Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Headscratchers/Season 4: Difference between revisions

Headscratchers for ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]''. Spoilers abound.

 

 

== Spike's Chip Kicking In ==

** It probably just took a while to kick in and Willow was just lucky it began to work when it did.

** Actually, it kicks in as soon as he gets out of his cage. During the struggle with the two doctors, you can see he pushes them out of the way a lot, but he actually ''attacks'' just once. That one time, he screams in pain. People just don't remember that particular moment, the first time around, because ''they don't know the chip is there'', yet, so they assume someone or something hit Spike, and that's why he's screaming... but he's the one hitting. Next time we see him, he's at Willow's place.

** As we learn later it has something to do with his intentions. Him throwing her around for one reason or another doesn't qualify in his mind as trying to hurt her. Not any more than me cracking an egg qualifies as me eating. He's able to spar with Buffy because he knows he won't hurt her so what would have happened if she simply didn't dodge? Based on that episode Spike probably could have trained himself not to trigger the chip if it had occured to him.

*** I think that's exactly the direction Drusilla was trying to lead him in when she returned later. He was just way too emotionally messed up over Buffy by then to take her up on her offer to teach him how.

** Basically, Joss Whedon and the staff had so much symbolism in the dream scenes that they decided to come up with something completely nonsensical for fun. :)

** Another way to look at it is that the Cheese is the central metaphor of the entire series for the Slayer. To understand the Cheese, is to understand the series. The Cheese Man makes four appearances in this episode:

*** 4) Buffy's Dream: The Cheese Man appears between her, and the First Slayer. Buffy's role as the Slayer acts as a barrier between her, and the monsters that she faces

** Alternatively, each "Cheese" is a metaphor for the inner psyche of each character, and how they relate to The Slayer.

** The way I always looked at it (remembering that Whedon said it was meant to be totally random) was that it was sort of a nice tie-in to the rest of the dream elements to make them something the viewers can easier relate to. For example: In most dreams, no matter how linear or how much sense they make, there's usually one or two elements that don't really make sense no matter how you [[Incredibly Lame Pun|slice]] it. Thus, we have the dreams experienced by Buffy and the Scoobies, which given the plot line and progression of the episode, make sense in at least some basic way - there's something violent and angry that wants them all to die - and then you get this batshit crazy "cheese guy" vision out of nowhere. My two cents, anyway.

** If you interpret "cheese" in the American idiomatic way, to mean "kitchy and silly," the cheese man's words could be interpreted as Whedon's philosophy on screenwriting:

**** Dude. You're either a genius or a complete loon, and right now I'm leaning towards the former.

 

 

** "Healthiest Buffy ever had" is... kind of damning with faint praise. Yeah, he wasn't fighting off constant urges to kill her, and he didn't make her miserable for prolonged periods until the last stages of their relationship, but he still hurt her.

*** Yeah, [[Overly Narrow Superlative]] much?

** There's also the ancient and time-honoured principle of [[All Girls Want Bad Boys]]. Riley suffered hugely from coming after Angel, and then in retrospect from not being Spike. His complete failure to repeatedly try to murder Buffy clearly disqualifies him as suitable relationship material.

** He had a pulse and an average body temperature over 70 degrees fahrenheit. That alone disqualifies him from being suitable relationship material for her.

*** Buffy doesn't bear half the blame, or even a quarter of the blame, but she did handle the situation poorly. That's in character for her, though: when Buffy is in love, she throws herself into it completely, practically without reservation. She shouldn't have tried to "feminize" herself for him, and shouldn't have tried to slay less to assuage his insecurities. But it's understandable that she would, because that's what she does.

**** Wait, what? Buffy throws herself into love practically without reservation? She has intimacy issues out the wazoo and can hardly bring herself to get emotionally close to ''anyone.''

*** Buffy bears at least half the blame if not more. A) It's not fair to really say he didn't get over her being stronger than him. For starters he waw only a bit of a whiner about that and honestly any man who has trained to peak human performance and is on super soldier serum has a right to bitch if his girlfriend is stronger than him. Women are weak, that's simply reality. If I'm Captain America and my girlfriend turns out to be Super Girl I'm gonna cry a bit too cus it's really not fair. B) Buffy treats him pretty much the same way she treats Spike in season six. He's a warm body when she needs to get her physical entertainment on but if she wanted an emotional conversation she'd go else where. Granted in context it was just a matter of who was there and who wasn't which was random in itself but if I found out FROM SPIKE that my girlfriend's mother had a tumor to say I'd be pissed is an understatement. Oh this is after she decided that there were things she needed to say to her ex that I couldn't hear and that immediatly after he kicked my ass. I might not LIKE Riley but it's because he's a bloody ponce not because he's not a saint. He is. In the Buffyverse (pre-season 8 anyway) he's as close to pure good as anybody on the show.

*** I don't think it's fair to say he's justified over crying about being weaker than a woman (especially the Slayer, of all people), but I don't think that's exactly what he was doing. It's more that Riley, being a midwestern boy turned soldier, initially thought in very naive, chivalrous terms, and he had no idea what he could actually offer Buffy if it wasn't protecting her and fighting for her. He did come to his senses and realize that he could be there for her emotionally instead of physically, but by that point she'd drifted away from him emotionally so he wasn't even really doing that either. He gave up his future as a soldier to side with her (he did get recruited again later, but he wasn't expecting a second chance) and, as of Season 5, it seems like he barely even exists on her radar. She doesn't need him as a protector, she doesn't want him emotionally involved, and the other Scoobies (especially Dawn) have accidentally given him the impression that he's never going to measure up to Angel (and that might not be entirely untrue) - I can't blame the guy for getting frustrated and, when the chance arose to rejoin the military, asking her point blank whether he has any reason not to leave Sunnydale and get back into the life he'd originally intended. His timing, throwing this at Buffy while she was dealing with her mom being in the hospital, was horrible, but that's when the government made him the offer - the ultimatum wasn't in his hands. Then there's the vamp-sucking thing, which was just bizarre and stupid, but if he'd stayed in Sunnydale, he would have had to face up to that and earn her trust again. Since he didn't stay on the show, he dealt with it offscreen instead, while fighting demons around the world.

*** Both are probably to blame, more or less, as with nearly all relationship problems. But personally I have to admit that I hold Riley more responsible since he's older and I just feel he should be the more mature one. Although actually the one who's really guilty here is Spike.

** I admit that I don't like Riley. I just don't really know exactly why, I just kind of do. If I had to guess, though, it would be that he just seemed the kind of ''too perfect'' golden boy who everybody around him instantly likes which is what tends to piss me off big time. Maybe it's jealousy. I know I'm a pretty jealous person.

* I can't talk for the others, but I never liked Riley because he was rather boring and whiney. I don't like Angel much neither, actually, because of his whole "vampire with a soul" thing going on. Spike was ok, tough, since his personality didn't change much after getting his soul back (when he wan't insane, that's it)

** Maggie decides to kill Buffy simply because she asks questions.

** We learn that The Initative has been harvesting demon parts for possible "military applications", even building a Frankenstien Creature. (Because why not?)

** The Initiative drugs its soldiers, because of course it does.

** Forrest is so blindly loyal to the Initiative, that he's hunky dory with the concept of Maggie putting a hit on Buffy. Nothing shocking there for him at all.

 

== The Initiative. Seriously? ==

** Yeah, because nothing says "undercover" like openly flailing your rank and military clothing around in a college campus.

*** The cat was out of the bag already; Buffy knew he was military, but Riley was acting like his rank was a secret. Also, the costume designer was clearly going for non-civilian, but for some reason couldn't buy some cheap fake uniforms.

** [[I Take Offense to That Last One|They did mention in the commentary that Riley's hair was way too long.]]

*** Marc Blucas likes his hair! >:(

** The Initiative is obviously a dumping ground for people from the military who are incompetent, but haven't done anything specifically bad enough to get kicked out. Normally they'd be shipped off to a weather monitoring station in the Aleutian Islands for the duration of their service and then denied reenlistment, but a few of them have political connections that make that difficult. So ''those'' guys get put into a special unit and assigned as security to an academic laboratory(!) that's just landed a very large and very dubious DARPA grant. The military knows what a stupid project this is, but because these screwups are all prima donnas who have uncles are on the House Armed Services Committee or something, great pains are taken to keep ''them'' from realizing that it's a stupid project. Fortunately the project is on a college campus in Southern California and they basically get paid to hang out at the beach and flirt with girls. They're also told all the time how cool and important they are, and get to speak in pseudo-military jargon and otherwise act badass. What they don't get: real guns.

*** This theory makes a surprising amount of sense. In virtually every Military in the world, the first thing a CO thinks when he hears of a new "special" project recruiting is "who do I want to get rid of that is a complete fuck-up? Lets put ''his'' name forward/encourage to volunteer". Experimental projects are usually unofficial punishment postings for whoever is put in charge of them due to this effect.

*** It depends on the experiment though. I'm quite certain without consulting a history book that Neil Armstrong wasn't a complete fuck up that nobody cared if he came back from the moon. The Initiative would have or at least should a big deal where you sent the best.

* How are the Watcher's Council and the Inititive BOTH unaware of each other? The Watcher's Council is implied to have a lot of political power around the world. The idea that there for at least seventy years there was this US military unit studying monsters and they didn't know is a little odd. Possible but not plausible. Now the Inititive a unit with the the necessary resources to track down Angel when he was flying as low as he could manage and were versed enough in his history to know he had a soul somehow is ignorant to the existance of the Watcher's Council and the Slayer? It's likely they didn't know WHO the slayer was since on average the slayer changes probably annually, (Buffy dies after two years as the slayer, Kendra after less than a year, Faith on barely survives her first year) so it makes sense that they don't know who Buffy is but when Riley saw her with a sharp pointy stick it should have clicked. I suppose it's possible the Watcher's Council knew and didn't tell but even that seems unlikely. I would think that part of Watcher's Acadamy would involve laughing at the silly Colonials pretending to be monster hunters. But maybe not. Just bugs me.

** Where did you get the idea that the Initiative was 70 years old? I know that in Angel there were hints that the organization that recruited Angel would become the Initiative but all Initiative specific dialogue I heard never specified an age. The one bit of dialogue I do remember about age seemed to imply that the Initiative was started based on a proposal from Maggie Walsh so that she could craft her perfect demon soldier. And if that's the case, the Initiative would be twenty at the oldest.

*** It really just depends on how long the Initiative has existed, and how good they are at the "secret" part of being a secret government organization. That there was an Initiative-like organization operating in the 1940's doesn't mean that they are specifically the same organization; different branches, offshoots, one department being folded into another department or broken up into splinter groups, a lot can happen in fifty to sixty years. Especially when you're looking at a difference of wartime and peacetime; there's also the possibility that the Initiative is a backpocket organization, something the government takes out occasionally when it sees a particular need for it, then reassigns somewhere when it has no further apparent usage. That something that may or may not have been similar to the Initiative existed in some form sixty years ago does not prove that the organization is decades old, and even if it is, does not prove that they were ever important enough or effective enough for anyone in the Watchers' Council to take notice.

*** Or, on the other side of that coin, it's entirely possible the Council failed to notice their existence because they're a ''secret'' organization operating in another country across the pond that has absolutely nothing to do with the Slayer and is not actively threatening the existence of the world, and therefore has no reason to ever appear on their radar. The Council is not omniscient. There's no reason they would notice or even care that the Initiative exists.

 

== Rebellion and Old vs. New ==

* One of the major themes of the show is rebelling against the "old ways". Buffy does not adhere to the mythos; she attends school, has friends who help her, she quits the Council, and when a demon that supposedly can't be killed by any weapon appears, she uses a rocket launcher. The biggest expression of this is in the Season 3 finale when an Old One incarnate is taken down by the youth of Sunnydale, and some TNT. Fast forward to the next season finale, and a high-tech government outfit has started to fight back against the supernatural, only to be told by a Chosen One who pokes demons with a sharp stick to back off because it's not their business, and they're playing on her turf. Did anybody else find this a complete contradiction to the message the previous three years had worked so hard getting across?

** Alternatively, the problem with the Initiative is that they attacked the problem of demons with science. A smarter Initiative would have accumulated a library to put Giles' to shame, and had a few witches or warlocks on staff. Evidence indicates that the reconstituted Initiative was moving in this direction. Besides, Wesley used guns (with mixed results) on Angel.

** Besides, the Initiative was actually doing pretty well so long as it focused on fighting monsters {{spoiler|and not creating demon-cyborg supermen}}. Buffy's complaints aside, the lesson didn't seem to be "modern military sucks, old-fashioned slayers rule" so much as "[[Evil Is Not a Toy]], so stop trying to run tests on it and just kill it already". Or at least, the lesson was eventually toned down to that: when Riley returns later, he's still a government agent using high-tech weaponry to take down demons, and he seems to be doing a bang-up job at it.

 

== How much does Jonathan know? ==

** I think the spell itself took care of the details, as if he'd gone back in time and changed the past. In the new Superstar reality, Jonathan knew a whole bunch of stuff that he didn't know in the old timeline (like Adam and the plutonium core) because he has a different backstory. He says near the end that his memories are fading away and all he can remember about the advice he gave Buffy and Riley is that it was good advice and he hopes they'll still follow it. Superstar-Jonathan knew all about the slayer, the Master, the hellmouth, the Initiative and everything because he was involved in those adventures, but once the spell was broken and everything changed back, he lost those memories.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Headscratchers]]

__NOTOC__