Buffy Season One Episode Nine

[koganbot]

Observers find old Catskill comic wooden.

Also, policeman is briefly glimpsed in vicinity of body of murdered dancer, possibly investigating. Sousaphone player attributes her own indifference to dancer to "that whole dance/band rivalry." New authority figure looks like an older version of Eliot Spitzer.

Ho hum.

Comments

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

From memory, this is a bit of a sore-thumb ep, which makes a not-very-adept attempt at (jokily) addressing/redressing some of yr concerns about this being a real normal school in a real normal town (ie actually doing nothing of the kind, but making it clear that what's not there isn't merely inadvertently not there...)

more usefully (i believe) it starts to lay a fuller sociology of demons in the buffyverse, as something more complex and layered than we had perhaps grasped

[koganbot]

addressing/redressing some of yr concerns about this being a real normal school in a real normal town

Well, it would be good to pinpoint the concern, since my concern isn't that they fail to seem like a real normal school in a real normal town, but that they don't do a good enough job at creating their own world or their own conventions and so they rely on knowledge and conventions about high schools and towns (real ones and TV ones). And since they haven't established their own rules, it sticks out when they violate the assumed rules, even when it's stuff that's not really germane to the show. So it sticks out that (1) most of the time no other students or teachers are in the library when the protagonists need to be alone in the library, though a student or teacher will show up when the plot needs them to, (2) cops don't show up to investigate bodies found in schools, murders get no ongoing investigation, and no non-demon-aware people calls cops when a vast number of such non-demon-aware people are endangered, and (3) there's no explanation as to why the main characters need to keep what they do a secret (the assumption "people would think we're crazy" is never elaborated on, since they've managed to convince each other, and it would be useful to convince other authority figures at well, and in the previous episode it turns out for instance that the computer teacher is into Wiccan and doesn't need convincing). As for (1) and (2), we know, and Buffy and friends know, that Sunnyvale is not a normal place, but the show has established as one of its premises that students, staff, and townspeople assume that it is a normal place. So the show has to quickly sketch in enough of people acting on this assumption.

but making it clear that what's not there isn't merely inadvertently not there...

This is exactly what the show hasn't done. E.g., if it turns out in later episodes that the cops are demons themselves or are in cahoots with them, this still doesn't explain why the cops don't go through the motions of investigating murders. The thing is, we don't want the show to clutter itself up with cops investigating murders - it's not what the show is about - we just want a second or two each episode either to suggest that there are ongoing investigations and some ongoing concern that bodies keep showing up in a school and students and staff keep getting killed, or a real brief explanation as to why people who assume that the world is normal find absence of cops etc. normal. Also, supposedly normal people acting not normal is something that Willow and Xander and Buffy would themselves notice, since they have an eye out for abnormality as potential demon activity. I just feel that Whedon et al. don't yet have a sure hand here. I mean, absence of cops is standard on action shows unless the police themselves are protagonists, so what's also basic is the script containing a reason for the cops to be absent and the protagonists to be on their own.

[(Anonymous)]

i don't have a mental timeline of when it happens, but i think the rough strategy the show adopts here is to suggest, with brief scenes as you suggest, that the town's authority figures like the principal and the mayor and perhaps the cops are used to weird things happening which they sweep under the rug. sometimes the suggestion is that the citizens would freak out, and especially once the mayor storyline starts up, the stronger suggestion is that minor authority figures kowtow to the mayor. but we rarely see anyone covering up supernatural/unnatural hijinks for motives other than 'gotta keep the important people happy', 'gotta hide this mess from the citizens', or 'the mayor or his minions will kill you', and those are rarely linked together in any way that gives a clear picture of what the motivations of the corrupt authorities could be when they're not very much in the know (like the principal for quite some time, it seems).

in all that, though, cops still play an incredibly minor role. whedonco did pick up those themes in s01 of angel, though, putting angel in the vigilante position vis-a-vis his mulderized police counterpart.

s01 of dollhouse makes me think that the whole crew don't really have their feet where law enforcement stuff is concerned.

[(Anonymous)]

forgot:


j.

[koganbot]

more usefully (i believe) it starts to lay a fuller sociology of demons in the buffyverse, as something more complex and layered than we had perhaps grasped

No, not in this ep. What it adds is the idea of other demon hunters in parallel to demons (and the suggestion that demon hunters can, in essence, be trapped into immortality; this was the one thing that the episode did nicely, the demon hunter in effect committing suicide by killing the demon, and Buffy's compassion for him). The fact that the town is a hellmouth has been an all-purpose explanation for why demons are likely to show up, though the previous episode's demon came out of a book not out of the hellmouth (and it makes sense that Mr. Giles would have ordered that book), and in this one and the witch one there's really nothing to tie the demon to the Hellmouth in particular.

[koganbot]

What the show does seem to be getting away with:

(1) Mom. She's a single mom with a demanding job, which explains why she isn't really around to monitor Buffy's comings and goings. But what the show has actually established is that she cares about Buffy and recognizes that she doesn't understand Buffy but assumes that any strangeness is due to standard teenage issues, but also that she feels that she should only probe when Buffy is ready for her to probe but she'll be fundamentally sympathetic to Buffy no matter what. And nothing here is stated, but since we know that Buffy is fundamentally good and trustworthy, it makes sense that her mother would intuitively know the same thing, even though the show never explicitly states this and Buffy keeps getting into apparent mischief.

(2) Naturalism and depth in the main characters (esp. Xander) while some on the periphery get to be comic caricatures. This is standard in Dickens and Austen and a lot of other fiction, but it also hooks up with adults in institutional settings having somewhat one-dimensional roles in relation to youngsters, so their complexity isn't relevant. So it makes sense here that a principal will be a comic caricature while a mom will have more nuance.