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All the Way (Ep. 6.6)"Night Moves" It's a Buffy Halloween, and we all know what that means - the monsters are coming to Sunnydale. Don't they always? Only this time, they're a little closer to home than usual. . . . "All the Way" is, above all, a Dawn episode. It's a peek into the life of Buffy's sister - what does she do with herself while Buffy is out Slaying? What kind of person is she, really? These are questions that really do need to be answered - no longer a mystical key chased by every nightmare creature to come down the pike, Dawn's main role these days is to simply be Buffy's teenaged sister, the one we saw briefly at the beginning of Season 5. And what do teens want? Look at the episode title, and make a guess. As a Halloween episode, "All the Way" is by no means up to the horror-comedy standard of "Fear, Itself" or "Halloween," but it does follow the rule of thumb for Buffy Halloween menaces, that what the gang ends up facing is more of an "internal" fear than an external one (inner phobias coming to life, personalities changing to match your outer appearance). It also sets things up for the musical to follow, and this is the part where it's really interesting. Magic Box. The place is hopping. Anya is throwing a heap big sale for the occasion (a Halloween 'bone-anza,' proclaims a banner), wheeling around the premises on roller skates with a basket of candy in hand. To deal with the flood of holiday customers, she's managed to haul the entire gang in for retail duty - Xander entertains a group of kids with his over-the-top pirate impression; Willow grumpily lectures a traditionally costumed witch about falling prey to stereotypes about warts and hooked noses; Giles, dressed in his Magic Box grand-opening wizard's costume, is busier than a one-armed paper-hanger at the cash register. Dawn (wearing a snazzy black "Hello Kitty" T-shirt) navigates the crowd and sidles up to Anya. "What are you supposed to be?" she asks. "I'm an angel," replies Anya. "A special kind of angel called a Charlie. We don't have wings. We just skate around with perfect hair fighting crime." Snerk. Nice in-joke about Anya's "Farrah hair." And she does indeed look pretty special in her striped short shorts and baby tee. "Xander's going to show me a new game later called "Shiver Me Timbers'," Anya shares, and asks Tara if she's ever played it. Tara drily responds, "I'm not really much for the timber." Buffy is helping out as well, moping around in strange outift consisting of a lavender bustier and olive drab army pants with a wide leather belt. (Costume?) You'd think based on last episode's retail debacle that hell would freeze over before she'd return to Magic Box duty, but it seems she's a soft touch for helping out in a group sort of way. ("One-time deal," she explains. "But don't blame me if we have this conversation over, and over, and over...") Anya sends Buffy shlumping down to the basement to fetch some stock. In the cellar, she promptly runs smack into Spike, who's crept in through the tunnels to liberate an herb that makes his blood "hot and spicy." Buffy gives him a yuck face for the blood mention and a disapproving look for the stealing... then, embarassed, contritely asks him where the mandrake roots she's looking for are. He obligingly plucks a glass bottle off a high shelf and hands it to her. "Three to a jar. They go all wonky if you cram 'em too close," he informs her. And hm, now that I think of it, Spike's almost as big with the herb-cataloging/spell-identifying/demon-classifying as Giles and Anya. Odd that they don't use him as a resource more often. Buffy studies the jar. She and Spike are standing pretty close. Enough to go all wonky, maybe. "Feel like a bit of the rough and tumble?" he asks her suddenly. Buffy's reaction to this question is a wide-eyed stare, and a kind of frozen hypnosis. "Me... You..." he continues, his eyes soft and puppylike. "Patrolling? Hello?" he finishes. It takes a few seconds before the "patrolling" part of the question registers in Buffy's brain, and she snaps out of her daze, grumbling that she should stay and declining with a "maybe tomorrow." He shrugs, seemingly unbothered by her refusal, exiting with the claim "not like I didn't have plans - Great Pumpkin's on in twenty." Buffy watches him go, and shuffles upstairs, mumbling to herself, "so much easier to talk to when he was trying to kill me." When we watched this scene the first time, the conversation on our couch went something like this: The Deadly Hook: They are so five minutes from having sex right now. Seriously, though, Buffy's reaction to Spike's "patrolling" question is a far cry from the high-strung panic she displayed when first confronted with the very idea of his affection in "Crush." If she was honestly interpreting his question as an invitation to go someplace private and get naked together (and not a lot of other interpretations easily come to mind), her expression suggests that she might actually have been seriously considering it. That's certainly a paradigm shift in attitude. Anya whizzes by and grabs the jar from Buffy. "Go help Giles!" she orders. Buffy looks over the long line of customers at the register and her harried Watcher does an about-face on her previous resolve with "actually, Spike had a really good idea... maybe I should patrol." Giles cuts her off with "you've been patrolling every night this week... It's Halloween, it's the one time of the year that supernatural threats give it a well-deserved rest." She reminds him of costumes that rework your personality and "wee little Irish fear demons." He makes the excellent point that if something happens, "history suggests that it'll happen to one of us." Buffy sighs and resigns herself to bagging purchases. Closing time. The gang lies sprawled on the stairs, exhausted. Anya is jubilant about "the astounding heaps of money" they made and cheerily reminds the group they'll be doing it again tomorrow for "post-holiday clearance." All groan miserably, then rouse themselves for the task of clean up. Willow tries to suggest they skip the elbow grease with a little magic. "It'll be like Fantasia!" she lilts. Giles, humorless these days about Willow's witchly powers, reminds her how well that turned out for Mickey. "I think I'm a little more adept than a cartoon mouse," she grumbles. Meanwhile, still collapsed on the staircase, Buffy jokes with Xander about his pirate's peg leg. "You know, if you had a real peg leg, you wouldn't just have a lame costume, you'd actually be lame." (Which is a kinda funny echo of her "you're completely lame!" line to Spike last episode. Huh.) Xander doesn't even hear her. He's watching Anya at the cash register, doing a shake-your-groove-thang "dance of capitalist superiority" with fistfuls of money. "You do this every night?" Dawn giggles, gleefully copying her funky moves. "Every time I close out the cash register," Anya cheers. Xander smiles warmly, his whole face alight. "I'm gonna marry that girl," he says softly. This scene is terribly touching, mostly because it's exactly the sort of impossible-to-explain thing that makes people fall in love in the first place - some ridiculous, endearing gesture that's theirs and theirs alone which makes you go "that's the one for me." Aw. Xander's response is meltingly romantic - he gets to his feet and (finally!) announces their engagement to the stunned group. Anya looks at him with tears in her eyes. "I thought you were waiting for the right moment," she says. "I did," he smiles. Anya lets out a happy sob, turns to kiss her soon-to-be-husband, and tosses a handful of bills to Dawn in her bliss. (A funny aside here: Buffy has a sudden realization about Giles, who briskly begins cleaning his lenses to block out the sight of Xander and Anya tongue-kissing - "Is that why you're always cleaning your glasses? So you don't have to see what we're doing?" she asks, eyes wide. "Tell no one," he says tersely.) The gang relocates to the Summers house for an impromtu party. And - although discouraged from letting loose at the Magic Box - Willow casually redecorates the room with a spell that bedecks the halls with streamers and paper lanterns. Anya bubbles with happiness, but a frowning Tara confronts Willow later in the kitchen, uncomfortable with her lover's increasing magic use. "Why use magic when you can do something naturally?" she asks, reaffirming her status as a legitmate Wiccan "white witch," in touch with the natural world... unlike Willow these days. Giles's angry words to Willow in "Flooded" were: "Of everyone here, you were the one I trusted most to respect the forces of nature." From Tara's words, it looks like he's not alone in being surprised at how far Willow's strayed from that particular path. Willow rebuts, "Well, you can fight monsters naturally, with sticks and stones. Don't recommend it though," and puts forth the idea that it's Tara that needs to rethink things. "You're always coming down on me for doing magic that couldn't harm a fly. What's your problem?" she frowns. The argument comes to an abrupt end when Dawn walks in. "We're done," Willow says, but Tara's troubled expression says otherwise. At this point, Dawn manages to make an escape from the drama of her sister's circle, citing a sleepover at a friend's place. Caught offguard, Buffy agrees, after first trying to defer judgment to father-substitute Giles. "It's really not up to me," the British man says, clearly none too happy about the new pressures being heaped on his shoulders. Perhaps this is why he takes a moment later in the party to give Xander a few more worries to consider. "Anya is a wonderful former vengeance demon, I'm sure you'll spend many years of non-hell-dimensional bliss," continuing with suggestions about buying a house and ending with the not-exactly-comforting mantra: "You've got the rest of your lives to plan the rest of your lives." Xander looks like he can barely keep from hurling. Meanwhile, it's no surprise that Dawn's plans aren't exactly what she said - she and her friend, a glossy-haired girl in superlow jeans by the name of Janice, have planned their Halloween fun around meeting guys in the park and told their respective parents identitical tales about a "sleepover." "Can't believe they fell for that one. Like, own a TV?" Janice laughs. The pair meet up with the teen heartthrobs in question, a blond football type named Zack, and a dark-haired dreamboat in a letterman jacket named Justin. (Who, incidentally, is a pretty good lookalike for the star of the show that replaced BtVS on the WB, Smallville. "What are you, Superman?" Dawn asks later in the episode. "No, but I do have a few special powers," he says. I'm really starting to wonder about some of these little gags.) The guys lead the way, knocking over mailboxes and the like while the girls giggle over the boys' cuteness factors. Truth be told, the details of the teens' egg-throwing and pumpkin-smashing hijinks aren't particulary interesting, nor is the red herring presented by the spooky old man who says he has "treats." (Although the actor gets a big thumbs up for his eerie readings of lines such as "hands are good... always use more hands.") Turns out, the old man did have treats - rice krispy ones, in fact - and that the real threat is Zack and Justin. They're vampires. No kidding. From this point, the episode switches gears from sleight-of-hand Halloween spooky menace to a fairly straightforward depiction of teen sexual experimentation. "So what do you think? Lunchables? Or do we go all the way and turn 'em?" Zack asks Justin, of their plans for the girls. Vampirism, with its obvious erotic supertext of penetration and fluid exchange, easily maps as a metaphor for sex in general - something that BtVS has always been pretty hyper aware of (the scene where Angel feeds on Buffy in "Graduation, Part 2" is all the evidence you'll ever need for this). This episode, however, is the first time I'm aware of that vampirism has been used specifically as a metaphor for date rape. After leaving the old man's house (with the unfortunate retiree dead in the kitchen, thanks to Justin), Janice and Zack run off to be alone in the woods, leaving Dawn alone with Justin in the (stolen) car to learn the finer points of necking. The scene where Dawn receives her first kiss ("I just wanna taste you," Justin says seductively) is actually the episode's highlight (and a nice reminder of Michelle Trachtenberg's high talent level). Nervous and stalling before the kiss, Dawn's first reaction is jokesy bravado "I kiss all the time... Big expert here," she bluffs, then breaks down with "Okay, okay, it was my first kiss... My lips are dry and my tongue's all horrible and sticky and I'm pretty sure I drooled on you." Justin smiles and tells her "it was perfect." Dawn predictably melts. More paradise by the dashboard light ensues. Back at the Summers homestead, Anya reminds us what all this heavy breathing traditionally leads to, as she rattles off a list of her new all-American priorities - cars, houses, and babies. "Mortal life being so short, we gotta get in as much marital bliss as we can before we wither and die," she bubbles while Xander reels (still in his pirate costume) as if he were really a sailor on the high seas. It doesn't take long for this joie de vivre to start hitting Buffy where it hurts. "I am the luckiest ex-demon in the world," Anya proclaims. "I mean, to be able to find the one person in all dimensions that I was meant to be with, and have everything work out exactly as I dreamed. I mean, how often does the universe allow that to happen? Buffy's strained smile reminds us all that, for her especially, not too often. Not long after this uncomfortable moment, both Xander and Buffy seek refuge outdoors, where they sit on the front porch to gather their strength. "This is good... love and celebration and moving forward... this is the way life's supposed to work out," Buffy reassures her old friend. Having said this, Buffy now bails on the party with "I'm gonna take Spike up on that offer to patrol. Gotta be something out there cruisin' for a smackdown," clearly feeling more like hitting things than listening to additional happy-happy joy-joy. With a deep breath, Xander ventures back inside. No sooner is Buffy out of the house than Dawn's ruse is discovered, and in Buffy's absence it falls to Giles (again, the surrogate parent) to scramble the Scooby gang to find the missing girl. For their part of the search, Willow and Tara end up at the Bronze, which turns into the site of the couple's next argument about Willow's free-and-easy witchcraft. Tara is horrified by her lover's suggestion that she shift all the partygoers who aren't 15-year-old girls into another dimension. "What if something went wrong?" she protests, then pulls out the big gun: "What would Giles say?" Willow immediately gets paranoid, uttering a one-word spell to mute the crowd noise and accusing Tara of talking with Giles behind her back. "What do you want me to do, just sit back and keep my mouth shut?" Tara stutters. "Well that'd be a good start," Willow snaps back, cold as ice. Stricken, Tara storms out with "If I didn't love you so damn much, I would!" Buffy, for her part, has come across an unusual amount of activity for "demons' night off" - ambulances loading victims short a few pints of blood. Deducing that a few vampires are ignoring the Halloween moritorium, she marches into Spike's crypt with a determined stride and a "get your gear together" command. Interestingly, he doesn't seem all that happy to see her. "In civilized cultures that's called tresspassing," he notes drily of her unannounced barging. "Good thing you're uncivilized," she says briskly, then finds out that far from being the informed one, she's two steps behind on current events. Spike fills her in on the missing sister search, well in progress - he's already met up with Giles and made a sweep through the tunnels. Despite the fact that her contribution so far has been wandering Sunnydale's streets with a long face, Buffy immediately takes charge, rummaging through Spike's weapons' trunk and issuing orders. The discomfort Spike shows in this scene, and later when the gang finally faces off against Justin and a large group of his vampire pals is plenty revealing. His reactions are muted - he's intentionally holding back. In "Life Serial," he showed the same odd restraint, offering Buffy unconditional support, passing up obvious opportunities (would Season 5's Spike have skipped a chance to cop a feel on Buffy while she was drunk?), and passively tolerating her inebriated ranting and insults. After having spent the summer carrying around the immense weight of his grief and guilt over Buffy's death, Spike seems determined not to let his second chance go to waste. In "Afterlife," he'd told Xander that even if the resurrection spell had gone wrong, "if any part of that was Buffy," he wouldn't have let Willow "get rid of what came back." Grimly determined not to fail her again, he seems to have accepted his position as Buffy's sometime sidekick and wailing wall as a sort of penance... ...but the effort of maintaining this front is starting to show. Like the first two episodes of the season, when the pressures of his teen babysitter duties were clearly grating on his nerves, you can practically hear him straining at the harness here. There's a careless quality to Buffy's arrival at the crypt. When he's not immediately visible, she's confused - she's come to expect him to be there when she needs him, and do what she asks without questions or backtalk, and that's not a role that he fits into easily. His faint flickers of irritation are the only clues so far as to just how deep a problem this really is. Back in the woods, Dawn and Justin are steaming up the car windows something fierce... until Dawn's hand wanders up to his face and discovers ridges where none should be. Realizing immediately what his sudden facial disorder means, she gasps and pulls away, scrambling from the car in a panic. "I thought we could, like, hang out or something," Justin tries to reason with her, the fact that he's still in vampire face somewhat undercutting his argument. "You're not like other girls," he continues. "You're different. There's something special about you. I knew it the first time I saw you." Dawn is conflicted, unsure what to believe. "I just want to be close to you," Justin claims, drawing closer to touch her face, and without further ado, bends to bite her with, "It'll only hurt for a second." As in an earlier scene with Janice and her vamp "date," the rape metaphor is pretty explicit. "She was asking for it!" Zack tells Giles. "I'm fairly sure she wasn't," Giles snaps back, arriving just in time to save the girl. Giles is also the first to arrive on the scene to rescue Dawn, followed closely by Spike (it's not too much of a stretch to say that these two represent Dawn's male authority figures). But Justin's friends have shown up - there's now a pretty large-sized group of vamps surrounding them. Buffy jogs up to Giles and Spike and, once again, takes over. "Were you parking? With a vamp?" she barks to Dawn. "I didn't know he was dead!" Dawn whines. The two argue loudly, Buffy firing a "how could you not know" that Justin was a vampire, Dawn rebutting "I just met him... like you've never fallen for a vampire." Buffy's "that was different" gains her the pointed scoff: "it always is when it's you." Throughout this, Spike wears a pained look, and he's not the only one. A vamp from the crowd pipes up with an "excuse me, can we fight now?" Buffy and Co. quickly oblige. Spike fights the vamp who'd spoken up. "What is your malfunction, man?" the vamp shouts, clearly having a hard time figuring out his fellow vampire's percentage in all this. "It's Halloween, you nit!" Spike shouts back. "We take the night off. Those are the rules." And this coming from Spike, hardly the poster child for deference to authority. "Me and mine don't follow no stinkin' rules! We're rebels!" the big vamp guy snarls. Spike's answer is the deadened statement: "No. I'm a rebel. You're an idiot," and offs the guy with a crossbow, stone killer-style. "Give the lot of us a bad name," he grumbles. Is Spike really still "a rebel"? Well yes, actually... but not in the American you're-not-the-boss-of-me sense. His "those are the rules" line hints at a darker, more uniquely British worldview wherein you realize which parts of your existence are alterable and which are not. Spike may be playing for the opposing team, but he is still a vampire. He can't change that. Nor can he change his V-chipped status, or the fact that he loves Buffy. He's playing by Buffy's rules, essentially turning his back on "the whole evil thing." So yeah, he is a rebel - vampires don't typically hang out with Slayers, or stop their sisters from making out with the undead, but here he is doing just that. Fate is weird. Justin catches up with Dawn, who has scampered. "Your sister's the Slayer? I totally get it! I knew there was something about you," he says. And boy, how Dawn must love hearing that. What fun it must be to be compared to your big sister, the Chosen One, whom everyone is in love with and the entire world revolves around. She knees Justin in the groin for this little observation, but he soon catches up with her and tries once again to persuade her that his intentions are honorable. "I thought you really liked me," Dawn whispers as he pins her down. "I do. And you like me too," he says, and once again, leans in to bite her without so much as a by-your-leave. Before his fangs hit home, Dawn stakes him with a fallen crossbow bolt and watches as he dusts, tears streaming down her face. At the homefront once again, the fighters wind up the day. Buffy says goodbye to Spike with a blokely "good fight," and offloads the task of disciplining Dawn on Giles who, after a pause, gives the teenager a stern talking-to. In other quarters, the fallout from the evening is worse. Tara brushes past Willow with a curt "I think I'm gonna turn in." In their bedroom, Willow tries to apologize for her harsh words at the Bronze, but Tara is furious and isn't having it. "Well, what do you want me to do? Reverse time and take it back?" Willow laughs. Tara doesn't think it's so funny. Finally, Willow gives up and grunts, "Let's just forget it ever happened," then she walks to her dresser and picks up a small flower. "Forget," she whispers, and returns to bed... to a Tara who is suddenly very interested in cuddling. "So... you're not mad?" Willow checks her work. "About what?" Tara giggles. This. Is. Baaaad. In the season opener, I remember thinking that Tara's agreement with the resurrection spell was a bit odd - after all, in Season 5, Tara was the girl for whom "evil is evil" was the watchword. Now we're presented with the uncomfortable possibility that her agreement might not have been her idea at all. That Willow had magic mind-wiping weed handy within reach in their bedroom suggests that she might well have used it on Tara before, which is deeply creepy. Dawn managed to get out of this episode without being "raped," so to speak, but Tara has not. And her lover doesn't even see this as a problem. I have a VERY bad feeling about this...
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