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Normal Again (Ep. 6.17)"Can You See the Real Me?" Science fiction buffs ought to be well aware of the fact that the premise of "Normal Again" is not an entirely original one. The idea that the universe Buffy inhabits is a product of her own mind hearkens to many, many comic book stories, The Twilight Zone, Total Recall, the novels of Philip K. Dick, The Lathe of Heaven, and about a dozen other things I can think of. But what's really stunning is how well that premise maps to the current state of the BtVS universe. Every convoluted relationship, every confusing character reversal, every odd inconsistency suddenly takes on new resonance. The episode works on two or three levels at at once - in the grand old tradition of villains messing with Buffy's mind to the possibility that the dreamscape is the "real" reality to a sort of a surreal nod to the plight of the series' writers, a meta-commentary on whole of BtVS itself. The episode runs circles around your brain. God, I love this sort of stuff... . . . Nighttime in Sunnydale. Walking down a residential street, Buffy is searching for the Nerd Troika's lair, a printout list of new rentals in her hand. (It must be a pretty cold night - she's bundled up in a black-and-white combo of sweater, leather jacket, white scarf and a black ski hat pulled down low around her ears.) Having already redlined through a page of addresses, she is advancing on the actual hiding place, where her approach is shown on multiple flatscreen monitors... if anyone were watching. Jonathan is asleep at the switch on lookout duty... until he's blasted by a SuperSoaker wielded by Warren. Andrew snorts with laughter as a disgusted Jonathan rails at them, admitting that he hasn't "had a good night's sleep since..." obviously about to refer to Warren's murder of Katrina, but stops, realizing he should probably keep his feelings to himself. Changing the subject, be complains about how they haven't been out of the basement in weeks. "We're hiding out. Underground," Andrew reminds him. "It's a figurative, doofus," Jonathan snarks back. The trio then notice Buffy on the monitors and there's a moment of hand-waving panic. Warren nods to Andrew, and the demon-summoning expert of the troika blows into what I think might be an Australian bullroarer to summon a creature to deal with the problem. Outside, Buffy is confronted by the result - a waxen-faced demon in a swirling black cloak. A hard fight ensues. The demon jabs her in the arm with a luminescent stinger and she screams... suddenly to find herself struggling against the hold of two hospital orderlies trying to give her an injection. The camera pulls back to show where she is - a institutional room with a bed equipped with straps. A mental hospital. After a pause for the opening credits, Buffy awakens on the ground outside the house. It's not clear how long she's been out. Disoriented, she blinks and stares around, then stumbles off toward home. Next day, at UC Sunnydale, a jittery Willow lurks in the bustling hallways, rehearsing what she plans to say to Tara. "I've been magic-free for insert-number-of-days-here," she recites nervously, pacing, then brightens to see Tara emerge from her class. Willow moves to intercept, but is brought up short by the sight of Tara greeting a female friend with a warm smile and a gentle kiss. Distressed, Willow promptly shrinks back into the crowd and hurries off. Tara catches sight of her retreating back and frowns in confusion. At work in fast-food hell, Buffy stands over the deep fryer, her face reflecting deep depression. Another flash of the mental hospital hits. Her boss, or someone that looks just like her in medical garb, is saying it's time for her drugs. Another blink, and she's back at work. "Buffy! If I didn't know better, I'd say you were on drugs," her boss lectures. "Okay," Buffy mutters, confused, then turns back to her (now burned) fries. In the Summers' dining room, Willow despondently pecks away at her laptop, checking for e-mail from Xander. No luck. He seems to have been gone for some time. Buffy sits down next to her, dressed in one of the many turtleneck sweaters she's been sporting this season. "How come you're all home, hearth, and DSL, anyway - weren't you gonna see Tara?" Buffy asks. "Saw her," Willow says dourly. "Saw her completely." She goes on to tell Buffy about the missed meeting, and what she saw, commenting that "it was inconclusive, and I didn't stick around to confirm," adding sarcastically, "I mean, I press my lips against my friends all the time." Buffy tries for positive thinking. "I'm sure she's just a friend," she says reassuringly. "When you fall for Willow, you stay fallen." Which is a nice sentiment, but the possibility exists that Tara might have moved on with her life. It may not matter how many days Willow's gone without magic anymore. A ring of the doorbell brings - ohmigod, Xander! Both women rush to hug him, relieved that he's okay, and listen intently to his tale of woe. He asks about Anya, who has taken her suitcase, closed the Magic Box, and vanished. Had she asked about him? "You mean between sobs?" Willow asks. "She was kinda... broken," Buffy confesses. Xander says he needs to find her. Both women look puzzled. Willow begins the thought: "So you left her at the altar, but you still..." Buffy completes it with: "wanna... date?" Good question. Since we don't see Anya at all during this episode, we have no idea where she's gone or what she's doing. Is a return to vengeance on the horizon, or is she just a heartbroken woman fleeing reminders of her pain? Either way, her would-be groom didn't seem to have given much thought to what would happen to her after he left the wedding scene. Xander explains his feelings in more detail. "I love her so much," he says, but things "just got so mixed up" with all the relatives, and demons, blah, blah, blah. "I screwed up really bad," he admits. "Hey. We all screw up," Buffy offers apologetically. Oh, please. When a man who has done something so cataclysmically messed up as to leave his bride to walk up the aisle alone in tears, with her every friend and relative there to witness her humiliation and heartbreak, I can't think of a single woman, let alone his two closest female friends, who wouldn't immediately leap to agree with his statement. Xander, you did screw up. Badly. Really badly. You suck. Comforting back-patting is so not the answer. ...and yet, given the guilty consciences of the audience for this little epiphany, perhaps it's not so surprising that Xander is getting reassurance here. Xander has broken the heart of the woman he loves, probably beyond repair. But he's hardly alone in that - all three core members of the Scooby gang have now done things to seriously hurt those who love them. Condemming Xander for his shoddy behaviour would be the same thing as pointing fingers back at themselves. The overidentification we've seen paraded around so mightily this season is finally coming home to roost. Speaking of overidentification, Buffy has odd reactions in this scene. At the wedding, she'd grown misty-eyed thinking of Xander and Anya as her "light at the end of the tunnel," her proof that relationships could work. Now, as Xander explains his feeling of loss as, "it's like there's this painful hole inside me, and I'm the idiot who dug it out," Buffy drops her eyes thoughtfully in that I'm-thinking-about-myself-now way that she does. With this as a followup to her strangely tender reactions to Spike at the wedding, it's hard not to wonder if she isn't feeling a bit of regret over how things have turned out between them. Although she certainly makes it hard enough to tell - her reactions to Spike for the rest of this episode range from cold and dismissive to deliberately hurtful. Again, not exactly the healthiest relationship ever. Probably a very good thing that it ended. Right? That night, as Buffy makes her traditional rounds in the cemetery, she runs across the vampire himself toting a paper bag of groceries. "Looking for me?" he asks. "Really not," she replies curtly. "Right then, off you go," he answers, crisply lighting a cigarette and falling into an I-don't-care posture as she keeps walking. "Did you cry?" he asks suddenly. Buffy starts at this. "What?" she stutters. He clarifies: the wedding. "Two hearts joined for eternity... great pelting showers of rice and so forth." Suddenly remembering that he left before the denouement, Buffy sits down next to him on a gravestone and gives him the lowdown on the wedding-that-wasn't. "Didn't see that coming," he shrugs. "Well, some people can't see a good thing when they've got it." He glances at her meaningfully; she shoots him a sour look in return. One wonders what she originally thought he was talking about. Xander and Willow appear, inexplicably deciding this evening to join Buffy on patrol. Xander wastes no time in antagonizing Spike. "Should have known you'd be tagging along," he blusters in a style we haven't seen since his es muy macho display in "Afterlife." Buffy, suddenly self-conscious about her casual sitting-and-chatting-with-the-vampire posture, leaps to explain to her friends that, "I found Spike and was...uh, trying to figure out what kind of dangerous contraband he had." Spike gets to his feet and gathers up his grocery sack. "Tell you what. Let me just get out of your way," he sighs. "Yeah, maybe you should do that. Just run along," Xander goads. For some reason, this lame little putdown actually manages to get under Spike's skin. Since when has he been bothered by verbal abuse from Xander Harris? He wheels around and gets right in Xander's face. "You'd know all about that, wouldn't you? You're the king of the big exit. Heard it brought the house down." Compared to the kind of freakily insightful zingers Spike used to be able to deliver, this is pretty small beer, but it has the intended effect of pissing Xander off. "Hey, I just realized... Willy Wanna-Bite can't hurt me. Dumb to pick a fight," Xander says, meeting Spike's eyes with steely glare. Spike glares right back. "More than happy to beat you right through the pain," he replies, tossing aside his grocery sack. The two men square off like punks in a schoolyard, and a panicky Willow tries to get between them, with soothing words about the "impressive macho display." It doesn't help. Xander swings and connects, sending Spike tumbling bum over teakettle. Unnoticed in the background, Buffy is having another flash. "Guys... don't..." she manages before she's sent tumbling into her other world. A concerned doctor leans in close to where Buffy sits crouched in the corner of her institutional room. "Do you know where you are, Buffy?" he asks her. "Sunnydale," she whispers. "No. None of that's real," he tells her, and explains that she's in an institution, and that she's been there for six years. Buffy stares at him in shock, her hair hanging in her face like a heavy-metal rocker. To make the scene that much more surreal, her mother and father are then escorted into the room. Joyce is wearing a striped sweater that's more than a little evocative of Nightmare on Elm Street (which, as I remember, also had an episode in a mental hospital - film number 3, The Dream Warrriors). Buffy numbly looks at them... ...then mentally snaps back to the cemetery. The whole encounter seems to have taken only a fraction of a second - Spike is still rolling from the punch in the face. Buffy reels, grasping her head in pain; Willow and Xander promptly crowd around her in concern. Spike picks himself up and hovers over her as well. "Here, let's get her back to my crypt," he suggests. "Back off, Spike," Xander snaps as they help Buffy to her feet. "She's our friend - we'll take care of her." The vampire is left watching as the pair leads Buffy away. "Put some ice on the back of her neck," he calls after them. "She likes that," he mutters to himself as he heads off alone. Back at the Summers homestead, Buffy tells her friends about her visions. That her parents were there. That the doctor told her that this world wasn't real. "What, you think this isn't real just because of the vampires, and the demons, and the ex-vengeance demons, and a sister that used to be a big ball of universe-destroying energy?" Xander elaborates, belatedly realizing he should have kept his mouth shut. Willow promises that they'll research and find the demon who did this to her; they'll fix her. She begins to give the others marching orders, and their voices begin to fade in Buffy's ears as she has another flash. This time, she's sitting in an office with the doctor and her parents. The doctor elaborates on her delusion. That she's built an elaborate universe around herself with "people just as real to her as you or me... more so." She's the center of this world, a hero. She's created fanciful villains to battle, each more grandiose than the last, scenarios in which she saves the world. "But that world, those friends.. they aren't as comforting as it used to be, are they, Buffy?" he asks her, noting that "it's all coming apart." Buffy rocks on her heels, curled up into a fetal position in her chair. "Warren... Jonathan... they did this to me..." she says. The doctor follows up on this by observing that her adversaries used to be monsters and gods, but now they're "just ordinary students you went to high school with... just three pathetic little men who like to play with toys." Ironically, within the circle of the troika itself, Jonathan - who in "Superstar" traveled the exact road the doctor is assigning to Buffy, that of the hero around whom the world circles - is increasingly the one left out of the loop. At the lair, Warren and Andrew return after a trip to get supplies. A suspicious Jonathan barrages them with questions. The other two clearly have a plan involving a vault and what Andrew says will need "eight other guys" that Jonathan hasn't been filled in on yet. (Ah... an Ocean's Eleven gag. Didn't catch that one at first. Wonder if it will be a gambling casino that they try to knock off?) "You'll be in the know as soon as you stop being all freakazoid," Warren says smugly. Jonathan prepares to stomp out, saying he needs to get supplies of his own, but Warren steers him back into the basement, making it clear that he shouldn't leave. "It's just not safe out there... alone," Warren says. Jonathan can no longer trust the other two. There may be no way out of the basement for him. In the Summers living room, Buffy stares at an old photograph of herself with her parents - before Dawn, before Sunnydale. Willow brings Buffy good news - she's identified the demon. "Its poky stinger carries an antidote to its own poison," she enthuses. Instead of being happy about this, Buffy sounds absolutely broken. "I feel so lost," she tells Willow. "Even before the demon... I've been so detached. Every day I try to snap out of it... figure out why I'm like that..." Willow reassures Buffy. "You're not in an institution," she tells her friend. "You've never been in an institution." But Willow's wrong - she has. Buffy reveals that when she saw her first vampires, she'd told her parents, who'd assumed their daughter was having a breakdown. Buffy had been sent to a clinic for a couple of weeks, only to be released when she stopped talking about what she saw. "What if I never left that clinic?" she asks Willow with tears in her eyes. "What if I'm still there?" Willow tells her again that everything will be fine, and says that Xander's looking for the demon to cure her right now. "Alone?" Buffy asks, worried. Willow assures her that he got help. "Help" turns out to be Spike. "So, she's having a wiggins. We're not real. Bloody self-centered of her if you ask me," he rambles to Xander as they search for the demon. Xander is frosty with professionalism, toting a long rifle. "We need muscle, not color commentary," he sharps, in no mood for chatter. Spike ignores him and continues with his theory. "Then again, it explains a lot. Give me a chip, make me go soft, fall in love with her, then make me into her sodding sex slave..." Xander reacts with a surprised "huh?" Spike waves his hand dismissively. "Alternative realities," he mumbles, "where we're all figments of Buffy's funny-farm delusion," then neatly segues into a little petty antagonism: "Hey, maybe in a different reality you didn't leave your bride at the altar. Maybe you went through with it, like a man." (Thank god someone is hassling Xander about this.) The demon then pops up like a jack in the box, and mutal dislike or no, the pair make a surprisingly effective fighting team - Spike tackles the creature while Xander fires tranquilizer darts into its chest. Nice to see that although he's every demon's favorite punching bag, Xander can handle a gun like a pro. The demon goes down. "I altered his reality!" Xander says brightly. Dawn brings Buffy a cup of tea in her bedroom and asks how she's doing. Buffy claims that she's fine. "The thousand-yard stare really helps sell that," Dawn jokes. Buffy stares at her blankly. "I should be taller than you," she observes. "Maybe you're not done growing yet?" Dawn offers. Buffy grabs her sister's arm and begins to urgently plead with her. "It's all coming apart," she says. "Your grades, the stealing... Willow's been doing your chores, hasn't she? We have to take care of these things, Dawn." Buffy's dreamscape snaps into focus again. This time, her mother is leaning over her, trying to explain that she doesn't have a sister. "Say it. It'll help you believe it." "I don't have a sister," Buffy the mental patient whispers, then tries to take it back. "I didn't... grow up with her, but these monks, they made her..." The vision ends, and Buffy finds a stunned Dawn staring back at her. "I'm not there, am I?" Dawn says, eyes bright with tears. "Your ideal world, and I'm not in it. You just said it. You don't have a sister." She stomps from the room. Xander and Spike manhandle the demon into the Summers' basement where Willow performs a stinger extraction. Some time later, she brings a steaming mug of antidote to the afflicted Buffy, who sits in her room, huddled under a blanket with her knees drawn up to her chest. Willow explains that the batch of medicine took a few tries, but they have the demon in the basement in case they need to make more. "You've never stopped coming through for me," Buffy thanks her. Willow smiles, glad to be appreciated. Spike peers into the room. "How is she?" he asks Willow quietly. "Make sure she drinks all that. I'm going to let Dawn know that everything's going to be okay," Willow tells him as she exits, and the two are left alone for a moment. "You alright?" he asks. Mug in hand, Buffy decides that this inquiry into her welfare is inappropriate. "You need to leave me alone," she says, eyes hard. "You're not a part of my life." For the second time this episode, it's driven home how much her pretense that there's never been anything between them has shut him out. He's not even allowed to show concern. Frustrated, he begins to lash out, but reels back after a few words, having walked straight into a stray beam of sunlight. Again, he is cut off from her... but there is still one way he can get through. He pauses to mentally regroup, and speaks again, this time more calmly. "I hope you don't think that antidote is going to cure you of that nasty martyrdom," he says evenly. "I figured it out. You aren't drawn to the darkness like I thought. You're addicted to the misery. That's why you won't tell your pals about us. Might actually have to be happy, if you did. Either have them understand and help you, god forbid... or drive you out, to find your peace in the darkness, with me. Let yourself live, already... and stop with the bloody hero trip. We'll all be better for it." He turns on his heel to stalk out, but pauses to delivers an ultimatum. "Either you tell your friends about us... or I will." In this confrontation, Spike accuses Buffy of being in love with her own noble suffering, of voluntarily wallowing in poor-little-me angst. After watching Buffy plod her way through depression for episode after episode, it's hard not to cheer someone, anyone, telling her to snap out of it, to get over herself. But it's really not that simple, for her or her audience. For Spike, this speech is puzzlingly tentative. It doesn't carry the offhanded conviction of his keenest insights (e.g., "Lover's Walk," "Doomed," "The Yoko Factor," etc.). He's unsure, clearly arriving at this conclusion only after long thought ("I figured it out"), guessing when once he would have been able to perceive without effort. His singing confession in the musical episode hinted at this as well - "I think I finally know." Since when has he actually had to think about these things? The keen perception that was once Spike's trademark hasn't been operating in peak form for quite some time, and his words to Buffy get at the heart of the problem - he can't get a clear "read" on her feelings because he has too much personally invested in the outcome. Unable to face the idea that there is no place for him in her life, he's kept trying, hoping to find a different angle, a way in, only to end up projecting his own wants onto her. He's not talking about Buffy here so much as himself, echoing her words to him in "Smashed" - "you're in love with pain." His love for Buffy is his own miserable addiction, just as he sang in the musical - "I follow you like a man possessed." He's the one who wants to be accepted, or driven out to find "peace in the darkness." Ever since the chip, he's been straddling two worlds, barely tolerated by Buffy's group and with Sunnydale's lowest-tier demons as his only approximation of friends. Buffy's mixed signals ("I do want you... I can't love you...") are like torture to him. He's begun to crave a resolution, an end to the torment of not knowing where he belongs... his own equivalent of the Slayer death wish. He gives Buffy the tell-your-friends ultimatum perhaps not so much because he thinks it will help her (although it might... who knows?), but because it will give him a final answer that he'll either have to live or die with. That said, there is a healthy smattering of truth in what he tells her here. Buffy does indeed have a martyr complex. She's made a habit of sacrificing herself to spare others pain, but not out of a love for suffering. In "The Weight of the World," the idea that she'd somehow killed her sister by failure to do enough to save her was enough to break her mind. As she told Giles in "The Gift," she killed the love of her life, Angel, to save the world... but she just doesn't have that in her anymore. Now, she would rather die than revisit those feelings of guilt and loss. Just as Buffy tells Willow in this episode, she has been trying to snap herself out of her depression ever since her return from death. Her reason for reaching out to Spike in the first place was not that she wanted to be miserable, but just the opposite; she wanted to escape from her misery. In fact, it's only when she began to feel guilt over their relationship that she broke it off. You could argue that with her rotten job and secret shame that she's indulging in a form of self-punishment, but the facts simply do not bear it out. Given a choice, Buffy would prefer to be happy. But like so many victims of serious depression, she just can't see a way there. However, Spike has put his finger on one major weak spot - that she's become comfortable in her depressive state. Her default answer to every problem has become to keep it to herself, to bottle her feelings inside. She's shut everyone out of her life emotionally, choosing to stay "dead inside" rather than let out her biggest secret. Like the martyr she is, Buffy is holding back something she knows will cause them great pain, and it's not her sexcapades with Spike, although that information might well be the opening wedge to letting it out. The real secret, I think, is her resentment toward her friends. It can't be accidental that she's never really confronted them about the resurrection, that she's gone so far out of her way to close them off, to the point of carrying on an entire flown-blown affair behind their backs. That Spike is the only one who has been able to make her feel - the only one completely outside her circle of dependents and hangers-on - also can't be an accident. On some level, I think Buffy has come to hate her friends, even more than she hates Spike, and this is the emotional atom bomb she is holding back. But maybe not much longer... As Spike leaves, Buffy squeezes her eyes closed, as if unable to bear any more. She lifts the mug to her lips, then changes her mind, and pours it out into the wastebasket by her bed. Snap. Buffy's back in the hospital. "I don't want to go back there," Buffy tells the doctor and her parents in a quavering voice. "I want to be healthy again." She looks pleadingly at the gathered faces around her. "What do I have to do?" The doctor explains that it's the emotional ties she has to her fantasy world that she must break. "My friends," she realizes. The doctor nods in agreement, explaining how they are "traps" for her mind, anchoring her into her hallucination. He goes on to tell her that she'd had a period of lucidity over the summer, but it was her friends that had pulled her back in... just like the resurrection. "They're just tricks keeping you from getting healthy," her mother adds. The doctor tells her to "do whatever it takes" to set herself free from them. Buffy absorbs this. She knows what she has to do. Downstairs in the Summers house, Willow runs into Buffy in the hallway. "I was just going to check on you. No more Cuckoo's Nest?" she asks. "I'm still a little dazed," Buffy says. "But yeah, better." She regards Willow with an even stare. "It'll be nice to see you all better," Willow smiles, and offers to fix her something to eat. The two walk into the kitchen. Later, Xander comes through the front door and calls out. Strangely, no one comes to greet him. He walks into the kitchen to find Buffy. Alone. "Hey sane girl, Willow get that anidote to ya?" Xander asks cheerfully. (What's his excuse for being so jolly? Bride-jilter. Why aren't you out looking for Anya if you "love her so much"? Gaah... sorry, but Xander's really pissing me off right now.) Buffy lifts her head and looks at him blankly. "I'm better now," she drones. "So it's settled - we're real, right?" and asks if she's up to helping him muscle the demon out of the basement, because "I so don't wanna see Spike right now," he blathers. "I mean talk about losing touch. I almost feel sorry for the guy. Almost," Xander says, oddly echoing his words from "Intervention," then elaborating: "Some of the things he was saying...I mean, I get it - been a part of the Buffy obsession..." (Urgh! Xander, you prick! Good timing to bring up your own history as a Buffy obsessor. Jerk.) Thankfully, Xander's little monologue is cut off by Buffy abruptly swinging a frying pan into his face! He reels as Buffy tries to choke him, and after a short struggle, she drags him roughly into the basement. Bleary and half-conscious, Xander sees that he's not alone - Willow is already there, facedown on the floor, bound and gagged. A cold-eyed Buffy surveys her friends, then studies the chained demon nearby. But one more person needs to be added to the group. Buffy slowly ascends the stairs (the soundtrack subtly echoing Bernard Hermann's famous score from Pyscho). Dawn is in her room, packing a bag, and is startled to see Buffy standing in her doorway like an ominous shape. "Don't you knock?" Dawn asks coldly. "I called for you," Buffy answers in monotone, and asks where Dawn is going. Dawn claims she's going to Janice's "where they like having me around." Buffy tells her she isn't going anywhere. "You're going into the basement with the others. It's the only way," Buffy says, advancing on her sister. Dawn begins to get creeped out. "What's wrong with you? Stay away from me!" she shrieks, and runs. Buffy stalks her, relentless as Michael Myers in Halloween. "You're hallucinating!" Dawn says. "That asylum and those people, they're not real." In this scene, I found it kind of hilarious the way Dawn abruptly changes personalities from the sulky teenager she's been almost constantly for the last few episodes to the understanding, pleading, caring Dawn from the end of "Bargaining." "You're my sister. I need you and love you. Somewhere inside you you must know that's real," she pleads. "Sure it is," Buffy drones in reply. "Because what's more real? A sick girl in an institution, or some kind of supergirl, chosen to fight demons and save the world." She pauses and her eyes glaze, mouth twisting into a demented smile. "That's ridiculous," she says with satisfaction, as if everything is finally clicking into place. Dawn scampers, shutting herself in a room. Buffy kicks the door in, continuing her rant as she lunges for Dawn. "A girl who sleeps with a vampire she hates? Yeah, that makes sense." Dawn dives for cover, shrieking, but is soon overcome and deposited on the basement floor with Willow and Xander. Buffy coldly presses tape over her sister's mouth and watches as her friends and sister struggle to free themselves. She walks to the demon and loosens its chains, withdrawing into the basement shadows to watch as the creature moves to attack. Xander - slightly more mobile than the others with only his hands tied to the support post - does his best to fight back, kicking at the demon as it closes in on him. He screams for Buffy to help, to untie his hands. Buffy shrinks back against the far wall, her vision shifting between the scene in the basement and the hospital, where her mother desperately tries to talk a cowering Buffy through her distress at what she's seeing. "Hang on baby, hang on," Joyce encourages. "You're strong, you can get through this." The fight in the basement continues. The door opens suddenly to reveal Tara. (Could Buffy's delusion-self be fighting back by providing a saviour for the gang?) Tara promptly uses her magic to undo their ropes and sends a shelf crashing into the demon. She begins to descend the stairs only to be tripped up by Buffy, who grabs her ankle through the planks in the manner of the classic troll under the bridge (or monster under the bed - take your pick). Tara tumbles down the stairs. Willow hammers the demon with a baseball bat, but has no success in bringing it down. Buffy contines to huddle under the stairs. In her dream world, Insano-Buffy bangs her head against the wall in distress. "Willow!" she sobs. Joyce keeps trying to reassure her daughter, telling her to fight, that she can win out over her visions. "Be strong, baby," Joyce pleads, delivering an inspiring pep talk filled with her hope in her girl's recovery. "I know you're afraid," Joyce tells her. "I know the world seems like a hard place sometimes, but you've got people who love you. Your dad and I have all the faith in the world in you. We'll always be with you. You've got a world of strength in your heart, I know you do, you just have to find it again. Believe in yourself." As her mother speaks, Buffy quiets. She stops struggling, and listens calmly, finally looking up at the her mother with glistening eyes. "You're right," she whispers. "Thank you. Goodbye." We see Joyce's happy expression fade, despairing realization dawning on her face on as her daughter slips away, back into her other world. In the basement, Buffy stands. She walks forward, and attacks the demon with cold efficiency, punching her hand into its chest. She turns to her friends, her hand dripping with gore as the demon falls dead at her feet. Her friends and sister are arrayed in a line before her, eyeing her uncomfortably. "I'm so sorry" Buffy whispers. Xander hurries to assure her that they're okay, everything will be alright. Buffy tells them that she needs the antidote, and Willow promises to make more. But it's not quite over - in one last view of Buffy's dream hospital, she sits huddled in the corner as the doctor flashes a light in her eyes. "I'm sorry, there's no reaction at all," he sighs to Buffy's parents. "I'm afraid we've lost her." Joyce sobs, clutching at her husband in grief. That the episode ends on such an open note, with Buffy's dream world, is great stuff - much more than usual with this sort of story, you're left wondering which one is the "real" one. In the world of the institute, Buffy is indeed "lost," sunk so deeply into her fantasy that she's become comatose, dead to the world. But in the reality we know, the one we've been witnessing for six years, she hasn't been all far from the same thing lately - detached, depressed, emotionally cut off. The suggestion is that these two states are interlinked - if the institute is real, then Buffy's depression has been a result of her struggle to snap out of her dream. If being the Slayer is her true reality, her surrender into a coma would suggest that her full awareness is now ready to come back online... that she's ready to live again. But even that idea is tinged with bitterness, suggesting that to re-renter the world where she's the strong "Warrior of the People," she must abandon her parents, and a reality where her family was never fractured, where it seems relationships do work. What the hell does that mean? Layers upon layers. How can you not love this stuff? If the world of BtVS is all in Buffy's mind, she is the ultimate "author" of what happens. She is not just the center of the universe, but its god - her wishes, her wants, create everything in it. From this standpoint, every oddity of the series can be put down to a quirk in Buffy's psyche making adjustments to her own storyline, such as Dawn - who, according to the doctor was "inserted into the storyline... out of her need for a familial bond" - or her relationship with Spike, which can be read as either repressed sexual issues or Buffy's mental need to throw in something so outrageous as to shock her mind into recognizing its own fiction. The inconsistencies her "adjustments" have made have confused the narrative to the point where she's left helplessly beating her head against the wall, wanting to get out, which can also be read as a weird meta-commentary on the production staff. Have they, like Buffy, written themselves into a corner? (Why is Dawn taller than Buffy?) The fantasy has spiraled out of control. Spike is right - Buffy's universe does make more sense as a product of her mind. Why else would the entire world so often hang on her actions? But her players have grown beyond her ability to manage. They've become too real, too individual, with their own wants and desires that too often conflict with her own. Buffy's death at the end of last season when she was at her strongest, at the point of her ultimate evolution as a hero, can now be interpreted as a last-ditch attempt to exit from her dream in a grand, dramatic finale - even the doctor confirms that she came out of her fantasy shell during the summer. So the grand hero's death was her escape from that world... until her friends' resurrection dragged her back in. Buffy was unable to resist this pull, but her previous confident state could not be recovered. Some histories cannot be rewritten. But that hasn't stopped Buffy from trying... Season 6 has been characterized by its backward motion - the members of the Scooby gang, all of which could be said to have reached their peaks in both power and personality in "The Gift," have been reverting to Season 1-2 insecurities and handicaps. Willow's loss of her magic and reversion to nerdy hacker-science girl (with considerably worse fashion taste than WitchWillow - what's with the sudden pulled-back hair?), Xander's increasingly piggish commentary ("You wanna get lucky? I've still got, what, fifteen, twenty minutes?"; "when you say 'poke'...?") and inability to act "like a man," Dawn's devolution into a singularly annoying whinger. If you accept that Buffy is creating all these people, that their origins are comforting props for her fantasy, this all makes sense - Buffy herself is mentally kneecapping her pals, cutting them down to a more manageable level to keep herself in the spotlight, to bring the fantasy back down to size. Their relationships are too complicated, and they divert too much attention from her, so they must be broken, destroyed. She is trying to re-establish the original form factor of her gang, when everything was about supporting her. In the very same sense, in the "real" world of vampires and monsters that we've been watching, her actions also define the universe. Like the sociology lecture from "Life Serial" pointed out, she is actively creating her own reality. The visions inspired by the demon's poison play on this - in fact, every one of the troika's attacks on Buffy has played with her mind, her senses, her perceptions. Her mental construct of the hospital gives her permission to do what her subconscious thinks will make herself "healthy" - get rid her friends. If both problem and solution are creations of Buffy's mind, then she has some incredibly rough issues to work out with them - somewhere in Buffy's head, she blames them for what she's going through. So what is the final answer for Buffy? I do think "tell the truth" is a big part of it. After all, communication is one of the main themes of BtVS as a whole - keeping things repressed has never been shown to be a good idea. I also am beginning to wonder if the main theme of this season doesn't have something to do with forgiveness - after all, without it, how can any of these people go on? It's been suggested in the series that the greatest strength comes from love - Giles' admiration of Buffy's ability to "place your heart above all else" in "Spiral," etc. - but as the Slayer's Guide-in-the-desert from "Intervention" suggested, that's only part of the whole formula... "love, give, forgive." For Anya, this will be particularly significant - the loving and giving she has down, but forgiving? Likewise, the Slayer and her Slayerettes have to learn to forgive each other. Until then, they are truly "lost."
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