May
24, 2002, 8:45 a.m. Buffy’s
War
Good and Evil
101.
By Thomas S.
Hibbs
t
one point, in this season's final episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
the good girl gone bad, Willow, mocks one of the friends who's striving
to save her from herself: "Willow doesn't live here anymore."
It was one of the best and most chilling moments of the two-hour finale,
a moment that underscored the central and consistent teaching about evil
in this surprisingly successful series about a teenage, valley-girl cheerleader
turned vampire slayer. In the culminating episodes of this season —
a season that repeated last season's uneven plotting — Buffy returned
to the dramatic depiction of the metaphysics of good and evil, a metaphysics
that reflects classical accounts of evil as vacuous, as a deprivation
of goodness.
The show is in many
ways different from what it was in its early years. For one thing, it
used to be much more funny. In the initial, high-school years, verbal
repartee between the characters captured the caustic side of adolescent
humor in ways that a teen show like Dawson's Creek — with
teen characters speaking in complete paragraphs and sounding as if their
young bodies had been invaded by thirty-somethings just emerging from
years of therapy — never could. In an early episode, Buffy is taken
aback by her attraction to Angel, a vampire, cursed by the return of his
soul, and now a would-be assistant of Buffy. She informs him that it's
not good form for a vampire slayer to be seen with a vampire. Then she
adds bluntly, "Or do you find that offensive? Do you prefer 'undead
American'?"
But, graduation from
high school and Angel's departure (to star in his own spin-off series,
of course) signaled a shift away from humor and toward greater analysis
of human relationships, even if the characters have never become as self-involved
as the Creek kids. Last season's finale featured Buffy sacrificing
her own life to save her sister, Dawn, and the cosmos from the reign of
evil. This season opened with Willow — Buffy's brainy high-school
buddy, now accomplished witch — finding a magical, slayer exception
to the unyielding law of death and bringing Buffy back. With her friends
a little miffed at her lack of joy at being returned to the living, Buffy
manages to thank them for saving her from what she describes as hell.
Unable to tell her friends the truth, she confides to her longstanding
nemesis Spike that death was in fact heavenly bliss, compared to which
this world is hell. (The darkest story line of this season has been the
sadomasochistic sexual relationship (in the family-viewing hour of 8 PM!)
between a demoralized Buffy and Spike, from which Buffy seemingly emerged
in the last episodes.)
Indeed, in the past
two seasons, male characters, particularly noble male characters, have
been pushed to the margins, while female characters — especially
the lesbian relationship between Willow and her Wiccan lover, Tara —
have taken certain stage. Buffy seems unable to find any man who can replace
Angel; even the older Giles, her virtuous watcher (the one assigned to
train and advise the slayer), left the country to return to his homeland
of England. That left two male characters: Xander, whose life peaked in
high school as Buffy's wisecracking sidekick, and Spike.
Previous seasons
have often been unified around the presence of a powerful demon whom Buffy
must defeat. This year seemed to lack that persona, until Willow's dark
side began to take over. For a number of years now, Willow has been a
devotee of the arts of magic, at first using them only for good but increasingly
as a way of expressing her own power or even for revising recent history
and covering up her own vices. Her inability to exercise self-control
led to the breakup of her relationship with Tara.
When the head of
a trio of nerdy boys who covet the allure and power of magic tries to
kill Buffy and accidentally kills Tara, Willow is disconsolate and consumed
by a desire for vengeance. After an unsuccessful attempt to persuade the
dark forces to bring Tara back from the dead, she corners her assailant
and then kills him by skinning his entire body. She then heads off in
search of the other two plotters, whom Buffy and company are now committed
to protecting, not, Buffy is quick to add, so much for their own sake
as for Willow's. If she continues to kill, she will "cross a line"
from which it will be nearly impossible to return.
Buffy proves no match
for the scorned Willow. The only hope appears to be the return of Giles
who is fortified with mystical powers of his own. When he is unable to
restrain Willow, she drains him of his powers and leaves him for dead.
But Giles's powers come from a different source — the true essence
of magic, Giles calls them — and they afflict Willow by making her
feel pain and emotion. To rid herself of pain, Willow sets out to destroy
the world. When the suddenly brave Xander confronts her, admitting that
he cannot stop her but wants only to be with his childhood friend as she
puts an end to human history, she scoffs and begins to torture him. Eventually,
Xander's professions of friendship and love for Willow break her down
and she relents. A suddenly recovered Giles explains that the infusion
of good magic into Willow enabled Xander to tap into the "spark of
humanity she had left."
The ending —
with Xander's defeat of bad Willow and Buffy's subsequent protestations
that she now wants to live on earth, to see her friends happy — seemed
a bit contrived. Indeed, the dialogue at times seemed to reduce the difference
between good and evil to a sappy distinction between those who feel and
those who don't. But, in a show that has always stressed the inevitable
and dire consequences of decisions and actions, we can be sure that earth
will remain closer to hell than to heaven and that Willow will suffer
the consequences of her immersion in dark arts.
And Buffy's renewed
sense of purpose, rooted in her newfound love for her sister and friends,
is a counterpoint to the metaphysics of evil. By contrast to goodness
and in parasitic dependence on it, evil involves isolation from the rest
of humanity, a closing off of the possibility of love, friendship, and
communication; it is a will to raw, unconstrained power, a nihilistic
drive to destroy all that is, including oneself.
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t
one point, in this season's final episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
the good girl gone bad, Willow, mocks one of the friends who's striving
to save her from herself: "Willow doesn't live here anymore."
It was one of the best and most chilling moments of the two-hour finale,
a moment that underscored the central and consistent teaching about evil
in this surprisingly successful series about a teenage, valley-girl cheerleader
turned vampire slayer. In the culminating episodes of this season —
a season that repeated last season's uneven plotting — Buffy returned
to the dramatic depiction of the metaphysics of good and evil, a metaphysics
that reflects classical accounts of evil as vacuous, as a deprivation
of goodness.
