Seven Seasons of Buffy: Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors Discuss Their Favorite Television Show (Smart Pop series) (40 page)
Authors: Gilene Yeffeth
Lawrence Watt-Evans is the author of some three dozen novels and over a hundred short stories, mostly in the fields of fantasy, science fiction, and horror. He won the Hugo Award for Short Story in 1988 for “Why I Left Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers,” served as president of the Horror Writers Association from 1994 to 1996, and lives in Maryland with his wife, two teenaged kids, a pet snake named Billy-Bob, and the obligatory writer’s cat.
LAST ARC
With the airing of “Chosen,” the “Buffy era” (as the late 90’s to early 00’s will come to be known) is finally over. We will all mourn its ending in our own ways. Some will bitterly conclude that the series had run past its prime in any event (see Larbastier’s essay in this volume). Others will, in desperation, turn to
Angel,
which, for all its recent brilliance, can never replace the hole in our psyches left by
Buffy’s
departure. Yet others will pine for possible sequels featuring Dawn or Faith or Giles, or for the major motion picture that surely will come soon. Nancy Holder chooses to celebrate the ending with an examination of
Buffy’s
final story arc. She describes how well it fits an ancient and profound mythological structure, which perhaps goes a little way towards explaining the uncanny way the final sequence—and, even more, the entire series—got under our skins and touched us in ways no show ever had before.
W
ITH THE ANNOUNCEMENT
that
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
was ending its seven-year run, viewers went on high alert and speculation mounted about how Joss Whedon and his staff would conclude Buffy’s story. There had been discussions about the fate of the show before, by savvy fans who knew that Sarah Michelle Gellar’s contract was due to run out at the end of season seven (as were the contracts of most of the regular cast.) They were aware that Gellar could decide to renew her contract, but the prevailing feeling
was that she would not. Surely for a show titled
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
, the character of Buffy Summers was pivotal—or was she? If Gellar left but the show went on, would it be revamped (sorry) and titled
Slayer
, as it had originally almost been called? Would Buffy die? Would Faith survive and take over the job? Would Buffy “jump” into Faith’s body? Would the Buffybot provide a model for a new Slayer? Would Dawn take on the mantel? What about a new unknown becoming the Chosen One?
During the course of season seven, most of the possibilities fans discussed among themselves were brought into play. The opening shot of “Lessons,” the last season’s first episode, shows the assassination of a Potential (though not revealed to be so at first.) Potentials were murdered; Willow had visions; The First drove the newly ensouled Spike even crazier, and haunted the living with their dead. Potential Slayers by the dozens hurried to Buffy for safety, and Giles returned to mentor and guide them. In “Potential” (7-12) it appeared that yes, Dawn was in line to become the next Slayer. Then in “Dirty Girls” (7-18), Faith herself showed up. And the race to figure out how Buffy would end was on.
The official announcement drew casual
Buffy
viewers into the guessing game, and the puzzle mainstreamed to the point that the media began running articles about the end of “The best show that you (probably) didn’t watch” (
San Diego Union
, May 18, 2003.) Pieces appeared in publications such as
The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly
, and
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Magazine
itself, all posing the Big Question: What’s going to happen?
Joyce Millman of the
New York Times
wrote:
Frankly, as long as Whedon doesn’t try to tell us that the whole series was a figment of Buffy’s imagination, I’ll be happy. I’ll be even happier if the finale grandly articulates, one last time, the show’s main themes: woman power, friendship, growing up and sacrifice.
(appearing in the
Kansas City Star
April 21, 2003)
Entertainment Weekly
asked Whedon which of “our favorite characters” were scheduled to be “slaughtered.” And although he wouldn’t say, he did promise “one hell of an ending.”
It’s my position that he delivered, and that the ending he provided took off in a fabulously clever miniature arc consisting of the last five
episodes, which delivered on three levels: as a mini-quest of its own; as the satisfying conclusion of season seven; and as the well-structured and premeditated closure to the entire
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
series.
Although the fate of the series was unknown at the beginning of season seven, there was a definite consciousness on the part of Joss Whedon and the writing staff that they needed to guide the show toward possible closure. As Co-executive Producer Marti Noxon noted, in an interview in
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Magazine
in the June/July 2003 issue, “The way that Joss designed the final episodes left things very flexible. Even though it’s a complete end to the series and you’ll feel very satisfied, it also leaves open a lot of possibilities.”
Those possibilities have now been revealed, and as of this writing (June of 2003), the fan boards have lit up with arguments and debates about the show’s finale. Some fans feel cheated, arguing that if the original concept was that there can be only one Slayer, there should only ever be one Slayer. Others are exuberant that the new, improved, open-ended nature of Slayerdom—that there are now many Slayers—may indicate that spin-offs of many forms will be the offing.
Taking all that into account—and having read all twenty-two scripts of season seven back-to-back—I’d like to offer that what Whedon and Company did to end the series “works” in every sense of the notion of mythic storytelling. And nowhere is this more evident than in the last arc of the show. That this is an arc was suggested by Marti Noxon herself when she stated
in Buffy the Vampire Slayer Magazine
, “Faith’s arrival in episode eighteen obviously sets off some fireworks that will propel us into our season’s end.”
First, on
Buffy
and arcs: In its first season and a half,
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
started out as an anthology show, with primarily standalone episodes featuring “monsters of the week”—the “phlibotenum,” in the
Buffy
speak of the show’s writers’ room. Although the evil Master dwelled in his underground prison, the individual episodes were not linked week-by-week to his presence. Instead, monsters drawn to the evil energy of the Hellmouth provided the forces of darkness that Buffy and her friends had to battle, as in
The X-Files
or the first season of the more current
Smallville
. These were episodes such as “Teacher’s Pet” (1-4) and “Go Fish” (2-20).
However, once the show established Buffy’s world and the operating definition of her heroic nature, the storylines expanded into arcs that lasted a few episodes—the arrival and demise of Kendra in the
Becoming
arc, for example—to the notion that a Big Bad would dominate
each season: Mayor Wilkins for season three, Glory for season five; and arcs that extended past seasons: the duo of Spike and Dru, introduced in “School Hard” (2-19) in season two and, one might argue, extending until the end of the show. But as the story of
Buffy
herself unfolded, all seven seasons become a linear, organic whole, and as I posit, the last arc not only underscores this, but provides a perfect conclusion to the 144-episode-long Hero’s Journey that Buffy undertook.
The notion of a universal Hero’s Journey in the mythos of humanity was first popularized by folklorist Joseph Campbell in his book,
Hero with a Thousand Faces
. Campbell held that there are universal storytelling elements to be found in myths and legends worldwide, and he described these elements in Jungian terms of archetypes and stages. The subject of many books, TV series, and documentaries, his work probably entered the cultural mainstream when George Lucas cited his influence on the development of
Star Wars
(“It’s possible that if I had not run across Joseph Campbell, I would still be writing
Star Wars
today,” he has been quoted as saying.)
Then Christopher Vogler, now a story consultant at Fox, took Campbell’s work and applied it to his own observations about story and structure as he evaluated over 10,000 screenplays. His book,
The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers
, provides a template for describing this last arc of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
. And using his template, I’d like to bolster my argument that Joss Whedon’s last arc for
Buffy
“works” beautifully.
Vogler’s modifications of Campbell’s journey lists twelve major steps, or Stages, in the journey of a Hero:
1.
Establishment of the Ordinary World
2.
The Call to Adventure
3.
Refusal of the Call
4.
Meeting with the Mentor
5.
Crossing the First Threshold
6.
Tests, Allies, and Enemies
7.
Approaches to the Inmost Cave
8.
Ordeal
9.
Reward (Seizing the Sword)
10.
The Road Back
11.
Resurrection
12.
Return with the Elixir
Each season of
Buffy
follows this model on its own, including the shorter first season (as
Buffy
was purchased for a twelve-episode run as a mid-season replacement.) But in the last five episodes, this model expanded to create a mini-epic, or Journey, of its own: First, the Ordinary World is established: a young Potential is running for her life from the Bringers, who have already been established as minions of the bad in previous episodes. We are on the outskirts of Sunnydale, home of the Slayer, and to whom the Potential is running for safety. To Revello Drive, to be precise.
This is the Slayer’s Ordinary World, and recognition of the ordinary world is crucial if one is to leave it in order to embark on a path to a more extraordinary world.
The Potential—named Shannon, in the script—leaps into Caleb’s truck, and at first assumes that she is safe for the moment. Then Caleb quickly reveals himself to be the leader of the Bringers, brands her, and asks her to deliver a message to the Slayer. She agrees, he guts her, and pushes her out of the truck . . . knowing full well that agents of the Slayer are traveling close behind him.
Sure enough, Willow’s car screeches to a halt and Willow and her companion get out of the car. Willow rushes to the aid of the Potential, who will deliver the Call to Adventure to Buffy . . . and Faith stares out at the landscape and reminds the viewer that the call has been delivered within the boundaries of Buffy’s ordinary world:
F
AITH
: “Yep. Guess I’m back in Sunnydale.”
(“Dirty Girls,” 7-18)
Buffy hears Caleb’s message from Shannon—which the viewer will later learn is “I have something of yours”—and Buffy decides to answer the Call to Adventure (Stage 3) by attacking Caleb immediately, before he expects it. The Call to Adventure is the second stage of the Hero’s Journey: The call is initially refused—not by Buffy herself, but by her followers—the Potentials and the core Scoobies—who suggest that she’s impulsively leading them into a trap.