Willow Where

I seem to be at a time in my life when I can appreciate Jane Espenson's writing more. "Same Time, Same Place" is a really good episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer from 2002. Willow comes home from England after some amateur therapy to fix her from being evil and finds her friends seem to be absent. In fact, Buffy, Xander, and Dawn were there for her, but somehow neither party is able to see the other. Espenson's premise is a nice way of using supernatural elements to explore the emotional fallout of Willow's situation. The episode's monster, a Gollum-ish creature that paralyses and feeds off of living victims, is one of the few genuinely creepy demons in the series.

The episode also has one of the best "Crazy Spike" moments when Spike talks to Willow and Buffy at the same time and assumes one of them is a hallucination. Though it's kind of awkward that, after the conclusion of the previous episode, that Spike has ended up back in the high school basement somehow. You'd have thought Buffy would've done something for him.

It's also kind of odd how much the demon's paralysis is played for laughs. Buffy and Anya have fun posing a paralysed Dawn even after reading the paralysis may be permanent. Buffy takes a moment to remark on a can of nuts Anya brought back from Brazil.

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Buffy Bucks

My respect for Jane Espenson as a writer has increased with each viewing of Buffy the Vampire Slayer but I still think her work on season six is a low point in the series. I watched "Flooded" last night, the fourth episode of the season, in which Jane Espenson and Douglas Petrie's teleplay unwisely delves into Buffy's financial situation.

Apparently, though, all the writers were involved with this idea. This quote from Marti Noxon is from the Buffyverse wiki:

So I guess we started toying with adult responsibilities and then decided we'd have to go the way of nasty sex instead. We had been asking in script meetings, 'What are adult responsibilities?'

One is left with the peculiar feeling the writers didn't know the answer to that question, despite presumably being adults themselves. It's hard to decide where to begin criticising the web of problems underlying this aspect of Buffy's story. They're all interconnected and work together to make the whole thing insubstantial.

So Buffy's been resurrected by Willow, or Willow leading a group composed of herself, Tara, Xander, and Anya. Spike and Dawn are left out of the loop and Giles has gone off to England. While Buffy's been gone, Willow and Tara have moved into the Summers household and become surrogate guardians for Dawn. The reason Dawn doesn't go to live with her father isn't clearly explained and is hand-waved away. I don't remember if we ever actually get a scene between Dawn and her father. I assume they couldn't get the same actor from season two or three or whenever it was he appeared and they didn't consider the plot thread important enough to recast. Willow's parents haven't appeared since season three and Tara appeared to be dramatically disowned by her family.

These things become important when they're giving Buffy the hard talk about how the inheritance from Buffy and Dawn's deceased mother is running out. Willow and Tara, despite living in the house and presumably using the utilities, never mention if they've been contributing financially or how they would be able to. Buffy will eventually be forced to drop out of college so she can work to support Dawn and herself. Why wouldn't Willow and Tara do the same? Where does their money come from? Willow's parents? How do they feel about the fact that Willow has become head of a household with her girlfriend and is presumably using her parents' money to do it?

There's lots of comedy about Anya being obsessed with money but how much money can she make from that magic shop? How much does it cost for her to pay merchandise suppliers--who are those suppliers? How much money could Giles possibly have at this point? With him it becomes a particularly important question when he starts to shame Buffy for not tackling financial responsibilities herself. Even if he's not her Watcher officially anymore, he's still her friend and father figure and she's still often enough the only person standing in the way of the apocalypse, a full time, frequently overnight job with no pay. If he can help her and Dawn financially, surely he's morally obligated to. And if he can't, why is it even a discussion?

These characters and their situations have gone on too long without considering financial realities for the show to start leaning on them for dramatic purposes now. It's like putting a hippopotamus in a shopping cart. The episode ends with Buffy rushing off to a rendezvous with Angel who, of course, owns a hotel . . .

Twitter Sonnet #1595

A query drifted north to meet the snow.
For ev'ry egg we never hatched a plan.
Remembered briefings help the yoghurt grow.
The noble pudding's sweeter now than flan.
If true or false the scene was very weird.
The eye was never right when brown or blue.
A million little snakes create a beard.
A station girl could stop a murder crew.
Where singing gulls were caught to nab a crab.
The puzzle gathered strength on castle walls.
The dark's as good a place as Hell to stab.
We figured odds the Lotto's got the balls.
The broken pot was something all forgot.
We packed the mind behind the vacant lot.

Finding Witches on a Hell Mouth

Whenever I think of screenwriter Jane Espenson, I tend to picture Joyce Summers from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Maybe it's because of "Gingerbread", a 1999 episode Espenson co-wrote with Thania St. John, which features Joyce prominently. It's really not fair to Espenson that I imagine she looks like Joyce because Joyce is my least favourite character and Espenson's scripts are often good. "Gingerbread" included.

It begins deceptively bad. When Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is on patrol for vampires to slay, her mother, Joyce (Kristine Sutherland), shows up unexpectedly with snacks. Buffy tells her slaying is something she needs to do alone but only manages to convince Joyce to try to stay out of the way. What Buffy ought to have said is that it's dangerous for Joyce to be wandering about in the dark, vamp-infested park, that Buffy has enough to worry about looking out for herself. The whole segment lacks a necessary sense of mortal danger.

Maybe that was done intentionally to dilute the shock of Joyce coming across the corpses of two young children. This kicks off a thought-provoking episode about mob mentality and witch hunts--symbols drawn on the kids' hands leads Joyce and the other neighbourhood moms to blame witches.

As things ramp up, Joyce founds a MADD-like organisation called, amusingly, "MOO"--"Mothers Opposing the Occult". There's a joke only female screenwriters could make. And they're merciless with the frightened moms in this story, who incite book burnings and locker inspections with all the casual cheer of a bake sale. Kristine Sutherland, who plays Joyce, is a terrible actress, always giving the one-note, supporting role sitcom mom performance no matter how serious or complex the show got. But she's kind of well suited to this except I think the story might have been more effective if it had granted some better sense of legitimacy to the initial fear that kicks off the paranoia. But there's also some pleasure in seeing nitwits like this getting lampooned.

This episode marks the one and only appearance of Willow's mother, Sheila (Jordan Baker). She plays a feminist theorist professor who's totally out of touch with her daughter, hilariously spouting theory as she attempts to confront her daughter on the issues. Now there's a character I doubt anyone's allowed to write these days.

SHEILA: Identification with mythical icons is perfectly typical of your age group. It's a classic adolescent response to the pressures of incipient adulthood.

WILLOW: Oh. Is that what it is.

SHEILA: Of course I wish you could have identified with something a little less icky but, developmentally speaking--

WILLOW: Mom, I'm not an "age group". I'm me. Willow group.

...

WILLOW: How would you know what I can do? Last time we had a conversation over three minutes it was about the patriarchal bias of The Mister Rogers Show.

SHEILA: Well, with "King Friday" lording over all the lesser puppets . . .

Alyson Hannigan as Willow really shines in this scene though her "rebellious" turn at the end feels a little rushed and is part of the reason I feel like this story would have been better off as a two or three part episode.

I really like the scene where Buffy realises no-one knows the kids' names and no-one knows who their parents were. Those are some pieces of information one might chalk up to bad writing of the episode--it would be pretty typical of bad television writing--but this show turns it on its head to give the viewer a little lesson on remembering to think critically. And, of course, such witch hunts often do get momentum by maintaining awareness of only a very narrow set of facts. One could look at the recent cancellation of Joss Whedon himself and point to all kinds of obvious details that are consistently absent from articles and opinion posts.

This is also the episode where Amy (Elizabeth Anne Allen) accidentally turns herself into a rat, one of my favourite ongoing plot threads. It's a good thing the actress was always evidently willing to return to the show.