I don't think they compromised it in S6...and I think it's more complicated than getting her with Spike. I think she's been depressed for a long time.
In the absence of any medical evidence, I don't think Buffy's "depression" is general depression but melancholia. Melancholia is a failure in the grieving process. In normal mourning the loss is externalised and the world seems less. In melancholia, it's internalised and the self is less. It's an old term but recently, it's been taken up by French Feminists. Here's a synopsis of Julia Kristeva's
Black Sun: Depression and Melancholy (1989).
@Taake - I've actually read
and scribbled in this one! Several times.😏 ) "Kristeva's primary analysis proposes a loss theory of melancholia in the tradition of Freud's “Mourning and Melancholia.” Like Freud and Klein before her, she asserts that early development results in a separation of the infant-mother dyad, and she identifies the sadness of depression with a mourning for the lost other (mother, breast) relinquished at weaning. In addition to such “objectal” depression, Kristeva adapts Freud's theory of the death wish to introduce the notion of a kind of depression that is “narcissistic.”
Thus, as well as a form of mourning for the lost mother, melancholia is a mourning for the lost self.
The loss described here is imaginary but has a real impact. It's to do with separation. Think of the number of times Buffy's separated from Joyce or something/someone intervenes between her and Joyce often with traumatic outcomes. Ted? Her first death? Becoming? Giles? Faith? Dawn? She's "lost" her mother over and over...until she loses her in the real in The Body. She loses her again in Normal. Buffy's not depressed because she died (look at the reference to "death wish") I think it was a relief. Resurrection tore her away from a state that's easily aligned with the imaginary state described above.
"I knew that everyone I cared about was all right. I knew it. Time ... didn't mean anything ... nothing had form ... but I was still me, you know? And I was warm ... and I was loved ... and I was finished. Complete. I don't understand about theology or dimensions, or ... any of it, really ... but I think I was in heaven. And now I'm not. (almost tearful) I was torn out of there. Pulled out ... by my friends. Everything here is ... hard, and bright, and violent. Everything I feel, everything I touch ... this is Hell. Just getting through the next moment, and the one after that ... (softly) knowing what I've lost..."
Personally, I'm not sure she was in an actual heaven. This could be a state of nothingness retroactively reconstructed.
The saddest thing is...and this is why I think this is a feminist text...I don't think she ever recovers from it. She just has periods of remission. In S7 she's evicted from her mother's house (Revello means "torn out, plucked out") or arranges her own eviction (a death wish of sorts). In S8 she comments on missing her mum...In S10 she says Joyce's death was much worse than the AR. It's sad because (for various reasons) it's the price she pays for being a slayer...and a woman. As it stands, the psycho-social makes it almost impossible for a woman to recover the mother.
I agree with
@Spanky about her being in love with Spike in S5 but I think her feelings for him are bound up with her feelings for Joyce (it might be because he offers her unconditional love...traditionally a mother's love) ...after this...well...it's complicated. But yeah...I think it would have happened. For me, it would have been a lesser text if it hadn't.
@Priceless - I'm burning my copy of S12.
😡
That's it...BtVS is more intelligent than me. I'm going back to Lucifer.
