I'm still waiting for the final word on Angel before I finish my "End of Mutant Enemy" essay, but this afternoon I had the following new essay fall into my head. See what you think of it:
Things That Never Were
Ten missed opportunities on Buffy the Vampire Slayer
May Sweeps are upon us, and with them comes the series finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s a time for reflection, a time to look back at the show’s long run. There are some who are happy with the way the show is ending. Others are not. And if the Nielsen ratings can be trusted, there are many who have checked out early.
Joss Whedon and his band of writers have insisted that they are being true to “the story,” that “the story” and its needs have taken them to where the show is ending. But is that true? Has the plot really been driven by story “needs,” or is it really more a matter of story choice? Are there other story choices out there that might have been better, or at least as viable, as the plot we were given?
Here - in no particular order - are ten story elements that I’ve come to think of as “missed opportunities.” Alternate choices to the ones Mutant Enemy made. This is not an attempt to say that the show would have been better if only these things had been done. (Some of them are, in fact, mutually exclusive, so they couldn’t have all been done.) They are simply other possibilities, one or more of which would have changed the way Buffy unfolded in its later years. Would any of them have made the show better? Read on and decide for yourself.
#1 - Keeping the gang in school. Most people identify Buffy’s first three seasons, the Sunnydale High years, as the show’s best. One of the reasons for the show’s success in those years is that the high school setting provided a context that the audience could understand and relate to. The high school experience is so self-contained and emotionally charged that it provided an excellent setting for the fantasy/horror events that were going on there.
UC Sunnydale was perfectly capable of providing that same kind of environment. Whatever problems may have existed with Season 4, the college setting itself wasn’t to blame for them. There were plenty more college stories to tell - all-night cramming sessions, sorority pledging (imagine what “hell week” might mean at UC Sunnydale), teaching assistants from hell, Willow’s drama class. Season 4 didn’t even come close to exhausting the possibilities.
And yet UC Sunnydale was largely abandoned in late Season 5, and it disappeared completely in early Season 6. Instead, the characters were thrown out into the adult world, where they floundered around aimlessly, not knowing their places. It made the willing suspension of disbelief more difficult - and not just because the monsters weren’t as credible in the adult world. In the adult world, removed from the school setting, the characters began to look more like they were the ages of the actors playing them instead of the ages they were supposed to be, which further weakened the credibility of the show’s premise.
#2 - Giving Xander a story arc. It seemed like every summer for the past four years has been filled with rumors that the next season of Buffy was going to be “the season of Xander,” that Xander was finally going to get a major story arc. Unfortunately, that never happened. The closest thing he got to an arc was the aimlessness he drifted through in Season 4 and early Season 5.
But is that the way things had to be? “The Replacement” was the perfect opportunity to start Xander on his own journey into adulthood. At the same time that we watched Buffy, Willow and Tara going to college, we could have had seen Xander learning the ropes of his trade. Again, there were plenty of story opportunities - dealing with a union, dealing with a bad boss or troublesome coworkers, being pressured to cut corners, having to work his way up the ladder, and so on. All that was wasted. Xander’s carpentry career wasn’t treated as a story element nearly as much as it was treated as an excuse to get out of hearing about Xander’s aimlessness.
As with the case of abandoning UC Sunnydale, catapulting Xander into rapid success as a carpenter damaged the audience’s ability to suspend disbelief. There’s no way someone of Xander’s young age and relative inexperience could have been given the kind of authority he’s been depicted as having. It made Xander look more like he was Nicholas Brendon’s age instead of his own age.
#3 - Letting Xander and Anya get married. Marriage isn’t just the happy ending of a romance story. It’s the beginning of a new story all its own, with plenty of room for the heartache and angst that Mutant Enemy is so fond of. Showing Xander and Anya has a married couple would have added an extra dimension to the cast of characters. It would have set them apart from the crowd.
It’s not as if marriage has no good story opportunities. Can you imagine Xander and Anya trying to figure out joint household finances? Going to marriage counseling? Can you imagine Anya pregnant? Unfortunately, imagining such stories is all we’re able to do, since Mutant Enemy gave up all of them when Xander left Anya at the altar.
#4 - Making more of Anya’s return to vengeance. Anya’s vengeance demon story arc was so sparse that it could have been done in one tightly-written episode. She gains her powers back, discovers that she’s become too human to use them, and then gives them up again. Instead, the plot was stretched across ten episodes, from “Entropy” to “Selfless,” with a summer hiatus in the middle. That’s longer than the amount of time Angel spent being Angelus in Season 2 - and yet so much less happened in that time.
If Anya was fated to be a vengeance demon again, there were plenty of story opportunities that would have let her be a vengeance demon. And not only that, but certainly in the midst of all the chaos at the end of Season 6 it might have occurred to someone that Anya’s powers could be used to undo one or more of the things that went wrong. Imagine the predicament then - Anya would have been stuck as a vengeance demon, because undoing the wishes she granted would have meant harm and death for her friends. It’s one more dramatic conflict that we never got to see.
#5 - Making use of Dawn's "key-ness." Supposedly Dawn was “the key,” a mystical blob of glowing green energy. An entire sect of monks was devoted to it. So was an entire legion of knights. And after the time to use her “key powers” came and went, what happened next? Apparently nothing. She had no residual power left over, no special abilities. She may have been “made from Buffy,” but she didn’t have Buffy’s Slayer power. It seemed that all she was good for was whining and screaming “Get out! Get out! Get out!” at people.
Having Dawn around gave the audience a different perspective on Buffy. Having her go through the same school trials that Buffy went through could have provided a fresh look at where the series had gone. But apart from one or two episodes, that’s not what happened.
#6 - Making more of Sunnydale. Many people point to Season 3 as the show’s best, and Season 3 just happens to be the season where Sunnydale made the most sense. In Season 3 we learned that Sunnydale was put on the Hellmouth deliberately, by someone who wanted to use the demonic power it attracted for his own purposes. It made the town almost like a character all its own. But once the Mayor was gone, Sunnydale faded into the background again.
If Mutant Enemy was going to insist on taking Buffy and her friends out of school, then they could have at least provided them with a well-textured environment where their struggles into adulthood could have taken place. The occasional demon bar or game of kitten poker hasn’t been enough, because there’s no credible framework around them. Perhaps more importantly, the lack of a detailed environment has closed the show down around its core characters. Buffy and her friends fight the forces of evil - but who are they fighting for? Who do they help? Who do they protect? Since the audience never got to know anyone but Buffy and her friends, the fight against evil looks more like a small private feud instead of a struggle of global proportions.
#7 - Giving Buffy a new Watcher. In “Checkpoint” we learned that the Watchers Council needs a Slayer to watch - so much so that they caved in to all of Buffy’s demands without a single bit of haggling. And yet once Giles left in “Tabula Rasa,” the Council apparently left with him. Did they not need a Slayer any more? If not, why not?
It’s true that Buffy probably wouldn’t have accepted a new Watcher, but wouldn’t it have been interesting to see that happen? A Watcher would have given Buffy a sense of direction and purpose, things she was desperately lacking in Season 6. Even if she’d wanted nothing to do with a new Watcher, her attempts to resist one or prove she didn’t need one would have given her some kind of a goal to strive for. Instead, she got nothing - and so did the audience.
#8 - Keeping Tara alive. I’ve already written extensively about the importance of the Willow/Tara relationship, but here I want to examine Tara individually. The show established a rich family background for her - the men in her family tricked their women with myths about being demons, her grandmother owned a doll’s eye crystal, and her mother was a powerful witch who died young. We knew more about Tara’s heritage than that of any other character on the show, including Buffy herself. Surely something could have been made of it.
Furthermore, as Season 6 progressed, Tara’s separation from Willow allowed her to stand on her own as a strong character in her own right. She was Dawn’s surrogate mother and Buffy’s confidante. She had Wiccan knowledge and wisdom that Willow lacked. Even though her magical power wasn’t as great as Willow’s, she had established her own place and her own presence among Buffy’s friends. Imagine what the show might have looked like if Mutant Enemy had decided to use all that character development to tell stories instead of using it just to inflate the shock value of Tara’s “surprise” death.
#9 - Creating a believable Dark Magic Willow story. The excuse given for Tara’s death in “Seeing Red” is that “it was necessary to send Willow over the edge.” But there’s a flaw in that argument - if something was necessary to send Willow over the edge, then the implication is that Willow wouldn’t have gone over the edge by herself. Killing Tara was therefore an artificial contrivance, not a natural development.
In fact, Willow was well on the way to going over the edge all by herself. In the beginning of Season 6, it was established that Willow had come to depend on magic as a way to get things done quickly and easily. The fact that she could use magic so well made her feel special. It was a boost to her self-esteem that she felt like she couldn’t live without. Under these circumstances, Willow could have easily come into conflict with Buffy about how to fight the latest demons to arrive in Sunnydale. She could have easily become estranged from the rest of the gang. She could have easily pushed her quest for power too far and become Dark Magic Willow all on her own.
Instead, Willow’s problem was inexplicably transformed into a thinly disguised drug addiction story. Instead of watching Dark Magic Willow develop gradually through the middle of Season 6, we got to see Willow moping around and being in “magic recovery.” Willow spent all of three episodes in her dark magic persona instead of the nine episodes that Angel spent being Angelus or the ten episodes that Anya spent as a vengeance demon. And yet Mutant Enemy insists that the Dark Magic Willow story was important - so important that they had to kill Tara for it. Was a three-episode arc really worth that much?
One final note on the killing of Tara - if Willow had been allowed to reach her dark magic state on her own, Tara wouldn’t have needed to die. In fact, Tara would have been vital to Willow’s eventual recovery, since she would have nursed Willow back to health and taught her to respect the magical powers they wield. Instead, in Season 7 all we got was a faceless coven of far-away witches - hardly the kinds of characters capable of creating an interesting story.
#10 - Making something of Faith’s return. In Season 4, Faith hardly left Sunnydale under ideal conditions. Buffy and Willow both hated her. In fact, Buffy followed her to Los Angeles and got into a fight with Angel over her. Since that time, Buffy and Willow have both had trips to the dark side of their own. Presumably, they both understand a little more about what Faith went through and why Faith did the things she did. You would therefore think that Buffy and Willow would both have some interesting things to say when they saw Faith again - but apparently that’s not going to happen. Faith and Willow drove all the way back to Sunnydale together, but as far as we can tell they didn’t talk about anything of substance. And once Faith got to Sunnydale, she more or less took her place as one more cog in the plot machine, with very little of what happened before being up for discussion.
As I said at the start of this essay, these are simply possibilities. Opportunities that weren’t exploited. Choices that weren’t made. Places where the course of the Buffy storyline could have been altered. Options that might have given us a very different series than the one we see in Buffy’s final episodes. My point in highlighting them is to show that writing is about making choices. You can’t hide behind “the needs of the story,” because as a writer your choices are what produce the “needs” that you’re hiding behind. As we head down the Buffy home stretch, we are where we are not because this is where the story has taken us, but because this is where Mutant Enemy chose to put us.
Just something to think about as the final episodes roll.
Comments, anyone?
"The first task of anyone, lest you get canceled, is to entertain people, because they ain't there for message." - Dick Wolf
Edited by: BBOvenGuy
at: 4/30/03 10:12:01 pm
at: 4/28/03 9:55:51 pm
at: 4/29/03 3:42:52 pm
(Oh, because this the GG-, not the Joss-verse, Dawn survives as well).
Out