Seven Seasons of Buffy: Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors Discuss Their Favorite Television Show (Smart Pop series) (28 page)

And that is incontrovertible evidence of a master craftsman at work on this show, making it truly Great Art and Great Literature.

We never saw this coming—never expected Willow to pull in all her magic and focus it on revenge. It is so out of character for Willow as a person!

Yet, now that we’ve seen it actually happen, now that we think about Willow as a human being, not a character in a story, it is so absolutely inevitable, so perfectly right and correct, we can only stand in awe of the writer who has spent seven years developing this before our eyes without our seeing it.

Magically, at the end of the sixth season Willow faced the greatest initiation. She was in full, direct confrontation with the consequences of her own weakness. She had been used by her power—she had become the victim of her own power.

She has used magic to commit murder, and it didn’t help her feel any better. She just went on to attack her very dearest friends. Giles and Xander saved her by touching her emotions, but as the seventh
season opened, we had no reason to expect that the power that is within her won’t grab her and use her again.
¹⁸

In season seven Willow, fresh from a sequence of Magical Initiations in England, faces the requisite tests following any Initiation. She is confronted with opportunities to use her Power and must judge each situation for herself. Because of the intimate ties to her friends and her ability to be emotionally honest with them, she finds she now has the strength to resist the temptation to use Power for personal gain, and thus has more strength to use it for the good of all.

She had to go entirely back to the Dark-Haired Willow and climb out of that trap by her own Will. This is also very typical of the aftermath of Initiation. What has been done within Ceremonial Initiation must be manifested in the life.

During the last episode, “Chosen” (7-22), Willow is still unsure of herself. She has to perform Magic to unleash the power of the slayer to all potential slayers. Her fear is that darkness will overpower her and she will lose control once again. Buffy tells her that she is confident in Willow, possibly because Buffy recognizes the changes in Willow as being akin to the changes she has undergone which allow her to control her Power.

Willow uses the sickle to perform the needed magic and turns white (a first). The expression on her face tells it all. She has ‘become.’

So now the show has ended. With the exception of Spike and Anya, the Scoobies are safe and Sunnydale is no more. The Hellmouth is closed. Both the demons and the humans abandoned the city long before its destruction. The potentials are Slayers and have become the ones who must find the other potentials and instill that confidence of becoming in the ones who never made it to Sunnydale for the ultimate sacrifice.

Now think back to Buffy’s Becoming and compare it with Willow’s Becoming—notice how all the other characters have lived, loved, laughed, and touched both Willow and Buffy? And each of them has “become” as well. When one changes, they all change.

What is the power that changes them? What makes them become?

The power that binds this group in a dynamic process of becoming is
emotional honesty. They suffer together, they heal each other’s wounds, they move in together and shelter each other. They accept Dawn even though she was inserted into their lives, and pitch in to raise her as best they can. They change because of what they feel for each other.

Joss Whedon has been writing a perfect example of a new genre I call “Intimate Adventure”
¹⁹
—where the real adventure demanding courage is on the field of relationships, not action. Note that the “action” in
Buffy
is routine, repetitive, and unoriginal—face the monster, get beaten to a pulp, vanquish or kill the monster. But each season there are new relationships, new emotional complexities, and new challenges to emotional courage.

Buffy
has allowed characters to grow, change, learn, and evolve because of the pain, the angst, the loves, losses, and emotional battering they take standing between us and the Hellmouth Spawn.

And what is the hallmark of Great Literature that was lacking on television up until the 1990s? Character maturation due to the power of intimate relationships. And that’s what we see in
Buffy
—a trait that was forbidden to televised SF/F when
Star Trek
first went on the air. Close friendships and love change the characters before our eyes, so that the next time they face a challenge, they tackle it with a different coping strategy—step by step evolving a more mature coping strategy until they face major challenges.

How many characters on other TV shows do we learn to know, understand, and love before they commit deliberate murder?

Murder is something only bad guys do. The import of what Willow has done is not in the murder itself, but in the wellspring of personal emotion—the deep and terrible love for Tara, the vast and unstoppable pain of that loss, and the righteous rage that loosed her magic to take over and rule her. She used her power for personal gain—the gain being entirely emotional.

And in the end, she learned that she could master the Power and not be used by it when she had a task to perform for humanity. This time she sought nothing for herself, not even self-confidence or the high regard of others.

We all understood why, at Tara’s death, Willow went for revenge in the one way that violated the covenant between her and Tara. And so
did all the other characters. We understood because we had lived their intimate adventure with them.

The hallmark of Great Literature is that the reader understands how the events cause the character to become someone different. Our understanding of Willow indicates that
Buffy The Vampire Slayer
is Great Literature.

But look again at the sequence of shows beginning between 1989 when I first mentioned intimate adventure in
Publishers Weekly,
when
Forever Knight
first appeared—and today.

Every one of those shows has a following producing fan fiction and vast amounts of e-mail. Every one of those shows touches the creative core of millions of people, just as
Star Trek
does. When I started writing
Star Trek Lives!
in 1972 to explain why people like
Star Trek
,
²⁰
I only hoped that Hollywood would eventually figure it out.

And now we have
Buffy, Enterprise, Farscape
, and
Smallville,
and more SF/F than one person can watch and still do a day’s work.

Buffy
is not the end product of this process of becoming that television is undergoing. It has made a major innovation by adding dimensions of relationship to the
Babylon 5
breakthrough of story-arc structure. But most important of all,
Buffy
has given us evolving characters—characters who are significantly changed by the traumas and emotional anguish they have to live through.

In
Buffy
, all the characters Become. And in that Becoming lies their power to change television, and perhaps SF/F as well.

Great Literature is about the process of Becoming, of growth and learning through hard lessons. It explains the human condition, shows us how our own unique experiences are related to common human ones familiar to everyone. Great Literature changes its field, opens new avenues, explores new venues and is copied or emulated.
Buffy
appears to have all three of these key traits.

______________________

¹
The second-season finale is titled “Becoming” (3-21, 3-22) and marks several pivotal points in becoming. Angel opens Hell by pulling the Sword of Acathla; Willow becomes a witch when she restores Angel’s soul; and Buffy becomes a mature figure when she sacrifices her personal happiness, sending Angel to Hell.

²
I enlisted the aid of two television experts, fan Cherri Muñoz and the scriptwriter/journalist Anne Phyllis Pinzow to verify the following timeline.

³
“Helpless” (3-12) aired 1/19/99. This was the ultimate initiation. On Buffy’s eighteenth birthday, the Council of Watchers ordered Giles to give Buffy an injection that would take her powers away. She is then faced with a psychotic vampire where she must kill using only what she has learned in her years as the Slayer. At the end, we learn that it’s not only her initiation but Giles’s too.

⁴
Name changing or taking on a new name is a necessary part of Initiation. The use of a disregarded middle name qualifies as a name-change.

⁵
Angel gives her a claddagh ring in “Surprise” (2-13). Angel says “The hands represent friendship. The crown represents loyalty. And the heart . . . well, you know. Wear it pointing toward you. It’s a sign that you belong to somebody.”

⁶
The candidate is led into the ceremonial hall in near darkness, placed in a coffin with the lid closed, and left in this sensory-deprivation chamber for a long time. When the coffin is opened, sometimes by the candidate’s own efforts, the candidate arises with a new name. These ceremonial initiations are designed to replicate the psychological processes we go through in real life, telescoping seven years of hard living into a few hours. But the most effective Initiations are those lived through life. Every Ceremonial Initiation, to be effective, must be followed by a recapitulation of the lesson life-events. Then the ceremonial “Death” initiation is followed by massive lifestyle changes. In the language of “Death –”Birth.”

⁷
The Training and Work of an Initiate
by Dion Fortune is a good place to start learning about the Western Ceremonial Initiatory tradition. As
Star Trek
drew upon Shakespeare and other great literature,
Buffy
draws upon Ancient Greek, Kabbalistic, and Egyptian sources. Besides studying mythology, anthropology, and archeology, the curious student should investigate the traditions behind the magical systems alluded to in
Buffy.
For the beginner, the best place to start is Fortune’s book
Psychic Self-Defense
(various publishers over nearly a century, look for a cheap current paperback) and my own
Biblical Tarot: Never Cross a Palm With Silver
(Toad Hall Inc.), both of which can be found on
amazon.com
.
Or read my award-winning SF/F review column from
The Monthly Aspectarian
which examines what can be learned about magical initiation by reading science fiction novels:
www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/

⁸
Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge
by Carlos Castaneda, Pocket Books; ISBN: 0671600419; Reissue edition (June 1985)

⁹
“Doppelgangland” (3-16)—Vamp Willow crosses over from a different dimension. Our Willow dresses in Vamp Willow’s dominatrix black outfit so she can rescue Oz and the others in the Bronze. Willow is distressed by Vamp Willow. Later she talks about Vamp Will, stating, “And I think I’m kinda gay.”

¹⁰
Willow gives Angel’s soul back (“Becoming, Parts 1 & 2,” 2-21, 2-22). Willow casts a spell so Tara doesn’t see her use magic (“Tabula Rasa,” 6-8).

¹¹
“Halloween” (2-6). Willow is a ghost but she’s still trying to hit the books so she can help solve the problem. Only thing, she can’t turn the pages because she’s a ghost.