MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological, sociological*
LESSONS (F)-- The first episode of Season Seven signals much of the season's theme as the series draws to a conclusion, and the writers have to ask what all the characters have learned in the show's progress. Willow, for instance, is in England seeking to master her enhanced magical powers, while Anya comes to realize that she no longer enjoys being a vengeance demon. Further, the city officials have built a new high school, and Dawn must start attending. Buffy plays mother-hen to Dawn as usual, but it's justified because the school is again built over the Hellmouth. While wandering the semi-familiar corridors of the high school, Buffy stumbles across a new menace in the basement-- as well as a former ally. For some reason, after Spike passed through severe trials to regain his soul and to become a better man for Buffy, he returned to Sunnydale in a semi-crazed, nonsense-babbling state and took up residence in the school basement. (I suppose this was a more convenient location for him from the writers' vantage, though in the previous season they'd established that Demon Clem was keeping the crypt warm for Spike.) The explanation for the appearance of weird specters in the basement is probably the weakest rationale in the entire series. Perhaps the writers were saving up for the introduction of the new Big Bad, who appears before Spike by wearing the faces of previous Big Bads. Further, the new principal offers Buffy a temp job at Sunnydale High.
BENEATH YOU (G)-- This episode-title is even more clever than the one previous. Not only does it play upon the Big Bad's motto, Spike literally lives beneath the school where Buffy works, while in "Fool for Love" Buffy told the bad vamp that he was beneath her, coincidentally echoing the words of one of Spike's previous love interests. Here Spike manages to tamp down his madness so as to sound like his old self, and he offers Buffy his help in solving the mystery of a giant worm-thing chasing after a helpless woman, name of Nancy. Xander realizes that Nancy was fooled into making a wish to a vengeance-demon, who is none other than Anya. When the Scoobies seek out Anya, Spike gets into a fight with Anya and Buffy intervenes to beat him down, not coincidentally getting her first chance to punish him for his attempted rape in "Seeing Red." Xander persuades Anya to reverse her curse on Nancy's boyfriend. After the worm is turned (!), Spike takes refuge in an empty church, and in a moving scene Buffy finally learns that his insanity is the result of having his soul returned, for her sake.
SAME TIME, SAME PLACE (F) -- Willow returns to Sunnydale, but she's so apprehensive about meeting the friends she fought against that she subconsciously surrounds herself with a spell, rendering Buffy, Xander, and Dawn incapable of seeing/hearing her. Yet significantly, she doesn't prevent Anya from witnessing her presence, which gives the writers a bit of an out. Meanwhile there's a skin-flaying demon on the loose. A standout is a scene in which Crazy Spike talks to both Willow and the other Scoobies, without the respective parties being aware of one another.
HELP (F)-- School counselor Buffy experiences her most challenging assignment: Cassie, a young female student convinced that she's going to die on a pre-ordinated date. The Scoobies seek to figure out what forces conspire to take Cassie's life, and Buffy does come to the young girl's rescue-- though only from an external menace. Good twist ending. The character of Amanda appears in a minor capacity but assumes more importance in this season.
SELFLESS (G)-- That Season Six remark by Buffy about the improbability of Anya's marriage to Xander bears fruit, for the Slayer's always been wary of Anya returning to demon-hood. Now that Anya's returned to the ranks of vengeance demons, she finds she lacks her old passion for enforcing curses. But, under pressure from her perceptor D'Hoffryn, she goads a humiliated woman into wishing death upon a college fraternity, through the agency of a spider demon. The killings motivate Buffy into a violent duel with Demon Anya despite Xander's pleas for clemency. However, D'Hoffryn appears and offers Anya the chance to bring back her victims at the sacrifice of her demon-life. Anya agrees, but her master rather capriciously changes the terms of the agreement, merely returning Anya to human status while sacrificing Halfrek in order to bring the frat boys back.
HIM (F)-- In the fun tradition of BEWITCHED, BOTHERED AND BEWILDERED, the "menace" is a high school quarterback. He just happens to own an enchanted letter-sweater, and so he can, without conscious effort, enthrall any woman who sees him. Thus what appears to be Dawn getting her first high school crush proves to be part of a spell that also draws in Buffy, Willow and Anya as well, and they all do a lot of funny stunts trying to impress Quarterback Boy. Xander and Spike work together to solve the case. There's a weird opening sequence in which Buffy saves Anya from demons sent by D'Hoffryn to kill the former vengeance demon. Since D'Hoffyrn had just spared Anya, this is about as random as things get in the series.
CONVERSATIONS WITH DEAD PEOPLE (F)-- The Big Bad steps up his campaign of terror. His most substantial attack involves taking control of Spike and causing him to sire new vampires, apparently overriding the effects of the chip, as Drusilla did in CRUSH. The evildoer stage-manages encounters with both Willow and Dawn, convincing them that they're talking with loved ones, though Willow sees through the deception and warns the others. Buffy encounters one of the vamps that Spike created, but it's not clear whether or not his revelation of being sired by Spike was a contrivance by the evil master. In addition, Andrew and Jonathan are manipulated into returning to Sunnydale. Jonathan intends to become a force for good, but the great evil pretends to be the spirit of Warren in order to trick Andrew into killing the guileless Jonathan.
SLEEPER (F)-- The title refers to the idea that the First Evil had transformed Spike into a "sleeper agent." One problem with this metaphor is that Spike isn't doing anything agent-like, such as spying on the Scoobies. He's just vampirizing random humans, and none of them play any role in the First's dark plot. When Buffy charges Spike with killing again, he denies it, but then seeks to launch his own investigation. He encounters one of his vamp-victims at a concert and they fight, the battle ending when Spike dusts her. He begins to remember his dark deeds and shows Buffy a mass grave of other victims, who choose that moment to come to life. Buffy dusts them all, while Spike is manipulated into attacking the Slayer by the First, masquerading as Spike himself. Buffy ends up taking Spike back to her house to find out what she can about the First's plans. A separate sequence sets things up for Giles' return.
NEVER LEAVE ME (F)-- Buffy binds Spike at her house, but he's incoherent and can't be questioned. Meanwhile, the First, in the form of Warren, cajoles Andrew to his next step in the plan. The killing of Jonathan was supposed to open a Hellmouth portal, but there wasn't enough blood-- doesn't the First Evil have this sort of thing calculated in advance? Andrew tries to make up the difference with butcher-shop blood, but by a fortunate coincidence, Willow runs into Andrew and drags him back to the Summers house. The Scoobies get their inquisition-mojo, trying to get info out of the insipid would-be villain. Spike breaks free, forcing Buffy to subdue him again and then chain him in the basement. The First's minions invade the house and spirit Spike away, ending the episode by using Spike's blood to bring forth a horror from the portal. Subplots are established for the Watchers' Council, which is attacked by the Evil's minions, and for Buffy's boss at the high school, Principal Wood.
BRING ON THE NIGHT (F)-- Even after Spike's blood brings forth the super-vampire known as the Turok-Han, the First Evil keeps Spike prisoner and tortures him gratuitously. Due to the Council's essential annihilation, Giles brings three Potential Slayers from England to take refuge with the Scoobies. None of these newbie vampire-killers have had anything like the pre-Slayer training that Faith received prior to being activated, so they're just a bunch of confused, helpless girls that Buffy must rally into a fighting force. Buffy has her first encounter with the Turok-Han and just barely escapes with her life. The same thing happens when one of the Potentials panics and flees the house, and Buffy can't prevent the girl's death or manage to kill the uber-vamp. The story ends with Buffy declaring that they will take the fight to the First.
POTENTIAL (F)-- Buffy continues to train the Potentials because the First has temporarily suspended its attacks. Willow's coven informs the Scoobies that there's another Potential in Sunnydale, and briefly they think it's Dawn. Dawn and fellow high schooler Amanda both undergo a "baptism of fang" and Dawn learns to her chagrin that Amanda's the lucky girl. Xander has a nice conciliatory moment with Dawn.
THE KILLER IN ME (F)-- Giles takes the Potentials off on a "camping trip" to commune with the Primal Slayer-- but is it really Giles, or an imposture by the First Evil? Meanwhile, Spike's chip is acting up, causing him bouts of intense pain, so Buffy has to seek to get new intel from the absent Initiative. The main plotline, though, is that since the Potentials entered the picture, a cute young lesbian, Kennedy, has been making cow-eyes at Willow, who begins to think about a new love. Then something causes Willow to take on the form of Warren, and since others can still touch her, they know she's not the First. Is Willow manifesting the guilt she feels for having massacred Warren, or is it another gambit? The episode includes the apparent return of Willow's witch-buddy Amy on top of all the lively melodrama, and Buffy's big decision about Spike's chip.
GET IT DONE (G)-- I assume that for the six previous seasons of BUFFY, Joss Whedon kept a detailed "show Bible" for the Buffyverse. I disagree with his decision to dole out only dribs and drabs about his universe to his viewers, but it's not too easy to argue with success. Up to this point Whedon merely teased viewers with some intimations about the origins of the Slayer line, and almost everything Buffy knows about her heritage has been confined to mysterioso encounters with a specter believed to be "the First Slayer." After another dream-visit from the specter, Buffy not coincidentally gets a bequest from Wood, left him by his murdered Slayer-mother. The bequest consists of two items that can transport Buffy back to the archaic era when the Slayer line was born. Unfortunately, the transportation-spell sends a big, fighting-mad demon to modern times to take Buffy's place. This makes no sense logically, but it serves the writers' purposes, giving Spike a sparring-partner and allowing the ensouled vamp to take himself off his self-imposed leash and to kill something. Buffy finds herself in archaic Africa, where she's knocked out by three Black African tribesmen. These appear to be the original wizards who created the First Slayer, which they accomplished by taking a tribeswoman and infusing her with the essence of a demon. It's not clear how this essence was transmitted down through the ages. In any case, the wizards' response to Buffy's petition for knowledge of the First Evil is to try to boost Buffy's own power to fight the First. Buffy views this experiment as both a violation of her own body and of the bodies of all those women forced to "bear" (double meaning here) the responsibility for demon-fighting. So after Buffy breaks free and knocks the wizards around, she essentially goes home empty-handed. As a viewer I always assumed that the tribesmen chose females to take on the demon-power because it wasn't possible for men to do so, but Whedon and his writers don't give a reason for the Africans' choice. Buffy assumes that they're just trying to maintain control while using women as their pawns, which seems to have been the dominant attitude of Whedon toward the Watchers as well. On a lighter note, Anya and Spike go on a drinking-date.
STORYTELLER (F)-- Andrew somehow acquires a video camera and begins taping the activities and responses of the Scoobies and the Potentials for some fanciful posterity. Meanwhile, the portal beneath Sunnydale High begins spreading its poisonous influence to the students and teachers, and even Wood suffers a brief spell of possession wherein he castigates Buffy for having slept with Spike. The Scoobies use magic to plumb Andrew's memory, and he recalls that the First persuaded him to use a particular knife in killing Jonathan to open the portal. On the theory that the knife can be used to close the portal, Buffy, Spike and Wood take the murder weapon, and Andrew, to the high school at night. However, several students wander the halls, all rendered berserk by the Hellmouth, and the heroes have to wade through them. Andrew tells varying stories of his murder of Jonathan, but despite his pusillanimous excuses, he does finally admit his evil deed and his confession quells the portal, temporarily. Buffy's speech to Andrew asserts that "Life's not a story," resembling Spike's phrase from ONCE MORE WITH FEELING that "Life's not a song."
LIES MY PARENTS TOLD ME (P)-- As the Principal Wood subplot trundles to its conclusion, the only real "lying parent" of the episode's title is a surrogate one: Rupert Giles. Giles disapproves of Buffy placing any trust in the liberated Spike, and he argues that the vampire still possesses some buried mental trigger which the First Evil can use to usurp Spike's will. Thus the former Watcher comes up with a gross version of a Jedi mind-trick to cause Spike to remember the trigger. Spike does remember that the trigger is an old folk song he heard from his mother, but he conceals the context of his memories, that go back to the period following his siring by Drusilla. Giles finds out that Wood intends to avenge his mother's death by executing Spike, so Giles seeks to distract Buffy while Wood sets a trap for Spike. While fighting for his life, Spike recalls all the unpleasant things that occurred when he sought to sire his mother. But the overcoming of his repressions empowers Spike, so that he both beats Wood and overcomes the power of the song-trigger. As for Giles, while he may have been trying to remain relevant in Buffy's life after he cut her loose to be more independent, the end result is that Buffy tells him that he has nothing more to teach her. It's not among the worst episodes. Yet the various subplots, particularly the maternal elements common to Spike's and Wood's lives, don't come together particularly well.
DIRTY GIRLS (F)-- This BUFFY episode follows the ANGEL tale "Orpheus," which concluded with Willow picking up Faith (who'd joined the Angel team for a short while) and driving her to Sunnydale to join in the apocalypse. Willow and Faith happen to come across a wounded girl, left to taunt the Scoobies by Caleb (Nathan Fillion), a misogynistic Catholic priest who's gone over to the First Side. While Willow watches over the wounded girl at a hospital, Faith seeks out the Scoobies, resulting in a fistfight with Spike. Later, the two of them have a pleasant conversation that irritates Buffy. Caleb challenges Buffy to a meeting, and she brings several of the trained Potentials along as her backup. Caleb, who had a history of preying on women even before becoming a First-servant, possesses strength far greater than a Slayer's, and Buffy's army is forced to retreat after they lose two of the girls and Xander loses an eye. Caleb is another lame make-work menace from the BUFFY writers, and if Faith hadn't been part of the package, DIRTY would have received a much lower rating.
EMPTY PLACES (P)-- "Hey, kids, what time is it?" "It's 'Everyone Dump on Buffy' time!" A couple of times before this, the Scooby Support Group drove Buffy from their ranks. This time, the logic is incredibly strained. Almost all of the residents of Sunnydale flee the city in reaction to the evil emanations from the Hellmouth. Buffy checks out the deserted high school, where Priest Caleb attacks and defeats her but does not kill her. I don't think the scene serves any plot-purpose, though Caleb's desire to break Buffy suggests a genuinely "toxic male," in contrast to Spike, who almost rapes Buffy because he's out of mind with passion for her. Scooby-research comes up with a clue to Caleb's origins, and Spike, improbably teamed with Andrew, goes to investigate. Faith sees how edgy the Potentials are, so she takes them out to party. Some rogue cops, under the Hellmouth influence, attack Faith, the girls attack the cops. and Buffy gets pissed by the careless excursion. It's not illogical that the Potentials all vote to kick Buffy out of her leadership role and to nominate Faith as the new general. The script doesn't even begin to justify the regular Scoobies doing the same-- not even Giles with all his control issues. And so, off wanders Poor Little Buffy. Sob sob.
TOUCHED (G)-- There's chaos in the Summers house as Faith struggles to take control of the situation. She comes up with the strategy to capture one of the First Evil's blind minions and to interrogate the creature regarding his master's plan to end the world. This has the effect of revealing to the heroes that the First is building an arsenal of weapons for conquest. Spike and Andrew return, and Spike is not impressed with the groupthink decision. He uses his vampire-senses to track down Buffy, holed up in a deserted house and deeply in mope-mode. In one of the series' best speeches, Spike convinces Buffy of her uniqueness, and she's fortified enough to pursue the plan she proposed to the Potentials. She beards Caleb in his den, where he enigmatically claimed to hold some possession of hers, and uses her superior agility to elude him and claim the prize, an ancient scythe embedded in a stone block. Meanwhile, Faith and the Potentials invade a lair of the minions looking for a cache of weapons, but what they find is a ticking time bomb.
END OF DAYS (G)-- The junior Slayers largely escape the bomb and seek to bear an injured Faith back to their base. Meanwhile, Buffy, to use her own word, "King Arthurs" the scythe out of the stone block. Not only does Caleb refrain from attacking Buffy while she holds the weapon, the First Evil commands him to let her go. Buffy crosses paths with the Potentials and repels a couple of uber-vamps, thus more or less re-assuming the role of leader. Caleb and the First converse, with the incorporeal master confessing envy of humans' ability to touch one another, if only for the pleasure of murder. Afterward, the First infuses energy into Caleb, which he seems to regard as an erotic experience. After some soulful conversations with both Faith and with Spike, Buffy lays her final plans. One plan involves her getting Xander to abduct Dawn and take her far from the madding war, with which Dawn declines to cooperate. The other involves using Scooby research to find a hitherto unmentioned temple. There Buffy meets a female Guardian, last of an order of immortals who have been watching both the Watchers and their (arguable) manipulation of the Slayers since the Slayer-magic was conceived. The female Guardian lasts just long enough to render more cryptic advice, at which point Caleb intrudes and kills the immortal. Even with the scythe, Buffy is on the defensive, but- it's crossover-time, as Angel suddenly appears and decks Caleb. In short order Buffy defeats Caleb and fondly greets Angel. Spike, watching from hiding, is not a happy vamp-camper.
CHOSEN (G)-- Caleb springs back to life and Buffy has to kill him sincerely dead. Angel volunteers to join the final battle. but since this is the last episode of BUFFY and he still has a couple more seasons to go, she has to cobble together a reason for the Original Soulful Vampire to fight on some other front. Angel does leave behind an occult trinket he acquired in one of his episodes, which plays into Spike's big moment here. Later, following a colloquy with jealous Spike-- whose jealousy really doesn't have any effect on the story-- Buffy goes to sleep but is awakened when the First Evil shows up again, trying to undermine her confidence. Buffy then gets, as out of the blue, an inspiration as to how to win this unwinnable war. It might've been more logical if she was inspired by something that the Guardian told her, but Whedon doesn't even like his positive authority-figures. So Buffy and her army return to the high school, where a pandemonium of super-vamps plan to swarm forth to devastate the Earth. Willow uses "the essence of the scythe" to change the male-determined rule of "only one Slayer in the world at a time" to "every girl in the world who might be a Slayer will be a Slayer." Thie spell empowers all the Potentials and gives them the edge to fight the vamps on an even footing. For whatever reason, Anya does not survive the final battle (I personally wouldn't have minded losing Giles instead). Spike's amulet infuses him with enough supernatural power to close the Hellmouth for all time, costing him his undead life, at least until he returns in ANGEL. The closing of the Hellmouth also turns Sunnydale into a deep pit, seemingly assuring that no dopey mortals will ever seek to live their again, while Buffy and her troops escape, appropriately enough, on a school bus. For all the budgetary limitations of TV, and for all the script-shortcomings, CHOSEN is one of the few times a television show succeeded in delivering an epic battle-fantasy. particularly one devoted to the theme of female empowerment.
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