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Bargaining, Part Two (Ep. 6.2)"From Beyond" We join Buffy's resurrection in progress. Motorcycles circle the damaged Buffybot. "I'm... dangerously close to... system failure," it squeaks. The Hell's Angels demons laugh, snaring the robot with chains, jerking it off its feet. Poor thing. The spellcasting conspirators push deeper into the woods to escape from the bike-riding ruffians. The group decides to split up to offer a less attractive target, Xander carrying the unconscious Willow in one direction while Tara and Anya head toward town. Near Buffy's grave, the demons continue to abuse the poor robot, kicking it and laughing. Six feet underground.... Buffy's face is contorted with blind panic. She knows all too well where she is. In her coffin, buried alive. She tries to breathe, scream, but the stale, poisoned air trapped in the box isn't enough. The only sound to emerge is a dry rasp. Her hands pound helplessly on the sides of the coffin. Having watched my share of Italian horror movies and read Poe's story "Premature Burial" in junior high I was still horrified by this scene... it was even worse when I realized that in reality, all of this would have happened in total darkness. Shudder. Buffy claws at the silk, desperate, tearing the fabric away, trying to get at the casket lid. She has little leverage in the confined space. She claws with her hands, her strength finally splintering the wood. Dirt pours in on top of her. She pushes forward into the ragged hole, up into the soil, and begins to dig herself out. Buffy's gruesome efforts to escape from her grave are intercut with the Scooby gang's efforts to escape from the biker demons. Forgive me if I find it hard to care about them at this point. There are moments, though - Willow's realization that Buffy is gone for good is heartwrenching (or rather would be if I wasn't already so creeped out by the horrific experience she's thoughtlessly putting her best friend through), and I was touched by Anya's panicked tears over the missing Xander and Tara's attempt to comfort her. Meanwhile, the biker demons rampage around town, smashing things, roaring their engines loudly, setting fires, and generally making the place look like the setting of a heavy metal music video. Outside Casa de Summers, the demons are tearing up and down the street, attacking houses at random. Inside, Spike rummages through Buffy's weapons chest, finding little of use to help them with a seige (I guess every Scooby must have picked out a souvenir weapon after Buffy died). Dawn watches the rampage through the window, in direct opposition of what she's been instructed to do by her vamp babysitter. "Here! Want me to bloody thump you?" he says crossly when he sees her lingering near the glass, and jerks her roughly away. He explains what the demons are - whoa, they really are called "Hellions." Not just a cool name for their biker gang. "They raid towns. Use 'em up, burn 'em down... anyplace they think is vulnerable." With this, both realize that the demon underworld knows that Buffy is gone. Spike reassures a scared Dawn that he won't let anything happen to her, and together they wisely abandon the house to try to contact the others.
Buffy's hand finally bursts from the ground. Gasping for air, she drags herself from her grave in a reinactment of every vampire rising we've seen in the show since it began, and lays there for a moment, staring wildly around her in sheer terror. She gets to her feet, sees her own gravestone, and reads the inscription, eyes wide. Disoriented, the newly resurrected Buffy totters down a main street, ghostlike with her graveclothes and wild hair. She's dressed in a black, below-the-knee dress with a cinch belt and heels - mourning clothes, possibly the outfit she wore to her mother's funeral. Her hair is long and brown, her natural color - a reminder that her body is new, remade by the spell. There's wreckage everywhere. Fires are burning. She stares around her as if she recognizes nothing. Everything she encounters seems to react violently to her presence. She leans tiredly against a car and the alarms siren wildly. "Get off my property!" screams a hysterical homeowner, brandishing a shotgun. Wordless, Buffy stumbles away into the darkness. Across town, Spike and Dawn are still trying to get out of the neighborhood. Hidden in the shadows, they watch the Hellions smashing up a house across the way. Spike gets a wistful look. "Looks like fun," he says with a little smile. Dawn looks disturbed, but the moment passes - he shakes off his nostalgia for pointless violence and engages in a little directed violence instead, divesting one of the demons from his motorcycle with a flying kick. "Let's fly, Pidge!" he calls from astride his new acquisition. Buckling a neighbor's football helmet onto her head, Dawn climbs onto the bike behind him and they roar off, presumably to find the Scoobies. (Well, now we know where that shot in the new opening credits came from.) At the Magic Box, the conspirators have regrouped. Realizing that with the failure of the spell (as far as they know) Buffy will not show up to save them, they screw up their courage to go back out and try to do whatever they can to get rid of the demons. "Maybe they'll party themselves out, tire of this place and move on," Xander says hopefully. Fat chance. "Say hello to your new home, boys!" whoops the demon gangleader. His minions cheer and rev their engines.
Drawn by the light of a bonfire, Buffy the ex-corpse wanders onto the demons' gathering as they ready to "christen" Sunnydale as their new hangout. Through the haze and smoke, Buffy spots the robot, looking much the worse for wear, standing in the middle of the gathered demons, chains wrapped around its limbs. Buffy is then treated to the horrific sight of the Hellions drawing and quartering the hapless machine - she locks eyes with it just before its pieces fly in four directions and the dismembered torso lands on the pavement with a bounce. Buffy lets out a shrill scream, and the Hellions turn toward her. "Another one... Tear it up!" their leader orders. The demons give chase, driving the fleeing Buffy straight into the approaching Scooby gang. Unrecognizing, her friends immediately assume that the wild-eyed creature crouching before them is the Buffybot. Xander snorts in disgust that she is "no doubt here to lead the Wild Bunch right to us again," but Willow realizes the truth. "Buffy?" she whispers. Buffy turns and runs. The group gives chase, and find her at the end of an alley, cowering near a wall. She shrinks away from them, flinching at the sound of their voices. As they take in Buffy's disheveled state, her bloody hands, Xander realizes what they've done. "How could we... so STUPID!" he says, his face contorting with horror. (It's not often we get to see Nicholas Brendon really shine like this - it's a powerful, awful moment.) He approaches her gingerly. "We're sorry," he tells her. "We didn't know." At this moment, we see their faces from Buffy's point of view - dark and distorted as if through night-vision goggles, their voices muffled as if coming from deep underwater. "We brought you back. You're home now," Xander says. But home is also where the demons are. Razor and his Hellions have them cornered in the alley. A tense standoff follows. Willow shows off a burst of magic to let them know what they're dealing with. Xander does his best to bluster through, hefting an axe and staring Razor down. "I happen to be a pretty powerful man-witch myself," he boasts. Anya backs him up with "And we have a Slayer here who might actually be looking to eat some brains." Were not the situation so messed up, this would be a really funny line. Okay, it's still funny, especially in light of Anya's proclamation from the previous part, that zombies "don't actually eat brains unless instructed to by their zombie master. At lot of people get that wrong." Razor isn't buying it. "We don't want trouble. And you don't want trouble," Willow says, hoping to end the standoff peacefully. "We're demons. We're really all about trouble," Razor growls, and goes on to express the Hellions' horrible intentions re: the Scoobies in graphic terms: "We're just gonna hold you down, enjoy ourselves for a few hours. You might even live through it, 'cept that certain of my boys got some anatomical incompatibilities that tend to tear up little girls." Eww. Like this line shows, the level of violence in this episode is shocking, downright sickening in spots. The demons's language and actions are coarser and more to-the-point gross than anything to previously appear on BtVS - "You got a bug up your crack... shut your hole before I rip you a new one," etc. Granted, since we're into the second hour of the show it is at least after nine o'clock, but... ugh. Well, let's assume the overt brutality is there for a reason. As the first thing a newly resurrected Buffy has to face, the Hellions would presumably be the sort of thing you'd see a lot of in a hell dimension, right? Which is where Buffy just came from....right? Exhausted by the resurrection spell, Willow is unable to muster up enough power to handle the Hellions. Xander is easily brushed aside. (You'd think as often as fighting demons comes up in his life Xander would have taken at least a couple of self-defense classes by now.) Buffy steps forward, and the grinning Razor backhands her. She takes the blow, then turns to look him, eyes dark, blood running from her lip. There seems to be a flicker of recognition inside her. Razor rushes her, and she drops him with a couple of simple moves. The demons stare at her, stunned, then launch themselves at her in a group. Buffy takes them all on, fighting hard. Rallied by Buffy's example, the Scoobies rush into battle beside her, swinging their weapons, and soon make short work of the demon gang. The battle over, her friends turn to her excitedly. "You're back, Buff. You really are," Xander beams. Buffy backs away, then runs. The confused Scoobies hang back, troubled, no longer sure if they should follow. The scene cuts from the sight of a living Buffy to a dying one - Spike and Dawn run across the wreckage of the Buffybot. The limbless torso still recognizes Dawn, and speaks to her lovingly, wondering aloud, "Where did I go? I was here. But then I ran away. Not me. The other Buffy. Maybe..." It freezes, dead. Alarmed and hopeful, Dawn promptly dashes off to search for this "other Buffy." Lost in thought looking at the broken robot, Spike doesn't hear her leave, and panics to find her gone, screaming her name into the empty streets. Dawn either doesn't hear or doesn't care. Following the trail of Hellion bodies, Dawn soon locates her sister atop Glory's steel tower, standing on the edge of the platform she'd dived from, looking down at the concrete far below. This scene, overlaid with Buffy's memories of her death from "The Gift," parallels the final events of that episode. It's spookily clear that Buffy, standing on the edge of the precipice, is tempted to repeat her previous action and jump. Dawn has to talk her sister down, as if she were a cop confronted with a potential suicide. Buffy turns to her. "Is this... hell?" she asks. With this awful question, we're reminded again of the finality of Buffy's sacrifice. She died to save her sister and the world; a hero's death. Her return, via the spell, has been a nonstop nightmare - hardly the sort of reward you'd expect. "It was so clear here. On this spot," Buffy whispers. "I remember how shiny and clear everything was." She stares longingly at the ground. Dawn pleads with her sister, offering a heartrending reprise on Buffy's own speech from "The Gift." "Stay with me, please. I need you to live. Live. For..." But before she can finish the rest of the line, the tower groans and threatens to collapse. Physical danger to Dawn finally snaps Buffy out of her daze, and she grabs a swinging cable to get them to the ground as the steel tower crumbles and falls. On the ground, Dawn hugs her sister, tears in her eyes. "You're really here," she sobs. "You're alive and you're home." Buffy's face is visible over Dawn's shoulder, her expression a troubled blank. Buffy is now back. But with nothing but horrific experiences to greet her re-entry to the living world, she doesn't look too happy about it. What's the full story? For that, we have to wait until next episode....
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