From Salon magazine.
Like Fonzie before him, this too-cool thug in a leather jacket has diverted
a good show from its original mission: To celebrate the uncool outcasts of
the world.
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By Jaime J. Weinman
May 13, 2003 | A once-good show becomes a bad one through the unexpected
popularity of a posturing, vaguely thuggish minor character in a black
leather jacket. In television, as in life, events tend to repeat themselves.
First there was "Happy Days," where a charming show about growing up in the
'50s was revamped to focus on the Fonz. And now there's "Buffy the Vampire
Slayer," which has been all but destroyed by the Fonzie of our time: Spike.
As "Buffy" comes to an end, its fans are debating where to place the blame
for the mediocrity of this season. Was it the introduction of a team of
Slayers in Training, all of them so annoying that fans were happy to see
some of them get killed? Was it the overemphasis on irreleva
nt
new
characters like Kennedy and Principal Wood? Was it the decision to build the
season around a villain (the First Evil) who can't touch anything or do
anything at all except talk and talk and talk? Well, that's part of it.
But the problems with this season can be traced to a moment at the very end
of the last good episode, "Conversations With Dead People." That's the
moment when Buffy found out that Spike, blond vampire, attempted rapist, and
current possessor of a soul, had somehow been killing people despite his
souled status. From that point on, the show has no longer been about Buffy
and her friends, or Buffy and her mission, or anything that used to be
interesting on this show. It's been about Buffy and Spike. And that's about
all.
Look at the record. The next two episodes after "Conversations With Dead
People" involved Buffy trying to find out why Spike was killing again,
following which she spent two more episode
s
focusing her attention on
freeing Spike from a dungeon. Since then, we've discovered that a new
character (Principal Wood) has a vendetta against Spike, seen an entire
episode devoted to filling out Spike's back story, and sat through various
other plot threads about Spike. Even when Spike isn't on-screen, characters
are talking about him.
Meanwhile, the characters who used to matter on this show -- Willow, Xander
and Giles, who with Buffy formed what is called the "core four" -- are
getting nothing storywise; Willow gets a token lesbian relationship, Xander
gets his eye poked out, and Giles gets to look like a bad guy for wanting to
kill Spike (which, on the contrary, made some of us love Giles even more).
In the words of "Sep," who recaps "Buffy" episodes for the famously snarky
Web site Television Without Pity, "Watching episode after episode about
Spike's journey when Giles has become a prick and I don't know a goddamn
thing about what Willow or Xander are thinking, or even who they are
anymore, and will likely never find out, breaks my heart."
It would be less of a problem if Spike were getting brilliantly fascinating
stories, but he isn't, despite the potential inherent in the story of an
evil creature trying to reform. At every turn, the "Buffy" staff has
copped
out on Spike's story, whitewashing his past (a flashback in a recent episode
shows that even when he was turned into a vampire, he wasn't initially a
vicious killer -- something that contradicts all the previous vampire
mythology on the show) and making no attempt to show that having a soul has
changed him one way or the other. By the evidence of this season's episodes,
Spike is still a wisecracking punk who likes to hit women (he's hit Buffy,
Anya and Faith so far this year) and isolate Buffy from her friends, yet
we're still somehow supposed to sympathize with him, because ... why?
Because he got a soul in the hope that Buffy would forgive his attempt to
rape her and sleep with him again. Except for a couple of throwaway lines,
Spike has never been made to seek redemption for his crimes; he doesn't even
apologize to Principal Wood for having murdered his mother. The assumption
appears to be that Spike doesn't need to atone beca
use
having a soul makes
him a different and better person. But the writers haven't shown us that;
all they've shown us is the same Fonzie figure from Seasons 5 and 6, only
without the viciousness that made him moderately interesting.
And when they write a decent Spike scene, it gets cut. The second episode of
this season, "Beneath You," was originally supposed to end with a scene
where Spike expresses guilt for his past crimes, admits that he got a soul
for selfish reasons (he thought Buffy would love him if he had a soul), and
arrives at the realization that having a soul hasn't made him good enough
for Buffy ("God hates me. You hate me. I hate myself more than ever"). But
creator Joss Whedon rewrote this scene so that Spike talked mostly about the
fact that Buffy "used" him for sex -- just another attempt to create
unearned sympathy for Spike and deemphasize his past role as a killer and
sexual predator. And James Marsters, a good act
or who
has shown himself
capable of the kind of underplaying this show used to thrive on, made
matters worse by playing this scene as an over-the-top fit of lurching and
moaning, like one of William Shatner's lesser method moments on "Star Trek."
(The gratuitous shirtlessness just adds to the comparison.) Any interesting
stories about a vampire with a soul have already been told on "Buffy" and
"Angel"; with Spike, all we've been getting is a lot of half-naked
posturing.
But it's not just the overemphasis on Spike that's the problem; it's the way
this emphasis has betrayed one of the most appealing themes of the show:
that it's OK to be uncool. "Buffy" began with a high school girl, formerly
cool and popular, who discovers that she has a destiny that will prevent her
from ever having a "normal" life. But she finds some comfort when she
befriends people at the school who are social outcasts for other reasons:
Willow, a shy computer geek;
the
loyal but socially awkward Xander; and
Giles, head of a school library that none of the other students ever seem to
visit. The bond between these four characters was the heart of the show for
the first four seasons, more than anything else, even romance (there were
many episodes where Buffy's love interest, Angel, didn't appear or was
relegated to one or two token scenes). Every week, these characters proved
what we'd all like to believe when we're outcasts in high school: that the
uncool kids, the ones no one takes seriously, are really the coolest and
most heroic of all.
To make this clear, the monsters on the show were often portrayed as the
twisted embodiment of high school coolness. In the pilot, Xander's friend
Jesse goes from "an excruciating loser" to an effortlessly cool bad boy
after he is turned into a vampire. Another episode, "Reptile Boy," made frat
boys the villains. And Spike, when introduced in Season 2, was exactly
the
kind of smartass punk who makes high school a miserable place for geeks:
Arrogant, cocky and contemptuous of anyone who wasn't equally cool, he was a
superficial, self-confident Fonzie type who deserved to get smacked down by
our awkward heroes.
With the transformation of Spike into a lovable antihero, "Buffy" has
stopped celebrating the uncool outcasts; instead, it celebrates the cool
punk, the guy who would push the first-season Willow or Xander out of the
way in the school halls. And it's not just Spike. Willow's new love
interest, Kennedy, is a confident loudmouth with a privileged upbringing,
who obnoxiously admires Willow not for her intelligence but for her power.
Spike's nemesis, Principal Wood, is described in one of the scripts as "The
Coolest Principal Ever." And Andrew, the show's answer to "The Simpsons'"
Comic Book Guy, is constantly mocked for his geekiness, because a show that
was once on the side of geeks now
portrays them as buffoons or villains. And
whereas the early seasons usually showed the characters learning how to
defeat monsters by researching them in Giles' books, they now find
everything they need on the Internet -- a far cry from Giles' wonderful
first-season speech about the superiority of books over computers. It seems
that on a show where an unrepentant mass murdering monster can be a hero,
there's no more room for a celebration of the power of book learning, or the
nobility of uncool people.
Which brings us back to "Happy Days," and the Fonz. Just as "Happy Days"
went on for years with Fonzie even after Ron Howard left the show, there are
rumors that the character of Spike may go on after the end of "Buffy" --
perhaps moving to "Angel," or perhaps to a spinoff. The character is
popular; cool characters often are. But "Happy Days" was a better show in
the first two years, when it was just about the uncool Richie Cunningham.
And "Buffy" was a better show in the first four years, before Spike fell in
love with Buffy, before Spike started taking his shirt off in every episode,
and when the focus was on four uncool people and their quest to rid the
world of ... well, of characters like Spike.
Shame on you, Mr. Whedon.
I'll go away now,
Patrick.