Just Stake Me! Episodes

Get It Done (Ep. 7.15)

"What It Feels Like For a Girl"

What th--? Talk about a change in tone. As a transition from last week's fun-fest, "Get It Done" features a mood switch even more severe than the one between "Selfless" and "Him," or last season's shift from "Dead Things" to "Older and Far Away." The First makes a scary return from "hiatus," provoking Buffy to transform from a benevolent Jekyll - the hoop-earrings-earrings-wearing girl who believed that "you can't beat evil by doing evil" - into her own scarily personal Hyde, an even more severe version of I-Am-The-Law Buffy from "Selfess," the only real "power" in a world of weak-minded cowards and wimps.

Huh. Guess that "superiority complex" wasn't such a joke after all.

Oh, and thanks to a convenient time portal, we confirm that the Slayer's power is indeed "rooted in darkness." As if we needed to be told that by now.

. . . .

Nighttime at Slayer HQ. The place is filled to capacity - the floor is now filled with sleeping Slayer candidates and the furniture strewn with piles of how-to language manuals (a few more non-English-speaking candidates seem to have arrived). Buffy, patrolling the perimeter of her house as opposed to her usual rounds in the cemetery, follows a sound upstairs to where one of the teenage girls crouches in the hallway, sobbing. But before Buffy can get closer, she's tackled by the form of the primitive First Slayer, who snarls "It's not enough!" in her ear... and Buffy wakes. It was a dream.

The First Slayer has appeared to Buffy in dreams twice before - in "Restless," the S4 episode in which she told Buffy that the Slayer lives only in the act of death and that she is always "alone" (concepts that Buffy then utterly rejected); and in "Intervention," in which The First Slayer appeared as her spirit guide, and told her that she was full of love... and that death was her gift. "Love is pain... and the Slayer forges strength from pain... Risk the pain. It is your nature." Now, this same figure - or is it The First again? - is telling Buffy that "it's not enough." What, we have to wonder, is "it"?

When Vampires Suck
Meanwhile, out on the Sunnydale streets, an odd little interlude is taking place. We're invited to tag along with Anya and Spike, who have both decided to get out of the house for liquid solace, which is weird to begin with - you'd think after the events of "Sleeper," Spike would be a bit shy about wandering off to bars. But never mind that - it gets weirder. First, an awkwardly chatty Anya wonders aloud why he'd asked her along (good question - chaperone? comraderie? attempt at friendship?). Then, she suggests Tabletop Sex, Round 2.

It's a strange, forced little scene, but it does have a point... and it's not to reinforce our impression of Spike as a loyal-to-one-woman sort, as per "Sleeper" (although he does tell Anya to drop the subject, so consider that message received). The real goal is to provide an opportunity for Anya to be attacked by a demon, thus treating us to a really bizarre spectacle - Spike dragging Anya away from the fight in a good old-fashioned running retreat.

This, as it turns out, is the theme of the episode - that Buffy's army consists of powerful people who are acting like wimps. You heard me right.

Now here's what's wrong with that theme.

All Apologies
Since the beginning of this season, a hefty emphasis has been placed on the emotion of remorse - Spike insane with guilt in the school basement, Willow miserably afraid of losing control, Anya consumed with regret over the consequences of her vengeance. Just last episode, even, we saw Xander continue the remorseful theme by regaling his date with the tale of how he left Anya at the altar, and opining that he "shouldn't be allowed to forget it."

So ever since the lowlights of Season 6, which pretty much showcased the entire cast at their worst, the trend has been to show the characters trying to apply what they've learned from that experience. Willow doesn't want to go "black-eyed baddie" again, which does indeed seem to be a real danger (e.g., "Selfless", where she orders Anya's terrified vengeance client to "shut your whimpering mouth!"), so she now treads carefully when casting spells ("I'm facing my fear... you hear that fear?" she tells herself in "Showtime"). Spike, newly burdened with soul guilt and under nearly constant assault by everything from mysterious voices to the "trigger" and torture, has nonetheless managed to work himself into a reasonably sane and helpful state. Anya too, has managed to work past the recent history in which Buffy was actively trying to kill her to offer assistance to the gang. Xander, reconnecting with his core personality as a generally nice guy, is trying hard not to be so quick to judge. Dawn, aware of the seriousness of the situation, has the new maturity not to compound it by whining. All of these people have regrets and failure sharp in their minds, some kind of plan in progress for improving on that state of affairs, and have been struggling hard to find a way to assist Buffy in her battle, even under duress.

Which puts exactly one person into sharp contrast - Buffy. The Slayer herself, judging by her behaviour, seems quite free of regrets. At her high school counseling job, we see her joke and flirt with her erstwhile Valentine's date, Principal Wood, lighthearetedly musing that Hellmouth activity is "a little ahead of schedule" because it usually "blows around May." (A meta-joke for regular viewers that - sorry to say - I found thoroughly eye-roll worthy.)

A Matter Of Principal
If Buffy is out of synch with her own gang, Wood, the "cool and sexy vampire-fighting guy" and son of a Slayer, is even more so. His motivation, as we saw at the end of last episode, is really a very personal one - vengeance against the vampire that killed his mother... who we now know to have been the '77 Slayer Nikki, killed on the New York subway by Spike. So in "Get it Done," we have three major points of view going on - the Scoobies, whose energies are all focused toward helping Buffy despite personal obstacles; Buffy's own view, which will be laid out in shocking detail during the rest of the episode; and Wood's, which consists largely of his vendetta.

On the surface, however, Wood is all about being a Team Player. That said, the dynamics here are actually pretty weird - although Buffy's boss at the high school, when he asks to be shown where she "works," he means as the Slayer, an arena where Buffy would logically be the boss. And yet, as Buffy obligingly tours Wood through her makeshift HQ at Casa de Summers, one can't help but notice how ashamed Buffy is of her army, how self-deprecating she is about her own leadership skills. In Wood's presence, Buffy does not feel like the boss. We see her criticize her own choices - keeping Andrew around (although he frankly seems her most motivated team member at the moment, cooking funnel cakes and drawing up strategies on a "big board"), having the Potentials run through martial arts training with Kennedy, relying on Willow. "She really almost destroyed the world?" Wood comments after the redheaded witch's stumbling explanation for training Potentials as "preparation for the school-pep-dance-cheer-drill contest." With the air of someone nobly making do with far less than they had hoped, Buffy sums up her army as: "a bunch of fighters with nothing to hit, a Wicca who won't-a, and the brains of our operation wears oven mitts." She largely dismisses the Potentials with, "They're not all gonna make it. Some will die, and nothing I can do will stop that."

Wood pretends to be interested throughout all this, but none of it is really why he's there. Eventually he gets to the point. "Show me the vampire," he demands, and Buffy meekly does, escorting the principal downstairs just in time to witness the embarrassing spectacle of Anya railing at Spike for fighting like "a wimpire."

Anya stomps out ("no need to thank me!" Spike yells after her, annoyed - understandably, since he had a darn good argument about taking unreasonable risks) and Spike turns to deal with his new visitors. Buffy simply watches the wordplay between the two men. Wood lobs a number of pointed questions at Spike (how long he's lived in Sunnydale, and where he'd lived before that, etc.) and recieves answers couched in vague, hostile one-liners. Since Spike has no reason yet to suspect the real reason for Wood's antagonism, this scene plays as masculine bristling over territory, aka Buffy. In this, it's clear that Spike holds the weakest hand - he may live in Buffy's house, but he has no privacy (Buffy and Wood barge into the basement and watch the squabble between Spike and Anya like spectators at a zoo performance), a little fact underlined when it's revealed that Buffy told Principal Wood that he has a soul. "What, are you just telling everyone now?" Spike complains, hurt. Wood isn't just in a higher position on the stairs here - in "Get it Done," it's made absolutely clear that Buffy is more concerned about making a good impression on Wood - someone she barely knows - than she is about maintaining good relations with her supporters and friends. There's an unavoidable carnival element to this tour, Buffy displaying her friends like freaks.

Blaming Of The Shrew
This attitude we see come to a head when Buffy, while chatting with Dawn, accidentally discovers a dead body of a Potential who hung herself in the night. It's Chloe, the shy girl she saw crying upstairs in the opening teaser.

To magnify this horrifying moment, The First makes a gloating appearance in Chloe's own form, claiming that "Chloe was a good listener" and that "we talked all night." It repeats a few other things Chloe "heard," including Kennedy's harsh remarks during the training session, then it looks at Buffy and speaking with the Slayer's own voice, repeats her words from the backyard about the Potentials: "They're not all gonna make it. Some will die, and there's nothing I can do that will stop it." It then vanishes with a jolly "TTFN!" (ta-ta-for-now), but all of the assembled onookers - nearly the entire house, by the time it's done speaking - have gotten the point. The First is not afraid of them. And not even Buffy believes that they will all make it.

Buffy's response, however, is another issue altogether. After burying Chloe's body in the backyard, the Slayer returns from this grim task and addresses the assembled group in the living room with cold fury, railing that Chloe was "an idiot" and "weak." She claims to be sick of "carrying" the rest of them, attacks Anya for adding nothing to the household, chastises Willow for not having the guts to use her magic. Spike, who attempts to excuse himself from this ugly scene under the mistaken idea that he's exempt, also gets the full force of her disapproval; Buffy rounds on him, snapping at the stunned vampire that all he's good for is being "weepy or whaled on." She insists what she really wants is "the Spike who's dangerous, who tried to kill me when we first met," adding, "You keep holding back, you might as well walk out that door." Later, Anya aptly sums up this outburst as the "Everybody Sucks But Me" speech.

Screw You Guys, I'm Going To The Dawn Of Time
Reactions to Buffy's verbal assault are varied and immediate. Most of the Potentials seem merely cowed; Kennedy bristling; Willow shamed. Xander makes the logical complaint that they'd just been doing what they were told, an idea promptly squelched by Buffy as not good enough; they obviously should have been doing more of something, even if she can't articulate what. Spike's shocked reaction echoes this even more sharply, a distressed sputter of, "I did this for you... the changes. This is what you wanted!" Buffy dismissively brushes this aside as "nowhere near" the kind of aggression she's looking for.

Then, Buffy becomes all purposeful action - she pulls out the leather kit bag introduced earlier by Principal Wood as his mother's "emergency kit," a belated Slayer hand-me-down which turns out to conveniently contain the Slayer's origin myth via a magic book and shadow-play puppet show. The approximate content of the text goes thus: first the Earth was created, then demons, then men, after which the men found a girl, and "chained her to the Earth." The puppets spin, a wind whips up, and a glowing portal opens. Buffy promptly jumps in, leaving the others behind to figure out how to get her back and deal with a demon spit out by the portal in "exchange."

Reversion Therapy
Anya makes the logical suggestion that Buffy "find her own way back" (and given that most Slayers haven't traditionally had a posse of helpers, isn't that how this would have worked in the past, or were there other instructions with the kit as to how to deal with "an emergency"?). But ultimately the gang decides on a spell. Willow, newly motivated to risk evil possession or whatever might be required in this scenario, promptly gets to work. Spike, for his part, heads off in pursuit of the demon, making a quick stop along the way to retrieve something he needs.

That "something" is his old leather coat, last seen draped over the hallway bannister at the Summers house in "Seeing Red" (now inexplicably stashed in a filing cabinet in the high school basement - deleted scene, or has the staff simply given up even trying to maintain continuity?). The symbolism inherent in the return of the signature duster doesn't really need comment, but I'll do it anyway; originally a generic wardrobe item in line with the black leather fetish look of all other major vampire characters seen on the show ("What's with you two and the leather?" a confused Cordelia asked VampXander and VampWillow in "The Wish."), this coat didn't take on its current weighty meaning until S5's "Fool For Love," when we discovered that it was a trophy from Spike's second Slayer kill, the ill-fated Nikki, Wood's mother. In the DVD commentary for that episode, writer Douglas Petrie describes the scene where Spike takes the coat as the last item in a journey toward the making of the monster he'd become. "Fool For Love" is also, arguably, the real starting point for that same journey in reverse, a two-and-a-half year deconstruction wherein Spike systematically loses everything that comprised his painstakingly crafted persona of the Big Bad, ending with his abandonment of the duster and undertaking of the quest to regain his soul. And with ironic circularity, both journeys started from the exact same place - with his hopeless, crushing love for a woman who looks down on him.

Clothes Make The Monster
I've mentioned in previous writeups how clothes are often used symbolically in the BtVS universe; the duster gets very significant seen in that light. "Fool For Love" showed that the Big Bad was indeed a conscious construct, and established that Spike expresses his willingness to contort to fit the roles he's been asked to play ever since by tinkering with his wardrobe: the Riley-esque khakis of S5's "Crush"; the playboy sex-god patterned shirts and jewelry of post-"Smashed" S6; the I'm-not-insane blue shirt "costume" of "Beneath You"; his currently favored undistinguished gray-green cottons. By changing his image, he's been trying to reinvent himself, like Madonna, to put distance between his old persona of Slayer of Slayers and the person he now wants to be.

In "Get it Done," Buffy specifically calls forth the monster that repelled her in "Fool For Love": the evil, disgusting, soulless thing; "the Spike who tried to kill me when we met." The "good man" she'd expressed belief in has now been rejected as useless to her. Spike's reaction to her demand that he adapt to this latest reversal is to do exactly as she suggests, and reach for his old psychological armor, reverting to the "costume" that fits the role she now insists that he play.

And for the moment anyway, he seems relieved to make that backwards trip: he efficiently dispatches the demon in a rough-and-tumble alley fight in which we see the return of something very like classic Spike - brawling, laughing, even smoking (gasp! how evil!) after snapping a match alight on the dead demon's horns. "A fight like that is good for the soul," he smiles.

Back On The High Horse
It's with this very moment, however, that morality in the BtVS universe became hopelessly tangled for me. That seeing a good old "fists and fangs" dust-up comes as such a welcome relief raises the confusing question of why watching characters try to be "good" is tedious and painful, but watching them be "bad" is exciting and fun? (S6's DarkWillow being another example of such - was there anything more boring and miserable than Recovering!Junkie!Willow! in contrast?) "Get it Done" seems to suggest that there's a certain vanishing point where the ends justify the means, whatever they may be.... but then even that conclusion is drawn into question with the results of Buffy's vision quest. The portal opens onto a desert, unsurprisingly like the one we saw in "Restless" and "Intervention," and Buffy finds herself facing off against three elaborately robed shamen, who (speaking in subtitles) address her as "the Hellmouth's last guardian." They then attempt to give Buffy a Slayer power-up by arranging a replay of the Slayer origin myth, chaining her to the floor of an primatively painted cave (suspiciously similar to the paintings we saw in the cave where Spike underwent his soul trials... coincidence?), and unleashing a black cloud that they claim is a demon's "heart." This scene is clearly meant to be interpreted as a sort of rape - the dark mist swirls around her skirted legs, attempts to enter through her screaming mouth. This, apparently, is the source of the Slayer's power.

Buffy's reaction to this contains all the indignation of modern womanhood - she snaps her chains, attacks the men, and breaks the leader's staff (wow, that wasn't at all symbolic!), an action which promptly dispells the demon. "You violated that girl!" Buffy shouts at the "weak... pathetic" men who she claims "obviously have nothing to show" her, even though we've hardly gotten the full story here. Was the First Slayer an unwilling recipient of this power? Or was she a volunteer, gladly accepting this unholy compromise to save the lives of her people?

It's a question we don't really get an answer to, but just before Buffy is returned to her own time, she is given a vision by the leader of the shamen that later leads Buffy to wonder if she "made a mistake" by turning down the offer of extra power. The vision, revealed to us at the end of the episode, is a CGI nightmare of thousands upon thousands of UberVamps, an invincible, Lord of the Rings-style army shaking weapons and clamoring for blood. Apparently, this is what the gang will ultimately face. End of episode. So was Buffy wrong or right?

Everybody Sucks But Me
From a strictly tactical standpoint, urging the more gun-shy members of Buffy's army to stop "holding back" makes a certain amount of logical sense. But wars aren't won merely through brute strength - or one should hope they aren't, since there's no way Buffy could possibly muster enough might to defeat the UberVamp army we saw. Morale is also an important factor, and Buffy's public dressing-down of her comrades - all the better to carry the maximum humiliation quotient - may have been a crippling blow in this regard. Buffy's tirade is personally offensive and vicious to everyone involved. She demeans the dead Chloe for committing suicide, with no regard to the feelings of others. She pointedly goes back on her earlier reassurances to Willow that "it's okay" for her not to risk using heavy magic. She tells Spike that he was "a better fighter" before he got the soul. Buffy accuses her friends - who up until this point we've seen working hard trying to become better people, as per her own high-handed proclamations of right and wrong - of letting her down by not somehow managing the impossible balancing act of being as powerful as they can be, even if that includes being actively evil, while still jumping at her beck and call. Her statement from "First Date," "you can't beat evil by doing evil," now seems painfully ironic.

That said, Buffy's willingness to accept help from shady sources is hardly a new development - Buffy and the Scoobies have habitually exploited whatever means necessary to get the job done. The bulk of Willow's most powerful spells clearly fall in the realm of black magic. Anya's demonic help was gladly accepted in "Two to Go" and "Grave." Certainly they've gotten their money's worth out of Spike over the years. And Buffy has even used brutal tactics herself - roughing up vampires and demons and/or Willy the bartender for information, even to the point of resorting to torture ("When She Was Bad"). But in "Get it Done," hypocrisy is the real word of the day - hot on the heels of asking her lieutenants to risk their hard-won sanity in her battle, Buffy selfishly refuses to take the same risks herself, rejecting the demonic power-up offered by the shamen. Her tantrum essentially reverses any lessons in restraint we've witnessed in the past two years. This Buffy, contrary to the preachy, moralistic, holier-than-thou attitude she flaunted in Season 6, has no interest in clean-and-sober Willow, or struggling-with-soulful-guilt Spike. If you were generous, you could try to justify this new set of demands as a staggering display of trust in both Spike's and Willow's ability to control their inner demons, while suggesting a lesser degree of confidence in her own... but you'd be reaching to do so. This is Buffy at her least flattering, the Buffy of "Dead Things" - a demanding, vicious harpy who asks for everything and gives nothing in return, a side of the Slayer that previously only Spike has gotten a good look at... and I have to wonder, is this the sort of person anyone would want to keep as a friend? Or follow as a leader?

I've mentioned previously my suspicions about The First, and what might be needed to defeat it, and "power" in the classic sense seems less and less likely to be it. The CGI swarm Buffy sees at the episode's end is not something that her little army has a ghost of a chance of fighting, no how far they all push themselves, even they can even bring themselves to do so after this episode's vote of no-confidence. So what then, will be the answer?

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