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Same Time, Same Place (Ep. 7.3)

"Stuck in the Middle With You"

From Blighty, Willow returns... but to what welcome? Is she immediately forgiven for going black-eyed superwitch and trying to destroy the world? Or is her magical rampage held against her? Well, neither... and both. In "Same Time, Same Place," Willow gets to experience her own invisible adventure in Sunnydale, but it's nowhere near as carefree and fun as Buffy's was in "Gone." But that's part of the point, isn't it? Nothing works for anyone else the way it does for Buffy. And on that note, we also get a follow-up on the class issues "Beneath You" began to strongly suggest. Result: not too pretty... for people who aren't the Scoobies, that is.

. . .

Sunnydale International Aiport. The new abbreviated Scooby Gang (Buffy, Xander, Dawn) have organized Willow's welcome-home party, and are gathered at the gate watching passengers deplane. (Small nitpick here - I don't think they let you wait at the gate anymore, not since 9/11.) Xander is toting a sign that's pretty hard to read, having been written in yellow on white poster board, a reminder of his world-saving "yellow crayon" speech. "Tell us again what you said?" Dawn deadpans, and it takes Xander a moment to catch on before realizing that it's a joke. "We've heard the yellow crayon speech a few times," Buffy smiles tolerantly. "I saved the world with talking. With my mouth. My mouth saved the world!" he reminds them. Um-hm. And apparently he hasn't let anyone forget it since.

Buffy is nervous. She's unsure what she should say to her best friend... the one who she's seen carry out a gruesome killing, and who would have done the same to her sister. Yeah, what do you say to that? Xander reassures Buffy that "Giles wouldn't let her leave unless she'd completed that, whatever, recovery course." Uh, well... Giles did, in fact, let her leave early. Because she was doing so well. Because it was really important that she come back. Now. "He said we shouldn't worry," Buffy says lamely. Yuh-huh. Dawn blanches. "She didn't finish being not evil?" she asks, tense. Then Xander notices something strange - all the passengers have gotten off the plane. But no Willow.

The scene then replays. Same airport. Same passengers getting off the plane. Only this time we see Willow... but not her friends. What's going on here?

 
Boys And Girls Come Out To Flay
Meanwhile, the monster of the week now makes its appearance - a taunting voice from the shadows closing in on a hapless guy spray-painting a wall in the middle of the night. Remember that lesson, folks - graffitti will get you killed. "All alone. Are you frightened to be all alone?" the voice chuckles from the darkness. The kid's red shirt tells you everything you need to know. Exit tagger, screaming horribly.

 
The Couch Is Full, But Nobody's Home
Back to Willow. Having assumed that her friends just blew off her arrival thanks to the understandable tension factor, she tentatively ventures to Casa de Summers. The place is deserted. She stares around in dismay.

Willow's lonely exploration of the empty Summers house is an echo of Buffy's own disoriented reintroduction to her home in "Afterlife." Things have changed. There is different furniture, different art on the walls... or were these pictures always there, and I just never noticed before? The stairway leading to the second floor is lined with a row of framed photographs, all spooky black-and-white images of ivy-framed doorways. (I'm reminded simultaneously of nineteenth century "ghost" photography and the ominous black-on-black cry-for-help of a drawing that Buffy was scribbling in "Once More, With Feeling," which looked like nothing so much as a coffin's-eye view of a grave.) More importantly, the bedroom that Willow shared with Tara - Joyce's old room - is now Buffy's, clearly marked as such by a little license plate on the door. Willow sadly moves about, touching things, remembering the bullet through the window that took Tara's life... then starts at a sudden noise of a door downstairs. (Another "Afterlife" echo.) She rushes to see... but no one is there.

Downstairs, however, it's a different picture. Big as life, the abbreviated gang wanders in, loudly talking over the situation. A quick call to Giles revealed that Willow had indeed gotten on the plane, which hardly precludes the possibility that she might have doubled back, or gotten off after he left. Giles is blaming himself for not realizing she wasn't ready to return, Buffy reports. Xander is also big with the self-blame, thinking that "maybe there's something about us that she couldn't face."

Dawn has a different take. "So Giles is blaming Giles, and we're blaming us... is anyone gonna blame Willow?" she asks, clearly more worried about Willow's potential evil quotient than her possible state of mind. Buffy shrugs, "If Willow flipped out it's her bad. We can only be here for her so much if she won't... be here."

As in "Villains," which the three-person tableau on the couch replicates neatly, Buffy's answer to Dawn's complex question has a rote quality, as if repeating something she's read. The gospel according to Buffy says that if Willow's gone bad, it's her own fault. A Willow who has "crossed a line" from good into bad is an easier, more clear-cut situation to deal with than the uncomfortable prospect of making nice with her prodigal best friend. It's beginning to look to me that Buffy hasn't learned that much over the summer at all.

Now the image of the three sitting on the couch dissolves... and we see Willow there, stretched out on the sofa, right where they're sitting. Same time, same place... two different realities. So okay, we now know what's going on. Willow is invisible to her friends; they can't see her. They're invisible to her as well. They were nervous about seeing her. She was, we know, nervous about seeing them. Both sides are blind; unable to face up to the same reality. Interesting.

And more interesting yet, when Willow wakes to find herself still alone in the house and unable to reach Giles on the phone, she heads over to the ruins of the Magic Box... and has no problem seeing Anya, who is emerging from the boarded-up storefront with a boxed of burned remains.

 
Sympathy From The Devil
Startled, Anya begins a wide-eyed retreat. "Don't run away!" Willow pleads, relieved to see a familiar face. Anya halts, wary, wondering aloud: "I thought you were in England with Giles studying how to not kill people," and reminds Willow that the the result of her previous recovery efforts was "the debris of... my ex livelihood," the burned-out shell of the Magic Box they're standing in front of. Ashamed, Willow mumbles that she wants to help. "I feel really responsible," she says lamely. "You feel responsible? You are responsible!" Anya snaps back, but when Willow guiltily mopes that if Anya wants vengeance to go right ahead, Anya's face crumples with disappointment. "That's no fun," she grumps.

Willow sits down on miserably on the curb, and with a resigned eye roll, Anya joins her. Pleased at the attention, Willow begins to leadingly ask for a current-events update. Anya is even more thrilled to have a listener, and begins with an animated report on her own life - she's back in her own apartment, but "vengeance takes me all over the world, of course." However, Willow only wants to hear about Buffy, Xander, and Dawn. "You haven't seen them?" Anya says, then adds "I guess they're still mad at you. They've been a little temperamental lately, just between you and me," and begins to spin the tale of the ill-fated worm-demon. Clearly uninterested, Willow cuts her off and asks where she might find the others. "Everyone's all about the high school," Anya says distractedly, and bullet-lists the activities - Buffy's new job, Spike insane in the basement, Xander working on construction. "He likes to start early... he's probably there now," she notes. She's still keeping track of the big lug enough to know his daily schedule. Poor girl. I feel for Anya.

However, Willow has more important fish to fry than hanging around with lonely vengeance demons. She heads over to the construction site to find Xander... and finds a skinned body on the ground instead, no doubt the remains of the unfortunate spray-painter. She flees the scene in a panic, unable to see that Buffy and Xander are there. Xander did indeed arrive early, came across this grim surprise, and called Buffy to inspect the scene. Both have the same thought: no skin is Willow's M.O.

 
Spike's... What In The What-ment?
Suitably freaked, Willow tries the next stop on her list, following Anya's cue to the school basement to look up Spike. The vampire is rapidly returning to the shambling wreck of the opening episode; the collapse of his I'm-okay facade and broken soul confession in "Beneath You" seem to have taken the last of his strength. "This is my place! You need permission be here. You need a special slip with a stamp," he blurts, popping out of the darkness like a jack-in-the-box, hair in disarray, eyes wild. His speech jumps back and forth between schoolmaster-ish word pictures ("I have to check their slips, see they have authorization") and stream-of-consciousness text that could apply equally to Willow or to himself. "You go off, and you try to wall off the bad part and put your heart back in where it fell out and you think you're finished but you're not. Worse than ever, you are."

Willow tells Spike about the flayed corpse, and tries asking for information, but his discourse is extra hard to follow since he seems to be addressing unseen others at same time. "You went away," he says, then asks "is there blood?" then walks forward with the odd comment "look at you, all glowing," finally retreating with "I should hide... you know what I did." He shrinks back into the shadows, hand pressed to his temple. "You didn't do anything. Did you?" Willow protests, confused. He looks up at her. "Everyone's talking to me... but nobody's talking to each other," he puzzles, then finally figures it out. "Someone's not here... my money's on the witch," he claims, and looks directly at Willow.

And rewind, we see the scene again. Buffy and Xander, it turns out, were the unseen "others" - they have ventured into the basement on pretty much the same mission as Willow, looking for information. Xander makes the unsettling observation that the blueprints are no longer an accurate map of the basement's layout because "it's like the walls move or something." Okay, now that's creepy. They cautiously approach the insane resident of this shifty nether zone, already in full rant mode.

On replay Spike's odder actions are now explained - his quiet, "You went away. You've been gone since..." which first seemed to have been in response to Willow, is now shown to have been directed at Buffy, who nervously fills in "...the church. You scared me a little. I didn't know what to think."

...and now, with this, we know Buffy's reaction to the news that he got his soul back for her. She turned on her heel, walked out, and hasn't seen him since, unable to even bring herself to care if he burned himself to ash in her absence. If I'd asked for a show of hands at the beginning of the episode from however many of you readers think that Buffy actually feels anything at all for Spike (pity, compassion, friendship... love?), and if you were one of those who would have raised your hand, you might as well put it down now. The coldness of "Dead Things," where she left him in an alley too beaten to walk, no longer looks like such an anomaly.

But... once again, given Xander's lack of clever comments, it looks like Buffy has neglected to share what passed between them with anyone else. She looks nervous as Spike approaches her, shyly folding his hands behind his back. "Look at you... all glowing," he murmurs, and wonders aloud, "What's a word that means glowing? Gotta rhyme." As if afraid to let him reveal too much with this sort of talk, she cuts him off with a whispered plea, causing him to back away in distress. "I should hide... hide from you. Hide my face. You know what I did," he mutters, retreating back into the darkness. "Boy he's extra useful today," Xander sours, and the two turn to go.

But Spike now turns to talk directly to Willow in an extension of the previous scene - a Willow the others can't see. "They think you did it. The Slayer and her boy. They think you took the skin. Red's been a bad girl," Spike tells her. Puzzled, they turn back - what does he know? "I'm her boy?" Xander protests, then scoffs that an insane vampire who talks to invisible people is hardly a reliable source. Spike turns back to Buffy, expression serious. "I have to go," he tells her. "There are things here without permission." He wanders off, leaving them generally baffled.

 
Wicca Work
Now thoroughly wigged out, Willow goes to Anya's new apartment to ask the only other person who can see her for help. "Come in. Enjoy my personal space," Anya says brittlely as Willow stalks into her apartment without asking, and notes diffidently of Willow's predicament, "With the skin thing, they're definitely going to think it was you." Desperate to find the real killer, if only to prove that it isn't her, Willow manages to talk Anya into helping her do a locator spell - the same type she once performed with Tara. "This isn't going to get all sexy, is it?" Anya worries as they sprinkle special powder on a map on the floor, surrounded by lighted candles. The resultant pinpoint lights reveal all the demons in Sunnydale, including a large concentration around the high school. "There's me!" Anya squeals, waving at her representative light.

From the spell, Willow zeroes in on a location. She insists that Anya go check it out. "You're a vengeance demon, just... teleport!" Willow demands with an imperious wave of her hand. Annoyed by the damage the flamed-out spell did to her carpet, Anya confesses that she can only teleport for official business... and surprise, it's because she withdrew the spell last week. (I guess vengeance demons do have a quality-control department.) Unexpectedly, Anya and Willow end up bonding somewhat during all this. In a nice reminder of Willow's long-lost tender-hearted nature (and a nice echo of "The Initiative," where Willow ended up comforting a newly chipped Spike for not being able to bite her), she makes sympathetic noises over Anya's new discomfort in her vengeance job and delivers an extended empathy fest about understanding the dangers of power, the temptation to use it, the fear of it going out of control. Anya smiles in appreciation. "It did get kinda sexy, didn't it?" she says. Willow takes this as her cue to leave, though not unkindly, taking the map with her.

 
Freak On A Leash
Meanwhile, at Casa de Summers, research is in progress. While Dawn industriously hacks at Willow's laptop, Buffy drags Xander aside. "I have this feeling in my gut... we know exactly who did this," she vents. "And all this work that we're doing is just a way for us to convince ourselves that Willow's okay." But before Xander can come up with a plausible defense for his best friend, Dawn gleefully breaks in with the results of her search (from the same "Demons, Demons, Demons" website previously seen on Angel) - a flesh-eating demon who strips skin from his victims while they're still alive. Dawn is quite the little detective, having pinpointed this one by Buffy's report of a lack of spilled blood - the demon laps it up. "It's like his natural beverage," she beams proudly. Buffy is skeptical, but is forced to acknowledge that her sister's Scully-like unsqueamishness has done the job. "You're terrifying," Xander tells the smiling Dawn.

Buffy follows this up with her own great idea for tracking the demon's blood trail - using Spike as a bloodhound. According to her fairly specious moral code these days, it's perfectly acceptable to continue exploiting an ex-lover that you never cared about anyway, dehumanizing him to the point of treating him like a dog. "Should've put a leash on him," Xander mentions as the gang trails the muttering vampire through the woods. With this added onto the previous basement scene, I think it is now fair to equate Buffy's S6 crypt visits with visiting the slave quarters. I am literally liking Buffy less by the minute.

Worse, in classic Teach-the-Children-Well tradition, Dawn too seems to be on her way to accepting the utter wrongness of Buffy's convoluted morals as normal. During the forest march, Dawn is downright perky, rambling on about creating a computer database for demon research and other "non-magic" ideas. I am generally liking Dawn this season, but someone needs to get her the hell away from her sister. She is a bad influence. Seriously.

Map in hand, Willow arrives at the same cave Spike leads the Scoobies to. Unfortunately, with the invisibility still a factor, she can't see them, and they can't see her. When the demon attacks Dawn and slashes her with its paralyzing claws, the gang retreats and seals the cave opening with rocks to keep the demon in... unfortunately sealing in Willow as well. She too is soon slashed and paralyzed. The demon hovers over the prone Willow, telling her that "they wanted me to have you... they left you as a gift for me." Then comes the peeling and eating of skin, as advertised. Okay. Now that's just gross.

 
Fun With Paralyzed Dawn & Willow
Back at the Summers house, we get the comic adventures of paralyzed Dawn. Xander deposits Dawn facedown in the couch and has to be told to turn her over so she can breathe - he's not exactly showing off a high I.Q. score in this episode ("I'm insane. What's his excuse?" Spike winced at one of Xander's dumber comments in the woods). Hesitant to leave her sister alone, Buffy calls Anya to babysit, just to ram home once again how much the Scoobies really are taking advantage of their demon liasons. "No need to thank me, by the way, for sitting with her. I'm feeling very benevolent," Anya says graciously on arrival and mentions that she helped Willow recently as well. While Buffy and Xander are largely tuned out to the sound of Anya's voice, this gets their attention, along with the news that Willow went to the cave as well. "Wouldn't it be tragic if you were here being kinda silly with your comically paralyzed sister while Willow was dying?" Anya speculates while playing with Dawn's poseably paralyzed fingers. With this, Buffy decides Anya is worth more as a demon resource than a babysitter and insist that she return to the cave with them. She sticks a cell phone in Dawn's frozen hand and leads her team away.

Back at the cave, the demon is still feasting. I hadn't previously noticed this, but it speaks in rhyme. Spooky. Anya is huge help on return to the cave. "Remember what I told you, go for its eyes!" she yells to Buffy. She also comforts the still-invisible Willow, telling her that her friends are there, that they didn't leave her. "I'm not alone," Willow sobs through her paralyzed jaw as Buffy dispatches the demon with her thumbs in its eyes. "Buffy killed the demon. It was gross," Anya reassures, then goes for help. Concerned but confused, Xander and Buffy hover over the place Anya said Willow was, aware she is badly hurt, unsure what to do or say. "We can't exactly see you... but we're really glad that you're back," Buffy finally says... and Willow materializes, like Tinkerbell from the sound of clapping hands, sobbing in relief that she's no longer alone.

 
Buffy Lends A Hand
In the final scene, Willow sits on her new bed, meditating, drawing power from the Earth to heal herself, growing new skin. Buffy listens as her friend explains what happened with the invisibility - she made it happen just by thinking it, because she wasn't ready to see them yet. In return, Buffy confesses that she suspected Willow was the killer. "I'd want to be the kind of person who would never think that," she says awkwardly. Willow disagrees. "You're the Slayer. You have to think that stuff," she says, and confides her own doubts about her magic recovery, but pulls herself back into position for more meditating. Buffy smiles at the tentative compromise of this discussion, and sits facing Willow, taking her hands, sharing her own strength with her friend, helping her get strong again.

This final reconcilliation between the two friends, while touching on a superficial, aww-look-at-that level, seemed to me to have left more questions than answers. "It's nice to be forgiven," Willow says, but nothing in Buffy's expression said anything about forgiveness to me. Has she really forgiven Willow? Or is she willing to "share her strength" for the same reason that she protected her friends from her I-think-I-was-in-heaaaven secret last season, that she just doesn't want to hurt her by confessing the depth of her hurt and distrust? Or, judging by the cold treatment we've seen Buffy dole out to Spike and Anya, is she willing to forgive Willow strictly because she is human? What's really going on here?

So while Buffy remains an enigma, Willow, however, gives me hope. Although the fact that she could be seen by Anya and Spike isn't exactly a point in her favor - she obviously wasn't worried about their opinion of her being lowered, and she unfortunately shares the Scoobies' dismissive tendencies - she also showed more empathy than either Buffy, Xander, or Dawn to both demon outcasts. Willow is now no stranger to the lure of dark power, and this gives her a rare reach on both sides of the issue. Perhaps Willow will be the bridge that brings these separate points of view together?

Or perhaps Sunnydale will remain an enclave where humans are humans and demons are demons, and those who cross the tracks just don't admit where they've been.

 
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