Buffy Season Six: The death of metaphor

Here's an anecdote that you may or may not find relevant further down. When Steven Spielberg first set out to make Jaws he originally planned to have a whole lot more shark in it ("I gotta have more shark, baby!"). The problem was that the damn shark just didn't work. This meant Spielberg had to scrap a load of shark action and instead come up with shots that suggested the shark but didn't actually show it (things like the infamous fin moving through the water).

For my money this is one of the reasons why Jaws is so great: it's not just about a rubber shark, it's about the threat of the shark, the image in your mind's eye of that shark, the potential of the shark. Now, fast forward to Jurassic Park, where Spielberg had the freedom to put as many dinosaurs on the screen as he wanted and you'll find a monster movie that's far less effective .

When the Buffy production team started work on Season Six they weren't just embarking on a new series, they were moving the show to a new broadcaster (UPN). With the move came more money (nearly twice as much per episode, I gather) and more freedom in what they could show on screen (finally, for instance, you could have Tara and Willow actually kissing, and you could talk about them having sex rather than use the metaphor of casting magic spells together).

Consequently, it's not without reason that some fans refer to this as 'season sex'. While previous years had their fair share of bonking, it was pretty much always off camera or, at the very least, left as much to the imagination as network standards prescribed. This year it was full on - and most of that was Buffy on Spike, or vice versa.

Buffy & Spike

While I do believe that the S&M relationship the two characters embark upon is crucial to their development, it probably didn't need to be anywhere near as blatant as it was. My wife made the very good suggestion that the relationship could have been just as effectively conveyed, perhaps more so, by just leaving it at Buffy and Spike fighting constantly. You could happily read an S&M metaphor into that, or just accept that these two just really like hurting each other. Either way it still moves the characters in the intended direction.

The dramatic peak of this particular plotline is the attempted rape scene in Seeing Red and it's a scene I've never been fully comfortable with. True, it shouldn't in any way be a comfortable moment and I understand the filming of the scene was meticulously planned not only to make certain it was uncomfortable to watch, but also to ensure that the audience is allowed some degree of empathy with Spike (otherwise we just wouldn't want him to come back from Africa at the end). To that degree it's a well-constructed, well-filmed scene that does what it needs to do.

But this is Buffy. It's a fantasy show. It's most definitely a fantasy show that has never, ever been scared to deal with real-life issues (which is one of the reasons why many people admire it so highly) but it's always dealt with those issues through metaphor.

Whenever I think about Season Six I'm always drawn back to one of my favourite scenes from the show, and one of its finest uses of metaphor. It's the moment in season 4 where Spike attempts to bite Willow only to discover that he's been implanted with a chip that makes it impossible for him to harm humans any more. That it effectively turns him into an impotent vampire is hilariously explored in the ensuing "that's never happened to me before" exchange between the two characters. This makes it obvious what the writers are aiming for while never once removing us from the basic scenario of a vampire attempting to feed off his victim. In short it's still about the vampire, and the impotence is more of a subtext.

To have Spike literally attempt to rape Buffy somehow flies against the spirit of the show. It's no longer about the vampire and the Slayer, it's about a profoundly troubled relationship and a spurned lover. Even worse, to have the Slayer seemingly unable to fight off a single vampire in her own bathroom makes you wonder if she just got lucky all those other hundreds of times. Yes, they have the scene where she gets drop-kicked into a gravestone, so we know she's hurt her back, but how many times has she been flung against walls, pillars, concrete blocks, etc?

I think the reason that the scene is so upsetting is not only because it's a rape scene but also because it's a moment where the writers betray the premise of the show in order to make their story happen. It jars is because you have the nagging sense at the back of your mind that you're not really watching Buffy The Vampire Slayer anymore. The beauty of the series is that you don't need to have a vampire actually trying to rape a character: a vampire biting his victim is the perfect metaphor for that.

For Seeing Red the writers wanted Spike to do something that even he would find so appalling that it would compel him to go and fight to regain his soul. But, I have to wonder, if a soulless vampire is already suffering a paroxysm of guilt then what exactly is his soul for anyway? It's not like people who already have souls never commit rape. Having the attemped rape almost seems like taking the easy way out dramatically speaking. Few things are more horrible than rape, so it's an easy choice to use rape if you need a truly disturbing scene.

While doing some background reading for Season Six I learned that neither Sarah Michelle Gellar or James Marsters were happy about the various sex scenes, with Marsters being particularly upset over the rape scene (see here and here). I think this is quite telling. Gellar had been the lead actor for the show for over five years, while Marsters had had been a semi-regular since the start of the second season: both actors were intimately familiar with the characters they were playing, and yet both judged the sexual content of season six inappropriate. Nevertheless both were overruled by the production staff.

It might be that they were simply uncomfortable with having to perform relatively explicit scenes (though I'm not at all convinced that's the case) but if they genuinely thought that the sex scenes were inappropriate either for the show or for their characters then I find the idea that their concerns were ignored to be as good an indicator as any that Season Six has some fundamental problems.

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Big Bad: Willow

Is Willow the real big bad, or merely a means to provide a more dramatic conclusion to Season Six? You can imagine that ever since The Wish, and its semi-sequel Doppelgangland, the writers had been itching to turn cute, cuddly Willow into deranged, evil Willow again. (Of course, by this point we'd long ago had half a season of Angel being evil, so doing evil Willow for more than a few episodes would potentially get old really quickly.)

Let me just make it clear that I think the end of season 6 is a blast: evil Willow is both fun and nasty; Giles' entrance at the end is made out of pure awesome; dramatically it's also probably one of the best finales they've done. In addition it leads to a very noteworthy conclusion in that it's not Buffy who saves the world, it's Xander - and he doesn't save it by fighting, he does it by talking. Given that Xander is frequently made out to be an irritating prick this is a big deal for the character, and it's entirely logical that he would be the person who could talk Willow back down to humanity. It also dovetails nicely into the 'real world' sentiment of the season: the one character with no supernatural powers or features whatsoever is the one that saves everything, and through entirely human means.

But that's not to say that the way in which we get to this finale couldn't have been handled a whole lot better. On viewing Season Six this second time around one thing that became even more apparent was how clumsy the whole addiction storyline was. Clearly the idea was to present a clever metaphor for teenage drug addiction by having Willow become addicted to magic. The problem is that having Willow become addicted to magic means it's not a metaphor for addiction: it's actual addiction, and the way it was presented wouldn't have looked out of place in something like The O.C. or 90210, but that's not what we tune into Buffy for.

Really, the fact that Willow's addicted to magic is almost secondary. Structurally the strand is also pretty dire. Over the first 8 episodes or so we see Willow abusing her magical powers in various ways, possibly building up to something really interesting. Then, over the space of just three episodes, she quickly spirals out of control, finally realises the error of her ways after almost killing Dawn, and goes cold turkey. Abruptly, and not a little unconvincingly, we're back to nice, timid Willow.

I have to wonder how much more interesting it might have been if Willow had simply continued her inexorable downhill slide throughout the season, or maybe even peaked mid-season in such a way as to make the Trio seem the least of the Scoobies' problems.

But no, that was never to be. Clearly the plan was always to pull Willow back from the brink, pretend that she's normal, and then find some dramatic pretext to push her wholesale back into the abyss.

Sadly that pretext was the death of one of my favourite supporting characters: Tara. Generally I don't object to a character being killed off if it serves a genuinely useful dramatic or emotional purpose. There are many perfect examples in Buffy: Jenny Calendar, for instance, to show us not only that Angel is *really* evil, but also that Giles is more than just a mild-mannered librarian; or Joyce Summers, whose death gave us one of the greatest episodes of the series and a new path for several of its main characters.

In contrast, the death of Tara is blatantly engineered for the sole purpose of serving Willow's character path. If I can put my mock writing tutor's hat on for a moment... (pay attention) character should serve the plot, that's to say that everything a character does or says should ideally move the plot along. The characters become a function of the plot, which means they are there to react to and enact the various plot points. Naturally as a writer you will need to manoeuvre characters in certain ways in order to tell the story you want to tell, but this should always be invisible, you should never make it appear as though your characters are being manipulated.

The problem with Tara dying is that it's clearly designed to have a specific effect, which is to turn Willow mad, and it doesn't really have any other notable dramatic value. The writers split Willow and Tara up, and keep them separated through most of the season, but then finally and conveniently reunite them only for Tara to get killed off in the following episode. It's cruel to the characters and to the viewers who may be invested in those characters, but it's also far too structured to truly convince.

It's bad enough having guns in Buffy (somehow that just seems so very wrong, even though the writers insisted that they wanted Tara to die a 'human' death) but as we all know there is no way on earth that bullet could have ever struck Tara - if they had to have Tara being shot could they not have at least studied the basic laws of physics first?!

To save me going on: for more thoughts and questions about Tara's death, including how the writers managed to fall headfirst into the dreaded 'dead/evil lesbian' cliché you should read this excellent essay: The Needless Murder of Tara Maclay.

My final grievance is that the writers were obviously planning Tara's death to be a cataclysmic event, and yet they undermine it by having Buffy take a bullet as well. Which one is meant to be the big deal here? Are we supposed to reel in shock over a supporting character being slaughtered or are we supposed to be on the edge of our seats because the effectively immortal, supernaturally empowered lead character has also been shot? As it is the episode closes on Willow' eyes turning black, so does this mean we're supposed to be moving on to evil Willow already?

It's a surprisingly poor show from a team of writers who, as we know from experience, are frequently capable of brilliance. Here's hoping that they managed to learn from the mistake of Season Six, as I get ready to plough into Season Seven.

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