Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 6: Smashed and Wrecked

[beccaelizabeth]

So two storylines come to a head in these two episodes, Spike/Buffy and Willow's misuse of magic.

And the thing is, on a lot of levels, they are telling the same story up through Smashed. Magic has up until now been the go to metaphor for sex. Buffy certainly compares herself to Willow. They've been using their respective poor choices to hurt and manipulate others in order to avoid feeling bad. But then the misuse of magic turns around and adds a physical drug addiction angle that's just... it shifts the story sideways into something that just doesn't pay off the build up.

So, Willow and magic: Up through the end of Smashed, Willow's misuse of magic has been consistent in motivation and tone. She uses it to take control of the world around her, including the people around her, to show off so she looks cool, and to make her own bad feelings go away. What she does to Tara, over riding her decisions by making her forget them, using magic to force her to continue a relationship she had doubts about and ultimately walked away from, that is perilously close to rape. It's certainly abuse. The real world parallels are difficult, because there isn't a drug that can force compliance quite like that, but if she was medicating her girlfriend without her consent to make her more friendly that would clearly be abuse and if that got Willow sex ever at all then that sex would be rape, because drugs and no ability to say no because Willow wipes the memory of no away. Willow has been evil, and she hasn't faced up to that.

In fact once she gets Amy back she doubles down. What she does to the people at the Bronze? There's some hint that the whole evening gets wiped from everyone's memories once the spells are all undone, but that doesn't exactly make it better. She did the things, she just wiped the possibility of consequences. Willow got her enjoyment from that crowd, without their consent. It was Amy who came closest to messing with someone sexually, snapping her fingers to bring a girl over for Willow, but Willow only turned that down because she didn't want a girl, because she still had feelings for Tara. Willow didn't stop then and say it was wrong. Willow didn't seem to notice it was massively wrong.

The sex layer is... she did spells with Tara, and it was part of a loving relationship. Tara leaves and Willow magics herself up a new spell partner, one who doesn't care and isn't interested in holding her back, in fact encourages her and is all impressed all the time. Also, experientially, because Amy has been a rat, I think it's fair to say she's still a high school girl in the brain parts. So Willow effectively went and got herself a replacement much younger partner who is still in high school? Creepy.

Smashed is Willow being evil, and not noticing. Willow's problem with all that magic? She gets all tired. That's the only reason she doesn't want to do it again. The effect on her. So Willow hasn't confronted what precisely she has been doing wrong. She doesn't realise or acknowledge she's done things to other people and that free will is kind of an issue.

But the story doesn't confront or acknowledge that at this point either. Tara was all 'how could you do this to me' but the story zooms off in another direction. Doesn't answer that.



Wrecked kind of wrecks the story arc. Because it presents an entirely new problem, and that is the one Willow notices. What Rack does, what she does with Rack, that's just getting high. Hallucinogen equivalent and staggering around drunk and then shaking and panting with withdrawal. And that's nothing she's experienced before, nothing to do with her actual personality and the problems she herself chose to create. Instead of the problem being 'Willow has done evil' the problem gets shifted to 'Willow had a bad trip'.

And it would have taken very, very little to rewrite the story to continue Willow's arc. She wants control, she gets shown how to summon up something, it turns out to have a mind of its own, Dawn gets hurt, Willow realises she's gone too far. Except Willow doesn't realise that. Willow didn't do the bad thing. She had it done to her. What Rack did put her completely out of control. And of course Willow has a problem with that, control is what she's been abusing magic to gain. So the problem Wrecked answers? Isn't the problem Willow actually has.

Wrong kind of addiction.



But being willing to do a spell with a stranger for the rush is, by previous metaphor, a close parallel to what Buffy is doing with Spike.



I said the other day that Spike hadn't been doing anything wrong, and someone in comments pointed out that Spike's song sounds a lot like someone getting angry cause they're friendzoned and then he tells her to die in a fire. This is pretty much true. I partly didn't notice cause he's too pretty and it's too easy to like him, plus I measure Spike's behaviour against the baseline 'is actually a serial killer', which I think we can agree he has risen above lately. But mostly I didn't see it that way because I have a real problem with Buffy's behaviour. Also with the writers giving Buffy these specific behaviours, and never calling Buffy out on them. It's like they didn't notice they'd written her into a physically abusive domestic violence situation, with her as the abuser.

Actually it's more of a mutual abuse thing.

... it's a problem.

What I heard in Rest in Peace and what I see in Spike's behaviour is his refusal to be treated as a thing. What he valued most, what he thanked her for at the end of season 5 when he promised to die to protect what she loved most, she treated him like a man. That was how he saw it then. But since she came back she's been treating him different. It seemed like letting him in, to tell him things she wouldn't tell her friends, but the song is the hidden stuff so it's the side of Spike as reckons 'whisper in a dead man's ear doesn't make it real', that she's treating him as a dead thing and only talking to him because he doesn't count. The song is asking her to stop. He doesn't want to play. He's objecting to some actually objectionable behaviour. That's what I heard. But I can hear the other thing too. She's got every right to draw boundaries where she wants them. He has no right to tell her to die because she won't let him in. Even if she does tend to remark often that she should kill him or at least let him die.

They're both screwed up, and in similar ways at the moment. She treats him very poorly, and he treats her badly too.


In Smashed he trots out the old abuser line about how she doesn't really have anyone else, there's only him. But she turns it around right back at him. And what with one thing and another, the whole demon world wanting to kill him for instance, and the human world being entirely willing to hit him, she's more right than him. Spike's stuck, and nobody's treating him particularly well. When he's a dick it's because he's a vampire. What is Buffy's excuse?

He finds out he can hit her because he hits back. She hits him because of her own feelings. It's fucked up.


And okay, you can write that story, even about one of our few heroines. That could be interesting. ... if it faced it square on.


Even all the 'stop' 'make me' exchanges that end so very poorly are... if the writers meant to demonstrate that Spike's a bastard then it's really awkward that they had Buffy act consistently in saying stop and meaning pounce. She pounces him a lot. Basically those two needed a safeword, and much could have been avoided if they'd had one.

... would Spike have respected that? Seems unlikely. Also Buffy wouldn't have only used it in a different way than 'stop' because she's not wanting to admit she wants things.

Messed up.



Why is this the story that needed telling?

Spike is hot and them bringing the house down is spectacular and really, why did they have such a strong woman and make her sex life about being knocked around?



Up through the end of Tabula Rasa there's no 'came back wrong' angle to Spike's desire for Buffy, and he seems more respectful of her. After that they turned it around so he tells her she's wrong, dark, nobody else would want her. And that's when Buffy climbs him?

Why?

Why is that angle the one they want to tell?



And she tells Spike such things about him, all with the disgust and evil thing etc. It's the dead opposite of treating him like a man. So when this is the moment she wants him, him thinking it's her having a thing for vampires seems reasonable.



It's creepy and nasty and I guess one of the available interesting stories, but with Willow and Buffy both, the story takes the two strongest women and then makes them into abusers and drags them through hating themselves. And I have trouble now seeing that and not seeing it as political. And it's nothing we dreamt of seeing, nothing we'd want for our heroines.





Spike's trajectory is interesting because he starts out wanting the dark and nasty, then we see him think the chip isn't working and have to actually psych himself up and talk himself into trying to be evil, like it isn't working for him as an idea even before he finds the chip is still there. And then he does go to demonstrate his new freedom and Buffy's changed status, but Buffy hits him first, he doesn't, like, ambush her, and he never that we see tries to bite her. By Spike's standards this is playing around. His standards are fucked, but they're actually improving. But then it's Buffy who makes it sex. And still calls him an evil thing.

And that's kind of messed up on a lot of different levels.



It's a complex story exploring the down side of violent power, in some ways, it's just... really? This, now?




I like that Buffy has to deal with depression and making stupid decisions to chase feeling anything. That's interesting and feels real. I mean, her life has sucked, depression fits.

I don't like that she is evil to Spike in the process. I mean, he seems an enthusiastic participant and is giving the exact same garbage back to her, but it's wrong. Why was this the story they felt the need to tell?


But they do tell it interesting.




Willow's story though, they screw that up in Wrecked. They present her with a different problem than the one she actually has. It's unsatisfying narratively and annoying on many levels.

Because the next thing they have her do is give up magic, entirely. If they parallel it to sex instead of drugs, which so far they have on several levels, then are they really advocating celibacy as a fix? Because it seems like the actual answer would involve getting back in balance with yourself and stopping using other people to fix your own bad feelings, starting to only use the magic/sex to connect to people as equals again. Like if it was a food related disorder, or I guess like Dawn's stealing things can't get replaced with just not having new things. They have to take their proper place in their lives and stop being used wrong, is all.

Replacing the metaphor with the substance abuse imagery? That's the wrong problem again, and only presents the answer that we pretty much know they're not going to stick with because Willow magic is the big gun.

But I guess actual discussion of the ethical use of power would be too useful and not dramatic enough. :eyeroll:



It's also bothered me that they connect magic to darkness textually again. Like Anya's joke about decoupage is about calling on the forces of darkness, and witches can find Rack because of darkness same like vampires and in contrast to the Slayer. Slayer power isn't dark?? It doesn't track, and it's rude to actual magic using religious people, like the Wicca group they had around just long enough to mock. Willow... [mum phoned and I lost the thread... um, probably I was going to say...] Willow reaches for darker whenever she wants more power. Dark side complete with force lightning. But some episodes it seems like the show believes that's what magic is, which, you know, not cool.

So Willow's problem up to the end of Smashed is that she thinks darker is more powerful, consistently since she was sneaking Giles' books back in high school, she wants the things hidden from her and ploughs straight through the safety warnings and assumes they're about power not just risk or, you know, evil. And when she's up in the Bronze looking down sighing because she's done pretty much all the magic she knows and she feels like there should be something bigger... that's not a moment where she's stopped and wondered what magic is for. If she's tried everything, she's tried it because it's there, not because need. And these are really reasonable problems for someone to have, they get some knowledge and some power and they do things because it's possible without thinking through if it's necessary or remotely ethical. Same thing could be with chemistry and kabooms, or physics, or politics. She can push the world around, so she does.

Then suddenly in Wrecked the magic is the boss of her, she's out of control, and that's the problem she'll admit and address.

Not the right problem, very frustrate.



But hey, whole rest of season to go. Some fixings eventually ish. Shall see.