[ Home | Characters | Episodes | Ramblings | Downloads | Fanfiction | Contact ]
 

Seeing Red (Ep. 6.19)

"This Night Has Opened My Eyes"

Red, the color of rage; the color of blood. Red, the color of the glowing "orbs" the Troika go after; the color of Willow's eyes in the closing scene.

"Seeing Red," even moreso than the amazing "Dead Things" (also written by Steven DeKnight, who's shaping up to be one of the series' best writers) went places I never expected to see BtVS go. Horrifying to watch, shocking and disturbing, these events unmercifully shove both us and the characters into Season 6's uncomfortable reality - it's the real world , and the real things in it, that have the most power to hurt you.

This is not a fun hour of television. Powerful, yes. Painful... oh, yes.

. . .

It's the morning after Willow and Tara's reconciliation. The two are cuddling and giggling, reveling in their rediscovered happiness. "I forgot how good this could feel. Us. Together. Without the magic." Willow purrs. Tara smiles and reminds her "there was plenty of magic." Aw. And what a relief to see such a comfortable, passionate love scene between two women, on TV no less. Just two people in love, nothing sensationalistic about it.

Deciding that staying in bed all day is a pretty good plan of action, they settle under the cozy covers and begin to hash over the previous night's events, a sort of reverse of the traditional closing scene from Hill Street Blues. Willow remarks that Buffy "wouldn't talk about what happened at the magic shop," only turned around and left again to resume her search for the nerd's lair. "This is going to sound crazy," Willow shares, "but I think there might be something going on with Spike and Buffy. She looked so hurt when she saw him with Anya." Tara, seeing no point in further secrecy, blurts out "they've been sleeping together." Willow is stunned. "Does everyone else know?" she asks, wondering how Buffy could "hide something like that" from her. Tara gently reminds her that Buffy was afraid of getting exactly that kind of shocked reaction, and suggests that Buffy "probably really needs someone to talk to." Chastened, Willow swallows her hurt and obediently pads down the hall to Buffy's room, but finds the bed unmade. She hasn't come home yet.

Dawn pops up to check in as well. "You don't think she'd hurt Spike, do you?" Dawn asks, clearly in the know. Willow, still trying to adjust, wonders aloud if Buffy told her; Dawn supplies "It was kinda obvious last night" and goes on to display her interpretation of events as "It must have hurt so much. Seeing him and Anya like that. And poor Xander... Everything's so screwed up." Feeling the need to provide parental guidance, Willow struggles to offer some kind of perspective, coming up with: "It's gonna be all right. It's just... complicated. When people have such strong feelings for each other..." This little bit of channeling her own love life is interrupted by Tara's appearance in the hallway wearing a blanket. Dawn is at first bug-eyed, then ecstatic. "oh my god oh my god oh my god!" she squeals, flapping her hands in glee. "I'm totally not here! You guys do whatever you want! Oh my god! I love you guys!" she scampers off, skipping the light fantastic. For the first time in months, Dawn's life is looking up. With Willow and Tara's reunion, she's no longer at the mercy of just her gloomy sister.

 
Have A Nice Death Trap
Said gloomy sister has redirected her anger into a relentless all-night trackdown of the Troika's lair. Finally locating the place, she busts in ready to administer a stern pummeling for her recent invasion of privacy. But she's "too late" as helpfully informed by a scrawled message on the nerd's master-plan dry-erase board. A cartoony buzz-saw trap then swings into action, giant saw blades making short work of the evidence. Buffy only manages to grab a handful of documents and beat it outside before the whole place disintegrates into sawdust behind her. She inspects a large slash in her leather jacket, a near miss from one of the saws, with an exasperated huff. "Okay, now that's gonna cost you," she grits.

Buffy takes half-shredded evidence home to present to Willow, Tara, and Dawn. This time, it's personal - she's really serious about wanting to find the Troika. Only the candidates available for helping with this task have been seriously depleted - Buffy summarily rejects the idea of calling either Xander, Spike, or Anya. Dawn eyes her sister, noting her seething reaction to the mention of Spike's name. "So he's not going to be around anymore?" she asks. Buffy, regaining her composure from her snapped-out comment that Spike is "not a part of the group," tells her "I don't know... not for a while."

 
Meanwhile, On The Dark Side...
At this point, we check in with Anya. Contrary to first appearances, she's not crying in her drink but comforting a scorned woman, as Vengeance Demons (er, Justice Demons) do. "I know how you feel. Maybe I can help," she tells the woman with a disinterested air. Under the guise of a sympathetic listener, Anya offers such insights into his cheatin' heart as: "It's not always about looks. Or a beating heart. Sometimes intimate sweaty relations with the wrong person just seems like a good idea at the time."

This is interesting - Anya, who got to know the plight of a scorned woman firsthand by being jilted at the altar, is now up-close-and-personal with other side of the issue. Her self-involved monologue shows off her new understanding of the fact that infidelity can sometimes have extenuating circumstances.

Which of course doesn't do the Scorned Woman any good - Anya is too absorbed with pondering her own issues to even notice she's being asked to fulfill a wish. "They say 'I love you' and you think it's true... and you believe they feel the same way you do because that's the way love's supposed to work, right?" Anya rants. "He keeps saying it's not me, but how can I believe him? He knew he didn't want to get married. Deep down, he knew, but he lied to me every day for months. He lied and lied and then lied a little more, 'cause hey, who's gonna notice with all the other lies flying around like monkeys." This seems to be the Number One lesson Anya has drawn from all this. "Guys never say anything they don't really mean, do they?" she says sarcastically.

From here, we see what the Troika's been up to. The three have hatched an elaborate scheme that involves a) killing and skinning a demon b) using its skin as a disguise to pass through a mystical barrier to c) retrieve a box containing a pair of magical orbs. Jonathan is now unambiguously the goat in their team - Warren and Andrew discuss ditching him in hushed tones while the demon-skin-wearing Jonathan gets to "guinea pig" the barrier. "By the end of the night, Jonathan won't be a problem," Warren says ominously. Warren's status as top dog is then made extra clear, as he immediately takes possession of the orbs, which give the user "strength, invulnerability, the deluxe package." Flush with his new power, Warren messily kills a demon with his superhero abilities, and slaps the others' hands away from his customized belt pouch containing the orbs. "You'll each get a whirl, as soon as I'm done playing with 'em." he grins.

 
Tales From The Crypt
Meanwhile, Dawn has decided to give Willow and Tara some romantic quality time alone, and arranged a sleepover at Janice's, but makes a stop at Spike's crypt first, finding the vampire depressed and drinking. "I just wanted to stop by on my way and, you know..." she begins casually, then changes tone and informs him, "Everybody's pretty mad at you."

This is a long overdue check-in with a relationship that hasn't really been touched upon since the season opener. Although long since shut out of Dawn's daily life ("not a part of the group," as Buffy icily stated), Spike was an integral part of her surrogate "family" before Buffy's return; her dedicated protector. Dawn's distress at the idea that he won't "be coming around anymore," stated twice in this episode, is obvious - she doesn't want to lose yet another person she feels she can count on.

Dawn obviously means well. With her young girl's romance-novel concept of relationships, she thinks the best way she can help her sister and friend is to play negotiator, much the same way she tried to pass messages to Tara about how Willow "misses" her and "had been really good about being careful" with magic during their "movie-and-milkshake fun-day" in "Smashed." "If you really wanted to hurt Buffy, congratulations - it worked," she tells him.

Lost in despair, Spike barely reacts to her well-intentioned prodding. "Ain't love grand," he whispers miserably. He's unable to defend his actions, managing only a bitter aside about Buffy's shoddy treatment of him and the ironic comment, "must be a bit of the evil left in me after all," the meaning clearly being exactly the opposite - he really didn't want to hurt Buffy at all. Like the Buffybot, the liasion with Anya was something he never intended for her to know about, and he shows every sign of deep regret that it happened at all... which is notable in and of itself. Since when are vampires supposed to feel "sorry" for or guilty about anything?

 
Scoobies Status Report
Next on the agenda: Buffy screws up her courage to go talk to Xander, finding him in much the same state as Dawn found Spike, sitting alone in his apartment, drinking, incidentally not too far from the picture of the "bitter, angry old man" his future vision of Anya had accused him of heading toward. Self-righteous as always, Xander shows little empathy for Buffy, and makes no attempt to hide his disgust. This talk, ugly as it is, finally brings a number of long-neglected issues out in the open; Buffy reminds him how hard it is for her "just being here" and accuses him (correctly) of not wanting to know. She also tells him that her personal life is none of his business (thank you!).

Xander's judgmental attitude, already hard to take before this, only gets worse, containing such charmers as his mocking sum-up of how the affair "just happened" - "'Say, you're evil. Get on me.'" Frostily, Buffy points out that his "decision making skills have really sparkled lately" and that he worked right alongside Spike during the summer, and trusted him to take care of Dawn. "But I never forgot what he really is," Xander rebuts. "You think he'd still be all snuggles if that chip ever stopped working? Would you still trust him with Dawn then?" Buffy has no answer for this, and Xander leaves her sitting there alone to think about it, and drifts by the Magic Box to stare in the window at Anya as she fluffs about dusting the shelves. Out of options. Nothing left to say.

Meanwhile, Willow and Tara have continued to try to make sense of the papers and CDs Buffy managed to grab from the Troika's lair, although they've decided to combine their task with a healthy dose of bedroom-lounging, the "Trio's Evil Scheme" not as high a priority as maintaining their love high. Willow comes out "firmly against" any idea that involves getting out of bed.

 
Spike Snaps
Nighttime. On her usual patrol beat, a distracted Buffy takes unexpected damage from a typical vampire fight, ending up with an injured back from being thrown against a tombstone. Wincing with pain, she goes home to take a hot bath. Dressed in her bathrobe, she's leaning over the tub when she hears Spike's voice from behind her. "You hurt?" he asks from the doorway, quietly entering the bathroom and closing the door behind him. With no energy for further confrontations in one day, Buffy tiredly tells him to get out. "We need to talk," he insists, just as he has several times this season, adding, "this isn't just about you, as much as you'd like it to be."

He tells her how sorry he is for the Anya incident, adding despairingly "not that it matters now," and explains that he'd gone to the Magic Box for a spell - not for her, but for himself: "anything to make this feeling stop. I just wanted it to stop." He trails off with the hopeless statement, "you should have let [Xander] kill me." Spike has reached his lowest ebb, his last shred of self-worth long since gone. Death is sounding like a mercy.

"I couldn't," Buffy replies. Asked to explain why, she answers, "You know why." Spike thinks he does. "Because you love me," he states quietly, his need to hear a final answer from her clear in his voice. Buffy pauses. "No," she says. "I don't."

As in the earlier scene with Xander, this conversation finally gets issues out in the open that desperately needed saying. Buffy admits, for the first time, to some kind of emotional connection between them. "It's not that I don't have feelings for you. I do," she tells him. "But it's not love. I could never trust you enough for it to become that."

Seen strictly from Buffy's point of view, this is technically fair. She has seen little behaviour on his part that could honestly be called as selfless, having been dead for the largest stretch of time that such a description could have been applied. Certainly not once their relationship became sexual. But for her to single out "trust" as the holdout reason for her inability to really care for him is baffling at best - as was pointed out in her discussion with Xander, she has trusted him. They all have. And since the V-chip no longer works on her, Buffy can't even convincingly use that as her excuse (a little detail she skipped over mentioning to Xander).

Spike is as confused by this as the rest of us are. In an echo of Anya's "he lied and lied and lied some more, 'cause who's gonna notice with all the other lies flying around," he assumes once again that she's hiding her real feelings, putting up a front. "Why do you keep lying to yourself?" he asks her, frustration rising, and tells her that "trust is for old marrieds. Great love is wild and passionate and dangerous. It burns and consumes." Buffy scoffs "Until there's nothing left. That kind of love doesn't last." This too, hits a familiar note - remember Buffy "wanting the fire back"? Now Spike uses fire imagery to try to describe what he feels for her... and what he assumes she feels for him.

What happens next has been strongly foreshadowed. Desperate, he reaches out to her in the one way he's ever been able to get through - sexually. "I know you feel like I do. You don't have to hide it anymore," he tells her, reaching for her, trying to kiss her. Buffy tells him to stop. He doesn't.

To tackle the issue of rape at all on TV takes courage; to address it with two characters we know well enough to understand the how and why of it, is braver yet. It wasn't until after I spent a few days processing this scene that I realized rape has actually been one of the running themes of the season, from Willow's mindwipe of Tara to Dawn's Halloween vampire "date" to Katrina's kidnapping... and now this. Even Willow's magical probing by Rack could be viewed in some ways as a rape - certainly her reactions to it were consistent with such an event; sitting in the shower and sobbing as if she felt dirty, needing to wash the memory away.

Buffy at first doesn't realize the danger. She struggles to free herself from his embrace, but her own disbelief - this can't be happening to me - delays her reaction, and her injury handicaps her from resisting with full force. He presses on, ignoring her sobs and pinning her to the floor. Only when she gets a leg between them and kicks him across the room does he stop. In these few, horrible moments, everything between them has changed.

 
How'd This Happen?
There's really little reason to get deeply into Spike's thoughts here; deconstructing how he arrived at this terrible place, at these actions, is no challenge - in truth, we've spent far more time inside his head this season than Buffy's. But it's this very familiarity that gives the near-rape its horrific shock value. It's a frighteningly seamless transition between their usual "make me/stop me" foreplay and sexual assault.

Throughout this season, people have consistently lectured Buffy on forgetting Spike's nature, from Spike himself ("thinks I'm housebroken... she forgot who she's dealing with") to Riley ("deadly, amoral, opportunistic... or have you forgotten?") to Xander ("I never forgot what he really is"). Buffy even chastises herself for it ("That's just you. I should have remembered."). But that's actually not the part of the equation she's forgotten about - she's never been less than aware of him as a vampire. What Buffy has forgotten is to take him seriously.

Despite her listlessness and depression, being raised from the dead has made no real significant impact on Buffy's strength and power as the Slayer. As we saw in the musical, these days she can easily do her job on autopilot, going through the motions. As such, she's become overconfident, cavalier in her dealings with monsters and demons. The average demon is no real threat to her - it doesn't matter as she sang. Likewise, from the first moment they appeared, the Troika have not been taken seriously as villains. They're jokes, not worthy of her full attention.

Buffy sees Spike, too, as a joke, a failure, harmless. She describes him as "incompetent," demonstrating her lack of regard constantly by often not even turning to face him when he talks. (In Season 4's "Who are You?" the newly chipped Spike even called this out as a sore spot to the body-switched Faith: "Oh, fine! Throw it in my face! 'Spike's not a threat anymore, I'll just turn my back, he can't hurt me'.") How many times this season, including this episode, have we seen him talking to her back? As something that "can't be human, can't be a vampire," he's beneath her notice, nothing - not monster enough to worry about nor man enough to be worth dealing with emotionally.

As viewers, we have a pretty clear picture of Spike's view of love - "blood screaming inside you to work its will... you're in my throat, my gut, you're all I think about, dream about" - but clearly Buffy does not. Despite being on hand to personally witness the disintegration of his relationship with Drusilla, she has not absorbed any particular lesson from it. Of Spike's entire history of obsessive passion, Buffy has only seen enough to form an opinion of him as a pushover, weak, someone who can be blackmailed into a standoff by threatening his girlfriend, as in Season 2's "Lie to Me." She missed the entire point of his truce with her in the Season 2 finale, that he would do anything, even side with a hated enemy, to get his lover back. Distracted by her own view of him as a toothless monster, she's unable to see the man underneath, driven nearly insane by his own obsessive love, hopeless, desperate, miserable, and frustrated... and at this late date, terrifyingly dangerous.

 
After
They stare at each other from across the room, both shaken by what's just happened. Buffy clutches her torn robe together. "Ask me again why I could never love you," she spits out, trembling with anger. Spike looks at her numbly, only just realizing the seriousness of what he's done. "Oh, god. Buffy... I didn't..." he begins. She cuts him off with "because I stopped you." He has no answer for this, and wanders back to his crypt in a daze, unable to shake the images of Buffy's painful cries from his mind.

The broken Spike we see after this is a curious, unfamiliar creature - lost in remorse, confused to the point of insanity, clawing at his head and sing-songing in a distinctly Drusilla-like manner. "What have I done? Why didn't I do it? Why do I feel this way?" he rambles to the loose-skinned demon Clem, who's shown up toting a bucket of hot wings in hopes of an impromptu TV night. As with Buffy and her came-back-wrong excuse, this completely-lost-it incarnation of Spike seizes on the V-chip as the only possible explanation for his behaviour. "I can feel it. Squirming in my head," he says. "This isn't the way it's supposed to be." In a distinctly scary monologue about how "clear" things used to be - "Slayer. Vampire. Vampire kills Slayer, sucks her dry, picks his teeth with her bones" - he finally decides that "change" is in order. "I wasn't always this way," he tells Clem feverishly. "I can be like I was." He gets on his motorcycle and jets out of town with an ominous I'll-be-back... "and when I do... it's all gonna change."

Like Xander's exit from the wedding, or the antidote he lectured Buffy about, Spike is actually running from himself. The V-chip has clearly been a catalyst for a major change, but from a story standpoint, removing it is now absolutely necessary - as long as he remains on a "leash," he has no free will; caught in an amorphous limbo between monster and man, "nothing." I find it particularly significant that the signature leather duster, his trophy from the second Slayer he killed, is left behind at Buffy's house. The coat has literally been his identity, one that he's kept wrapped around himself like a suit of armor for nearly thirty years. By leaving it behind, he's also abandoned his persona as Slayer of Slayers, and until he's able to make his own choice, to either find a new identity or return to his old one, the trophy now belongs to Buffy, as a symbol of her victory over him, her complete destruction of everything he was.

 
Calling Charles Atlas
In the meantime, oblivious to this latest, grim chapter to the drama, Xander has retired to a bar to drown his sorrows, pushing off the attentions of a lovely young woman with a self-absorbed rant not too unlike Anya's, heavy on an extended fish metaphor involving lots of "flopping and gasping." At her puzzled stare, he finishes lamely with "I'm just looking to curl up with the quiet alone tonight." Unaware to him, Warren and his buddies are at the same bar, Warren eager to show off his new magic balls.

Quick break: I would note here that Warren's "magic balls," complete with their scrotumlike custom pouch, are so obvious a metaphor for testicles that they're not just symbolic of testicles, but are symbolic of everything testicles are symbolic for. (Get it?) Which is why Warren is so keen to flaunt his new power by making time with the hot chicks. Masculine power, baby! Unfortunately, balls or no balls, Warren is no Mr. Wonderful - his come-on lines still leave a lot to be desired. "the clothes, the cars, the money... that's all just window dressing, baby. This is what's really important," he tells a hot brunette, holding her hand and rhapsodizing about "two souls coming together." Her beefy boyfriend then shows up, calls Warren a shrimp, and tells him to get lost.

Warren brightens visibly, recognizing Beefy Boyfriend as a bullyish high-schooler who used to give him wedgies in gym class, and cheerfully recounts their history aloud. "God, I thought I'd never stop crying," Warren smiles, but claims "no hard feelings" and "this ain't high school." He hauls off and smacks the guy across the room, and a full-on bar fight begins, Warren making a thorough mess of anyone who tries to take him on. As the crowd gives him a wide berth, Warren struts about the room, continuing his ladies' man act, immune to the obvious terror of the ladies he talks to.

Like something out of Pulp Fiction, Xander comes out of the restroom to see the bar in a shambles and also catch the tail end of Warren's smoove-operator act. Proving that he's not exactly lacking in balls himself, Xander marches straight up to Warren and gets in his face. "Why don't we leave the ladies to their impending nausea and move the freakshow outside? Whaddya say?" Warren replies with an off-color joke about Anya, Xander punches him. "You hit like a girl," Warren laughs. "At least I know how to get one," Xander snarls back. The fight turns ugly, Xander taking a hard hit and flying across the room, but Jonathan intervenes to remind Warren of "that thing you wanted to do tonight." Warren considers and decides kicking Xander's ass will keep. "Your lucky night," he jokes on the way out.

Bloody-nosed, Xander tromps into Casa de Summers with the news that "his face found" the Troika, and is brought up short to see Spike's abandoned duster on the banister. Furious, he marches upstairs to confront Buffy with it, and finds his friend still sitting in the bathroom in her torn bathrobe, tears streaming down her face. "What did he do? Did he hurt you?" Xander asks, realizing immediately. "He tried. He didn't..." she whispers, and moves her robe to hide bruising evidence of the assault. Xander is keen to pull a repeat performance of last night's revenge rage; Buffy holds him back. "Don't. Just... don't," she pleads.

An instant later, Willow barges into the room, flushed with I-think-we-found-something and freezes, taking in the scene in front of her - Xander with a bloody nose, Buffy red-eyed in a torn bathrobe. Promptly turning all-business, Buffy abruptly pushes past her "what happened?" question with a brisk "nothing." Shortly, everything is back to more-or-less normal, Buffy once again in a turtleneck sweater and Xander with an icepack against his nose as Willow explains what they've found - schematics and blueprints for a number of banks and armored car routes; recipes for theft on a large scale. Willow and Tara pinpoint a local job that's likely to go down that evening thanks to being "time sensitive," and Xander warns Buffy that Warren's "gone all Mighty Mouse." "Good," Buffy says darkly. "I won't have to hold back."

 
All's Fair At The Fun Park
An amusement park. (Now Sunnydale has an amusement park?) The Trio pull a job on the armored car loading up the cash from the opening weekend, Warren rolling it over with one hand. "Man, I can't wait to get my hands on his orbs," Andrew sighs... and that works on so many levels I can't even make a joke about it. Jonathan rolls his eyes. "Yeah, I'm sure he'll be giving them up any second." In case you haven't caught on by now, you can't borrow another man's balls. You gotta grow your own.

Buffy then appears like something out of a superhero comic, standing tall and majestic atop the toppled armored car. "I was wondering when Super Bitch would show up," Warren jeers. "You really have a problem with strong women, don't you?" she answers, and gets right down to the business of kicking his ass. And although she's still a little slow from her injuries, she collapses a heavy arch of masonry over his head, bringing him down. But, invulnerable due to his magic balls (snerk!), Warren quickly rises again. "What's the matter, baby? Never fight a real man before?" he grins maniacally, and really lays into Buffy... and she's starting to tire. He isn't.

Andrew is getting into the fight a little too much. "Kill her! Kill her!" he shouts from the sidelines, eyes alight with bloodlust. Jonathan makes a choice - and leaps onto Buffy's back, appearing to his friends as if he's attacking her, but using the opportunity to whisper into her ear "smash his orbs!" And if you weren't convinced of the male genitalia reference before, Buffy does indeed kick Warren in the crotch before she spots the leather pouch and grabs it away. Warren's eyes flash red and the energy drains away, and Buffy smashes the magic balls against the ground with the ironic tagline "good night, bitch."

"You're nothing but a sad little boy, Warren," she tells him condescendingly. "It's time to grow up and pay for what you've done." But it's Warren who gets the last laugh - he rips away his jacket to reveal a rocket pack, and blasts away into the sky with "I swear to god I'm gonna take you down." Andrew gives Buffy a sinister smile, and whips off his coat to reveal a similar jetpack, but he has far less luck with his getaway - he blasts off and crashes straight into an overhang, knocking him back down to the ground. Jonathan is stunned to realize that he didn't even get a rocket pack, that his friends were just going to leave him there... but that's hardly the least of their worries, as Andrew and Jonathan are escorted to the police station. "Oh god. The Big House," Jonathan says miserably. The disillusioned Andrew is even more upset, sounding suspiciously like the jilted Anya: "How could he do that to me? He promised we'd be together. He was just using me. He never really loved... uh, hanging out with us." So... hmm. Is Andrew "gay now"? Deeply idolizing Warren? Both?

 
Hit And Run
Next morning, the gang relaxes, reassured that they've gotten past the worst of it. Willow and Tara engage in more loverly bliss in the upstairs bedroom, and Buffy attempts to clean up after this latest escapade by stoically picking through the bushes in her backyard, looking for more spy cameras. (Can I mention here how tired am I of Internet pop-up ads for just such devices?)

Xander approaches Buffy, contrite. She quietly fills him in on the previous night's events, and the fact that Warren got away. "You'll find him. He won't be much good without his friends," Xander says. Buffy looks at him and sadly answers "No. He won't." A pregnant pause follows, and two friends confess their mutual hurts: Xander's that Buffy hadn't trusted him, Buffy admitting that she should have. "Maybe you would have. If I hadn't given you so many reasons to think I'd be an ass about it," he smiles. Finally, with his apology, Xander shows the most maturity he has all season. Yes, he's behaved like jerkass. No, he's not perfect - nor, for that matter, is Buffy - but he has the ability to learn from his mistakes. I've been hating Xander ever since the wedding and this scene gave me hope that there's a light at the end of the tunnel.

I should have known better.

The episode's worst shock is still to come. Warren suddenly appears in the sunny backyard. "You think you can just do that to me? That I'd let you get away with it?" he seethes, producing a handgun and firing several loud, ugly shots. Warren scarpers, and Xander wheels around to discover Buffy lying in the grass, blood seeping from a bullet wound near her heart. Panicked, he presses his hands to her chest to try to staunch the blood flow. "Oh, god... Buffy..." he sobs.

Upstairs, in the haven of light and love, things are even worse. The shock heralded only by a small cracking sound, Willow is abruptly sprayed with blood. "Your shirt," Tara says dazedly, staring at her own blood on her lover's clothes, and collapses, shot through the heart from the back. Willow drops to the floor, clutching Tara's body to her in a sudden wave of overwhelming grief, then raising her head to show her eyes burning black and red with rage.

Throughout Season 6, the supernatural world has taken a decidedly backseat role. This shooting continues with the story that Mutant Enemy has been telling all along - that all the true, lasting hurts to have been suffered have come from mundane, real-world things, from the wine bottle that killed Katrina to the car wreck that injured Dawn. Warren with invulnerability and super-strength is a fantasy challenge; Warren with a gun brings real death, death like Joyce experienced, death that you don't come back from. Likewise, Spike with his vamp-face and blood-drinking is just a movie monster, but Spike trying to rape Buffy in her own "safe" house is disturbing, terrifying... and real.

That ME has had the nerve to push their characters, their story, this far is frankly incredible. That the events are presented in such a dispassionate, detached way is bone-jarringly effective - the combined shock of the rape attempt, of the shooting, Tara's death, is enough to make you feel numb, but at no time are you told how to feel about any of it. There is no pat moral message; you have to make your own judgments. This is life, the story seems to be saying. Unfair. Frightening. Unavoidable. Beautiful and Ugly and Raw and Real.

Just this.

 
Go Back

 
[ Home | Characters | Episodes | Ramblings | Downloads | Fanfiction | Contact ]