Buffy and Birds and Rocks and Things

Date: 01/12/2003
From: Stax_

This is a follow-up to Informants reply at http://bboard.scifi.com/bboard/browse.cgi/1/5/545/4065719/18

AYW and Gone

I was caught up in the gist of that part of the discussion, which was the set-up part of those episodes. The question I meant to ask was ‘How was the set-up different in each episode?’. That wasn’t the question I asked, I don’t have grounds to ask it and I agree with on how they approached the episodes in general

I don’t want to be pedantic (Who am I kidding? Of course I do) but ‘Buffy’s life sucks’ doesn’t constitute theme.

You seem to be arguing that a challenge raised and met and nothing else makes up a plot and that isn’t true. A plot is a series of events and the Spike and Buffy’s dance around each other and their eventual sex in ‘Smashed’ is just as valid as Buffy foiling the Troika in ‘Seeing Red’. The sex and the violence in that relationship were different sides of the same coin. Spike being able to hit Buffy raised the stakes in the “abusive” part of their abusive relationship so the “relationship” part had to be also raised in turn. (Salon.com has a great article on this)

‘Bad Girls’ is structured like a frame, onto which the episode is hung. They all feed into the Balthazar plotline and the ongoing plots are forwarded within that story. Those S6 episodes play like a collection of spinning tops. The individual stories spin on their individual axis (axi ? axises?) and bump into each other once or twice an episode. Structurally, they are not in the same league, they’re not even the same sport.

The Espenson/Fury thing means that, either way, one was wrong.

Whedon could say that ‘Buffy’ was about giant green rabbits but that wouldn’t make it so. Whedon can say that ‘Buffy’ is about Life but that doesn’t make it so. The show says otherwise. If Whedon means it to be about Life and not Coming Of Age, his intentions haven’t translated to screen.

The geeks weren’t contrasted to the Scoobies in ‘Flooded’, that only happened later. At best you can say they took money from the same source that had refused Buffy it, them through irresponsibility, her through responsibility. However that’s all retrospective. You could make the same argument that Glory and Buffy’s treatment of the monk in ’No Place Like Home’ was a comment on organised religion, had S5 been about theology. The episode by itself can’t support that and the same is true for ‘Flooded’. The Troika may have been used as contrast throughout S6 but in ‘Flooded’ alone, no.

Your reading of the Glory/Ben thing isn’t a million miles from what I think was what the writers had INTENDED for them. However, they managed to negate that rather complex metaphor with an enormous mistake.

Glory and Ben together were to represent The World but I don’t think it was as simple as one representing good and the other bad. There was no balance between them, Glory is strong and invincible, Ben is weak and mortal. What Glory took and did heavily outweighed what Ben had. Also the blurring of good and evil isn’t a theme present anywhere in the season. People vs. Nature is though.

Glory was meant as a metaphor for the external, unstoppable forces that affect our lives, the acts of god (It could have been so good). Ben was meant to represent humanity, fragile and well-meaning. They fight for control and can’t help but affect each other. The blurring of these two characters wouldn’t have represented the inextricability of good and evil, it would have represented the corruption of humanity by being forced to make hard choices imposed on it by nature. Unfortunately none of this is on the screen because Whedon made a crucial misstep. He gives Glory motivation.

In making Glory dedicated to obtaining the Key, he created something incongruent with the Buffyverse that in the end smothered the metaphor. All Glory needed to be to work was cruel and random. In having Glory work towards a goal and manipulate things as much as she could to reach it, she became separated from the real life phenomenon they were trying to portray, or at least the Buffyverse perception of it. Because Glory no longer stood for anything then Ben couldn’t because they were symbiotic. Had Glory been an indirect threat to Buffy, causing Joyce’s tumour or whatever or had her minions been used to drive the plot, I’d have no problem.

It’s not a bad metaphor like Willow’s addiction or a metaphor whose literal implications are so sticky you almost wish they didn’t go there like Buffy’s resurrection (Though my problems with that can be reduced from three to one with a simple twist) it’s a null metaphor. The problem undercut on a level so fundamental that the whole thing went from metaphor to plot device.

I can’t agree with your reading of ‘The Gift’ because I don’t think that the inseparability of good and evil was a theme present in S5. Glory and Ben didn’t represent that and no other event in the season revolved around that. I think Whedon wrote ‘The Gift’ under the delusion that the Circumstance/Humanity metaphor was still working and when he realised there could be no satisfactory ending to both the literal and metaphorical story, he stopped working it as a metaphor. Allegorically this is how ‘The Gift’ plays out .Hero overcomes Circumstance through intelligence, help from friends and dedication fuelled by love. Good, great, fine. Then Circumstance gives way to Humanity (what?), Hero makes a deal with Humanity to keep Circumstance away from her (what?!?), Humanity agrees (what?!?!?) and Father commits genocide (resigned what). Call me crazy but I don’t think that’s a message Whedon would support.

And as unlikely as realising that life and death are inseparable is as a motivation for throwing oneself of a tower, it would make sense of some stuff. Unfortunately there is nothing to support that conclusion. Buffy’s death is 100% self-sacrificing suicide, 0% epiphany. And that’s my big problem with S5. It could be up there with S2 and S3. It’s big moral question could have been “How and why do I make the right decision when I’ve stopped caring?”. Unfortunately, that just hasn’t been committed to film. For it to work people have to fill in all the gaps and ignore the actual text and as far as I’m concerned that’s the writers job.

I realised Buffy was coming back, that was my problem. And you were obviously meant to feel SOMETHING with all the regulars gathered around crying. I didn’t because I knew she was going to be up and about in no time.stax

Okay...

Date: 01/13/2003
From: Informant

I'm gonna try to wind this conversation down since it could go on forever and still get nowhere. This isn't in order, sorry.

You seem to take some things away from the show that are far different than what I take. For me, the season 5 arc worked. I see the metaphor and I do not think that the writers did a bad job of it. It makes perfect sense to me. To you, it's choppy and poorly executed. I guess it's a matter of perspective. It's obvious that I'm not doing any good in changing your mind there, and you're not changing mine. So there's not much else to be said there.

You can't say the Joss' vision of the show doesn't matter. It doesn't work that way. You can say that you see it differently. Again, that's perspective. But you don't get to say that Joss' perspective is wrong. If a person writes a song because they're feeling a certain way, then that's what the song is to them. You can say they did a bad job of getting what they feel across, or you can see something totally different in the song, but in the end it doesn't matter. What you see in the song isn't the final say. That's how art works. To one person, a painting of children playing in the now could represent the innocence of childhood, and to the another, it could represent the desire for people to find some happiness in the coldness of the world. To another, it could be a picture of kids playing in the show.
People see things differently. One opinion is no more valid than the others. However, Joss' is more important in terms of how the show is written, so I'd say that his perspective does mean something.

That pretty much sums up the conversation. We have different points of view on the whole thing. To me, season 5 has a deeper meaning and several metaphors that are interesting to watch. You don't see that, so you won't enjoy it as much. To me, "Flooded" has a good contrast with Buffy and the Trio. Again, you don't see that. We've had a pretty good discussion on the topic, so I guess there's not much more to say without going into repeats.

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