I'm just so sick of this 'only a monster can understand me' shtick they were going for in those later Seasons. Or only a monster makes a good sounding board. It's effed up to the utter degree.
But that's partly the point the episode is trying to make. That's why we have that shot of her phone lying abandoned yet ringing on the grass as Dawn tries to reach her. Buffy should be making connections with her loved ones but her sense of isolation leaves her feeling unable to. I'm not sure I understand your argument that she 'should know better'. She's not doing anything wrong or reckless: she's not hurting herself or really putting herself in harm's way; she's absolutely sure she can overpower Webster. She should of course, be a little cautious since he is a vampire, and therefore not entirely trustworthy (he's also linked to the First, since he's sired by the one who's controlled by it - so he's connected to evil in a much more specific way, though this is unbeknowst to Buffy at the time) but I don't see how she's displaying any kind of big failure of judgement here.
Never Leave Me:
‘Shouldn’t we stab him through the chest. Isn’t that what we do when these things happen?’ Anya articulates challenge Buffy faces in this episode, namely how to deal with the possible threat posed by Spike and who to hold accountable.
Spike’s story and its addiction-recovery metaphor is reinforced by Andrew, who takes over Anya’s role and provides the parallel, this time in a blatant visual way as he struts around wearing a long black leather duster and black boots and is tied down to a chair in a mirror image of Spike. He’s buying blood like Spike is still being affected by his taste of human blood; his inability to take responsibility raises the question of to what extent Spike will be able to take responsibility for his soulless actions, triggered actions and his actions going forward.
I like the portrayal of Spike’s withdrawal symptoms. I was afraid they’d somewhat gloss over the effects the consumption of all that human blood would have on him. The vamp ‘tiger roar’ sound effect is excellent – it’s good to hear them again; I feel like it’s been a long time since it was used. And yes, I love that Spike grabs Andrew through the wall! Buffy continues to display a mixture of wariness and compassion, which I like.
Now for a line that causes a fair amount of fandom strife: ‘I have come to redefine the words pain and suffering since I met you’. This gets interpreted either as Spike victim-blaming her, or as him admitting that getting his soul – for/because of her - has given him a new understanding of pain and suffering in the sense of self-loathing and the torment of guilt. I’d go with the latter as the idea of him blaming her outright doesn’t quite square with the self-blame he is experiencing at that point. All the same I found Spike’s choice of phrasing rather curious. IMO it hews remarkably close to the Petrarchan poetic conventions of the ‘afflicted lover’. For anyone unfamiliar, the traditional Petrarchan voice is characterised as a male speaker, tormented to the point of virtual illness by his love for a woman. This mistress, often absent or unavailable is loved from afar and frequently characterised as emotionally distant or cruel, yet at the same time is idealised. There are clearly Petrarchan qualities to his love as a soulless being but from his choice of words here it seems that they persist - after all a soul only gives you the capacity to think, feel and act differently, it doesn’t automatically fix psychological or behavioural patterns especially if those were present in the original human. So while I don’t believe he is actually – or consciously – blaming her, I wonder if it’s possible to see him as still casting himself in the role of suffering lover, which kind of does blame her, if only inadvertently and perhaps on a textual level because it put the onus of action or inaction on that proffered love entirely on her.
What I think is a bit more understandably problematic is the line ‘You used me’. Again, I don’t see it as him actually blaming Buffy. It’s about him having now come to understand a bit better what Buffy was going through in S6 – it was about self-loathing. Before, he would insist that Buffy wanted or needed the darkness but now his soul has allowed him to achieve a greater clarity of perspective to understand that Buffy was using their sexual relationship as a form of self-harm. However, what we don’t get – and this is why I think people are put off by S7 Spike/Spuffy – is the equivalent from Buffy’s side. She never calls him out on his own behaviour during that time, which makes the path to a mending of their dynamic seem off-balance.*
Then we get to Spike’s ‘Amends’ moment. Buffy’s stance is consistent with her character – she views Spike with the same distinction she applied to Angel (even if the audience takes a different view) ‘Was it you who killed those people’/ Spike: ‘There’s no one else’/ ‘That’s not true’. *I suppose you could view Buffy’s maintenance of this distinction as the reason she doesn’t take him to task about the way he behaved with her – that she believes he is not to blame. But I can still see the problematics of this for the audience, especially as the distinction, at least in terms of speech patterns and some mannerisms is more clearly less pronounced for us and with the whole he’s-responsible-for-the-good-deeds issue.
‘You faced the monster inside of you and you fought back. You risked everything to be a better man’ – I’m not sure if Buffy is referring to his coming back to his senses in the basement in ‘Sleeper’ or his actual soul quest. I prefer to think it’s the former since if we take it to be the soul-quest it raises the problem of defining the soul (is the monster inside him + some unspecified ‘humanity’, or is he the monster – which leads to the usual questions of how much agency and choice he had then yadda yadda…big argument for another day). The basement stuff makes more sense too since she actually saw him do it.
I’m going to go with @Taaroko’s take on why Buffy insists he’s a better man at this stage. She’s telling him what he needs to believe in himself, so that he can actually go on to be a better man. It might even also be partly a case of practicality as well, tying into this impending doom they’re all feeling. Buffy knows she can’t continue to have Spike as a liability especially with some external force affecting things so she’s trying to give him the strength to take control himself.
Going back over MF’s review of this episode, I was reminded of the controversy over Spike’s insistence on his former viciousness and depravity and whether it amounts to a retcon. I have stated many times before that I felt the writing of Spike became a little too sympathetic, too softened at times during S5 & 6 and I feel like this was a case of the writers sheepishly acknowledging that. I also think they were also trying to back up their decision to give him a soul (since many fans believed he deserved redemption even without one) by reinforcing the distinction between his unsouled and souled selves. I personally have never believed Spike as incapable of viciousness. He was after all introduced with a reputation of torturing victims with railroad spikes and was in many ways presented as quite a hyperviolent character as well as a pathetically romantic one. I’ve never taken the whole ‘honorable killer/fighter’ view of him either (I really don’t like as I find it too extenuating), so I actually appreciated the writing effort.
However I’m not sure it quite works; it feels a bit of a case of too little, too late since we’ve gone multiple seasons with a neutered, harmless, occasionally helpful Spike whose only previous serious past crime referenced since probably S2 is Nikki Wood. MF provides a good sampling of views on his blog which attest to this - one commenter rather startlingly describes Spikes as ‘a regular bloke who happens to be vampire’. I can recall reading some pretty angry reactions by some fans who were outraged by the implications of rape and torture of young girls here (I guess in a similar way to how some fans believed the AR was out-of-character for him) and though they’re probably a relative minority section, it does illustrate my point that we weren’t given a good enough balance of his seriously violent and destructive side alongside his lighter one, which naturally encouraged a lot of people to see him as a fairly decent and sympathetic person.
Other thoughts:
- My love for Dawn continues. She’s so refreshingly matter-of-fact, almost channelling Anya. ‘Her exact words were, "I've got stuff coming out of both ends."’ Please stay this way, Dawn.
- I like the running gag of the house constantly being destroyed and Xander having to keep fixing it.
- Loved Willow nerd-threatening Andrew.
-I was quite affected by the scene where Wood buries Jonathan. It was harsh seeing his body so casually disposed of. Poor guy did not deserve that.
-Uptick on the religious imagery towards the end, foreshadowing Caleb’s arrival later. QT the Jerkface (thanks
@Grace) quotes ‘Proverbs 24:6 and TF gives Spike a nice little crucifixtion as it is by it’s own admission ‘a sucker for the old classics’.
- The Turkey Khan (yes, I’m going with this too
@dcai0830) is genuinely terrifying. It’s supposed to be from a kind of primitive Hell, yet it wears pretty hardy leather armour – I guess evil really does love leather…?
Bring on the Night:
- Nice little callback by Xander to ‘Life Serial’s mummy hand
- So good to have both Juliet Landau and Kristine Sutherland back again. Landau does a great job at playing Dru-not-quite-Dru. I like the ‘daddy’ mistake. I know a lot of people think Joyce was kind of a bad mother (though I don’t – at least not really) but you have to admit it was nice to see her again. Even if it was just a dream/ The First – it can control dreams, remember – and was being manipulative, I immediately got a sense of warmth on sight of KS. Buffy herself looked younger, softer and more vulnerable in those scenes.
- Love that Dawn is into the violence with Anya.
- Giles is back! Woohoo! But also not, because of what happens later. The Potentials get in the way of a Buffy/Giles hug – possibly signalling the rift that is to come. ‘The knowledge had to be protected. There was no time for bureaucracy or debate. ‘Two things: Giles is clearly being positioned as metaphorical representative for the WC – it’s
their knowledge he is guarding. Foundations for scary-utilitarian Giles are also being laid down.
But, given my theory about how the Giles-is-The-First fakeout is a metaphorical clue, I do think that it actually makes sense. It focuses the ideas of the Watchers' Council into Giles, a character we know and love, instead of in Quentin Travers the Jerkface & Co. Buffy has never had much problem rejecting the Council. But Giles is a different story — she's defied him before but never really rejected him.
*sigh* I'm going to hold off on total judgement about Giles' arc until I'm further into the season but I will say that while I think Giles as metaphor for the final patriarchal barrier is a great one in theory, the problem for me is that it feels like his character had to be stripped of much of the nuance and facets of his personality in order to make it work.
- TF seems to be wasting a lot of time and energy on one vampire and it’s not quite clear why. Spike has shown a great deal of resistance to its influence and yet it continues to try and break him down. I get that this is Evil’s MO, but are we supposed to believe that TF the thing that by Giles’ admission ‘has endless resources’, is banking so heavily on Spike turning against Buffy and the Scoobies? The drowning attempts were ridiculous though – did the writers forget?
- Wood’s conversation with Buffy ‘once you see true evil’ sets us up for the upcoming Wood/Spike confrontation, cemented nicely by the immediate cut to Spike
- It feels abit contrived that Buffy knowingly faces the ubervamp again without a weapon of any kind!! It’s like she’s forgotten axes and swords even exist. I know the whole point is that we see her beaten and vulnerable but it just seemed overdone to me. She could easily have gone out with a weapon of some kind and still been defeated by ubie.
- Buffy’s speech at the end was great, actually. I’d been kind of dreading it because of how speech-heavy I remember this season being, but SMG just delivers it wonderfully. Her voice is tiny yet measured and firm. I got chills.
