Just Stake Me! Ramblings - Deadly Hook's Season 7 Speculation

Season 7: Wild Speculation!

Themes of Responsibility, Forgiveness, and Silly, Silly Action

By The Deadly Hook

So... you've now experienced the unrelenting grimness of Season 6, you've read through our recaps, and you're wondering - what's next for the gang? Well, so are we... and now that we're in deep in the summer hiatus, we thought we'd give you a look-see at our predictions for the season ahead. These are based on where the character arcs seem to be going (at least in my eyes) and guesses on overall tone. Put on your tinfoil hat, and stay with me...

Theme A: Responsibility
With the fallout from passion-driven relationship meltdowns and murderous rampages into world-destroying evil as a starting point, my guess is that the first theme of Season 7 will be taking responsibility for your actions. For starters, Willow will have to come to terms with the consequences of her apocalyptic slide into darkness, and face the potential for evil within herself. I'm guessing that managing her advanced magic level will be an issue - as Giles pointed out, one does not come back from a descent into ultimate, dark power unchanged. (Might she possibly go to England to undergo magic training with the coven Giles mentioned?) But even if she manages to work through her grief, guilt, and power issues, can she regain the trust of her loved ones enough to reforge their bonds of friendship? Or will all be forgiven without question because... well, it's Willow?

Second, we have Spike, with his shiny new soul. After over a century as a conscienceless Peter Pan, he'll be dealing with his new awareness of every rotten thing he's ever done, and trying to balance that past against the person he clearly wants to be at this point - the "good man" he once was. (Thematically, I hadn't thought of this before, but it's rather Biblical, isn't it - you can almost view the soul restoration as the equivalent of the Garden of Eden's forbidden "fruit of knowledge of good and evil.") But no matter the depth or sincerity of his remorse, he's unlikely to be received with anything resembling open arms upon return to Sunnydale. Soul or not, Spike is the traditional goat of the Scoobies in any event, plus in the wake of his attack on Buffy they have an extra-good reason to send him packing the moment he arrives. (My money's on Dawn to deliver the initial harsh welcome.) Spike has a seriously hard road ahead, no matter what path he chooses - atonement may simply not be possible. If it's redemption he wants, there's no guarantee that he will succeed... or that anyone would care if he did.

And yet, here's food for thought: since both Willow and Spike will be wrestling with similiar issues, I anticipate the two of them might well have a lot to talk about. That both share geeky, bookwormish pasts is likely to be significant as well. Maybe they'll be able to help each other?

Buffy too has a lot to answer for. Having neglected her sister and all her key relationships since her resurrection, she'll no doubt spend the summer compensating, making amends. I'm hoping we'll step into Season 7 to see the results of her new committment to Dawn, taking her sister on Slaying patrol ride-alongs and training her in self-defense, helping Dawn become the "beautiful" and "powerful" young woman Buffy imagines her to be. But we've also seen glimmers of a tough, practical, snarky Dawn, impulsive and prone to attracting mayhem. Buffy's biggest challenge may be to mentor her sister through her awkward phase, to be the grand old hand of Slaying, the voice of experience, taking on the role Giles used to play to her.

And to support that dynamic, I predict that since the Magic Box has been demolished, the Summers house will become the new center of operations. This is important symbolically as well - one of the driving themes of the season has been how Buffy has tried to separate the different aspects of her life from each other into distinct satellites, like game pieces on a Monopoly map, never shall any of them be allowed to meet. Her growth and maturity necessarily involves rebuilding her center, intergrating all aspects of her life, including her sister, with her Slayer self and its reality.

But more than just letting her friends and family in, Buffy also needs to let herself out. If the house is symbolic for Buffy herself, then her task now is to create an open place of feng shui energies rather than a fortress of solitude. If it's important that she stop protecting her sister, her "other self," from life, then it's equally important for her to ease off on protecting herself, to stop taking the world on her lonely shoulders and using it as a shield against life. She has to open up, to "risk the pain."

Theme B: Forgiveness
As an adjunct to the responsibility issues comes the theme of forgiveness. Everyone, but everyone, in the cast has much to be forgiven for, but it almost goes without saying that some of them will be forgiven and others will not.

Largest on this list is Sunnydale's current king of intolerance, Xander. He needs to make a number of decisions about how he really feels about the people in his life: he saved Willow by his ability to love her unconditionally, but he has yet to reach a similiar understanding about Anya, especially now that she's a demon again. Could he ever love her the way he does Willow, flaws and all? It's a tough call: Xander's history has never really been one of loving acceptance. He judges. Immediately. Harshly. The difference is that now he's starting to judge himself by the same standards as he does others... and realizing that he comes up short. Can he learn to accept the uncomfortable truth that nobody's perfect, including himself? Can he forgive?

Anya's problems are also complex. As a Justice Demon once more, she's struggling with her identity. Demon or not, Anya seems in some ways to be more human than ever, and she has new understanding of what makes relationships fail. She also now knows, thanks to Willow's dark rampage, that vengeance is not always the answer. That being the case, will she - or can she? - be able to forgive Xander for abandoning her, or will she move on with her life to build something new? My gut says the latter - I see her throwing herself into her career, finding a way to integrate her demonic powers and her people skills by either rebuilding the magic shop or starting a new business venture to go with her new life as an independent, single woman.

Buffy and Willow have major issues still to hash out on the forgiveness front. Their alienation from each other was left unaddressed at the season's end, and from the way it looks to my mind, there are still heavy leftovers from Buffy's post-resurrection trauma. Buffy has yet to forgive her best friend for pulling her out of the ground, not to mention that whole trying-to-destroy-the-world thing. Willow has reason to feel burned by Buffy as well - why did she start learning magic in the first place if not to help Buffy? But did her best friend even notice or care about the sacrifices she'd made? These are hard questions that aren't going to simply go away - of all the ugly confrontations still to come from the wreckage of Season 6, this one is likely to hurt the most.

Well, there are two more that are going to hurt quite a lot.

The advent of Spike's return will be raising difficult issues for Buffy. Personality-wise, I expect to see a happier, quipper, less emotionally frozen Buffy than we've seen this season, but even at her lightest Buffy is a very intense, private person, who learned long ago to keep from wearing her deep feelings on her sleeve. And this relationship has indeed stirred some deep feelings in her, pressing uncomfortably on her memories of the worst hurts of her life. His reappearance plus soul may finally force Buffy to face a number of questions that have been looming for quite some time now. If Spike could love her, truly love her, without a soul, then it means that Angel could have as well... but didn't. I really don't see how the show can continue to avoid talking about this, if only to point out how this situation differs from what she's already experienced with Angel. And how will Buffy react now that Spike is the one to have suddenly changed the rules on her, kicked over the last wall between them, his soulless state? Will she be able to accept him as a new person, separate from the old version, as she did with Angel, or will she consider them one and the same, the souled version just as culpable for his actions as the soulless vampire? Now refer the above point about Angel for the circular problem this brings up. It's not likely to be a pretty scene.

Either way, no matter what Buffy does or doesn't feel about Spike, with the uncomfortable specter of his assault on her hanging in the air, it's unlikely we'll see them dealing with each other in an even remotely sexual sense for quite a long time... maybe not ever again. But that at least leaves open the prospect of them finally dealing with each other as individuals - who they are instead of what they are. I would not be displeased to see them finally as friends; Spike as a right hand to her, a partner in a different sense, a Willie Garvin to Buffy's Modesty Blaise. Somehow that seems fitting to me.

And finally, I can't help but feel that Xander's relationship to Spike is going to be a key powderkeg. These two have hated each other intensely for years, but this time they may finally to be forced to come to terms with the reasons why. I'll say no more.

And as a note to all this, does anyone besides me see a subtheme (or overtheme) of identity in general, as in "you can't get your identity from someone else"? There's more than one case here of characters changing themselves to please others, existing in the shadows of another's opinion, and I think we'll be seeing this expanded on a little in Season 7. If the timeframe we're currently exploring in BtVS is young adulthood, what else are those years about if not discovering who you really are?

Theme C: Silly, Silly Action
Despite the hangover yet to come from all the grevious hurts to have been suffered by all (as detailed above), I can't help but feel that Season 7 will be lighter, more fun, more action-packed. BtVS as a series has always been character intensive (one of the things I love about it... or could you tell?), but in this case, having already explored everyone's hearts of darkness about as thoroughly as possible, I predict the pendulum seriously swinging back toward comedy.

In particular, I think we'll be in for a number of mood-lightening gimmick episodes to break the tension, with such fun features as time travel or a visit from another Slayer from the past or future - which has not been done yet on BtVS, and it's a staple of comic-book/sci-fi stories if there ever was one. Other possibilities include a film crew coming to Sunnydale a la Cops or Unsolved Mysteries (for maximum effect, the characters would be called in to act as extras, no doubt cast hilariously against type, such as Buffy standing in for the screaming victim), the "let's put on a show" show, where the characters perform in a play or puppet show for a benefit or some other charity function (again, cast hilariously against type).

Otherwise, there's the ever-popular body-switching stunt - an oldie but a goodie, and it has been done, with Buffy and Faith... but not the rest of the gang, and there are so many possibilities there. (After that, about the only other sci-fi tropes to have not yet been used on the series are the storylines where everyone travels into a prehistoric world, or space, or characters become dramatically older or turn into babies.) I would also predict that the critical Xander/Spike confrontation will be handled in a humorous fashion. I would be very surprised if we get out of Season 7 without seeing a major knock-down, drag-out fight between the two of them or a Defiant Ones-style situation where they're chained together. Or switch bodies. You name it.

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