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Afterlife (Ep. 6.3)"Spirit in the Sky" Last week, Buffy came back from the dead in a big two-parter. However, the end of those two hours left us with only the image of a newly alive Buffy. "Afterlife" shows what came next, and thankfully, finally delivers the emotional gut punches missing from the earlier episodes. Having spent the summer trying to deal - or not deal - with Buffy being gone, what's the gang's reaction at last to having her back? And what's her reaction to being back? . . . Willow, Xander, Anya, and Tara stride purposefully through Sunnydale streets as the Hellions motor out of town, in search of the missing Buffy, last seen running from them in a confused panic. This is a straight continuation from the point where "Bargaining Part Two" left off ("Afterlife" is essentially Part Three of the trilogy on Buffy's resurrection). "I think we screwed it up," Anya complains as they walk. "I think she's broken." Willow is distraught at this thought. "No! She's not broken! She's just disoriented from being tormented in some kind of hell dimension... we don't even know how much time passed there for her, possibly years. That's not something you get over..." she trails off, beginning to realize. "What if she never gets over it?" she panics. Anya has the logical reaction: "And you think of this now?" Tara fills in the rest of Willow's unspoken thought - that Buffy might actually be dangerous. These are exactly the kind of fears they'd done their best to skip over before casting the spell. From this intro, we now know that the rest of the episode will be concerned with the effects of their willful ignorance on Buffy... and we're not disappointed. Across town from the worried Scoobies, Dawn has escorted her sister home. Buffy's face is an expressionless blank; she stares around mutely at the changes in their house, things moved to different locations, evidence of Willow and Tara's residence. She lets Dawn redress and wash her without comment, staring at her own face in the mirror, getting up to restlessly wander from room to room. "Buffy? You wanna, like, stop?" a distressed Dawn pleads as she trails in her wake. The entreaty doesn't help - Buffy is clearly out of it. She struggles to pay attention to Dawn's summary of events (Giles leaving, etc.) but can't manage to focus. This changes at the sound of a door slamming downstairs; Buffy promptly comes to full, nervous alert. "It's just Spike," Dawn reassures her. Tense with expectation, Dawn descends the stairs as Spike slams the door behind him and starts to rant at her, more or less relieved that she's safe. "You scared me half to death. Or, more to death. I could kill you. I mean it. Could rip your head off one-handed and drink from your brain stem." As in the previous two episodes, Spike's violent language is a reminder that his new role as Dawn's caretaker goes deeply against his nature - as a vampire, he's meant to be feeding off of teenage girls, not looking after them. But at the same time, his "you scared me half to death" line reconfims that the promise he made to a dead woman, "to protect her," is still the most important force driving him. He's put Dawn's welfare ahead of every impulse he has. "Look," Dawn says, stepping aside a little so he can see Buffy descending the staircase behind her. Like the Scoobies, Spike also assumes it's the robot at first, but barely gets the thought out before realization sinks in. He simply stares, stunned. Dawn tries to explain, "she's been through a lot, with the... death"; he barely seems to hear her. After a long pause, he finds his voice. "What did you do?" he whispers to Dawn - a not unreasonable assumption considering her attempt to resurrect her mother. Dawn protests that she didn't do anything. Spike continues staring at Buffy, as if seeing a ghost. In this one scene, all the emotional force so sorely missing from "Bargaining" is poured into the expression on Spike's face. His shock and awe at the sight of her is so powerful that everything stills around it; so intense, in fact, that Buffy shows her first real reaction in response to it - she becomes suddenly self-conscious, hastily buttoning up her shirt and nervously clutching the fabric together over her breasts. The motion has the effect of drawing his attention to her bloodied hands. As a vampire, Spike instantly realizes what the injuries mean, and quietly voices the thought aloud for Dawn's benefit: "Clawed her way out of a coffin... Isn't that right?" he asks. Buffy confirms this and looks away, unable to meet his eyes. "Done it myself," he tells her, and there's another long pause while he simply takes in her presence, face alight with wonder. In sharp contrast to his earlier harsh words to Dawn, Spike's treatment of Buffy from the moment he realizes that it's really her, alive, is amazingly gentle. "We'll take care of you," he says softly as he guides her into the living room, sending Dawn to fetch bandages for her hands. Buffy, for her part, allows herself to be led, and they take seats opposite from each other. He takes her hands in his, lifting them slightly in an almost courtly gesture, as if he were about to lead her in the Virginia Reel. These are Victorian mannerisms; quiet, patient respect for the lady; the sort of thing we saw him display in "Fool for Love." But more than just glimmers of the human he once was, we also get the depth of his grief. When she asks how long she was gone, he answers with an exact count - "147 days yesterday, 148 today... except today doesn't count, does it?" He looks back down at her hands, and asks her, "How long was it for you, where you were?" Buffy's expression is haunted. "Longer," she whispers. This quiet moment is promptly wrecked by the appearance of the gang, who burst through the door in riot of noise. "Is she here? She's here. You're here. We didn't know where you were. You ran away!" Buffy's friends crowd around her, their voices overlapping in an excited babble. Buffy visibly flinches away from them, unable to cope with their questions. An upset Dawn yells at the assembled group to back off while Spike retreats, unnoticed, disappearing out the front door. Dawn quickly gets the picture who is responsible for Buffy's return, and asks for an explanation, getting the distinctly non-detailed, "a spell - we did a spell," from Willow. Dawn is understandably freaked, no doubt with visions of her monkey's-paw attempt at resurrecting Joyce whirling thorugh her mind. "I'm okay," Buffy suddenly pipes up. All turn to look at her. "I'm gonna be fine," she says. Her eyes lift nervously to look at her friends, looming over her as she sits on the couch looking very small and scared. "I remember. You brought me back," she tells them. Anya tries asking her what it was like, but at Buffy's obvious distress the gang hastens to reassure her that she doesn't need to talk about it. The gang's reactions are, if anything, even more confused and conflicted here than in "Bargaining." Their guilty horror at Buffy's crawl out of her grave has given way to nervous smoothing-over gestures. As if determined to make up for their previous lack of after-spell planning, the gang spastically begin making suggestions about ordering pizza, and asking Buffy if there's anything she wants. Buffy's response is an uncomfortable comment that she's tired; she wants to go to bed. "Yeah. Long day," Willow agrees. "But, Buffy... be happy. We got you out. We really did it." She smiles, pleased and proud. Willow's post-spell behaviour is perhaps the strangest of all the group. As she and Tara prepare for bed (their everyday routine of pjs and applying lotions seeming weirdly out of synch with the strange evening events) Willow comments about how "intense" the spell was ("that's gotta change you," she says - gee, y'think?), then confesses her dismay over Buffy's strange non-reaction. "If things did go right, wouldn't you think she'd be happier? Like, wouldn't you think she would be happy that we brought her out?" She'd expected Buffy to be "grateful" and wonders aloud if that makes her a "terrible person." "Terrible person" or not, it's hard not to remember Willow's strange, self-centered behaviour in "Tough Love" here. In that episode, Willow had confessed to feeling left out and jealous of the new connection between Tara and Buffy, forged by their shared experience, a mother's death. She was simply unable to relate to what Buffy was going through until she experienced a personal loss herself. Additionally, Willow's reactions to grief have consistently been to "correct" the situation somehow - Tara being brainsucked by Glory provoked a hell-for-black-magic retaliation; Dawn's grief over Joyce's death prompted her to point out the magic book containing the resurrection spell; her anger and pain over Oz's betrayal with Veruca and her later grief over his leaving had her turning to spells both times; even as far back as Season 2, Buffy's pain over Angel's soul loss was the catalyst for Willow's first foray into heavy magic. In the long run, Willow has not turned out to be a consider-the-consequences girl, and in nearly every case, it's been Buffy that's paid for it. Buffy is clearly paying for Willow's lack of foresight now. All through "Afterlife," we see her constantly trying to orient herself, and failing. "What else is different?" she asks Dawn early in the episode. She is skittish, sensitive, startling at every noise, wincing from bright lights. She seems to barely recognize herself, her own body, staring at the mirror as if looking at a stranger. Even her friends appear menacing to her, oppressive. In a creepy vignette in her bedroom, Buffy sees photos of her friends morph into skeletal death's heads. Like her strange, filtered vision in the previous episode, the changing photos illustrate Buffy's new perspective. Her sudden re-entrance into a living world that has clearly gone on without her has left Buffy feeling hopelessly disconnected and lost. But it's worth pointing out here that, just as she and Tara suddenly had something in common when her mother died, Buffy now shares a point of reference with Spike. Her friends may be ill-equipped to understand her current trauma, but with his quiet reminder that he, too, intimately knows the terror of waking in a dark box and desperately clawing for escape, lets Buffy know that he, at least, understands. Spike understands a lot this episode - hard realizations all. Outside the house after the gang leaves Buffy to her rest, Xander and Anya catch sight of him on the Summers front lawn, half concealed in the shade of his traditional lurking tree, wiping tears from his face. Xander apparently decides that a little macho bluster is called for, and insensitively blurts, "I hope you're not going to start your little obsession now that she's around again." He's promptly grabbed by the lapels and slammed up against the tree. "You brought her back and you didn't tell me," Spike grinds out in an anguished voice. Xander has no real reason to give him. "Well, now you know" is his off-the-cuff response. "I worked beside you. All summer!" Spike insists, still unable to wrap his mind around this turn of events. Xander gathers his wits and offers this incredibly lame response: "We didn't tell you. It was just... We didn't, okay?" The two men lock eyes, and what's not being said comes into focus. They are not friends. The summer has changed nothing. Spike may have worked with them, but he's not one of them. He never was. Spike pulls back, letting Xander go with a bitter look, and says that he's "figured it out." Willow, he says, knew that there was a chance things could go wrong. "So wrong that... she would have to get rid of what came back. And I wouldn't let her. If any part of that was Buffy, I wouldn't let her. And that's why she shut me out." Xander himself had brought up exactly this point, in fact, asking what they would do if Buffy "tries to eat our brains." Willow convinced him that nothing of the sort would happen, but it's worth wondering if Spike is right. And for that matter, what would Xander have done if faced with a damaged Buffy, a brain-eating zombie or some variation thereof? Xander refuses to believe it. "You're just covering. Don't tell me you're not happy," he scoffs. "Look me in the eyes, and tell me when you saw Buffy alive, that wasn't the happiest moment of your entire existence." Spike gives him a contemptuous look, and Xander really deserves it here. He couldn't have said a more wrong thing, especially in light of Spike's firsthand knowledge of the horrible experience the gang has just put Buffy through. Likewise, it's one thing if their shutout was the result of simply not caring, but Xander's words here are deeply personal. While recognizing that Buffy's resurrection is cause for "the happiest moment in your entire existence," Xander's first priority is to drive home the fact that Spike has no right to that feeling - "I hope you're not going to start your little obsession again" - and emphasize how much he's not a part of their group, summer assistance be damned. So much for the "we few, we happy few" that fought Glory. With a final, disgusted glare, Spike stalks off, firing up his newly acquired motorcycle and roaring off with the parting remark that magic always has consequences. "Always!" he shouts. The consequences for this bit of magic don't take long in making themselves known. That night, a loud crash suddenly wakes Willow and Tara, who sit up to see Buffy standing by the door. "Do you know what you did?" she shouts, her voice rough with anger. She screams that their "hands smell of death," calls them "filthy bitches rattling the bones," and unmistakably refers to the deer Willow killed for the spell. "Did you cut a throat? Did you pat its head?" "You were stained." Buffy accuses. "You still are!" Willow snaps on the light, and room is empty but for the two of them. Of course, it's Willow's spell that's to blame for this manifestation, and others to come - first, Anya is possessed, a milky-eyed apparition wielding a butcher knife. Later, Dawn falls prey as well, breathing fire and shreiking at the group, "Do you think the blood wouldn't reach you? I can smell the death on you. Look at what you've done!" The spell seems to have brought its own guilt complex with it. At least one person seems to realize this is not unjustified. "We shouldn't've brought Buffy back. I knew it was going to end badly," Anya shrugs, the voice of after-the-fact rationality, adding, "I should've said something." While the gang tries to research the hauntings, Buffy listelessly decides to "go patrol." She walks through the cemetery as if in a daze, and ends up at Spike's crypt, interrupting the vampire in the midst of his own emotional crisis. In the tunnel underneath beneath the crypt, Spike paces like a caged tiger, takes out his aggression on the stone wall, and breaks into hysterical laughter at the sight of his own blood. A sound from upstairs prompts him to investigate, and he finds Buffy standing in the darkened space. She notices his injured hand. He looks at it, and makes a surprised sound. "Same with you," he gestures. She looks at her own hands. There's a moment of silence. At first, Spike tries for small talk, mentioning his renovations to the place ("you should see the downstairs... quite posh"), but when she simply sits, staring soberly at him, he sits down across from her and begins to explain himself, letting out all his feelings of guilt over her death. He tells her that he hasn't forgotten the promise he'd made, "to protect her." "If I had done that... even if I didn't make it... you wouldn't have had to jump," he confesses, then adds the heartwrenching coda: "But I want you to know I did save you. Not when it counted, of course, but... after that. Every night after that." He stares off into the distance, almost as if talking to himself. "Every night I save you," he says softly. Throughout this speech, Buffy is silent, simply witnessing his confession. The hauntings are finally identified as a side-effect of the spell - a demon created as a sort of cosmic swap for Buffy. Thankfully, it will eventually return to nothingness... unless Buffy were to die again. Unfortunately, the demon possesses Xander in time to hear this information, and speeds off to see to it. Back in her bedroom, Buffy is forced to fight the ghostly creature as it taunts her with her status as an unnatural, reanimated thing. "You're the one who's barely here," the demon whispers. "Set on this earth like a bubble. You won't even disturb the air when you go." The Scoobies manage to help her just in time, with a spell to make the demon solid enough for Buffy to kill with an axe. Interestingly, Willow and Tara start out chanting the spell together, but Willow pulls away from her lover to finish it, her eyes glowing black as she says the final word. Willow's power, once strengthened by her connection to Tara, has become something beyond, something dark she cannot share. Buffy too, has something dark she cannot share with everyone. She spends the next day reassuring Dawn and the gang that everything is indeed okay, and that she's grateful for all they've done. "I was in hell," she tells them the group gathered at the Magic Box. "It felt like the world abandoned me there. And then suddenly... you guys did what you did... You guys gave me the world. I can't tell you what it means to me." Her contrite thanks have the desired effect - the gang rush to hug her and show their obvious relief. But moments later, in the alley outside the Magic Box, Buffy pours out a confession to Spike that explains her real feelings, not the ones her friends want to see. She tells him that she was happy where she was. That she felt loved and at peace, her fights at an end at last. "I think I was in heaven," she explains. "And now I'm not." Thanks to her friends. "Everything here is hard, and bright, and violent... This is hell," she elaborates, and then, suddenly realizing she's said too much, leaves him behind with the command, "They can never know. Never." That Buffy confesses this awful secret, her loss of heaven, to Spike of all people, once again confirms her distance from her friends. Although she can't bear to hurt them - thus her "they can never know" ultimatum - her only option not to do so is outright lies. The gang's comforting talk about how "wonderful" it is to have her back only points up how heavy their expectations of her really are. ("It was bad when you were gone. But it'll be better now," as Dawn says.) They need Buffy to not only be there, but be the strong hero and friend they remember; the one they haven't been able to do without. And Buffy realizes this pressure almost immediately, quickly putting on the appearance of normalcy, dismissing all questions about her welfare. ("I'm going to start charging money for every person that asks me that," she'd told Dawn when asked again if she was "okay.") Her numb, blank reactions to her friends and Dawn are now understandable - she is shutting down, trying to close off her pain and resentment. But by doing this, she is also isolating herself, leaving her with only one person who she can relate to or confide in. Her former enemy, as the only one of her present circle not to blame for her resurrection or further burdening her with anxious pleas to "see her happy," has become her confidant by default. What's more, as Xander's off-putting dismissal made clear, Spike is also isolated at this point. Although he spent the summer gamely helping the Scoobies fight vamps and monsters and look after Dawn, Buffy's resurrection seems to have led to his summary ejection from their ranks. While Buffy was gone, he was a necessary evil. Now he's no longer required. His presence loitering outside the Magic Box is a poignant, subtle illustration of this - "I was gonna go inside," he tells Buffy, but hesitated to enter when he overheard their "special moment." "I came over a bit queasy," he shrugs, offhand, but the fact remains that during the summer, he would have been a part of that group, included. Now he's not. But perhaps because of that, and his status as a fellow traveler from beyond the grave, he's also become the only person with whom Buffy seems to feel comfortable. Be interesting to see where this will lead, won't it?
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