![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jedi_of_urth posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
tori_reviewsI feel like I should offer some kind of warning prep for this one, as this is a messy review of a messy episode, but I guess this will have to be enough.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: 2x19 – I Only Have Eyes for You
I’m going to end up tackling this episode is a scattershot fashion and a bit out of order (not that there’s ever much order here). But before I start I have to say, does this episode play better if you give a single damn…anything about Buffy and Angel? Is the metaphor as bad as I think it is, or am I lacking the decoder ring that would make it make sense?
I do know this episode got a lot of discussion back in the day, though not necessarily in my corner of fandom, especially since I was showing up late. And I seem to recall a lot of people thought this didn’t work, and that its ultimate moral was just wrong; but my memory could be playing tricks on me.
Before I forget, I have to say again how much I do not care about Spike looking all jealous as Angel paws at Dru. Now, if we were actually exploring how fucked up Angel and Dru’s dynamic is given all he’s done to her, I might be interested, but we’re not. Mostly I can’t decide if Angel even wants to fuck Dru or if he’s fucking Spike by proxy, but Spike is the least interesting part of this whole dynamic. So I’m pretty much falling back on saying they should have killed him when they had the chance.
The buildup through this episode is decent, and not so caught in a tortured metaphor. I did remember that the Mayor got name dropped here, but I can’t tell if they were already setting him up to be a big threat or if they were building towards a kind of Sunnydale Founder’s Council (TVD reference) that would be a group of normies that the Scoobies had to contend with. I’m not sure they ever do explain the extent of who knows what about the Hellmouth, but I’ll admit that wasn’t one of the things I was paying a lot of attention to back in the day.
One thing that’s been bugging me but I forgot to bring up last time and glossed over in Passion, is the question of who does get charged with Jenny’s murder? She was found in Giles’ apartment, but here the Scoobies at least know she was killed at the school which I think they would only know if there was enough evidence to suggest it (like her busted computer that somehow Willow has been recovering files from…maybe they were on disk; and maybe Angel was an 18th century guy who didn’t know which part of the computer he needed to break to ruin the data, but then it shouldn’t be so hard for Willow to find the soul spell then). If she had just died and been found at the school, that would be a different story; could have been any of a number of things as far as investigation goes, either natural or supernatural. But the way she was found means someone was out for something and that needs investigation. Does Giles try and pin in on Ethan as the only person alive who hates him (even though I don’t think Ethan actually does hate Giles) enough to pull the kind of sadistic game of how Jenny was found? If the police know about vampires, do they have to wonder what vampire Giles invited in and then decided to fuck with him?
I’m guessing Joyce was once again out of town for this one. Otherwise she might have come down and wondered why Buffy was holding a meeting of her friends from the library in the living room at two in the morning. It’s not like they’re trying to keep their voices down, and if Joyce was there they could have just gone to Giles’.
Okay, so I said I had an idea how my Giles sub-subplot theory would play into this and…I didn’t remember enough to make it a clean fit. I’d sort of thought the ‘forgiveness is an act of compassion’ part came at the end, that I could read it as he was letting go of whatever bit of anger he’d been gnawing at and being the one to forgive Buffy outside the possession.
Now, that line is still pretty much just a mess. I’m sorry Giles, but I don’t think we’re talking about the same kind of forgiveness here (which is really the problem with the whole metaphor). Forgiving a mistake is an act of compassion, partly because there is rarely anything that needs complicated forgiveness (more of a ‘my head knows it’s not your fault, but I’m having a hard time being fully rational here’). And what Buffy is focused on blaming herself for in this episode was a mistake; she didn’t know the consequences of sleeping with Angel.
Buffy’s actual…crime (for lack of a better word to set it apart from mistake) is not killing Angelus when she had the chance, letting her feelings for Angel stop her before Angelus could wreak havoc across Sunnydale, including Jenny and various classmates of Buffy’s. And that’s not what she’s blaming herself for in this episode, so it’s not the forgiveness that the story is reflecting.
James made a mistake in the midst of committing a crime. And while I’m not sure what the statutory rape laws were in 1955 (and I suppose James could have theoretically been 18), there was (likely) another crime going on there that he was the victim of. This episode seems entirely unaware of that portion of the equation, and the fact that it makes the possession parallels make even more sense that Buffy is taken over by the screwed up teenager and Angel is the older person who should not have wound up in this position in the first place.
I’m saying the situations bare very little resemblance to each other, so the metaphor is quite tortured. And clearly done to get the scenes I think the episode was built to play out between possessed Buffy and possessed Angel. The episode is built to get lines coming out of SMG’s mouth that kind of sound like they could come from Buffy and then pretend that what DB is saying is somehow Angel talking through the spell. But…it’s not. Buffy and Angel are playing out a script just as much as SMG and DB.
And if you remove the forced parallel of putting the scenes together, there really aren’t a lot of parallels between the relationships in question. If only because Buffy has two different guilts, that involve two somewhat different people (Angel ‘dying’ and Angelus *killing*) that don’t map onto the two person conflict of James and Grace. Meaning that the story ignores the greater guilt of other people dying because of Buffy’s initial mistake with Angel in favor of focusing on her feeling like she killed Angel which…is a way to look at it; but not the way Buffy has been shown to feel in the episodes since it happened. Also this episode has to come after Passion, but Buffy’s attitude would make more sense before the consequences of Angel/us hit so close to home.
On top of that, there are two additional influences on especially the final scene in the band room. Since Giles has been bringing Jenny up throughout the episode, she is haunting that scene as the actual consequence of what happened between Buffy and Angel. Her unresolved issues and traumatic death are not addressed when they really should be. There’s just no scope in Grace and James’ story to account of that kind of extra guilt.
And the other influence is Giles. Because *Grace* is agreeing with Giles’ definition of forgiveness; whether or not James has earned it or deserves it, she cares enough for him to forgive him, perhaps has wanted to for a long time. Which is why it feels so much like the script is agreeing with that poorly thought out set of lines.
I think that implied parallel between Grace and Giles is why I thought there was a way to twist my potential Giles sub-substory into a resolution with this one. That James and Buffy have been blaming themselves (for wildly different reasons); and maybe Grace and Giles have been blaming them a little bit too (for also wildly different reasons); and Grace granting James the forgiveness he needs to move on could echo in Giles…doing what he already did back in Innocence and telling Buffy there’s nothing to forgive.
Plus, you know, actual teacher-student parallels.
Since my attempt at headcanon construction didn’t pan out, I’ll reevaluate about the end of the season. Or I’ll just rewind and pretend they did have a better talk at the end of Passion and forget I tried to force my own story into scripts where it doesn’t fit. Or if something comes up in the meantime, and it’s not like I remember the next episode very well either.
What am I shipping?
…once more, I don’t think anything. Some of the usual suspects (my usual suspects), but nothing gripping my attention.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: 2x19 – I Only Have Eyes for You
I’m going to end up tackling this episode is a scattershot fashion and a bit out of order (not that there’s ever much order here). But before I start I have to say, does this episode play better if you give a single damn…anything about Buffy and Angel? Is the metaphor as bad as I think it is, or am I lacking the decoder ring that would make it make sense?
I do know this episode got a lot of discussion back in the day, though not necessarily in my corner of fandom, especially since I was showing up late. And I seem to recall a lot of people thought this didn’t work, and that its ultimate moral was just wrong; but my memory could be playing tricks on me.
Before I forget, I have to say again how much I do not care about Spike looking all jealous as Angel paws at Dru. Now, if we were actually exploring how fucked up Angel and Dru’s dynamic is given all he’s done to her, I might be interested, but we’re not. Mostly I can’t decide if Angel even wants to fuck Dru or if he’s fucking Spike by proxy, but Spike is the least interesting part of this whole dynamic. So I’m pretty much falling back on saying they should have killed him when they had the chance.
The buildup through this episode is decent, and not so caught in a tortured metaphor. I did remember that the Mayor got name dropped here, but I can’t tell if they were already setting him up to be a big threat or if they were building towards a kind of Sunnydale Founder’s Council (TVD reference) that would be a group of normies that the Scoobies had to contend with. I’m not sure they ever do explain the extent of who knows what about the Hellmouth, but I’ll admit that wasn’t one of the things I was paying a lot of attention to back in the day.
One thing that’s been bugging me but I forgot to bring up last time and glossed over in Passion, is the question of who does get charged with Jenny’s murder? She was found in Giles’ apartment, but here the Scoobies at least know she was killed at the school which I think they would only know if there was enough evidence to suggest it (like her busted computer that somehow Willow has been recovering files from…maybe they were on disk; and maybe Angel was an 18th century guy who didn’t know which part of the computer he needed to break to ruin the data, but then it shouldn’t be so hard for Willow to find the soul spell then). If she had just died and been found at the school, that would be a different story; could have been any of a number of things as far as investigation goes, either natural or supernatural. But the way she was found means someone was out for something and that needs investigation. Does Giles try and pin in on Ethan as the only person alive who hates him (even though I don’t think Ethan actually does hate Giles) enough to pull the kind of sadistic game of how Jenny was found? If the police know about vampires, do they have to wonder what vampire Giles invited in and then decided to fuck with him?
I’m guessing Joyce was once again out of town for this one. Otherwise she might have come down and wondered why Buffy was holding a meeting of her friends from the library in the living room at two in the morning. It’s not like they’re trying to keep their voices down, and if Joyce was there they could have just gone to Giles’.
Okay, so I said I had an idea how my Giles sub-subplot theory would play into this and…I didn’t remember enough to make it a clean fit. I’d sort of thought the ‘forgiveness is an act of compassion’ part came at the end, that I could read it as he was letting go of whatever bit of anger he’d been gnawing at and being the one to forgive Buffy outside the possession.
Now, that line is still pretty much just a mess. I’m sorry Giles, but I don’t think we’re talking about the same kind of forgiveness here (which is really the problem with the whole metaphor). Forgiving a mistake is an act of compassion, partly because there is rarely anything that needs complicated forgiveness (more of a ‘my head knows it’s not your fault, but I’m having a hard time being fully rational here’). And what Buffy is focused on blaming herself for in this episode was a mistake; she didn’t know the consequences of sleeping with Angel.
Buffy’s actual…crime (for lack of a better word to set it apart from mistake) is not killing Angelus when she had the chance, letting her feelings for Angel stop her before Angelus could wreak havoc across Sunnydale, including Jenny and various classmates of Buffy’s. And that’s not what she’s blaming herself for in this episode, so it’s not the forgiveness that the story is reflecting.
James made a mistake in the midst of committing a crime. And while I’m not sure what the statutory rape laws were in 1955 (and I suppose James could have theoretically been 18), there was (likely) another crime going on there that he was the victim of. This episode seems entirely unaware of that portion of the equation, and the fact that it makes the possession parallels make even more sense that Buffy is taken over by the screwed up teenager and Angel is the older person who should not have wound up in this position in the first place.
I’m saying the situations bare very little resemblance to each other, so the metaphor is quite tortured. And clearly done to get the scenes I think the episode was built to play out between possessed Buffy and possessed Angel. The episode is built to get lines coming out of SMG’s mouth that kind of sound like they could come from Buffy and then pretend that what DB is saying is somehow Angel talking through the spell. But…it’s not. Buffy and Angel are playing out a script just as much as SMG and DB.
And if you remove the forced parallel of putting the scenes together, there really aren’t a lot of parallels between the relationships in question. If only because Buffy has two different guilts, that involve two somewhat different people (Angel ‘dying’ and Angelus *killing*) that don’t map onto the two person conflict of James and Grace. Meaning that the story ignores the greater guilt of other people dying because of Buffy’s initial mistake with Angel in favor of focusing on her feeling like she killed Angel which…is a way to look at it; but not the way Buffy has been shown to feel in the episodes since it happened. Also this episode has to come after Passion, but Buffy’s attitude would make more sense before the consequences of Angel/us hit so close to home.
On top of that, there are two additional influences on especially the final scene in the band room. Since Giles has been bringing Jenny up throughout the episode, she is haunting that scene as the actual consequence of what happened between Buffy and Angel. Her unresolved issues and traumatic death are not addressed when they really should be. There’s just no scope in Grace and James’ story to account of that kind of extra guilt.
And the other influence is Giles. Because *Grace* is agreeing with Giles’ definition of forgiveness; whether or not James has earned it or deserves it, she cares enough for him to forgive him, perhaps has wanted to for a long time. Which is why it feels so much like the script is agreeing with that poorly thought out set of lines.
I think that implied parallel between Grace and Giles is why I thought there was a way to twist my potential Giles sub-substory into a resolution with this one. That James and Buffy have been blaming themselves (for wildly different reasons); and maybe Grace and Giles have been blaming them a little bit too (for also wildly different reasons); and Grace granting James the forgiveness he needs to move on could echo in Giles…doing what he already did back in Innocence and telling Buffy there’s nothing to forgive.
Plus, you know, actual teacher-student parallels.
Since my attempt at headcanon construction didn’t pan out, I’ll reevaluate about the end of the season. Or I’ll just rewind and pretend they did have a better talk at the end of Passion and forget I tried to force my own story into scripts where it doesn’t fit. Or if something comes up in the meantime, and it’s not like I remember the next episode very well either.
What am I shipping?
…once more, I don’t think anything. Some of the usual suspects (my usual suspects), but nothing gripping my attention.
