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Him (Ep. 7.6)"The Look of Love" The story of "Him" is not exactly the stuff of classic drama. It's sheer X-Files-y filler, actually - an enchanted varsity jacket makes girls go crazy for an inarticulate jock, yeah whatever - but you do get some way serious silliness, some long overdue sister interaction between Buffy and Dawn, a new roomies situation, and a rather curious change of heart on Buffy's part. . . . The story opens on Xander's apartment. He is not happy, and expresses such to his trailing company - Buffy, Dawn, and... Spike. In the space between episodes, it seems that Buffy has (a) told her friends that Spike has a soul, (b) somehow coaxed said souled vampire to leave the Sunnydale High basement and auto it over to Xander's place (presumably under the cover of darkness) where she has (c) inexplicably convinced said friend to take her crazy ex on a roommate. Say what? Just for fun, let's visualize this hypothetical conversation. Start by imagining Buffy sitting Xander down on the sofa at Casa de Summers. What might she say? "Okay, Xander? I know I just tried to kill your ex-fiancee, which is, I know, pretty traumatic and all, but I know you understand why I had to do it, and y'know, now that we're on the topic... I'm kinda worried about, uh, Spike. Well, uh, he has a soul now. No, I don't know how he got it. He just does. Have one. And... and he's really going crazy down in that basement so... Well, he needs a place to stay. I mean, I know you're pretty mad at him, and I get that - I mean, the whole sleeping with Anya thing... and then the you trying to put an ax through his head.... No, I haven't forgotten that he tried to rape me. I remember that, alright? But... well, I really don't think he should be left alone, y'know, with the crazy, and the Hellmouth, and the big, creeping evil.... So... could you? Um, like, put him up at your place?" Okay, so now we're up to speed, right? And... I also hold out great hope for Xander/Spike talks in the future. As two losers with little enough luck in the romance department, I can see some interesting parallels developing here. Well, except for the burning hatred issue. Okay, whatever, I have hopes. Go roomies. After laying out the ground rules of the living arrangement, Xander complains "I just don't understand when his problems became your problems." Buffy gives her reasons: the school basement is making him crazy; it's "different now" because he has a soul. "We can't just leave him there," she says. Huh. Given that she seemed okay doing exactly that until this precise moment, what gives? This thought seems to have occurred to both Xander and Dawn as well. Xander observes that "Crazy Basement Guy is better than Stalking Buffy Guy" and doubts that having a soul is a guarantee against the possibility of him attacking her again; Dawn tries to ask, uncomfortably, if her sister and the vampire are resuming relations ("you guys aren't... you're not starting up again with the whole..."). Buffy rushes to reasure them that "he's been through a lot" and "nobody's attacking" anyone, but she still reacts with a startled gasp when Spike puts a hand on her arm. Intellectually, it seems, Buffy has rationalized the rape attempt... but on a deeper level, it's still with her. Out of the basement, Spike is quiet and sober, and at least lucid enough to protest to Buffy that "this can't work" that he doesn't need her "mollycoddling." Edgy, Buffy insists that "It's not. Coddling. Now go to your closet!" Okay. Not coddling. Check. Undeterred, Dawn prompts for more detail. "I'm just trying to understand. None of it makes sense," she says, ticking off a list of both her sister's and Spike's erratic behaviour. "First you say Spike disgusts you, but secretly you two are doing it like bunnies. And then Spike says he'd die for you, but he tries to rape you." She also repeats Tara's question from "Dead Things" - "You love him?" Buffy's answer is still a firm no, but... "I just... I don't know what I'm feeling. I think I can't stand him, but sometimes..." and explains that "I feel for him." She also makes what could be construed as an excuse for the rape attempt: "For the record, Spike knew how wrong it was. That's why he went away." Well. This is different, isn't it? Last week, the extent of Buffy's sympathy for her vampire ex-lover was a stern instruction that he should leave the basement because it was "killing" him, and that he should "show" her (i.e., prove to her) that he really has a soul by getting up and leaving, a pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps approach. This episode, she's extended the helping hand she'd previously been firmly withholding, and confesses to having ambiguous feelings. Or are they ambiguous? How many interpretations for a line like "I think I can't stand him, but sometimes..." are there? A later scene gives one possible reason for this sudden change of heart: Buffy shows up at Anya's apartment to rescue her from an attacking demon, apparently sent by D'Hoffryn to kill the lapsed vengenace demon after all. "Something bad is happening. I don't want my friends out there alone right now, okay?" Buffy tells Anya by way of welcoming her back into the Scooby circle. Is her new compassionate attitude the result of her rethinking her relationships in the wake of last week's ugly scene, or simply a circle-the-wagons impulse to put them all in a better position to deal with this year's Big Evil From Underneath (BEFU)? It's a good question. Buffy's waffling aside, Dawn shows little faith in either souls or love in general, and makes the good point that there's no guarantee a soul will make Spike a better person. "Xander had a soul when he stood Anya up at the altar," she notes. "And now he says he still wants her? I just don't think it's the school basement that's making people crazy." To Dawn, love sounds like a miserable waste of time. She launches into a good-natured tirade about how you could take all that energy and paint a beautiful mural on every ugly wall in the world instead. Ah, Dawn. You're so young. Buffy gives her a tolerant smile, and leaves her sister to her rant. You can almost hear the thoughts in Buffy's head for this one. You'll learn, li'l sis. You'll learn. And as fate would have it, that day of learning has come: A sandy-haired jock on the football field inexplicably draws Dawn's eye. Hypnotized, she watches, her jaw slack with awe, as the guy drinks from a water bottle and cheesy romantic music fires up on the soundtrack as an echo to what she presumably hears in her head. She actually topples over with the depth of her distraction. Think this one's a comedy? Xander is also present for Dawn's meltdown. He's arrived at the Summers house in hopes of a video night, as an alternative to "a cozy night with Spike." (Now there's a picture.) He suggests ordering a pizza. "Don't teens in a snit like pizza?" he asks. And it's just the thing for resurrections too! Geez, Xander, get a grip. Dawn yanks open the door, and chokes out. "It's not a snit. I finally met him - the guy of my dreams and I blew it." She runs to her bedroom and throws herself on the bed, sobbing. Buffy tries again to soothe her, but Dawn is inconsolable. Buffy reminds him that "you don't even know this R.J.... he wasn't even on your radar yesterday." Dawn insists that she does know him; she knows his soul. "You're telling me I don't know what I feel?" she asks her sister. "Of course not," Buffy answers. "I believe that you think it's real. It seems real... to you." Dawn stares at her, wide-eyed, and blurts: "You know what? Maybe I don't want advice from the Dysfunction Queen. You have no idea how I feel. You have no idea what real love is. Maybe if you did, you wouldn't make fun of me this way." Okay. Now what exactly is this scene trying to say? The day before, with only her sister's nebulous explanations to go on, Dawn came away from the conversation on the bleachers with a view of love as a confusing and complicated creature, something she wouldn't even want to bother with. "I mean, you put all this energy into chasing and having and brooding and... I just don't understand these relationships where you all do insane things," she'd said. Now, in the throes of love herself, however magically inspired, she is seeing the situation in a different light: love is not the problem. The problem is Buffy, the Dysfunction Queen, who doesn't know "what real love is." Ouch. Where's she getting this idea from? Well, even though Dawn has only physically been around since Season 5, she presumably has her own memories of Buffy's romantic track record, which as we well know, consists of a pretty dismal string of failed relationships. "Relationship debris is kinda piling up on the Buffy highway," Xander had commented shortly after Riley's departure. And Buffy's comments to Dawn on the subject are not exactly the height of sensitivity - she dismisses her sister's feelings for R.J. in nearly the exact same words she used on Spike: "it seems real... to you." Dawn has come to the not-unreasonable conclusion that when it comes to love, Buffy doesn't really know what she's talking about. Xander has his own theory about the appeal of the mysterious R.J.: "It's the jacket. It's true. Something about the big letter on the chest makes girls get all swoony and crushy. I saw it all the time in school," he says. Okay. I think this is one of those occasions where Xander guesses it right off, and nobody else notices, 'cause it sounds too simple. Think I'm right? Next we see Dawn, she's in the principal's office, bluffing up a storm about the "accident" which in her version involved a trip and fall - more plausible in the minds of the principal and Buffy than the student's story about being pushed. However, Buffy's suspicions are raised when Dawn makes the comment that the football team at least has "R.J. to take over." Outside, Dawn is approached by the boy in question who seems to have made a fair guess about the cause of the "accident." He asks Dawn if she wants to meet up later. She eagerly agrees. Later, at the Bronze, the core Scoobies are gathered around a table. Xander shares more details about life with the Odd Couple: Spike seems less crazy overall, he says, but "once you get back the soul, doesn't that mean you start, like, picking up your own wet towels off the floor?" Buffy follows this up with an "at least he's showering" comment, which is her second occasion of making an observation about Spike's personal hygenie, which you'd think would hardly be her concern at this point. Either she's paying too close attention to these kinds of details or I am. The group's attention is drawn to the dance floor. Buffy points out R.J. to Willow "The one who, according to Dawn, is the quote smartest, funniest, coolest, hottest, and having the thickest boy-eyelashes boy in school unquote." Said boy is sexing it up, dance-wise, with a girl in hip-hugger jeans and a midriff-baring, off-the-shoulder blouse. "Daddy like," Xander oinks. The girl turns, just as Buffy begins proclaiming "Glad Dawnie isn't here to see her precious boyfriend getting all thrusty with some slut-bag hussy..." and her eyes widen to realize that the "slut-bag hussy" is Dawn. Xander sputters with embarrassment over having let his eyes roam over provacatively dressed li'l sis; Willow makes similiar sounds. Guess he wasn't the only one. Mortified, Buffy strides up to her sister and lets fly with this charmer: "So do you have plans later, or are you just going to go down to the docks and wait for the fleet to come in?" Dawn reacts about like you'd expect: "I think I look hot. And so does R.J.... It's my life. I'll do what I want to," she spits. Buffy throws back that she's glad their mother isn't there to see Dawn like this. This, from a girl who spent last year having sex in public places. Not to mention some of the hardly chaste outfits she used to sport in high school. The prudist high ground does not exactly go to the Buffster on this one, not that it would be an excuse to call her sister a big ol' ho even if it did. Buffy is, to my mind, severely out of line here. Coldly angry, Dawn calls her on it. She snarls to her sister that she's just jealous. "You've always been the special one. Hot little Buffy with her boyfriends. The Slayer. And now someone likes me, and you just can't stand that I'm getting the attention... I like the way R.J. makes me feel, and if you think that makes me a slut or whatever, I don't care." She pushes past Buffy and stalks out of the club. Buffy isn't the only one to take issue with Dawn's dance-a-thon. Outside, Dawn is confronted by one of the cheerleaders who'd been hanging raptly on R.J.'s every word in the school hallway. A hair-pulling wrestling match soon ensues, which Buffy breaks up. "First with the lap dance, now with the cat fight. Hey, you wanna get drunk and barf next?" Again, speaking from experience, Buffy? Jeezus! Okay, Xander was right. It's the jacket. At home, Buffy calls Dawn over to the couch for a talk and explains that she spoke to R.J. "He's okay. I think he likes you," she says. Dawn is ecstatic, eager to hear every detail. Buffy tacks on some more compliments, then adds the worrisome notation: "he might have said that you came on a little strong." Dawn agonzies, "Oh my god! I'm the Pushy Queen of Slut Town!" but Buffy shushes this with soothing sounds about how Dawn just has to "lay back a little" and let him come to her. "Dawn, you're gonna come out the winner here, with me looking out for you," she says, voice dripping with fake sincerity. Buffy is sabotaging her own little sister. Talk about the pushy queen of slut town. Having put Dawn off the scent for the moment, Buffy chooses the following day to haul out the big guns. She gets herself up in a screamingly unflattering Britney Spears imitation of an outfit (satin shirt, plaid schoolgirl kilt) and calls R.J. out of class to lure him to a deserted classroom and seduce him. Dawn, despite the warning about coming on too strong, sees no harm in looking in on R.J.'s class, but finds his seat empty. Wandering the halls, she then has the misfortune to come across the classroom Buffy has decided to commandeer for sex education. Through the window, she gets a good look at her sister's technique and stares for a moment, frozen in horror, then runs off in tears. Xander finds her sitting outside in the courtyard, crying, and she spills the sorid story. He ventures into the school to break up the party, flinching at the sight of Buffy casually straddling the teenager on top of a desk. "Checkout time was an hour ago," he pronounces from the classroom doorway. "Now get off the boy, Buffy. We're going home." I guess this makes the second time that Xander has walked in on Buffy while she's having sex... even if she was technically invisible the first time. Yikes.
At home, it's a mess. Dawn is crying. "Crying isn't going to make his love for me go away, you know," Buffy tells her sister in treacly tones. Willow has realized that it must be a spell that's affecting them. Dawn is insulted. "What do you know about our love? It's true and real. This isn't magic. This is my heart." Willow assures them that they'll be working on it, and tries to tell Dawn that what she's feeling isn't real. Buffy agrees, and continues to twist the knife in her sister in a maddeningly sweet voice. "I tried to get you to back away... Did you want me to tell you that he's in love with me? That your little crush is hopeless?" Dawn stands. "You lied to me! You're not supposed to do this! You were the one I trusted!" she sobs, and runs to her room. On the doorstep of the brother's house, Xander goes into field command mode, rattling off a list of things to keep in mind. "We're tangling with a powerful spell here. We don't know what the deal is so keep an eye out if this guy looks twitchy. And don't let this guy charm you, either. He had everyone around him practically kissing his ring back in high school." The door opens to reveal the brother, a not-terribly-impressive physical specimen who obviously peaked in high school and is clearly lonely for company, based on the welcome he gives to the Odd Couple, quickly plying them with beers and eagerly offering up his life story on demand. "Following in my footsteps," he says proudly of R.J. and relates that he used to be "worried" about his brother. He was into comic books, models, geek stuff, wrote poetry, but "blossomed" all of a sudden. Why he doesn't know. Spike takes note of a pair of photos on the mantelpiece - R.J. and his brother are wearing the same jacket. The brother explains that the jacket came from their dad, who'd been wearing it when he met their mom, a "former Miss Arkansas. Very hot in her day," says the bro. Figuring it out, Xander extracts them from the brother's offer of futher hanging-out, and the pair hightails it back to the Summers place. In split-screen mode, we see as the four women head out on their various missions. Willow lights candles in her room, commencing a spell to transform R.J. from someone whose "physical presence has a penis," as Anya put it, into a woman. So much for overlooking the whole orientation thing! Buffy screeches across town in her mother's old SUV, and hauls a bazooka out of the back. Anya, in cat burglar garb, pulls a ski mask over her face outside a bank, and hefts a sack. Dawn, despondent, walks along railroad tracks and lies down, waiting for the oncoming train. Xander and Spike arrive at the house just in time to interrupt Willow's spell. "Oh, man! Now I've gotta start all over. Hecate hates that!" Willow moans and spills that Buffy's on her way to kill the principal. Having heard enough, Xander mobilizes the remaining group to stop her. They arrive just in time - through the window of Principal Wood's office, we can see Buffy hefting her rocket launcher. Spike barrels into the frame and snatches it away from her. The distant figures run back and forth behind the window a couple of times, but are gone by the time Principal Hottie, uh, Wood, turns to look. He goes back to his work with a shrug. Back at the car, Willow has done a locator spell on Dawn. The gang gets to the trainyard just in time for Buffy to see her sister in danger, hitch a ride on a train going in the opposite direction, and yank Dawn to safety. Dawn tries to explain: She knows she can't compete with her sister. "You're older and hotter and have sex that's rough and kill people.... But if I did this then his whole life he'd know there was someone that loved him so much they'd give up their life... and it would be true forever." Buffy is shaken - apparently the shock of seeing Dawn nearly commit suicide having temporarily snapped her out of the spell. "No guy is worth your life - not ever!" she tells Dawn and admits, "I think I might be under a spell here." Finally. The jacket meets its end in the Summers fireplace. Buffy asks if Xander was tempted to try the jacket on. "I refuse to answer that on the grounds that it didn't fit," he says. The women are all suitably embarrassed over their behaviour. "It was a spell. You were helpless. We're not responsible for anything we did morally or, you know, legally," says Anya. Dawn tells Buffy, "the way I acted, the way I talked to you, I feel so stupid. All over a spell." Buffy smiles. "Get ready to feel even stupider when it's not." The subject comes up of whatever it was that Anya did to prove her love. She laughs weakly and tells them she wrote an epic poem, snapping off the radio as the announcer begins a report on a mysterious cat burglar. And thus this little escapade comes to an end. What have we learned today? Dawn has learned that "love makes you do the wacky" first-hand. She's also learned some very illuminating things about her sister's approach to love - that she's ruthlessly competitive and two-faced when it's her feeling it, and insulting and dismissive when it's someone else. Ouch. We've learned that Willow can still sling black magic given the right motivation, or does calling on Hecate not count as black magic, even though that's who Amy used to call on, all those years ago, and her eyes went black too. Hmm. We've learned that Xander can be a pretty capable team captain in a pinch, and that soulful Spike is capable of trailing along meekly after him without complaint if it's to help. And we've learned that Anya is a pretty successful thief. Well, at least that oughtta take care of her living expenses for awhile. Love is hell, ain't it?
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