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Help (Ep. 7.4)"Freedom of Choice" Fate. Destiny. The BtVS series has dealt with this idea, often brilliantly in the past. As "The Chosen One," Buffy's life is dictated by fate. And yet, she has proved time and time again that no prophecy or divine calling is worth the paper or sheepskin it's printed on if you really make the effort to change it. At least... that's how it's been so far. But is that really how the world works? Or has Buffy just been lucky? Is there really an escape from fate? As a standalone episode, "Help" is actually a pretty straightforward detective story, interspersed with Buffy's encounters in her first week as a high school counselor. But emotionally, it also functions as a sort of two-parter with the following episode, "Selfless," in which we get our first genuine peek into Buffy's psyche in well over a year. "Help" sets up the question which "Selfless" later draws a clearer box around - that sometimes fate can't be avoided. Is there any point to trying to help when you know there's nothing you can do? Is the effort alone worth something? What if it's not? . . . The episode opens on... not the cemetery, but a funeral parlor, where Buffy, Xander, and Dawn have secreted themselves in coffins to wait for closing hours and check on a possible soon-to-be vampire. I have to say, seeing Buffy blithely hop out of a closed coffin was a bit confusing - given last year's grave-clawing escape, you'd think she'd be a little phobic about that. Guess a Slayer gets over trauma quickly. Or something. Xander grouches, legitimately I think: "Since when do we go to all this trouble for one lousy potential vampire?" Well, since never... but the new improved Buffy seems to be all about prevention. Or something. And just when I thought her fashion sense couldn't get any worse, she's wearing a handkerchief-weight, cap-sleeved smock with the world's smallest empire waist, the kind of thing you'd usually find hanging off a six-year-old's shoulders. This with a pulled-back grandma bun of a hairdo. What the hell? You could easily construct a timeline of a girl growing into her identity as a powerful (albeit increasingly emotionally repressed) young woman as expressed through her clothes from this pattern... but should we make of this year's look: waifish linens, an overdose of white, and "mom" hair? If we go with the theory that clothes reflect emotional states as well - not a radical thought by any means - many of last year's outfits carried deeply loaded messages (the "I'm so conflicted" leather+lace combo in "Smashed," the psychological armor of her winter coats and hats), but I have no theory to offer on this current trend, other than (a) it looks juvenile, and (b) it's not flattering. Perhaps the fickleness of real-world fashion is wholly to blame for this one. One hopes. Ahem. Back to the story. Ah, now the theme. Help. Buffy's new gig as a school counselor appeals to me on a couple of different levels. For starters, I'd noticed some time ago that Buffy is historically terrible at giving advice. She's certainly not the world's best listener - a problem that's only gotten worse with time - and has a bad habit of seeing all problems through the lens of her own issues. At this point, learning to listen to and deal with the problems of others rather than simply using violence to eliminate/avoid them is really the only way that Buffy will ever be able to grow any further as a character. Without empathy or compassion, she is not so much a person as slaying machine, "just a killer after all." Buffy should by all rights be paying them to let her work there. A montage treats us to Buffy's on-the-job training. As might be expected, there's a healthy dose of irony in all these encounters, covering in short order nearly every issue in Buffy's closet, from inappropriate violence and emotional stonewalling to sexual dishonesty. A girl who was teased "stuck up for herself," just as Buffy would have, "and slammed his stupid face right into the pavement." A tough boy admits to fear for for his older brother, who is joining the marines, but reacts with alarmed hostility at the suggestion that he share his feelings. Another boy confesses that he thinks he might be gay, at first earning understanding noises from Buffy ("there's nothing wrong with that"), which then abruptly dry up when he propositions her, saying he needs to be sure. Her useful skill set (violence, do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do recommendations) having proved of little help, Buffy falls back on the blank-faced expression of clueless concern I remember from the guidance couselors of my high school days (usually moms working part time). But this big-hearted sympathy isn't doled out equally to everyone. For a time-wasting student who just felt like skipping class, the "I care" look is swapped for a steely, discomfort-causing stare. "Maybe I should get back to Bio?" he intuits uncomfortably. She nods, threat implicit in her narrowed eyes. Well, it's not empathy, but it's a start. We then see where they were heading on this stroll - the cemetery to visit Tara's grave. Willow kneels in front of her lover's tombstone and traces the inscription gently. Poor Tara. It's a touching moment, but one that's too briefly over. I'm curious: should we be noticing that no one seems to have spent very much time mourning Tara? Despite her time as one of the Scoobies, as "family," is she now just another casualty of the Sunnydale front line, a faded picture in their emotional scrapbook, soon to be forgotten? Has simple familiarity with death and tragedy inured the gang to real grief? I don't think I'm overstating things if I say that the lack of demonstrative Scooby sympathy felt deeply wrong in "Villains" and still feels wrong, the passing of time notwithstanding. Time heals, but not this completely, not this soon - even Willow, soft words to the gravestone aside, seems less than fully in touch with her mourning. Is this over? Somehow I don't think so. At first, Buffy thinks she has a potential suicide on her hands, and begins an earnest effort to try to get Cassie to talk about what's bothering her. Cassie's response to this sudden alarm is akin to embarassment; she insists it's not that she's suicidal or paranoid, she just "knows" that it will happen. She makes a few enigmatic comments about what else she "knows" - "there'll be coins... and you'll go someplace dark, underground." She also knows that Buffy will try to help but insists that she can't. With a pained smile, Cassie heads back to class, regretting that she said anything. Wigged, Buffy runs to tell Principal Wood, who offers the assessment that it's probably nothing: "Kids this age, they're hurting, they're pissed off, and they say things. Sometimes they say awful things," he shrugs. He reassures that Buffy has done right by reporting the incident, but until something concrete actually happens, it's all they can do. To Buffy, this isn't enough. "I need to fix this," she proclaims. "I don't usually get a heads-up before somebody dies!" Frustrated by the limits of her powers within the system, she finds her sister instead and gives her an off-the-record assignment: get close to Cassie. Find out what's wrong. Intercut with Buffy's efforts are the daily doings of Cassie herself. Unlike you might expect from a girl under a death sentence, Cassie is likeable and open. At lunch, she chats warmly with a male friend named Mike who wants to take her to the winter formal. Cassie declines, but there's no bitterness behind the refusal. Neither does Cassie turn away the offer of a new friend in Dawn, who insinuates herself into the conversation somewhat awkwardly with the entree that she needs to borrow notes. Cassie seems the kind of person that no one in their right mind could have a grudge against. Who would want to hurt someone like her? Xander dismisses the poem. To his view, Cassie is a death-obsessed freak, giving her own encroaching demise "a long sloppy word kiss... she has a yen for the big dirt nap." Willow disagrees, commenting that this is what teens do, write angsty poetry, join chat rooms, post fanfic. Xander all but glows at this picture of Willow's teenage yearnings. "I'm over you, sweetie," Willow sighs patiently. Dawn then cuts through this touchy-feely chatter with her own theory - Mike, the spurned wannabe boyfriend, is her choice for the "perp." Strangely, although Dawn is the inside agent in this situation and presumably the one privy to the most intimate information, the others ignore her, fixating instead on the drunk-and-disorderly police record of Cassie's father. For Buffy, this is evidence enough to justify action. She bustles out of the house with Xander in tow. But, as in the previous scene with Principal Wood, the human world and its rules aren't like the world Buffy the Vampire Slayer is used to operating in. She can't simply break down the door and attack; she must knock politely and be asked inside before leveling accusations. But it's still guilty until proven innocent in Buffy's outlook - it takes the information that Cassie's father doesn't have visitation rights with his daughter over the weekend she has fingered for her death to convince Buffy that he's not the pre-crime culprit. I'd like to think that Buffy feels abashed for jumping to conclusions, but this is, after all, her established Slayer mode - barge in, make it up as you go, kick evil's ass, and worry about the damage later. Perhaps the case is finally being made that this is not the best course of action for all occasions. Outside, the retreating pair run into Cassie herself, who tells Buffy again that there's nothing they can do that will help her. Buffy, in the way of someone in a foreign country who thinks they can make themselves understood by speaking loudly enough, tries again to talk Cassie out of suicide. "You think I want this?" Cassie asks her. "Believe me, I want to be here, I want to do things," she says, tears coming to her eyes as she lists all that she wants to do with her life that she knows she never will. "I just know," she tells them miserably. "Something out there's going to kill me." Days pass. Time begins to run short. In an artistic montage, Buffy's increasingly desperate efforts to find an answer to the mystery are overlaid with the sound of Cassie's voice speaking her poems. She describes herself as a snake on a windowsill, seeing children laughing, children who continue and grow old long after she is gone. "I sit alone and try to love them/I sit alone and laugh" Cassie reads. The sadness and jealous longing in her poetry applies to herself and Buffy both - onscreen, the images of the two women overlap, Buffy soberly thinks to herself, isolated in the midst of her friends, while the doomed Cassie laughs her way through the school day with Mike and Dawn, or quietly writes alone in her room at night, the crayoned lines of her art on the wall behind her framing her head like a halo on a saint. But this time, her connection to this dark realm, Spike, isn't willing to play oracle for her. Emotionally worn out, he's mentally walled himself off from the outside world - Buffy finds him sitting motionless against the wall, unresponsive as a statue. If he sits "perfectly still, don't think, don't listen to the voices," he tells her with some effort, "it doesn't hurt... much." But sparing him pain is far from Buffy's top priority. "Is there evil here? Do you know anything?" she demands impatiently, snapping her fingers in front of his face until he reacts. In a moment he is in tears again, viciously punching himself in the face in a fit of self-loathing. "I hurt you, Buffy," he sobs, tortured. "I hurt the girl. And I will pay. I am paying because I hurt the girl." In a rare show of compassion, Buffy stops his self-punishment and tries again, claiming that it's a different girl, not her, who needs his help now. Does he know anything. When he numbly shakes his head, Buffy heaves an exasperated sigh, and abruptly turns to leave. He pleads with her to stay. "Help me to be quiet," he begs. She looks back at him, impassive. "I think it's worse when I'm here," she finally says, then walks away. The kid spills: a group of would-be Satanists in red robes have chosen Cassie as a sacrifice to a demon in return for riches, having singled her out because of her angsty, death-obsessed poetry as someone nobody would miss. Let us now all appreciate the irony. Infiltrating the group, Buffy interrupts the summoning ceremony with her signature kicks and taunts, quipping that they "forgot the boom box playing some lame heavy metal tune from the 'Blue Clam Cult.'" Uh-huh. Funny, Buffy. Not really. Especially since the "lame demon" that responded to the summons doesn't look too lame. He's a pretty impressive actually, rather like that "Skip" demon on Angel. Buffy soon finds herself at a disadvantage. But she's lucky this time - Spike shows up, wielding a flaming torch. "Here to help. No hurting the girl," he tells her, resolved if not entirely lucid. Buffy promptly grabs his torch away and tells him to untie Cassie while she fights the demon. Spike follows his orders, pulling the obnoxious leader of the Satanist group off Cassie and savagely punching him in the face several times. "I'm a bad man," Spike snarls at the sniveling jock by way of explanation. That every punch sets off Spike's chip echoes the previous scene in the basement - by administering this beating, he's actually punishing himself. "There is evil. Here. Right here," he'd told Buffy in the basement. If nothing else, Spike has a firm grip on his own self-image as an evil thing, and his obvious self-hatred over this point is setting up an interesting question - is it even possible to channel this sort of thing into a positive direction? For a moment, when he grabs the bloody meat cleaver away from the cowering Satanist, we're treated to an image of a snarling Spike, dripping weapon in hand, looking so much like the evil vampire of old that for a moment I would have been unsurprised to see him bury the cleaver in the red-robed creep's skull. Spooky. Even spookier, in an odd way, is Cassie and her freaky prescience. Freed from her restraints, looks at her rescuing vampire with something like compassion. "She'll tell you. Someday she'll tell you" she says quietly. Spike looks at her, uncomprehending, then retreats without a word when Buffy rushes to Cassie's side, presumably returning once again to the basement he currently calls home. As it turns out, the Satanists were never the real threat to Cassie - her own heart was. Her family had a history of heart problems, and Cassie for whatever reason - psychic powers, instinct - somehow knew that her time was short. She was right - nothing could have extended her life past its natural expiration date. At the Summers house, the gang absorbs this grim lesson. Numb, Buffy claims miserably that she "failed." Dawn, in tears, disagrees. "You tried," she chokes out. "You listened and you tried." she ends with the helpless statement, "I guess sometimes you can't help." "What do you do when you know that?" Buffy then asks, sounding lost, and in the final scene we see her at her desk, flipping through files, then closing the folder and staring into space. Thinking. Buffy defines herself by her want to "help people," an impulse that's been established as intrinsic to her character from the beginning... yet, more than once in this episode, she's shown refusing to help. The bleeding "perp" of the demon-summoning scheme rates only a snarky comment when he begs her for assistance. To Spike, she coldly shows her back. Buffy's self-image is at odds with how she actually behaves. Buffy's methods too, are called into question. She is shown jumping to conclusions constantly, from her callous assumption that the drunken father must logically be to blame to blithely assuming that Principal Wood must be from "the 'hood." In every case, she's proved wrong. The Principal's home town is Beverly Hills. Cassie's father is a drunk, but he loves his daughter. The real villain was the slacker she'd stared down in her office, wrongly assuming to be a harmless jerk. Surface appearances, it's being pointed out, are not a reliable guide. But most interesting of all are the parallels between Buffy and Cassie. Cassie's poem of impending death has more than little in common with Buffy's own tearful speech in Season 1's "Prophecy Girl," when she learned that her death by the Master's hands had been foretold. "I'm sixteen, Giles! I don't want to die!" she'd sobbed. She later regained her composure and bravely ventured out to meet her fate, head held high... only to find that had she not done so, the Master could never have reached her and the prophecy could never have come true. Buffy's life, it seems, has always been dictated by a sense of tragic irony. With that in mind, one wonders what kind of particular karmic toll is in store for her now. Most importantly, "Help" is the first BtVS episode to suggest that Buffy has never gotten over the resentment she felt in those early days, the jealousy for the normal life she will never have. Based on several years of TV since then, you could almost have come to the conclusion that Buffy had come to a sort of peace with her Slayerness.... but in retrospect the signs of her discontent were all there. "You're just a girl," a stunned boy stuttered to Buffy in the opening of "The Gift." "That's what I keep saying," she'd sighed. With this in mind, it's the contrast between the two women's reactions to their respective grim destinies that stands out. While Cassie spent her last days on Earth laughing, making new friends, making the most of the moments she was allowed, Buffy to this day lives with the specter of death hanging over her like the Sword of Damocles, increasingly closed off emotionally even to her friends. Does she "sit alone and try to love them"? Can she ever forgive them for having the kind of lives that she never can? Is Buffy herself, maybe, one of those who can't be helped?
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