Conversations With Dead People

It's a long forgotten argument, but it's one that I've been thinking of lately and I just can't let drop. The argument? Buffy The Vampire Slayer "let down its viewers" in its last two, more adult, "darker" seasons. This is wrong, but more importantly, the fact that it still rattles me is something I need to discuss.

Time has gone by - Buffy ended its 7 season run in May of 2003 with "Chosen," an episode that accomplished the rare feat of bringing me to tears during even its fight scenes - potential slayers working together to conquer evil tugged at the heart strings, who knew? Yet today, as a news item on Salon.com was discussing Buffy creator Joss Whedon's new series Dollhouse (starring buxom Buffy alum Eliza Dushku), links were listed to synopses of Buffy's season 7 and season 6 finales, and Salon's sometimes-gushing, sometimes-puzzling analysis of it. I guess it had been a number of years since anyone had mentioned Buffy in print, thus these two articles were the most recently linked related articles.

I've been thinking a lot of Buffy lately, and I mean all of Buffy. A month or two ago, I watched their seminal 1997 season 2 2-part episodes "Surprise" and "Innocence," two episodes that really transformed the series into the cult it became. In it, Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) turned 17, faced an apocalypse and responded by having sex with her vampire true love, Angel (David Boreanaz), accidentally making him evil in the process and losing him forever. On this risky 2-parter, after which nothing in the series remains the same, a franchise was launched - Buffy and Angel were never to truly get back together, leading to the ability to create Angel, and the ability to keep that show's entire 5-year run stocked with shelves and shelves of romantic anguish. I watched the episode because of the show's heartwrenching final exchange between Buffy and her mother, Joyce (Kristine Sutherland):

Joyce: So what did you do for your birthday?

Buffy: (with a pause) I got older.

Joyce: You look the same to me.

Joss Whedon commented in today's article on "Dollhouse" about how surprised he had been that internet culture allowed head writers and creators or shows to become celebrities in their own right. Really, it was dialogue like that - simple, cutting, powerful. I went and watched a separate Whedon-penned episode a few days later, their famous season 3 finale "Graduation Day." I wanted to see the ferocious fight scene between Buffy and "bad" slayer Faith (Dushku) that involved leather pants and handcuffs. Even more, I wanted to see the elliptical dream sequence that followed it, in which a comatose Buffy and Faith share an untennable moment of bonding. These were risks, like the season 4 all-dream episode "Restless," that people remained behind, even as Whedon challenged his viewers. Yet when season 6 came along, people stopped answering the challenges. They knew their Buffy, and that wasn't it.

Buffy and Buffy have been such a part of my life. As season 6 began, it was 2001, and I was a college sophomore, doubting my life and wondering what I was doing in college. The season began with Buffy returning from the dead and contemplating a malaise that she had never anticipated. The subject of the season, truly, was constituting life after the end of certainty - it was about learning how to live with confusion. That season was, I thought rather undeniably, exciting and well plotted. In its end, Buffy regains a certainty of some kind and comes back in season 7, their final year, as a leader. It was in this season that the fans really started to hate the season, calling Buffy "a total bitch" and complaining about everything - the villain that talked too much, Buffy giving inspirational speeches, a crew of Slayers-in-training that "mostly whined," and a rush of too many series-long topics not given the forefront they deserve.

These are the arguments I take most issue with, and it's because I can't forget about them. I don't necessarily care that people didn't like seasons 6 and 7 of Buffy because I have them. I can go back and rewatch their legendary "Once More With Feeling" musical episode and feel the same stir I always felt. These arguments to me just show a lack of understanding not only about what made Buffy such an incredible experience, but of a lack of willingness to appreciate entertainment that asks anything of its audience. In my mind, it doesn't matter that Buffy reached a point in its run in which it could no longer resembled what it was before - that to me was so much the point of using the television medium, of allowing a story to actually take place across time, as only a work that played out over 7 actual years could truly do.

It also just points to TV audiences inundated with too much modernity, too much ability to whine, too much familiarity with having influence over the production of a TV show. This is probably something that makes a certain marketplace sense - an audience for a TV show, in effect, gets to be its "boss," since TV shows are just a product, a means to satisfy advertisers that you'll stick around through commercial breaks. Therefore, if an audience is unhappy with the product they are seeing, they, via blogs and letter writing and simply changing the channel, have the capacity to demand a different show. This happens - I can recall stories about The OC and 24 and Grey's Anatomy and Lost changing directions of plot lines mid-season in response to terrible audience reaction.

But I suppose terrible audience reaction is the problem - if you're a writer with a "voice," shouldn't this be the exact thing you should avoid? This is rather hard to enforce, considering how inundated television is with terrible writing (I've given up on far more shows than the few I've watched until the series' conclusions). But for a show that had the voice of Buffy, it's difficult to not find people taking the same territorial control as an affront to quality. Much as I complained about the whining regarding The Wire and The Sopranos' final seasons, I couldn't help but want to shut the whiners up - since most, anyway, were coming up wtih complaints in order to have some sort of relevance. I always fear that a gifted writer would hear so much complaining, consider it too valid, and collapse the trajectory of their show and their work - leading to both the next clear criticism by whiners, that a show has "lost its direction."

Thankfully, Joss Whedon was never one to cave to too much pressure. I remember reading about "The Body," the famous Buffy season 5 episode without any background music. Whedon included a kiss, out of panic and solace, between its two lesbian characters Willow and Tara (Allyson Hannigan and Amber Benson). The two had never kissed on screen before, although we knew they were lovers. The WB took issue with the kiss - it was rather long, in an episode that was supposedly focused on the death of Buffy's mother - and Whedon told them simply, it was "not negotiable." Looking at that landmark episode objectively, the episode would have been plenty powerful without the kiss, and there's one line in that great scene that I just don't buy at all (Willow says to Tara about her need to wear a blue sweater, "Joyce loved it so!" No one says "so"). But this was the mark of someone who did not compromise his vision. Because of the inclusion of that scene, Willow and Tara seemed to make out in virtually every season 6 episode, and Buffy even included a lesbian sex scene towards the end of season 7 that was just as graphic as its hetero counterparts.

In season 6, though, one of the haters was one Whedon couldn't shut up - Sarah Michelle Gellar, who described the season as "missing Buffy's spirit." In a way, Buffy is a hero of mine - somoene with power and knowledge, and the clarity to know when she's in the right and when she's not needed. It saddens me that Gellar didn't see Buffy's own battles with confusion and uncertainty as an essential part of that knowledge. Buffy has one line in the season 7 episode "Conversations With Dead People" in which she explains, with vivid clarity, the true tenor of her confusion:

"I feel like I'm worse than anyone. Honestly, I'm beneath them. My friends, my boyfriends. I feel like I'm not worthy of their love. 'Cause even though they love me, it doesn't mean anything 'cause their opinions don't matter. They don't know. They haven't been through what I've been through. They're not the slayer. I am. Sometimes I feel—(sighs) this is awful—I feel like I'm better than them. Superior."

The vampire she's speaking with tells her, "You do have a superiority complex - and you have an inferiority complex about it."

In reading about season 7, some writers of the staff felt that Joss Whedon was writing the thinly veiled Joss Whedon story - a leader with "vision" (over his writing staff) who was aware of the direction he wanted his season to move in, and a gifted group of underling writers, many of whom were his close friends, that he distanced himself from in his decision making. That only makes the season more profound to me, in looking back on it.

A PJ Harvey line I also identify with: "I freed myself from family, freed myself from work, freed myself, freed myself, and remained alone."

What am I speaking of exactly that I see reflected in the last two years of Buffy? An understanding of certainty, the role uncertainty plays in it, the way that certainty of who you are and what you do can make you whole, but can also make you separate from those around you, even those you love. I see so much said about how we live in these two astonishing years of television. And perhaps that means when I read of these arguments about what Buffy did "wrong" in those last couple of years, I hear an argument not against the show, but against how human beings are in general, a lack of understanding, and a getting-in-the-way. I hope I hear others returning to those final two years with a bit of growth and humility at some point.