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Flooded (Ep. 6.4)"Mirror, Mirror" Last week, in "Afterlife," the newly risen Buffy told her friends that they'd rescued her from hell, and then confessed to her former enemy that she'd been pulled out of heaven. You might guess that this isn't a situation that's likely to lead to your typical adventures of BtVS, and you'd be right. The opening scene - where Buffy's trek through a dark basement turns out to be a quest for a leaky pipe rather than a slobbering monster - says it all. Supernatural menaces are the least of Buffy's worries now. "Flooded" intimately concerns itself with the real-world problems Buffy now has to face. Coming back to life isn't easy. . . . As of her resurrection, Buffy had been dead for approximately five months, during which time the gang rallied to take over her Slaying duties and look after Dawn, recruiting Spike to assist, even fixing the Buffybot to help maintain the illusion that all was normal. Everything seemed to be under control... except now that Buffy has returned, we're shown which problems they hadn't yet managed to solve. When the plumbing in the Summers house blows out, flooding the basement, they're forced to call in a plumber, which triggers a financial crisis. "But I haven't spent any money," Buffy protests. "I was all dead and frugal." Willow and Tara explain - medical bills took up most of Joyce's insurance, and Anya points out that the house itself is a financial drain. (California property tax is indeed a bitch.) Buffy is (at first) unconcerned, shrugging, "It's money... pieces of paper sent by bureaucrats that we've never even met," and that "it's not like it's the end of the world." Which, as she continues, "is too bad, because that, I'm really good at." As a mood lightener, this quip doesn't exactly go over with the gang, nor do any of Buffy's other attempts at gallows humor or her suggestion that they burn the house to the ground and collect the insurance. (Hey, I thought her "fire, pretty" gag was funny.) Anya chips in the suggestion that she "start charging" for slaying vampires. "You're providing a valuable service to the whole community. I say cash in!" she says brightly. No one laughs. An argument ensues about whether or not there's a precedent for charging money for saving people's lives. "Spider-Man does," Anya insists, and looks to Xander for backup. He lets her down. "Action is his reward," he mumbles, quoting the opening song of the Spider-Man cartoon. Anya storms from the room, feeling (justifiably, in my estimate) unfairly picked on. (I'd note that Buffy's forever-love, Angel, charges for saving lives... so if the gang is giving Anya crap about her idea because... um. Yeah, that's kinda weird. Inside joke?) Xander pursues her out to the sidewalk, and Anya reams him a new one about his general lack of support. She's beyond out of patience with his reluctance to announce their engagment. "It's painful and confusing!" she says. "First you, you give me this beautiful ring, and then I can't even wear it in public!" He tries to explain his point of view: that marriage is "kind of a forever deal," and that he wants "every step to be just right" because he loves her so much, blah, blah, blah. Anya melts at first, but soon snaps out of it and shoves him away, angrily accusing him of tricking her "with your fancy talk and... lips!" and of stalling - again. "When you gonna grow up, Xander?" she barks, and marches off. "Growing up" is meant to be the theme of this season, from all reports, and the introduction of this episode's villains confirms it. The trio of Warren, the Buffybot's builder; Jonathan, the "Superstar" spellcaster; and Andrew, the brother of that guy who trained those demon dogs to attack the school prom is now a combined force of nerdish menace. "You wanna team up and take over Sunnydale?" Warren asks his buddies during a laundry-room roleplaying game session as the group flashes back to their "origin" story. "Okay," his pals shrug. The nerds really are an interesting choice for villains, especially considering where the Scooby gang itself is right now in life. The nerds are group of twentysomething losers who quote too many movies and TV shows, from the looks of things, live in their parents' basements, just like Xander used to. Anya's "When you gonna grow up?" question to Xander himself throws this comparison into sharp relief. Last season, we saw the Xan-man painfully dragging himself into something resembling responsible adulthood, with a steady job, a new apartment, and by the end of the season, a fiancee. But he is still teetering on the brink of a grown-up life - he hasn't completely crossed over yet. "I'm still getting used to the miracle of a steady paycheck. And getting out of my parents' house. And this husband thing... it's a big step," he explains to Anya. The nerds, not having acheived even Xander's level of success (re: jobs and chicks) have decided to go a different route. "We're like supervillains," Jonathan intones, and the three laugh ominously. In the nerds' worldview, grown-up responsibilities are for suckers. Jonathan explains their philosophy later in the episode, noting that "life is like an interstellar journey. Some people go into hypersleep and travel at sublight speeds, only to get where they're going after years of struggle, toil and hard, hard work." Crime, as they see it, is a step around this scenario, an attempt to "blast through the space-time continuum in a wormhole." Their solution to the monetary shortfall that naturally arises from slackerdom is to summon a demon to help them rob a bank... unfortunately at the same time that Buffy shows up to try to wrangle a loan. Dressed in a modest blouse and skirt and armed with a can-do attitude, "loan-applier-for" Buffy discovers her history of generally ignoring authority figures hasn't exactly prepared her for dealing with beauracracy. The humorless loan officer ignores her reassurances about how responsible she is, and leafs through her inadequate paperwork, giving her the cold, hard reality of numbers. She can't get a loan. She has no collateral but her house, and confirms what I've long suspected, that Sunnydale property values aren't all that great. (One would imagine living at Monster Ground Zero just might affect home resales.) He also reminds her that she has "No income. No job." At this point, the demon appears, set on full rampage. "No job. I wish," Buffy grumbles. Buffy fights the demon and drives it off, then tries to make the best of the situation by following Anya's suggestion, trying to leverage her loan in return for demonic ass-whupping. It doesn't work. Frustrated, Buffy takes out her aggression on the punching bag in the Magic Box training room while Willow offers supportive chatter. As she watches her friend pummel the bag, Willow brightens to realize that Buffy is actually angry. Buffy claims "it'll pass," but Willow bizarrely tries to get her upset again, first by claiming she slept with Riley, then Angel. Buffy stares at her in utter puzzlement. Reconsidering, Willow tries to explain - "Since you've been back, you haven't exactly been big with the whole 'range of human emotions' thing" - but at Buffy's blank stare, she backpedals with "You know, this is really my problem... forget I even said anything." Buffy shrugs off the whole incident and returns to punching. Willow isn't imagining things - Buffy's emotions are seriously out of whack, wavering between blank zoning - becoming hypnotized by running water and making surrealist comments such as (to Dawn) "you should eat breakfast at least three times a day" - and crushing cynicism, just barely short of outright hostility. "You want a cappuccino and a pack of cigarettes to go with that?" she drawls upon seeing Dawn helping with the grown-up job of demon research. Her emotional range seems to entail little more than frustration, despair, and (at best) resignation. Giles's return in this episode throws Buffy's emotional instability into even sharper relief. (Let's indulge in a little gushing - oh, Giles! How wonderful to have you back!) Her reactions to her surrogate father alternate between vaguely clueing him into her pain and dismissing his concerns, as if wanting his support but unable to ask for it. Of particular interest is Buffy's comment that coming back to Sunnydale must have been "inconvenient" for him, delicately suggesting that Buffy is feeling a little bit abandoned by Giles. The father-daughter dynamic between them has never been clearer than in this episode, and maybe for Buffy, it's becoming a little too close to home - Giles is eclipsing her real father as the absentee parent that she really feels hurt by. The two share a touching hug on Giles entrance to the Magic Box, but later, at her house, she shrinks away from his comforting hand without even realizing she's doing it. As in the earlier "fire, pretty" comment, she softens the uncomfortable topic of her return from death with weak attempts at humor. "Sleeping's hard, but just because of the whole waking up in a box thing," she confesses with a pained smile. Giles, for his part, insists he's proud of her, saying that she's doing "remarkably well under extreme circumstances." Buffy gives him a weak smile and makes the "post-post-mortem" joke that "Willow brought me back. I just lay there." Later that night, in the Summers kitchen, Giles casually asks Willow about the spell she used, wanting details. Willow happily complies, acting out the spell with gestures as if telling a scary story to kids. "And this giant snake came out my mouth and there was all this energy crackling, and this pack of demons interrupted, but I totally kept it together, and then, the next thing you know... Buffy." She smiles, proud, and waits for his accolades. "You're a very stupid girl," Giles says roughly. Willow is stunned. "What?" she stammers. He goes on, asking her if she has any idea of - "the forces you've harnessed, the lines you've crossed?" - echoing the words of the demon from last episode. He reminds her that she could have unleashed any number of horrible consequences. Willow defends her actions, insisting, "I did what I had to do. I did what nobody else could do." Giles reminds her that she just "wouldn't want to meet" people who could. He shouts at her: "The magicks you channeled are more ferocious and primal than anything you can hope to understand, and you are lucky to be alive, you rank, arrogant amateur!" For Willow, this is the last straw. "You're right," she tells him. "The magicks I used are very powerful. I'm very powerful. And maybe it's not such a good idea for you to piss me off." The room crackles with implied menace as she stares him down, eyes hard. Yikes - meet DarkWillow, folks. The moment passes, and Willow seems like herself again. (The transformation is instantaneous - Allyson Hannigan gets a big "wow" in this ep.) After her quick, creepy, tantrum, Willow then makes concillitory gestures that, given the context, seem just as creepy. She tells Giles she doesn't "want to fight," claiming that she'll "think about what he said." Giles is wary, his voice straining with repressed fury. "Think of what you've done to Buffy," he tells her. "We still don't know where she was, or what happened to her," adding that he's "far from convinced she's come out of all this undamaged." He's right about that - Buffy is not undamaged, and she shares as much that night out on the back porch with her new confidant, Spike. "They all care so much, it makes it all harder," she vents tiredly. "I feel like I'm spending all of my time trying to be okay, so they don't worry." In contrast to this unhappy picture, Buffy's reactions to Spike himself are comfortable, relaxed. She smiles faintly when he appears, grinding out his tossed-away cigarette with the toe of her shoe, greeting him without even looking up. As they talk, he moves closer, step by step, and when she takes a seat on the stairs, he sits beisde her. "Why are you always around when I'm miserable?" she asks. "That's when you're alone, I guess," is his answer, but actually, if you think about their history, Spike has been witness to most of the key "miserable" moments in Buffy's life, from her "coming out" to her mother as the Slayer, to her sword-fighting confrontation with Angelus, to her death in "The Gift." That he's here now, when she's trying to come to terms with her third life, is maybe not such a surprise. The surprise is how willing she is to admit to being comfortable with him - "I can be alone with you here," as she told him in "Afterlife." "I'm not much for crowds myself these days," he affirms as they sit together. She adds "me neither," and they share a companionable silence, like two old soldiers at the end of a long battle, their positions mirroring the ending of "Fool for Love." The next sound you hear may well be hell freezing over. Meanwhile, the nerd troika has convinced the bank-robbing demon not to take out its fee from their skins. (How to handle the demon's payment seems to have been a not-terribly-detailed part of their initial plan.) After a certain amount of round-robin about who is actually the leader of the group, the three put their heads together and discuss what to do. The demon wants "the head of the Slayer." Jonathan and Andrew are dead against this course of action. "She saved my life a bunch of times! Plus, she's hot," Jonathan points out, adding that Buffy has super-strength. Warren makes that point that "It's her or us... and since this is my mom's house, I think what I say goes." Andrew disagrees: "But aside from the moral issues, and the mess, we can get in trouble for murder," he insists, drawing their attention to their initial mission statement, which, according to a chalkboard across the room includes the likes of "Control the Weather," "Shrink Ray," and "Girls." ("Girls" is listed twice.) Although the vote goes against killing Buffy, Warren (clearly the most morally ambiguous of the three) underhandedly slips the demon a piece of paper with Buffy's address and tells him, "You want to kill the Slayer? Make it so!" The demon pushes off, murder on its mind... ... and shows up at the Summers house in full attack mode, promptly smashing things, starting with the door. Buffy, despairing of the furniture, chucks the monster into her flooded basement. At the end of her rope, she goes berserk on the demon, savagely beating the creature to death with a shiny new length of copper piping. She winds down, panting hard, and stands there in the knee-deep water, staring at the floating corpse. Spike peers down the stairs at her. "Did you know this place was flooded?" he asks. Buffy looks to heaven, as if praying for help. Meanwhile, the nerds are doing well. Enhanced by the new influx of money, the trio recline in their styling new lair, now outfitted with action figures in a glass case, mod bachelor-pad furniture, a big screen TV, and a Soviet-surplus periscope. Jonathan lays out their philosophy. (The bit about life being an instellar journey.) "Gentlemen. Crime is our wormhole," he says, lighting a cigar on a bill from the bank heist, then belatedly trying to shake out the flaming note. Irregardless of their success, there's still a bit of debate about what to do about Buffy. "Sooner or later, the Slayer's gotta come after us," Jonathan tells them. "Bring her on!" they giggle, and suggest that hypnotizing her might be a plan. "Make her our willing sex bunny," Andrew suggests. The three laugh and Jonathan rushes to add that item to the chalkboard. Back at Slayer HQ, Buffy and co. are assessing the damage caused by the demon rampage - the front door, the bannister, one lamp, one coffee table, and other miscellaneous items. There's a feeble attempt at fixing, which is abandoned in favor of dramatic giving up, and hauling the pieces to the trash. "I don't think I can do this," Buffy mumbles, staring at Anya's carefully prepared sum-up of her new debt figures, a picture of utter exhaustion. Giles reassures her "Yes you can. Your mother dealt with this sort of thing all the time. She took one crisis at a time, without the aid of any superpowers, and got through it all. So can you." Buffy looks at him, far from convinced. The ringing phone interrupts Giles further attempts at comfort. Buffy wonders who could be calling. ("Everyone I know lives here," she mutters.) There's a funny exchange between Giles and Dawn while she answers the phone."I bet it's creditors. The hounding's begun. I read about it," she says, adding "No chance I'd have to quit school to work assembling cheap toys in a poorly-ventilated sweatshop?" Before a puzzled Giles can find out just how a teenage girl got her hands on The Economist, Buffy reappears, stammering that the call was from Angel. "He needs to see me. I have to see him." then clarifies that she won't be meeting him in L.A. or Sunnydale, but "somewhere in the middle." (Given that the two estranged lovers are now on different TV networks, I imagine a neutral ground would be called for. No "crossover events" for the time being. Again, inside joke?) She insists she has to go "now," and hurries to the door, with a brief backward glance. "Thanks for taking care of this for me," she says, and disappears. Giles stares after her retreating back with a worried frown. So Buffy's nemeses this season are... who? The nerd troika? Her own friends? Dawn? Giles? The Sunnydale Savings and Loan? Tito the Amazing Plumber? My guess is on all of the above.
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