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Villains (Ep. 6.20)

"Red Right Hand"

After last week's stunningly painful "Seeing Red," "Villains" gets right down to the business of showing the aftermath. Willow goes on a methodical magic rampage, Buffy dies and is pulled back from the brink yet again; Dawn gains another trauma to really get her future in therapy rolling; Anya lets spill that she's back on the Justice Demon tip; Xander still can't decide if he's a jerk or not; and Spike sets out on a vision quest in... Africa? Eh?

"Villains" features some very satisfying moments but is overall a very diffuse follow-up to the numb, brick-in-the-jaw shock of "Seeing Red." Season 6, after many episodes of meandering through the mundane details of Buffy's depression, financial troubles, career choices, and parenting challenges, is now gearing up for its big payoff... but it's slogging foward very, very slowly, as if every step hurts too much. With only two episodes to go after this one, I'm beginning to wonder if there's even time to resolve all the issues raised in a satisfying manner. I remain hopeful, simply because BtVS isn't exactly known for ending seasons on cliffhangers, but...

. . .

The opening scene picks up precisely where we left off last week, with paramedics rushing to attend to the bleeding gunshot victim in the Summers backyard. As the medics fuss over Buffy, a different drama is taking place inside the house...

 
Paint It Black
In the upstairs bedroom, a grief-stricken Willow cradles her dead lover, and desperately calls out to the forces of darkness - to the same Osiris she appealed to for Buffy's resurrection, - to bring Tara back to life. Clouds form in the room, and a giant face appears, looking for all the world like the Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz (or possibly the "return what you have stolen!" all-knowing creator from Time Bandits). The ghostly face denies Willow's request because unlike Buffy's death, no supernatural energies were involved. "She was taken by natural order... it is done!" the apparition rumbles. Willow screams in rage, magical power flowing from her in huge waves, but there is no court of mystical appeal. Tara is gone. For good.

Lost in shock, Willow stumbles from the house just in time to see Buffy being loaded into an ambulance. Xander, barely noticing her blood-spattered shirt, numbly identifies Warren as the shooter. "Warren," Willow repeats and strides off. Xander calls after her in confusion, but given the choice of following her or riding in the ambulance with Buffy, he chooses the hospital run.

Willow's destination is the Magic Box. She stops Anya's questions with a hand gesture, summoning every dark magic book in the place flying to the table in front of her. Sinking her hands into the pages, runes and text begin to crawl across her skin as she magically absorbs every bit of information in the pile of volumes, leaving the blank shells behind. "That's better," she breathes, her hair and eyes turning black, her skin pale, the very picture of a girl on her way to a Goth club. (So... does that mean she's evil now?)

Willow's actions from this point on are methodical, nearly emotionless. She goes to the hospital and magically removes the bullet from Buffy's chest just as she flatlines, healing the injury. Next, she leads Buffy and Xander in pursuit of Warren by car, magically sensing his location and forcefully backseat driving. (I'd drop in the side note here that we've never, ever seen Willow drive a car except by magic - I wonder if she even knows how?)

Throughout these scenes, both Buffy and Xander come down on Willow for her relapse into magic use, despite the fact that once again, it just saved Buffy's life. They tell her it "isn't right." Buffy states and restates that "this isn't how I want it" and "this isn't the way." She might as well be talking to a wall. Willow is through playing by Buffy's rules. She has no intention of "coming back" from this dive into her dark power source. With Tara gone, she has nothing to come back to. What Willow wants now is vengeance, pure and simple.

 
Reality Bites
Warren himself is only beginning to realize the gravity of his situation. Flushed with success, he's expansive at first, stopping by a demon bar to gloat about killing the Slayer, only to have the lowlife demon patrons laugh at him and tell him he's a "dead man" because they heard on the news that Buffy survived the shooting. "Might want to get a head start," a vampire laughs. "That girl is going to be coming for you, big time."

Suitably panicked, Warren goes to Willow's junkie magic hook-up, Rack, for help. Like the bar patrons, the sleazy warlock deals a blow to Warren's ego by admitting he's never heard of his supervillain "Trio," and gives him a healthy dose of the real. "Slayer's the least of your problems... if I were you, I'd be worried about the witch," Rack tells him. "She's the new power, man... she's going to blow this town away, starting with you." (And as much as I disliked the magic crackhouse storyline, I have to say I really enjoyed Rack here - he hit just he perfect note of amused stoner detachment; like Eric Stolz in Pulp Fiction, Rack is obviously a guy used to seeing a lot of strange people come traipsing through his place.) Despite these warnings, Warren shoves enough money at Rack to get a magical upgrade that manages to fool Willow temporarily, sending a robot copy of himself on a bus out of town. Meanwhile, Jonathan and Andrew have been left to cool their heels in jail, Jonathan realizing all too well that they've been abandoned by Warren, Andrew confident that he'll be back to break them out. "Sure. He's a nice murderer who keeps his word," Jonathan grumbles, and comments about how guys in jail like "the ones with little hands that remind them of their girlfriends." (I love Jonathan. Danny Strong is wonderful. Too bad he's almost certain dead meat.)

 
A Bad Road Trip
On a lonely highway in the California desert, Willow brings Xander's speeding car to a halt and gets out, stopping the onrushing bus with a word. After mentally forcing what she thinks is Warren out of the bus, she attempts to choke him, prompting startled protests from Buffy and Xander. Realizing the trick only when one of Warren's eyes pops out and rolls away, Willow turns away, darkly glowering, "We'll find him another way," and clearly states that she intends to kill him. At Buffy's shocked response, Willow finally tells them that Tara is dead. Momentarily shaken by this news, Buffy insists irregardless that "we don't kill humans... if you do this, Warren destroys you too." But Willow is through talking. She brushes off her friends with a magical wave of the hand and disappears into the desert.

QUICK QUIZ Are you Evil? Answer ye these questions and see! a) Is your hair black? b) Are your eyes black? c) Do you backseat drive? d) Are you bored now?

While all this is going on, Dawn arrives home from her overnight stay at Janice's and discovers Tara's dead body. She spends the rest of the day crouched in the corner in shock, and is still there when Buffy and Xander return. "I didn't want to leave her alone," Dawn plaintively cries. Poor Dawn. She's hardly lacked for grief in her short life so far, and Buffy can offer her little in the way of comfort or even useful advice. After Tara is taken away by the coroner's department, an anguished Dawn comes down hard in favor of Willow's vengeance against Warren. Buffy coolly tells her sister "you don't really feel that way" and that "being the Slayer doesn't give me a license to kill."

Leaving aside the inexcusably stilted dialogue here - the same point is made several times, i.e. "we can't control the universe" and "there are limits to what we can do" - Buffy's speech here is a reprise of the credo of every superhero comic ever printed - the special-powers-don't-give-me-the-right-to-kill trope. As a philosophy, this is valid enough - as Faith showed us, no one in their right mind would be eager for the prospect of a Slayer who feels free to do whatever she wants. But in this particular case, does Buffy's argument hold? Not really - if she really felt that Warren was a case for the police, why didn't she ever go to the Sunnydale P.D. with her suspicions about Katrina's murder? If human justice wasn't good enough to handle the situation then, why is it now? Not to mention the fact that it's Willow who's planning to kill Warren, not Buffy. So the million-dollar question is: Does Buffy have the right to intefere?

Buffy's automatic moralism has always been an interesting facet of her personality. From the start, the BtVS series has been about constantly challenging her perceptions of right and wrong. Starting with Angel, Buffy has been called upon to make judgments about gray issues that, as the Slayer, she would be within her rights to ignore in favor of black-and-white resolutions. She's bent the rules to the point of breaking on more than one occasion, from her truce with Spike to stop Alcathla to her willingness to kill Faith to save Angel to her refusal to sacrifce Dawn to save the world. But now she's about to deny Willow the ability to make such a choice because Buffy claims that right - to decide what's right and wrong - for herself. Giles understood this - in "The Gift," he murmured to Glory's human host, "She's a hero, you see. Not like us," just before remorselessly suffocating him, something Buffy herself would never do, or allow anyone else to (if she knew about it), no matter how many lives it would save. Buffy's claim that she won't "let Willow destroy herself" is partly about saving her friend, but more than a little about her own her need to stay on a moral high ground, to keep her conscience clean. And regardless of how laudable a position her "wrong is wrong" philosophy is, Buffy's "hero trip" is going to put her in direct opposition to her best friend, and since Buffy's own lax approach to tracking down the Troika is to a large extent what's to blame for Tara's death, I can't see any way this is going to turn out well.

 
(Not) Telling Little Sis
A course of action decided on - track down Willow and stop her - the conversation turns to what to do with Dawn. As in "Entropy," Dawn wants to come along. Buffy refuses to even consider it, saying she should be someplace "she feels safe." Resentful at being put off yet again, Dawn decides that, instead of staying alone in the house she'd shared with Tara's dead body all day, she'd rather wait things out at Spike's. After a brief pause, Buffy agrees. Xander can't believe his ears, and begins to protest. Buffy drags him aside to the entryway so they can argue about it quietly, clearly not willing to burden Dawn with the news of yet another horrible event to cope with. Surreally, Buffy justifies her decision to entrust her little sister to the care of "Mr. Attempted Rape" on the grounds that he's simply incapable of hurting her. Uh... did it not occur to Buffy that Spike is more than a little mentally unbalanced at this point - suicidally depressed at the very least, possibly even clinically insane? Shouldn't she be worried about exposing Dawn to that?

The two head off to Spike's crypt, but discover Clem there instead, comfortably ensconced in front of the TV. "He didn't tell you?" Clem asks, and delivers the message that the vampire has left, as in "left town." Buffy's response is an uneasy "oh," but she's quick to recover, asking Clem - a demon she barely knows, with no "physically can't" hurt people chip in his head... what is Buffy thinking? - to fill in on babysitting detail. Happy for the company, the easygoing Clem agrees and offers Dawn the "comfy chair." Mission: Ditch-Dawn accomplished, Buffy retreats, but pauses at the door to ask if Spike said when he'd be back. "No... he could be gone awhile," Clem answers. Wordless to this news, Buffy leaves.

I won't get too much into Buffy's odd reactions here - it's by now a standing tradition for the men in Buffy's life to leave her behind, so she should hardly have been surprised by Spike skipping town. But the fact remains that she was surprised - she had honestly expected him to still be there for her to once again lean on in a crisis, to take care of Dawn for her even though she says she doesn't trust him, and now has ample proof that she shouldn't. I have to say it - last week I really felt for Buffy, and in less than the space of one episode, my sympathy has all but evaporated. Where the hell is her head at? With the kind of empathy she's showing for anyone these days (i.e., none at all), it's looking like the gang was by far better off with the Buffybot.

 
Undead Man Walking
As to where Spike has gone off to, we now get to see the vampire striding through a torchlit village in what appears to be... Africa? Fast work - only 24 hours earlier, we'd seen him on a motorcycle headed out of town, and now he's on the other side of the world? Okay, so we know Sunnydale does have an international airport, but as had been previously established in Season 2's "Surprise," airplanes are usually off limits for vampires because of the sunlight problem. If Spike has indeed made it all the way to the dark continent since last episode, we have to assume that either a) he doesn't care if he does get caught in the sun at this juncture or that b) Mr. carries-a-lighter-even-though-vampires-are-flammable is more butch about such things than Angel or c) both. Or he's actually in Las Vegas. Or Gilroy. Or Burning Man. Whatever. (And I have to say - and I never thought I'd see myself typing these words - I actually could have done without seeing Spike for awhile after the events of last week. I honestly hadn't expected him to show up again before next season.)

No rest for the wicked, though - we see him barging his way into a cave past the protests of a yammering villager, using his lighter to view the primitive paintings on the walls. There's much in the way of bestial faces and dripping blood... and what distinctly looks like a stick-figure representation of a vampire staking. Hm. Whose cave is this?

A demon appears, half-hidden by shadows. It's a blocky, stony-looking thing with a pointed head, glowy green eyes, and what appears to be a thick tail twitching behind it like a distracted Cowardly Lion. Actually, it looks quite a lot like the alien in the Doctor Who serial "Pyramids of Mars." "You seek me, vampire?" it rumbles, quickly identifying via some kind of Ms. Cleo-like psychic ability the reason for his visit being "something about a woman. The Slayer..." Mention of Buffy sets Spike off on a dark rant. "Bitch thinks she's better than me," he snarls. "Ever since I got this bleeding chip in my head, I haven't been right. Everything's gone to hell." The demon confirms what seems to be the unstated request: "And you want to return. To your former self," mentioning that "trials" are involved. It also laughs, and adds the unflattering comment, "look what she's reduced you to."

The mystery demon's message to Spike is essentially the same thing D'Hoffryn told Anya in "Hell's Bells" - "You let him domesticate you. When you were a vengeance demon you were powerful, at the top of your game. You crushed men like him." Likewise, the glowy-eyed demon quickly identifies "a woman" as the reason Spike is looking for "restoration," and recounts the vampire's decline in status as "You were a legendary dark warrior, and you let yourself be castrated.... you're a pathetic excuse for a demon." (I would note that with this addition of this line on top of the DoubleMeat Palace demon, Warren's glowing orbs, "I got my rocks back," and other unsubtle male genitalia references this season, the emasculation theme no longer counts as subtext so much as outright Text. Strange focus for a show with a default feminist message.)

In full mad-on mode, Spike is determined to prove that, dammit, they're all wrong, insisting it's the "bloody chip" and encouraging the demon to "do your worst." "Bitch is going to see a change," he mutters to himself. Yeah, I'd say that's likely to be true. But what kind of change? Without speculating too much, I'm starting to wonder at some of the word choices here: "restoration" and "return to your former self" don't so much suggest a return to the fun-loving, conscience-free, mayhem-causing vampire of Season 2 as hint at something else, as did Spike's Pinocchio reference last episode. ("Squirming inside my head. The chip. Little Jimminy Cricket, gnawing bits and chunks.") Like Anya, it's entirely possible that Spike is too far gone from his roots as a demon to really get back in the game. His unforgivable actions in "Seeing Red" were weirdly balanced by geniuine remorse - his "what have I done... why didn't I do it?" showing the depth of the conflict. Just as Buffy in "Dead Things" wanted badly to believe she "came back wrong," Spike is now clinging to the idea that there's some way to fix whatever's wrong with him, and is desperate enough to "make the feelings stop" that he turns to magic - never his first choice ("consequences," remember?) - to get the chip out. But even if he gets it out, will things really change? Or what if, more to the point, he's the one that's changed? What then?

 
For Bitter Or For Worse
Back in Sunnydale, Xander and Buffy have checked in at the Magic Box to find Anya slowly recovering from the frozen state she was put into by Willow. Moving stiffly, Anya explains Willow's black magic power-up visit and, following Xander's request for a locator spell, confesses that she doesn't need one - that she can "feel" Willow, her "thirst for vengeance." Xander takes a moment to catch on that this means Anya's back with her vengeance. "When?" he finally asks. "When do you think?" she says bitterly. Buffy asks her to make a decision - whose side is she on? Anya chooses Willow's side... but agrees to lead them to her.

The revelation of Anya's return to "Justice Demon" status is handled in a disappointingly low-key fashion - it's passed over as barely an issue when it seems to me to be a huge item. Is Anya back to eviscerating and torturing or not? In "Seeing Red," Anya was established as being back on the job, albeit in an amusing manner where we didn't actually see her do anything bad. But isn't this an important thing to establish? Is there such a thing as demons getting sacked for doing a lousy job? Are there quotas? Is Anya now a "pathetic excuse for a demon," like Spike? Or is she merrily getting on with her vengeance duties off camera because, as she explained to Buffy and Xander, as a demon she would normally "have to"? Granted, current events make this a lesser item on the agenda than finding Willow, but since it seems to me that Anya's situation and Willow's are strongly related, shouldn't we be hearing more about it?

Either way, I would finger Xander's treatment of his woman as unilaterally shitty: "Seems Anya got her vengeance on again," he explains to Buffy, his voice icy cold, as if Anya is not even in the room. Again, like Buffy, Xander had won himself back into my graces last episode by apologizing, showing more maturity by the final fadeout than he has all season, but with this nasty comment he's blown it all over again. Were I Anya's friend, by this point I would tell her not to take him back. What a dick.

 
Pleasure and Pain
Willow, meanwhile, is hot on Warren's trail. His brilliant plan, by the way, seems to have been to run into the woods and get lost, like something out of The Blair Witch Project. Right. An impromptu magic map in hand (conjured from Tara's blood on her own shirt), Willow remorselessly tracks him down. There's a slight misdirection with Warren attacking Willow with an axe in the back. Silly boy - an axe "doesn't cut it." He tries to restrain her with other magical items, but nothing works. Willow soon has him ensnared by tree roots and gets down to her revenge in an extended torture sequence where she slowly pushes the bullet she drew out of Buffy into his chest, sealing his mouth shut so she doesn't have to listen to his cries of pain.

I get the impression that this sequence is meant to horrify, to shock, but it actually tells us little about either character that we didn't already know. We learn that Warren is a misogynist, and has no remorse. Uh... we knew that. There is a fairly spooky bit where the apparition of Katrina confronts Warren about her murder. "I should have strangled you in your sleep, back when we shared a bed. I would have done the world a favor," Katrina's ghost tells him. Is this really Katrina talking, or Willow? "Why, Warren? You could have let me go. How could you say you loved me and do that to me?" Katrina's shade continues, prompting Warren to lash out with "because you deserved it, bitch! Because you liked it!" Willow watches this little passion play and understands that Warren "never felt like you had the power with her. Not until you killed her," and that "you get off on it. That's why you had such a mad-on for the Slayer. She was the Big O, wasn't she?"

Seriously, I find it hard not to see this little talk as a reference to Buffy's relationship to Spike. At this late date, it's looking like their fatal attraction was actually the only real issue of the entire season, and nearly everything now seems to refer back to it. Is Katrina here meant to be speaking for Buffy, and Warren for Spike? Willow's sum-up would certainly cover Spike's initial desire to kill the Slayer. Does it still?

Willow continues to torture Warren, observing his pain in a robotic fashion. Finally tiring of the game, she abruptly rips away the restraint on his mouth to hear his final, pleading words... then cuts him off with a distracted "bored now," and magically rips his skin away, leaving him a flayed corpse, which she then ignites on fire. Buffy, Xander, and Anya push their way through the trees just in time to see this Hellraiser moment. "What did you do?" Buffy gasps. Willow turns to look at her, deadpans "one down," and vanishes.

So Willow has carried out her vengeance, and sadistic as it was, you could easily argue that it was justified. Certainly no one is shedding tears over Warren's smoking footprints. Oddly though, Willow's torture session is less disturbing than I think it was meant to be - Warren didn't seem to be in nearly enough pain (what's with all the rational sentences when he's supposed to be dying by inches?) and Willow's Robocop-style deadness did little to send chills through me the way I think it was intended to. If she does, however, go after the other two members of the Troika, as accessories to murder, and carries out the same treatment on them, would that put Willow beyond the point of no return? Would she then count as evil? Does she now? What about Anya? Spike? Any of them?

So here's our position, just before the finale - with Warren as a human bullseye for WitchWillow's revenge rage, and Jonathan and Andrew cooling their heels in jail, waiting for the axe to fall. As a sendoff to the Troika, it's rather disapppointing - I'd expected there might be a larger point in making a group of humans Buffy's main opposition this season, but it's looking like there really wasn't one - when it came right down to it, the Troika really didn't have any elaborate plans... just money and chicks. And, yeah, they got up to some pretty evil stuff. Murder. Robbery. Human bad stuff. So why is Buffy involved at all? Hopefully, that's what the finale will answer.

 
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