realizes how much of a fan I really am. There is no other TV show that has ever come close to grabbing my attention the way Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel (the Buffy spin-off) have. Even Battlestar Galactica, a fantastically politically relevant scifi epic, is a very distant second. Some may think that Veronica Mars or Medium or maybe Heroes might fill that supernatural and/or chick super-hero gap for me. (Supernatural doesn't even make my list, by the way...the jury is still quite a ways out from reaching a verdict on the new Bionic Woman.) While each of those shows addresses the battle between good and evil, right and wrong, none comes nearly as close to focusing on the daily struggle of sorting out all that gray in between as Buffy and maybe to a greater extent, Angel. Nor do any of them allow the same level of real, drastic change in character or setting, in my opinion. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

It wasn't a simple seduction. I was a late adopter. (Even after I was hooked on Buffy, I shrugged off Angel until I realized there were crossover episodes.) I heard the hype about Buffy dying at the end of Season 5 and moving to a new network. Few shows pull that off...actually, do any? Then FX showed two episodes a day throughout the summer of '01. My husband, much to his continued regret, was the person who suggested that I might like to check it out. I was fully addicted in time for Buffy's resurrection on UPN in the fall. I now own all the DVDs for both shows. I've been to one Buffy convention. I've met James Marsters (Spike) on three different occasions, and I collect the post-series comic books. (I should note that my participation in the Buffy 'community' was short lived. I realized fairly quickly that my Buffy obsession was actually very different than that of other fanatics. These people are more like serial monogamists with their TV obsessions.) I did have an opportunity to enable one other person's addiction. I don't know that she's bought the DVDs for herself yet, but she got some quality time with mine. (Yes, I'm talking about you Melissa. I got your text message about your teary-eyed re-watching of "Once More, With Feeling", by the way. Remember: Life isn't bliss. Life is just this. It's living.)

So why do I choose now to tell you about this, four years after the end of Buffy and three years after the end of Angel? Last night, I completed a several months-long project - re-watching both of the series in order. I skipped a few episodes, especially from the early years, but as the stories progressed, as the characters changed, as the weight of the plots increased, the fewer and fewer I skipped. I won't try to recount for you all the themes and characters and story-lines that particularly move me, but I do feel the need to provide some explanation as to why I have this bizarre attachment to such ephemera. In good, old-fashioned blogosphere meets Letterman tradition, I think I'll use the list format to highlight just ten of the reasons why I love these shows:

Number Ten: High school horror metaphor. The first and most obvious charm of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is its use of demons and supernatural occurrences as metaphors for the everyday horrors of adolescence. It allows for a lot of comedy, despite the fact that real people die, and Buffy, herself, is constantly in mortal danger. One of my favorite examples is perfectly expressed in the very second episode when Joyce, Buffy's mom, grounds her for getting in trouble at school (no doubt due to a demon-fighting episode of some sort). "I know. If you don't go out it'll be the end of

the world. Everything is life or death when you're a sixteen-year-old girl." Of course, in Buffy's case, it is life or death, and the world might end if she doesn't go out.

Number Nine: Unapologetic writers. This isn't so much a theme of the show, but it's something I find particularly amusing and satisfying about these series. If the writers want to take a drastic turn in the show, they just do it. Sometimes they do it gracefully. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes there are plot holes. Sometimes the effects are incredibly cheesy. Sometimes the metaphors are a little lazy. Sometimes they make reference to their own ridiculousness. All true, but the resulting stories are worth it. It's a means to an end. Trust them. If they're doing something that makes you crazy, there's usually a good reason.

Number Eight: The Initiative. Case in point. The Initiative is a demon-hunting military organization introduced in Season Four, Buffy's freshman year in college. This was an extreme turn for the show. Apparently, most fans hated it. They just wanted the show to do what other shows do - get stuck for eternity in the Buffy/Angel romance. Please, people. This is the number one mistake most TV writers make. It results in the telling of the same story over and over again. Take Smallville for example. Clark and Lana. I've watched exactly one-third of an episode of that show in the past three years, and it happened to be about Clark and Lana for-the-last-time-almost-getting-together-but-something-
getting-in-the-way-before-it-actually-happens yet again. Buff

y, however, moves on, and people can't take it. Guess what? That's life, people. In the immortal words of Cordelia Chase, "Get over it." This season produced some of the best episodes of the entire run of the series, like the Emmy-nominated "Hush", in which all of the characters lose their voices while The Gentlemen rip out hearts all over town, "The Yoko Factor", in which Spike, made powerless by the Initiative when they put a chip in his head that kept him from doing harm to humans, manages to turn Buffy's gang against each other through very clever social manipulation, and "Restless", a surreal season finale in which the whole gang meets up with the First Slayer in their dreams.

Number Seven: Angel/Angelus. Angel is Angel, the vampire with a soul. Angelus is Angel's alter ego who shows up on occasion when Angel is temporarily relieved of his soul. As the story goes, Angelus was cursed with a soul by gypsies back in 1890-something after a century of murder and mayhem so that he may live out the rest of eternity in torment for the horrors he commmitted. In the early years of Buffy, the difference between the two personalities is very distinct - not terribly muddled with moral ambiguity. (By the way, per the

curse, Angel loses his soul when he experiences a moment of, ahem, 'perfect happiness'. So what do you suppose happened when Buffy finally gave it up to him on her 17th birthday? Do you think he called the next day? Right. Score again for teenage girls' worst nightmares.) Once you get a good look at Angel in his own series, you realize that the darkness still exists below the surface of that soul. He's capable of some pretty surprising and disturbing things, although letting Drusilla and Darla (evil vampires from his past) massacre a roomful of evil human lawyers might fall into a disputable gray area. Even when not motivated by vengeance and despair, he's capable of making cold decisions for the sake of the greater good. A century of mass murder gave him a pretty thick skin.

Number Six: Spike. Yeah, I know. I have a thing for guys who need to be tamed. Shut up. Despite my predilection, Spike's character is worth some mention simply because he's such a wild card in the two series. He was slated to be a bad guy who gets dusted at the end of Buffy's second season, but the character was so popular that the producers decided to keep him around. And how. Spike went from bad guy to good guy. He went from kicking the Slayer's ass to getting a piece of it. He went from comic relief to dramatic lead and back again. The most interesting years for his character occurred after he was 'neutered' by the Initiative with the

chip in his head and before he endured the demon trials to get his soul back. Technically, he was still evil, even with the chip, but when he found out he could still kill demons, not people, he started fighting along side the good guys. He fell in love with the Slayer. He thought he was being a good person when he was really acting out of selfishness, hoping to win points with Buffy for all his good deeds. Even this was debatable. Spike exhibited some behavior during this period that could make you wonder whether or not an evil thing was capable of change, no matter what the original motives were. In regards to his soul, yes, the writers let Spike be the second vampire with a soul, just to make Angel crazy. The two characters are still quite different, however. As Angel says to Spike after he shows up in L.A., "You asked for a soul. I didn't! It almost killed me. I spent a hundred years trying to come to terms with infinite remorse. You spent 3 weeks moaning in a basement, and then you were fine!"

Number Five: Redemption. Redemption is the core theme of Angel. Each character is guilty of some kind of sin. Cordelia Chase evolves from a self-involved rich girl to a self-sacrificing super-power. Wesley Wyndham-Price raises himself up from a bumbling buffoon of a Watcher to a self-effacing, self-reflective, and tragic figure struggling with and often failing in some incredibly painful decisions. Angel, of course, continues to seek redemption for all the horrible atrocities he committed as Angelus with a margin of hope that he might one day become human again.

(Prophecy schmophecy.) In the end, redemption can never really be achieved. It's a carrot on a stick that these characters keep chasing until death.

Number Four: The chosen one. The premise of Buffy is that the Slayer is the ONE girl in all the world chosen to fight the vampires, demons, blah, blah, blah. By the second season, Buffy has broken that rule. She has a knack, actually, for finding loopholes in prophecies. At the end of season one, she dies...just for a minute, and then she's revived.

Because of her death - however temporary it is - a new Slayer is called. So, for six out of seven seasons of Buffy, there are actually two Slayers. Okay. Ultimately, Buffy continues to fulfill the role of the chosen one, but it has very little to do with her mystical choseness and everything to do with who she is, her personal strength, incredible intuition, intelligence, and dedication to doing the right thing, no matter the cost. She isn't cold in her decision making, like Angel. Up until Season Six, Buffy mostly wears her heart on her sleeve. It's charming, really.

Number Three: Real human death. Joyce, Anya, Tara, Cordelia, Fred, and Wesley are all core characters to the series, and they all die. A lot of shows won't kill off important characters so flippantly. Fans can't take it. Even on Buffy and Angel, it's hard to take death seriously when characters like Buffy, Angel, and Spike all die at least once and are magically resurrected. That's what makes the other, mundane natural human deaths that much more dramatic. Joyce, Buffy's mom, dies of a brain aneurism. There's nothing mystical about it. Anya is gruesomely sliced in half during the final battle at the Hellmouth. Tara is shot with a gun. Wesley gets a knife in the gut in

the last moments of Angel - a painful death, no doubt. Cordelia's death is most poignant because she was an original cast member from day one of Buffy. She dies in the very final season of Angel after spending months in a coma following a ridiculous demon possession. She has one mystical return to consciousness to help put Angel back on his path before her death. Fred's death is extremely traumatic, and not really human, now that I think of it. An ancient demon devours her body from the inside out until it is only a shell for its new inhabitant, Ilyria. Even Fred's soul is burnt away to nothing,

eliminating any possibility of resurrection, despite the mystical nature of her death. Besides being painfully blunt and final, these deaths are pointless in one way or another. No greater purpose is served by any of these sacrifices. These men and women simply succumbed to forces beyond their control and their inevitable mortality, period.

Number Two: Buffy series finale. As usual, Buffy breaks some more rules at the end of the series. Most of us were irritated halfway through Season Seven as we watched Buffy's house fill up with a bunch of whiny teenage girls who were in line to be the next Slayer. Some great evil is hunting them down and killing them, in an attempt to kill off the entire line of Slayers, so Buffy brings as many as she can to Sunnydale to try to protect them and prepare them for battle. At the same time, fans wondered how the series could possibly end satisfactorily without Buffy's death. As far as we knew, there was no other

way for her to escape her duty as Slayer. Oh, but our faith in the writers was low. Buffy finds a way to turn all the potential slayers into real Slayers, creating thousands of super-powered chicks all over the world. Cool. Now she isn't the only one. My favorite moment of this episode occurs in the last scene after Spike, of all people, saves the world (although the Hellmouth manages to devour the entire town of Sunnydale in the process) when Buffy looks at the road ahead of her rather than at the gaping pit behind her.

Number One: Angel series finale. The end of Angel, however, came with a little less hope. Over the course of Season Five, the characters were slowly come to the inevitable realization that the choice they made at the beginning of the season to take over the L.A. branch of Wolfram and Hart, the evil law firm run by all powerful forces of evil known as the Senior Partners (yes, it's supposed to be funny) was a devastating mistake. In the last episodes, they make a choice to turn this bad decision around and use what power they've gained to try to make a dent in the Senior Partners' armor. They know they'll die, but they realize they made that choice when they signed on to Wolfram and Hart in the beginning. The last episode ends not with the settling dust of the final battle, like Buffy, but with the first battle cry of The Apocalypse, the moments before we assume the last of the characters are slain, fighting desperately to show an eternal evil that they have a choice, that they have not been corrupted, and that they'll fight on the side of good, even when there is no hope. It gives me goose bumps.

I had expected this list to be short. Well, hopefully for your sake, I got a lot out of my system in this post, even though writing it made me think of a dozen other things I love about these shows. I didn't even touch on all the sex, torture, and violence. I barely mentioned Faith, the naughty Slayer. Maybe I should have gone back to some Buffy-related forum to get my issues worked out, but the folks there would just encourage me, I'm sure. I see what happens on Chris's Japanese toy sites. Damned enablers, they are. The silence I hear from the readers of this blog is really what I need right now. Thanks in advance for helping me out.

Labels: buffy, TV