Were The Intitative in "Out of Mind, Out of Sight"?

[Joshua]

[MENTION=11975]Always Bangel[/MENTION] got me thinking about "Out of Mind, Out of Sight" we didnt know much about those secret bodyguards that arrested Marcy. Were they from The Initiative?

 

[Robb Stark]

I think those might have been the very early days of The Initiative. They say pretty explicitly that they're from the FBI, but obviously if the FBI is sending agents into Sunnydale to deal with supernatural problems, that's along the lines of what they get into during S4.

I think that The Initiative had to be fairly new when S4 begins. They're completely useless and spend most of their time running around like a chicken with its head cut off. Plus, if they did exist beyond some sort of minor and secretive FBI-task force prior to that, why didn't they deal with The Mayor and all the crap he was pulling? They make it very clear that The Initiative is a federal thing (the heads of it are always shown as shadowy...um...heads in Washington), so you'd think that if they did exist they'd have no problems taking on Wilkins when he becomes a 60-foot high snake thing.

The same goes with Spike, Dru and Angelus. They rip through Sunnydale pretty good in S2, and almost end the freaking world, but The Initiative is nowhere to be seen. I think they had to be fairly new. My guess would be that they branched out of the work the FBI was doing in S1.

 

[Skytteflickan88]

I would guess they have nothing in common since their missions seemed very different, but maybe something along the lines of [MENTION=11975]Always Bangel[/MENTION]'s theory is true, that they're both working for the government. Could be that the guys in season 1 were a privat company/organisation though.

 

[JCoatsworth]

I don't think at all that they're the same. At the ending we can clearly see that the people in Out of Mind, Out of Sight train invisible people as assassins. Not really something the Initiative as we know it would do.

 

[white avenger]

I think that The Initiative had to be fairly new when S4 begins. They're completely useless and spend most of their time running around like a chicken with its head cut off.

Granted, the Initiative is the epitome of ineptitude, poor leadership, and ill defined mission, but common logic would have to indicate that they simply couldn't have just suddenly popped up, fully constructed and manned,over the summer between Seasons 3 and 4. Their underground headquarters alone would have taken at least a year of intense labor to construct, and that construction would have had to be carried out in almost total secrecy.

The Initiative might very well have been in Sunnydale, at least in the construction stages, even before Buffy got there, possibly since the college was first constructed or even earlier. We know that the Initiative was founded sometime neat the beginning of World War 2, and the demonic activities in Sunnydale would have been exactly the sort of thing that they would have been investigating.( Remember them recruiting Angel to rescue the American submarine crew?That might have been the inspiration for the ultimate development of the chip implanted in Spike's brain. If they could prevent a vampire from killing people,the next step would have undoubtedly been a way to control their activities,creating an army of literally super soldiers. Just keep them out of the direct sunlight. Bullets wouldn't stop them, and by the time the enemy realized exactly what they were up against, half or their own troops would have been turned, chipped, and fighting against their former commanders.)

Just because we never saw them, doesn't mean that they weren't there. The Initiative didn't concern themselves with apocalypses, they probably didn't believe in them at all, and they wouldn't have even noticed the activities of the Master in season 1 or Angelus in Season 2 as anything more than a temporary increase in HST activities

The Ascension would have been impossible to ignore, but covering up something like that, and there was undeniably a major cover up required to explain all of that, convincing the news media that the whole thing was the result of LSD slipped into the pre-Graduation punch by a fanatical terrorist group intent on destroying the school for some unknown reason, would have been right up their alley, and might have served to escalate and reenforce the activities of an already on site group instead of sending a hard core military team in to straighten things out.

(And I think I'm gonna stop there before this escalates from a post into a fan fiction. I obviously have just too much spare time on my hands lately))

 

[Jodast]

I would guess they have nothing in common since their missions seemed very different, but maybe something along the lines of [MENTION=11975]Always Bangel[/MENTION]'s theory is true, that they're both working for the government. Could be that the guys in season 1 were a privat company/organisation though.

I don't think the missions were that different. It seems that both groups set out to weapinise* supernatural creatures. Guys in suits are certainly more subtle than guys in camo if you want to pacify an angry lonely person, so I think it is certainly plausible that these agent guys were working for the initiative.



*I hate using 'weaponise' but it seems the most appropriate verb in this case

 

[JCoatsworth]

Huh, am I the only one who thinks that the guys from Out of Mind, Out of Sight are, like, evil?

I don't like the Initiative, but they actually have well-meaning intention (except Walsh). If the Initiative caught an invisible person, they would probably study the "illness". The guys from season 1 basically use them as weapons, as invisible killers. They're exploiting the people suffering from invisibility. Here's an excerpt of the transcript of the episode:

Teacher: Okay, class, let's get started. Everybody turn to page fifty-
four of your texts.

Marcie opens her book and flips through to page fifty-four. The title of
chapter eleven reads 'Assassination and Infiltration'.

Marcie: Cool!

As I said, I don't like the Initiative, but that doesn't sound like something they would do.

 

[VaderSpike24]

The Initiative had been around for a while. In Angel Season five "Why we Fight", weren't there a group of guys who came to Angel, talking about a "Demon Research Initiative"? That flashback was from the 1940s. I think therefore it is possible that they, like the guys from "Out of Mind, Out of Sight", were part of the organization that would eventually be called THE Initiative.

 

[WileyDairyGnome]

I always figured they were involved with the Initiative.

I mean, the Initiative were involved in creating a monster like Adam, so why not believe they had some sort of secret invisible assassination project as well? 😛

 

[Wild At Heart]

I doubt it was The Initiative BUT it does show that the government has special interest in the supernatural and they probably created different departments, The Intiative being the team that caught the demons to run experiments on them. It's crazy to think just how many different deparments they could've had, especially if they have just one for invisible people 😀

 

[BuffyElevated]

Huh, am I the only one who thinks that the guys from Out of Mind, Out of Sight are, like, evil?

Nope, you're not the only one. 😉 I remember seeing that episode and going "Whoa, those guys are creating an army of assassins! They're evil!!"

I don't think the idea for The Initiative had been created yet, at this point in the series. They were in the first season, and had no idea yet when they wrote those episodes if they were even going to get picked up for a second season, much less a fourth. So no, I don't think the guys in this ep were the same thing as what we saw in Season 4.

 

[Ethan Reigns]

There is a whole gamut of three-letter agencies, most of which never cooperate or talk to each other. They may have been identified as FBI, but CIA or NSA would be more likely. Of course, there may be other agencies and FBI may have been a "false flag" operation by some other agency that was designed to look like the FBI. The other agency need not be American or pro America - Russia and Israel run the two largest spy networks in the US.

 

[Zeppelin92]

Wow I never thought of any of these ideas. All of these theories are both plausible and interesting. Definitely seems like something Joss was thinking about doing along the lines of the Government studying the supernatural, which eventually turned into the main arc for season 4 being the Initiative.

 

[Sweet J]

We learn in Angel that arms of the governments of the world have been using supernatural beings for a long time as weapons. Angel & Spike in WWII for example in Season 5.

These "FBI" guys are just more of the same. However the initiative was something else entirely.