Normal Again

Well it's just that a series moves forward, there is no point in constantly looking back, I think BtVS and Angel do it the perfect amout, they slip it in without making it a huge deal cuz while it is important it's not as important as where they are going!
 
I loved this episode - though it was pretty hard to follow. My mind kept drifting (same thing with "Dead Things") off topic to other ideas and stuff about the episode and past episodes. Took me a while to catch on.

Even though you know Sunnydale is really real (I mean in the Buffyverse, not like, real real... you know what I mean), it still makes you think way too much and worry. I kept having to tell myself "it's just a demon, just a demon that poisoned her..." but then something would happen and I would start thinking again. It really is a good episode though.
 
Black Eye Guy said:
I don't think so, I mean I would rather see how the character moves forward then how they got where they were when they start the series, It's kinda unnecessary. What's more important is seeing the big times in Buffy's life, like Her relationship with Angel, Her mothers Death and her own death and see how develop the character. It gives the story a bit more if we actually see the development then go this is what happened in my past, and here's how I have grown from it.
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I disagree. While I do think the main focus should be on continuing their lives, I think they should have done more flashbacks. The origin of the characters has always intrigued me. I loved the flashbacks in "Angel" when we saw Angel before he arrived in Sunnydale or L.A. But I had also wanted to see him as a human, before he got turned.

Anyhoo, this was a cool episode. Sarah's acting was excellent when she sort of snapped and was chasing Dawn - I actually found it a wee bit suspenseful. I wish they had played that angle out more.

And I don't remember who said that this would be a good end for the series, but that is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. Who the hell wants to invest six years of their life into a show, get to know these characters and universe, only to have it be a figment of some insane girl's imagination? I never saw that "St. Elsewhere" series but didn't a lot of fans get pissed when that show turned out to be not real?
 
M-a-r-c said:
BUT I always was a bit confused when buffy told willow she had been in an asylum before. To my knowledge she says her parents put her in one when she first became a slayer because she was talking about vampires and demons. Surely if this were true in season 2 becoming with joyce finding out about buffy being a slayer this would have been mentions! Or at least spoken of at some point.
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I thought that, but come on, continuity! Yeah, it can be quasi-explained by repression but surely with as big a trigger as vampires are real, mom... Joyce would've remembered. Also, she says it was after she first saw vampires and that she was scared. We've seen her first see vampires, Angel watches when she's just been called so surely Angel would have known about it too, he's not forced to have said anything but somewhere there'd have been some reference.

As for the suggestion that it was a Dawn memory, I think that makes much more sense. Now I've seen Dawn-memories said to be both artificial and altered. Saying that a memory is altered doesn't mean that Dawn was just inserted into the old memories. A new memory had to be created - for her to start with - and there's nothing I've seen that says no new memories were added to the other's memories.

On the other side of the coin, it could have contributed to the hospital fear. Dead cousin plus time in an institution - I wouldn't want to go near a hospital either.

As for the reality of the situation, to an extent Sunnydale as a figment of Buffy's imagination it works, but things go on there that Buffy never knows about. The implication was that Buffy had created this world for herself and submerged herself in it, not that she's some omnipotent narrator. If that's the case then surely we wouldn't have had episodes like the Zeppo, Xander goes to all that trouble and Buffy never knows so... how could she have imagined it? Not to mention Angel of course...
 
This is my favorite episode after Afterlife, it was really well done.
I enjoyed how it makes you doubt their reality and makes you think, and also emote with Buffy
This is one of the saddest episodes. The difficulty of her lose of innocence, her parents and her youth made her form her own reality where she was insane and with her original biological family. How in her present she's depressed and under a deal of stress, she just wanted a way out of it all. The part where she says Goodbye to her mom was probably the most heartwrenching thing during the latter seasons of buffy,
 
LOVED it. It's great and twisted!!! The whole thing that it could've all been a hallucination was kinda trippy. 🙂
 
I found the comments I had about this episode when it first came out so I thought I would post them.

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I wish we had known more about the demon of this episode. We didn't know anything about it. Glarghk Guhl Kashma'nik. Good grief, could they have picked a harder name to pronounce? 😉 I guess it was just not important to the story.

Did anyone notice the look on Xander’s face when Buffy said the demon POKED her? During the last few episodes, it seems to me that Xander has been even more anti-Spike than he used to be. I think he must know about Buffy and Spike, but is not willing to admit it to himself.

So Spike has FINALLY insisted to Buffy that she should tell the others about their affair. Anyone else think it’s about time?

And now for the obvious question -- Which reality do you think is real? Have we been watching Buffy’s delusions this whole time or was the mental hospital a delusion itself?

At first I thought Sunnydale was fake because of the way the show ended with the doctor saying “We lost her.” But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I think that scene was just put in to throw us off. I firmly believe that the mental-hospital-reality was the delusion. Too many things don’t *fit* for it to be real.

If Buffy is really in the institution, and she had a recovery over the summer, (during her "death" after THE GIFT), then what caused her to have a relapse?

If Sunnydale is fake and it makes her feel safe then why would she have allowed Angel to leave, Giles to leave, Joyce to die or Tara to come in and untie Willow and the others?

I’m wondering why Dawn was the last one for Buffy to tie up. I suppose because she thought the others were more of a threat, but it didn’t make a lot of sense why she would let Dawn be *loose* in the house while Willow was tied up in the basement. Dawn could have gotten suspicious and snuck out to warn Xander. But I guess we would have to blame it on Buffy not being in the right frame of mind at the time.

After she had them all in the basement and she untied the demon, why did she go sit in the corner? She obviously didn’t WANT to see them die, so why didn’t she just leave the basement? Unless the people in the mental-hospital-reality told her she had to see them die for the delusion to end…
 
It's an extremely clever episode. It leaves the door open for the viewer to decide which reality is real. Joss Whedon admitted so much. He said he regarded either decision equally valid, although he was personally strongly inclined to think that Buffy's experiences were real. But could it be that the whole Sunnydale/Hellmouth/vampires thing is all one collossal delusion? Maybe. Just maybe....

I had a similar delusion once. OK. It wasn't exactly similar. In fact, it was nothing like Buffy's possible "delusion". I imagined I was a cartoon tiger/fish hybrid living underwater, singing "Under the Sea". Ah, good times. Until, that is, I got caught in a fisherman's net. Damn those ********
 
it was an excellent episode and I loved everything about it especially the end when the Doctor said something like 'she's gone' it made me go like, really was it just an illusion?
 
J
Joyce Summers
yeah it does make you think twice
It's a brilliant, darkly compelling and disturbing episode in a brilliant, darkly compelling and disturbing season. Love it.
 
I really do like this episode; it gave us a take on everything that had gone on in the Buffverse that we hadn't really considered. Plus, the people in the Sanitarium(sanitariam? okay, so my spelling is a little off today...) were so kind and nurturing that it had you thinking 'well they can't possibly be evil' and then you get so confused. And then when you think you've got it all figured out and Sunnydale is the reality we flash back to the mental hospital even though Buffy doesn't making us all thing 'hang on...'. I finally came to the conclusion, after much confusion and conflicting thoughts, that the mental hospital was just an alternate dimension (like the alternate world in The Wish). It isn't the world the characters we know live in, but it is still real and maybe the demon's pokey arm thing just sent Buffy to that alternate world in a Quantum Leap-esque fashion.
I love Giles' reaction to all of this in the season 6 finale though where he just bursts out laughing.
And that speech by Joyce was totally moving ('I know the world feels like a hard place sometimes but you've got people who love you. Your Dad and I will always be with you. You've got a world of stength in you Buffy, you just have to find it again') and the way it reaches Buffy on the level that, while not the one intended by Joyce, Buffy really needed reaching on. And I loved how it applied to her actual life; that yeah, it's hard but her friends love her and even though her Mom's gone, she's still there for her and she is the slayer and she can 'beat this thing'. Buffy's thank you and goodbye to her Mom though as she makes the final (and right) decision is totally heatbreaking as well.
 
I loved this episode. One of my faves. I pretty much agree with all of the praise and the general "what's reality?" vibe everyone else has mentioned. One thing no one has mentioned, though, is how it sort of pokes fun of the viewers for getting all involved in this obviously crazy world. That was awesome. I mean, it did kind of say, "Gee... you guys must be nuts to suspend your disbelief THIS much!" The show also made fun of itself when it said that the plots were becoming unstable. lol.


As a writer, this episode really struck a chord with me. Hear me out. This might get a little weird for you non-writer types. Writers will probably know exactly what I mean.

Joss and the other people behind Buffy are first and foremost writers. All of these wild thoughts and metaphors and symbolism and everything that we love or hate about Buffy - all of the inconsistencies and continuity errors, even - start in their minds first. They do this for a living. So that means that while they're stuck on the 210 or the 101 on their morning commute, only part of their brain is on the traffic. The other part is where the characters live. A whole world of unwritten scenes is constantly going on there. Buffy's fighting a demon. Xander's declaring his love for Anya. Giles is cleaning his glasses. Some character from a side project or that half-finished novel is butting in and begging for attention. At just about any given moment, one of the characters is just sitting there annoying the crap out of the writer saying stuff like, "I would soooo never say that. Seriously. Give me a better line. And you're making me sleep with that guy? I have some taste!"

Like Buffy, the writer has a choice. The writer can take the 101 to the bland office building and have the family that loves him/her and the steady paycheck and the health insurance with the nice doctors who, if you pay them enough, might make the characters shut up and leave you alone. Or, the writer can live with the characters and try to do what he or she was put on this earth to do: write. That's a lot harder. The writer can still have the house and the family and maybe a doctor or two, but the reality is that that's a lot harder to maintain as a writer than it is in most "normal" professions. It's usually a thankless job. And most writers don't make it. You've got to be a little crazy to bet your daily bread on writing. So I saw the episode as Buffy making the hard choice. She chooses her destiny. She chooses the crazy, messed up world of vampires and demons over the normal world of family and other institutions.

So, yeah. Because I'm a writer, this episode really struck a chord for me. Maybe I'm projecting, but that's sort of what it's like to be a writer. Minus the nut house, of course. I've never been crazy, I swear. But Buffy's experience of talking to family and doctors and anyone else in real life while something else is happening to the fictional characters in her head is very much like what must happen to Buffy's creators while they're drinking their morning coffee.

All in all, I thought it was an awesome episode.
 
J
Joyce Summers
I totally understand what you're saying about the charactors nattering away in your head aout what they would and wouldn't say and how you're only partially on that train... I also, therefore totally agree!
S
Spirit_Of_Fred
[No message]
Kana
Kana
Totally agree. It shows Buffy's strength of character really.
I really liked this ep as it flows from the philosphical to the personal. Part of the difficulty in growing up is dealing with the hardships of life. Buffy chooses the more grim reality where she hurt her friends and slept with a soulless vampire.

Either reality could be real and like the viewer it's up to buffy which reality she chooses to live in. It's a metaphor for adulthood. Part of growing up is defining "what our reality consists of" what it means to us. On one side Buffy has a crappy life because of the recent choices she made and her mythic responsibility, however, she is still a hero who has acheived a lot and helped a lot of people, she's important to the world and as hard as life may be, that possibly can be conducive to her self-esteem. The asylum reality is easier but Buffy isn't as special and all the positive traits she may have associated with herself over the past few years would be reduced to nothing. Which reality is better? This depends on the person perceiving it. Which reality is more true? Which reality feels more true to you?
 
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