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Gone (Ep. 6.11)"Seeing is Believing" Season 6 so far has been big on gimmicks - "Once More With Feeling," the musical; "Tabula Rasa," the memory-loss episode; the nerd trio's various challenges in "Life Serial." In all of these, the rules change when the playing field itself is somehow altered, leaving characters open to make decisions based on...what? Instinct? Blind guesses? Inner truth? In "Gone," Buffy becomes invisible, and she decides what she needs most is to not be herself anymore. . . . Evening in the Summers house. No more than a few days after the events of "Wrecked," it would seem. Dawn's arm is in a sling. Willow is sitting on her bed, looking unhappy. A spring housecleaning in effect - Buffy is systematically removing all magic paraphenalia from the place to remove "temptation" from Willow, who is determined to go clean-and-sober on the magic front. On the forbidden list are the obvious crystals and tarot cards, but also - much to Dawn's chagrin - candles and beloved statuettes belonging to their mother. "Why do we have to get rid of so many things I like?" Dawn wails. Buffy stoically speechifies how they have to remove any reminders that might hinder Willow's recovery. Digging through the couch cushions, Buffy then comes across a little reminder of her own - Spike's chrome lighter. She flicks it open, steamy images flashing through her head, then snaps it closed and drops it in the box of bad things. This opening scene is a cute harbinger of the rest of the episode for two reasons: the magic=addiction metaphor used so heavily in "Wrecked" is (deservedly) gently mocked (Buffy explains her purge of candles as "to witches they're like...bongs!"), and once again establishes that Buffy insists on seeing her own issues and Willow's as one and the same. Only this time, instead of focusing on the terrible after-effects, "Gone" addresses the issue of "temptation." It reminds me of that bit in Trainspotting where Ewan MacGregor talks about why anyone would start doing heroin in the first place - because it feels really, really good. ("We're not stupid," he says indignantly.) This is a nice layer to add to the issue, especially after the two-dimensional drugs-are-bad message of "Wrecked." Complexity good. The next morning, Buffy hollers for Dawn to get her butt downstairs for school; Xander will be there to pick her up any second. Jammies-clad Willow is in the kitchen trying to make an omelet, presumably for Dawn...although isn't she already running late? Things are not exactly operating like clockwork here. Buffy wanders into the kitchen and asks Willow how she's feeling. The shakes are subsiding, but not enough for her to go back to class. So Willow is a stay-at-home girl. Dawn finally shows up to bullet a glass of juice and glower at the two of them. "Thanks for your concern," she snaps to Buffy, then bangs her glass on the counter and walks out of the room. Buffy seems to understand Dawn's hostility. "I let it happen," she says sadly, of the incident that injured Dawn. She then makes the interesting observation that she didn't notice her own best friend was "drowning" because "I was too wrapped up in my dumb life to notice." This is an unusual piece of insight from Buffy, but not an entirely unprecedented one. Back in "I Was Made to Love You," while commiserating with Xander about her love problems, Buffy singled out her own negative points as "my alarming strength and remarkable self-involvement." Xander reassured her about her "amazing heart," but truth be told, Buffy is amazingly self-involved. Perhaps as a balance to the inherent selflessness her Slayer job requires, Buffy has an extreme tendency to obsess over her personal problems. Dawn is right to feel neglected. Speaking of problems. Spike now comes bursting through the kitchen door, covered in a smoking blanket. He makes a big production out of stamping out the smoldering wool, smooths his hair back, and puts on a casual face, claiming that he was just "out for a stroll." Both Buffy and Willow are thoroughly puzzled by this, and they're right to be - aren't vampires supposed to creatures of the night? "You couldn't pick a less flammable time of day to take a stroll?" Buffy queries. It's a good question. Spike has increasingly been making appearances during the day throughout Season 6. "You sleep during the day!" Buffy had yelled at him back in "Crush," in answer to his lovesick "I lie awake all night" claim. Is he trying to prove to Buffy that he can keep her hours?
Spike comes up with a reason for his presence - he's lost his lighter. "Haven't seen it," Buffy says crisply. (Eh?) Willow excuses herself to go get dressed. Before Buffy can think of a reason to stop her or follow her, she's stuck alone in the kitchen with Spike. "Lame," she says, turning towards him. "Making up excuses." She insists that he stop trying to see her. He changes the subject to what cute little pet name might be most appropriate for her. "Pet? Sweetheart? My little Goldilocks?" Moving closer, he toys with her hair - "I love this hair, how it bounces around..." Nice continuity here - remember the "shampoo-commercial hair" Spike ranted about in "Out of My Mind"? Buffy's show of resistance to this little bit of seduction is the stuff of men's magazines, hardly a Slayer-level butt-kicking. (She's gonna hit him with a spatula?) "Stop that," she breathes softly, sounding not terribly convincing as his hand disappears somewhere below her waist. Is it hot in here? This little tete-a-tete is broken up by the sudden appearance of Xander, who brays, "Spike, still trying to mack on Buffy? Wake up already. Never gonna happen!" Conveniently not noticing any compromising position he might have interrupted, Xander expands on this theory by proclaiming "only a complete loser would ever hook up with you," and itemizing the previous examples thereof - "simpleton" Harmony and "nutsack" Drusilla. Buffy shoves Spike away but is less than happy with the realization that she's now a more than honorary member of this club. She breezes out of the kitchen with Xander, leaving Spike behind. The front door is opened to unexpectedly reveal Doris, a sour-looking lady in a cardigan and nametag, toting a clipboard. She's Dawn's caseworker from Social Services, arriving on time for her appointment. Which Buffy isn't ready for because she doesn't know what day it is. Oops. What in the world does Buffy do with herself all day? (Quick pause here: According to Doris, it's Wednesday, and I assume from Dawn not going to school that the events of "Smashed" and "Wrecked" occurred over the weekend, so we are about three days out from the car wreck.) The subsequent interview goes badly. Dawn and Xander scoot out the door. Doris observes the time (late) and looks over the living room, still piled with boxes from the magic clearance of the night before. Her eyes then take in a lounging Spike, looking particularly unrespectable in major slouch mode. Buffy - not exactly dressed for a meeting with civil servants herself in a short-cropped black tank top through which you can see her bra - tries to struggle through the situation, but keeps tripping over her own words. "He sleeps here?" Doris frowns, as Spike withdraws with his blanket after making a well-intentioned but hugely unsuccessful attempt to defend Buffy's parenting skills. "Nope, just me and Dawn living here!" Buffy chirps, only to be interrupted by Willow's voice from upstairs. Doris then discovers a bag of mysterious herbs in the box of badness. "That's not what it looks like!" Buffy cries. "That's magic weed!" Ugh. Open mouth, insert entire leg. The social worker marches toward the door and hands out her sentence. Buffy is on probation. They'll be "watching her very closely." If she doesn't begin to provide a stable home life, she may lose her sister's guardianship. According to Doris, Dawn's grades have fallen sharply "in the last year," something Buffy's resurrection seems to have not helped. Hard to miss the sharp contrast between the surly Dawn of this episode and the fairly upbeat Dawn of the season opener, bluffing her way through Parent-Teacher day with the Buffybot and meekly accepting study advice from Spike. Weird to think, but I guess the summer combination of two witches, a robot, and a babysitting vampire actually offered a more stable home situation than she has now. Also of note is Doris' remark about Buffy being "unemployed" - I think we can expect her to return to the job market posthaste.
"Didn't go well, huh?" Spike says, reappearing as Buffy numbly closes the door. "Why won't you go?" she asks softly, but I guess that was a rhetorical question, since she shouts at him to get the hell out before he can finish answering. Really pissed now, he pins her to the door and thrusts a hand into her jeans pocket. Buffy makes the same ohgod-please-don't-oh-feels-good face she made in the kitchen until his hand emerges holding the lighter. "Just getting what I came for," he growls and sweeps out. Upset, Buffy storms up to her room and slams the door, then grabs a pair of scissors takes her anger out on her "Goldilocks" hair. Thick hanks of blonde hair fall to the floor. Buffy's decision to "go all Felicity" on her hair is a symptom of her indecision about Spike. She wants to avoid "temptation," but her method - simple denial plus general nastiness - isn't working too well. Just as we saw in "Wrecked," when it comes right down to it, Buffy's resolve isn't particularly strong. The kitchen scene fairly pants with their attraction - her first words to him are flirty, teasing; she allows him to waltz right up to her, whisper endearments, play with her hair and other parts of her anatomy, all without much in the way of believeable protest. Her feelings of guilt at caving in so easily then get expressed with scissors. At least her appearance is one thing she can change. "Just make me...different," she tells a hair stylist, wisely having decided to let a professional touch up her amatuer barber work. Now the nerd trio make the scene. Armed with their new invisibility ray, they've come to carry out their master plan... making themselves invisible so they can spy on naked women in a spa. Um... right. That's so ...evil. (The window helpfully supplies the info that it's "bikini wax Wednesday.") Andrew spots Buffy emerging from the hair salon and the trio panics. They begin fighting over the ray gun, and it goes off, spraying the street with the invisibility beam, wiping from view a streetlamp, mailbox, some traffic cones... and Buffy. Whoopsie. Now things get fun. Invisi-Buffy shows up at the Magic Box, where Xander and Anya are arguing over table placement of the guests at their wedding. (Personally, I can't wait to see Xander's famous uncle Rory.) Strangely, Buffy seems not at all bothered by her new status. "It kinda fits with the day I've had," her disembodied voice informs them. "Willow's still a wreck. Dawn's mad at both of us. And this Social Services lady put me through a wringer. Says she's gonna watch me. Like to see her try now." Buffy holds up a pair of painted balls to simulate eyes. "See what I did there, with the eyeballs?" she says happily. There's also some cute exchange about Buffy's new haircut, which of course they can't see, but Anya thinks "sounds adorable." "I was thinking of cutting my hair before the wedding, maybe layering it," she rambles. Ah-ha! Finally, we have an explanation for why Anya's hair has changed every episode so far. She's trying to find the perfect style for the occasion. Xander tries quizzing Buffy on what might have happened, but she is very short on clues. "I'm just gonna go for a walk... clear my head," Buffy's voice proclaims, and the Magic Box bell jingles as she leaves her friends behind to look into the "whats and hows." Thus begins Buffy's invisible wild ride. She strolls through Sunnydale's streets, on the lookout for pranky opportunities. "Too easy," she muses, watching a pair of joggers. She snatches a studded cap from a woman reading in a park, "I am the ghost of fashion victims past!" she hoots. She steals a parking cop's go-cart. She then does something rather smart - she goes to the Social Services office and makes life miserable for the hapless Doris, making her coffee mug move around and dance. "Kill, Doris, kill everyone. You know you want to." Buffy tells her in a ghostly voice. Doris wigs, and flees to the bathroom, giving Buffy time to doctor Dawn's casefile and fill it with pages of insaniac ranting - "All Work and No Play Makes Doris a Dull Girl." Well, if you want to make someone look like they're about to go postal, no reason to be subtle about it. Doris's boss arrives on the scene just in time to witness the woman's breakdown and reassign Dawn's case file. With this little stunt, she's managed to give herself some breathing space, at least until her new caseworker shows up. Invisi-Buffy leaves the room, whistling a happy tune. Meanwhile, Xander and Anya have come to the not-illogical conclusion that Buffy's invisibility was likely as not caused by a runaway spell. Suspecting WitchWillow - again, not undeservedly, given recent events - Xander shows up at Casa de Summers to confront his friend. He finds Willow surrounded by a pile of books, pecking away at her laptop in search of info on the diamond theft. (Turns out the diamond has mystical properties after all.) He tries hinting at the problem - "Is there something you wanna tell me?" Willow soon gets the message that she's being accused of making Buffy (bl)invisible. "So now when anything nasty happens around here, I get conveniently blamed for it?" she rails, and stomps out of the room... but soon cools down enough to follow up on Xander's info that Buffy disappeared outside the hair salon. Instead of "jumping off the wagon completely" like she threatened, she instead gets down to detective work the hard way. When Xander finds her at the scene, she's already armed herself with a can of spray paint to indentify vanished objects, mapped a tire tread, and has collected black paint scrapings from invisible fire hydrant which they theorize might have come from the "phantom van" that Buffy had been seeing. Good for Willow! Nice to see she hasn't completely left her brain in magic land. She sets herself the task of identifying the van while Xander heads to the Magic Box with a spray-painted traffic cone to continue research. Buffy's wild ride continues. Next stop: Spike's crypt. He's sprawled in his chair, watching TV. "Oh my god, look at all the BLOOD!" a woman's voice screams from the set. I wish I could find this channel he always seems to be watching. Horror movies all the time. Anyway, all this blood talk has made him hungry (there's an audible stomach growl), and he gets up to rummage in his mini-fridge for a mason jar of thick, gooey-looking red stuff. (I'm enjoying all these reminders that Spike is indeed a vampire - not to mention the Foley guys must be having a blast with this episode, since sound is about all you've got when your main character is invisible.) The crypt door swings open, seemingly of its own accord. Thinking he's got an intruder, Spike tries to stalk whatever it is - there's nothing there to see, but something brushes past him. "Oh, a ghost, is it? Go haunt the living!" he calls out. But obviously it's not a ghost. An unseen force throws him against the wall and tears his shirt open. "Buffy?" he pants. Clearly something going on here. "I told you," her voice answers, all seductive-like, "stop trying to see me." He's abruptly jerked out of sight. I think it's fair to say that Buffy wasn't really that disgusted with herself after all. Cue porno music. It's about this time that we discover the downside to Buffy's invisibility - the fact that it's only temporary, and not in a good way. Anya discovers the traffic cone is melting into goo ("like pudding... rice, or tapioca"). Back at Legion headquarters, we get the scientific explanation of this as Warren explains to the others that the Slayer got a huge dose of radiation which will make her cels mutate, molecular makeup lose integrity, and other Star Trek-like symptoms until she dies. His fellow Legionnaires are horrified. Warren doesn't see the problem. "We're villains!" he shouts. "When you gonna get that through your thick skulls?" "We're not killers, we're crime lords!" Jonathan argues. Andrew agrees, citing for an example that Lex Luthor never kills Superman. "Because it's Superman's book, you moron!" Warren scoffs. Yeah, and it's Buffy's show, but that didn't save her last year, did it? Jonathan insists that Warren finish fixing the invisi-ray (which was broken during the tug-of-war) so they can return Buffy to normal. Jonathan and Warren stare daggers at each other until Warren backs down... or at least pretends to. Xander arrives at Spike's crypt, hoping to get help in locating AWOL Buffy. He finds the upper level of the crypt in shambles. He descends to the lower level. Moaning sounds... and a naked Spike, who for all intents and purposes seems to be having sex with thin air. Yeesh, it just keeps getting racier here on the Buffy channel. Let's pause for a second. Xander knows Buffy is invisible. Right. Just wanted to make sure everybody got that. "What are you doing?" he asks. Spike cranes his neck to look at Xander, and for a moment really doesn't seem capable of thinking of a damn thing to say. Finally, he comes up with "I'm exercising," and does a few push-ups to demonstrate. You can hear Buffy gasp. Did I mention Xander knows Buffy is invisible? Spike gets up, wrapping the sheet around his waist, and listens to Xander's message about Invisi-Buffy. Weirdly, Xander doesn't mention that Buffy is disintegrating, which I imagine he definitely would do if he had any idea she was there, no matter how disturbed he was by what he'd just walked in on. But somehow, even though you can hear kissy-licky sounds in the background and something unseen is tugging on Spike's ear, no light goes on in Xander's head. He is so far in De-Nile that he might as well be a crocodile, and he leaves, none the wiser. "That was bloody stupid," Spike tells his unseen partner. "Ashamed to be seen with me?" Buffy jokes. No, it's really the other way around - it's her that's ashamed to be seen with him, something he realizes her see-thru visitation demonstrates all too well. Just as in "Tabula Rasa," Spike wants to talk about what's going on between them, wants to come to some sort of understanding. Buffy doesn't. ("So we gonna chat this out, or what?" he'd asked her that morning in her house, just before the social worker's visit ruined any chances of rational discussion.) "He had no idea I was here. This is perfect," Invisi-Buffy tells him. "Perfect for you," he says bitterly, and adds, "the only reason you're here is because you're not here." Buffy doesn't exactly disagree - she tells him that she's "free," from obligations, "free from this life." If no one can see her, no one can judge her. She's outside society's rules, literally invisible. He accurately points out that "free from life" is just another way of saying dead - she's giving up, trying for escape again. "I thought this is what you wanted," her voice pouts. "I thought we were having fun." But it's fun that won't last, and he knows it. He tells her to leave. He wants "all of" her. Buffy sure came to the wrong place for meaningless sex. Comfortably ensconced at the Espresso Pump (now a cybercafe!), Willow continues working on indentifying the van. She's tapped into the DMV database, and while the information she needs downloads ever so slowly, she drinks bottled water and taps her fingers impatiently, wishing she could use magic to speed things up. I know how she feels. She reaches for the screen, hesitant, almost giving into the urge... but then the data finally comes through and she lets out a sigh of relief. Temptation has been overcome. Elsewhere, Invisi-Buffy walks down the street, kicking a soda can and muttering to herself, none too happy with the turn of events. "Insensitive, that's what he is," she grumbles, pushing unseen through a group of strollers with a brusque "Hey, I'm walking here!" Arriving at home, she proceeds to freak out her sister by flying a pizza box out of the fridge, not even noticing that Dawn was creeping in very much after dark in clear defiance of big sis's curfew. So much for Buffy's parenting skills. Dawn promptly flips out. "I can't talk to you like this!" she hollers. "I can't see you! How can I talk to you if I can't see you?" She dashes out of the room. The camera tracks to where Buffy would be if she were there, and we see the button on the answering machine depress. Xander's voice comes out in a babble, and tells her about the whole dissolving problem. "Wow," her voice mumbles. Willow's hard work has paid off. She finds the mystery van and penetrates the nerds' lair, finding the plans for the invisi-ray. Unfortunately, the trio has made themselves invisible and captures her. Alterted to the hostage situation via phone call, Buffy agrees to meet with the villains. "You sound familiar," she tells the voice at the other end of the line. "I'm nobody you know," Warren answers, trying for a deep and mysterious persona. At a video arcade, the invisible forces face off. Warren offers to re-visualize Buffy, but Willow, having seen the plans, realizes that he's actually trying to kill her. An invisible scuffle follows. This fight is absolutely hysterical - the camerawork consists of panning back and forth where people would be if they were actually there. It's a lot like an issue of the Alpha Flight comic where two characters fight in a blizzard, and all the action is represented as sound effects and word balloons on plain white panels. Which, given the kind of villains we have here, I'm totally sure the staff has read. Great job. Willow retrieves the fallen raygun and re-visualizes everyone. Buffy and Willow quickly recognize Jonathan and Warren. Neither recognize Andrew. "He's Tucker's brother," they explain. "We're your arch-nemeses(es)!" Warren says proudly. Before she can reach them to kick their arch-villain asses, however, Jonathan throws a smoke bomb and, distracted by a security guard, Buffy inadvertently lets them escape. The crisis over, Buffy and Willow sit together on the curb, comparing notes on their day. Buffy's hair really is cute. And she's wearing a coat now that she wasn't before - I guess she was carrying it when she was first turned invisible. Willow shares that she solved the mystery without magic, even though it seemed to take forever and left her exhausted, Buffy confesses that she ran a little wild and is unhappy that she freaked out Dawn. But she also realizes something else. "When I heard Xander's message... I actually got scared.... Not too long ago I would have welcomed it. But I realized... I don't want to die." That's progress... isn't it?
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