Buffy Season Two Episode Eighteen
Nov. 1st, 2009 01:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
koganbot"Fear is for the weak! That's my motto. Either that or live in the now. I haven't decided yet."
The DVD* was due back at the library today, so I watched five episodes in two days. I took notes as I was running through, so I'll be recounting my thoughts and speculations in the order they occurred, more or less.
For this one, the hospital episode, I initially went, "Oh no, they're back to monster of the week. Probably just killing time until they can resolve the Angel business in the final couple of episodes" - which may be true, but this story had me from the first second. Not that it was a clutch-your-throat thriller. More a hazy "What's going on here?" mystery, though they quite wisely kept many scenes in the sharp skeptical daylight. Sort of a division of labor, where in the day you apply thought at a distance, which prepares you for the night where you need to combine this with the insight of delirium.
The pattern of a Buffy episode will often be: a number of things are going on, high-school life and demon life, always with something unexplained, and then there will be a turning-point scene that may or may not be plot-related but in which the episode locks into what it's emotionally about, at least for me. (There may also be more such scenes later in the episode, or at the end, to give you different angles.) These scenes will usually be conversations among two or more of the young friends, though occasionally they'll be between Buffy and her mom or Buffy and Giles. In the Kendra episode, the crucial scene - the one I remember as crucial, anyway - occurs when Kendra disparages feelings and Buffy therefore deliberately gets Kendra mad at her, comes on smug, telling Kendra why despite Kendra's superior technique she would have whipped her in a fight. She gets Kendra mad and tells Kendra that that's a feeling, that's anger, that a slayer needs anger to push her through to victory. And Kendra gets it, that Buffy is helping her, and she feels grateful, and this is conveyed in a couple of seconds, in looks, and the two girls bond.
The turning point in the hospital episode is early, on the hospital grounds outside the building, where the gang and Giles are helping sick Buffy along. It's a bright day and the crowd of them are coming at us from a distance, come to a stop as the conversation gets more significant. To my surprise, when I re-watched the scene, I decided that the dialogue and the acting were clumsy; but it's the idea, and maybe also the staging, out there in the day's brilliance, that carries it. Buffy is saying that she saw Death, and Willow immediately makes a wisecrack, giving a couple of possibilities about what Death dresses up as, and Xander advises Buffy not to challenge Death to a game of chess, the two not yet acting as if they take her seriously; and Cordy jumps in with a Psych 101 explanation, putting into words what they've been thinking, about Buffy not having been able to save her cousin from dying of fever when they were kids, and now Buffy wanting to personify germs as monsters, since she knows how to fight monsters. But Buffy insists, no, "This little boy Ryan is afraid of something, something real; as long as I'm forced to stay here I'm going to find out what." And the effect of Cordy's disparagement is to push the others onto Buffy's side, the point being no matter how feverish Buffy is, you have to take her intuition seriously. So they're with her (and Cordy still isn't totally part of the group).
This is an example of how the show locates itself in that middle space Dave was talking about, neither real life nor vampire fiction, where the supernatural is a representation of the characters' struggles, but the supernatural is real as well, you see it on the screen and the characters deal with it. Yet the supernatural nonetheless belongs to the characters. This is neither inner nor outer territory, but one that feels psychologically right, hence profound. It's not that the ideas are profound; or, anyway, they're not profound in the abstract, laid out as ideas, but as struggles made visual.
The scene that moves me most is when Buffy and Willow, working their minds, work out that if Buffy wants to see the killer again, see him clearly enough to protect the kids from him, she's got to reinfect herself, bring back her fever. She has to fight sickness by getting sick, see the killer by going to the killer's hunting ground, the land of the ill.
Jumping ahead to my notes to Episode 21, I wrote, "So basically they make the show work by turning the heat up on Buffy." The series catches fire (so to speak) in Episode 14, when Buffy takes on the guilt of having killed the Angel she knew by loving him, the feeling of having lost him by sleeping with him, just the feeling of being wrong. And here in Episode 18 she literally turns up her heat.
A couple of random notes:
(1) Buffy never bruises. This is one of those credibility problems that the show deals with by making a point of it; one of its consequences is that it makes the police skeptical of her, whenever she tries to explain that she was attacked, and was defending herself.
(2) I wish someone, like![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
katstevens or petronia or anyone who remembers, would comment on the clothing, since that's what I tend to be conscious of least, and what I'm least knowledgeable of. I'm good at plot shapes and intentions and themes. And what I see before my eyes makes me feel, but I'm not good at noticing. I do remember in the final scene of Episode 16, the scene where Cordelia stands against her gang; she's wearing a bright girly sunny summer preppy thing, primary colors, it jumping to the eye as especially pretty in a thoroughly mainstream way (my mind said "The Gap," but that's probably a decade or so out of date), this linking her especially to her crew, and differentiating her especially from Xander, which makes her beautiful distress when they run into Xander feel especially intense.
*I still haven't tried Hulu; I suspect that my DSL won't be able to handle it; my modem sometimes clogs up even on YouTube or MySpace, and I wouldn't be surprised if EarthLink were deliberately slowing things at times. Some ISPs do that, to users who stream a lot.
The DVD* was due back at the library today, so I watched five episodes in two days. I took notes as I was running through, so I'll be recounting my thoughts and speculations in the order they occurred, more or less.
For this one, the hospital episode, I initially went, "Oh no, they're back to monster of the week. Probably just killing time until they can resolve the Angel business in the final couple of episodes" - which may be true, but this story had me from the first second. Not that it was a clutch-your-throat thriller. More a hazy "What's going on here?" mystery, though they quite wisely kept many scenes in the sharp skeptical daylight. Sort of a division of labor, where in the day you apply thought at a distance, which prepares you for the night where you need to combine this with the insight of delirium.
The pattern of a Buffy episode will often be: a number of things are going on, high-school life and demon life, always with something unexplained, and then there will be a turning-point scene that may or may not be plot-related but in which the episode locks into what it's emotionally about, at least for me. (There may also be more such scenes later in the episode, or at the end, to give you different angles.) These scenes will usually be conversations among two or more of the young friends, though occasionally they'll be between Buffy and her mom or Buffy and Giles. In the Kendra episode, the crucial scene - the one I remember as crucial, anyway - occurs when Kendra disparages feelings and Buffy therefore deliberately gets Kendra mad at her, comes on smug, telling Kendra why despite Kendra's superior technique she would have whipped her in a fight. She gets Kendra mad and tells Kendra that that's a feeling, that's anger, that a slayer needs anger to push her through to victory. And Kendra gets it, that Buffy is helping her, and she feels grateful, and this is conveyed in a couple of seconds, in looks, and the two girls bond.
The turning point in the hospital episode is early, on the hospital grounds outside the building, where the gang and Giles are helping sick Buffy along. It's a bright day and the crowd of them are coming at us from a distance, come to a stop as the conversation gets more significant. To my surprise, when I re-watched the scene, I decided that the dialogue and the acting were clumsy; but it's the idea, and maybe also the staging, out there in the day's brilliance, that carries it. Buffy is saying that she saw Death, and Willow immediately makes a wisecrack, giving a couple of possibilities about what Death dresses up as, and Xander advises Buffy not to challenge Death to a game of chess, the two not yet acting as if they take her seriously; and Cordy jumps in with a Psych 101 explanation, putting into words what they've been thinking, about Buffy not having been able to save her cousin from dying of fever when they were kids, and now Buffy wanting to personify germs as monsters, since she knows how to fight monsters. But Buffy insists, no, "This little boy Ryan is afraid of something, something real; as long as I'm forced to stay here I'm going to find out what." And the effect of Cordy's disparagement is to push the others onto Buffy's side, the point being no matter how feverish Buffy is, you have to take her intuition seriously. So they're with her (and Cordy still isn't totally part of the group).
This is an example of how the show locates itself in that middle space Dave was talking about, neither real life nor vampire fiction, where the supernatural is a representation of the characters' struggles, but the supernatural is real as well, you see it on the screen and the characters deal with it. Yet the supernatural nonetheless belongs to the characters. This is neither inner nor outer territory, but one that feels psychologically right, hence profound. It's not that the ideas are profound; or, anyway, they're not profound in the abstract, laid out as ideas, but as struggles made visual.
The scene that moves me most is when Buffy and Willow, working their minds, work out that if Buffy wants to see the killer again, see him clearly enough to protect the kids from him, she's got to reinfect herself, bring back her fever. She has to fight sickness by getting sick, see the killer by going to the killer's hunting ground, the land of the ill.
Jumping ahead to my notes to Episode 21, I wrote, "So basically they make the show work by turning the heat up on Buffy." The series catches fire (so to speak) in Episode 14, when Buffy takes on the guilt of having killed the Angel she knew by loving him, the feeling of having lost him by sleeping with him, just the feeling of being wrong. And here in Episode 18 she literally turns up her heat.
A couple of random notes:
(1) Buffy never bruises. This is one of those credibility problems that the show deals with by making a point of it; one of its consequences is that it makes the police skeptical of her, whenever she tries to explain that she was attacked, and was defending herself.
(2) I wish someone, like
katstevens or petronia or anyone who remembers, would comment on the clothing, since that's what I tend to be conscious of least, and what I'm least knowledgeable of. I'm good at plot shapes and intentions and themes. And what I see before my eyes makes me feel, but I'm not good at noticing. I do remember in the final scene of Episode 16, the scene where Cordelia stands against her gang; she's wearing a bright girly sunny summer preppy thing, primary colors, it jumping to the eye as especially pretty in a thoroughly mainstream way (my mind said "The Gap," but that's probably a decade or so out of date), this linking her especially to her crew, and differentiating her especially from Xander, which makes her beautiful distress when they run into Xander feel especially intense.*I still haven't tried Hulu; I suspect that my DSL won't be able to handle it; my modem sometimes clogs up even on YouTube or MySpace, and I wouldn't be surprised if EarthLink were deliberately slowing things at times. Some ISPs do that, to users who stream a lot.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-01 05:53 pm (UTC)I don't know about that. Really. But that's something I've got to work out in a different post, probably over time and several more seasons (and maybe for Whedon to work out over time). It wouldn't have been proof in Storrs, Connecticut, 1966 through 1972, of course, but also I don't think that it's proof in the Buffyverse. But then, the show may not know, and may have - accidentally - chosen not knowing; that is, the Buffy world itself doesn't know whether or not the clothes are unfit. But you know Buffy world way better than I do.
"normal" in this context = something like the right to be normally emo about normal teen stuff; to just still be a stupid kid now and then
Yeah, that's stated very well.
whedon's extreme self-consciousness as a writer and director means he can't stop stepping away and showng you the nuts and bolts of drama, often by plunging well-made and pasteboard right in among one another
Relevant to Cordelia, possibly. I originally wrote that Cordelia's short speech on that hospital walkway was the writers hedging their bets, trying and mostly succeeding in having their cake and eating it too - letting us know that they're aware that they're overstating the theme, but in stating it through Cordelia they get the other characters to resist it a bit, not refuting the theme but bringing it down to size, which is what the between-worlds space does when it's working well: gets the theme stated but refuses to cede control to the theme, to say that the theme is altogether right; so the theme is just a potential that enriches the story(but still, maybe there's a better way to to do this, a way to make Cordy believable rather than just useful, though I think she's OK in this scene, and she's often believable in her moments, some of them, it's just that I have trouble connecting the elements). I took out that passage when I posted because the same thing comes up in the next episode, and this was one point too many for the post.