Before the season started, one of the writers told us this year was going to be about "girl power." I shuddered, remembering the Spice Girls' vapid version of feminism, and wondered if Joss et al. had taken leave of their senses. Although Buffy had never been the feminist icon Joss purported her to be (our Buffy is too much a mass of contradictions for that), she had never been Sporty Spice.
Another pronouncement was made by the Master--that baddie we love to hate for purely nostalgic reasons. In the opening episode of the season, he (or more precisely, the First Evil masquerading as he) told poor insane William that something big was coming, and that everyone was going to learn some important lessons about themselves.
Well, in "Lies My Parents Told Me" those lessons were learned. And in some cases, it was well worth the wait.
First, to Buffy. Since the inception of the series, she'd always chafed under the patriarchal yoke. She'd rebelled against Giles's mandates and later the mandates of the Watcher's Council. Eventually, she'd won Giles over to her iconoclastic mode of thinking. The Watcher's Council was more difficult, but in Season 5 she made it very clear that she had the power. Without a Slayer there would be no Watcher's Council. This season, the Watcher's Council was literally destroyed, blown up by agents of the First Evil. To further articulate Buffy's independence from patriarchal authority, she resisted the original Watcher's mystical demonic rape that supposedly would have given her additional power. She literally broke her bonds (and, ergo, the bonds of patriarchal authority). But she later wondered if this might have been a mistake. Perhaps those old men in power were helpful after all.
But this week's Buffy seems to suggest that one shouldn't always listen to the patriarch. Giles, Buffy's surrogate father, has been encouraging her for several episodes to deal with the Spike problem. He's afraid that she's still emotionally attached to the vampire and wants more for his charge's future. And Giles does make some good points. Spike is still under the First's power at the beginning of the episode. And, as Giles sees it, Spike is resisting treatment and is less than cooperative. Given Giles's previously established moral code (his smothering of Ben for the greater good in "The Gift"), it's not surprising that he reluctantly agrees to Wood's suggestion to eliminate Spike from the picture. After all, Spike may have a soul, but he's really not his own man. Furthermore, Giles went through the whole Angel debacle with Buffy. He saw how difficult it was on his charge. So he decides to make the decision for Buffy, as he believes Buffy would not allow Spike to be killed. And this is Giles's essential mistake: he takes this crucial decision away from Buffy. He uses his patriarchal authority and loses his surrogate daughter.
The scene in the graveyard was telling. Giles is stalling Buffy while ostensibly trying to convince her to kill Spike. Spike's a danger, Giles argues, even though he hasn't done anything lately. But really, these are sham negotiations. Giles has already made up his mind. It's time to, in military terms, "decapitate" Spike. [Sidenote: someday I'll write an essay on how this season is actually an allegory of the use of American power in the world, but that's for another day and, perhaps, another venue.] So, although Giles supposedly wants Buffy to make the decision, it's already been made for her.
But Giles has apparently forgotten one essential fact about Buffy's relationship with vampires--when push came to shove, Buffy didn't choose Angel. She chose the mission. And Spike would be no different. Heck, she even tells Giles that she wouldn't choose Dawn over the mission.
Wood's "lesson" has to do with the Slayer's mission and the realization that, while his mother may have loved him, the mission was more important to her than her child.
When Wood was first introduced as a character, many online lamented the fact that Buffy was getting a potential new love interest this late in the game. But Wood's role in BTVS is not romantic. His most powerful relationship is with Spike, the vampire who killed his mother. Through the course of this episode he seeks revenge on those who tried to kill his mommy. Revenge, as Hamlet and numerous other Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedies make gruesomely clear, is rarely a good idea. It simply ends in bloodshed, pain, and, occasionally, poisoned pointy instruments of death. Luckily, Spike is able to subvert Wood's plan and death is averted. And Wood actually learns some lessons from Spike. No matter how many people the Slayer has around her, she ultimately fights alone. No matter how many people love her, she can only love partially in return. Her duty is the mission. Everything else--personal pleasure, romance, love--is expendable. Buffy used to reject that philosophy. She was the Slayer with friends and family, after all. And that used to be her greatest strength. But Buffy's changed over the years. In this final battle it seems as though she's decided that everything is expendable, including, of course, her own life.
Spike is only able to make this astute observation about the Slayer's mindset through a little Freudian mystical psychotherapy. Why are his blinders removed about Buffy? Why does the song trigger the appearance of the monster within? It's all about his mother.
As many of us guessed, William was a mama's boy. According to what we saw in this episode, William was an established bachelor, living at home, writing bad poetry that only a doting mother could love. But his mother did dote, did love. And although she was dying of consumption she still had the breath to sing "Early One Morning," that great Old English ditty that the First chose to be Spike's trigger. The human William we see in "Lies My Parents Told Me" seems different than the nervous William we saw at the party in Season 5. He has a different wig, for one thing. For another, the actor looks significantly older (bad makeup job on Marsters!). But most importantly, William seems at ease. He seems quite happy living in his own little fantasy world where he's a great poet and there's always the possibility (albeit an unlikely one) that Cecily might love him in return. It makes the moment at the party even more poignant to understand the energy William must have spent, the courage it took to reveal his feelings to Cecily, to take the chance to make his dreams a reality.
But 'twas not to be. We all know how the tale ends. William was vamped by Dru. But here's the twist. Like Angelus, William goes back to his familial home. Unlike Angelus, he doesn't seek his family out for revenge. Rather, he seeks his mother to cure her with that "eternal kiss." For some reason, William's purity of love has survived post-vamping (although his moral compass surely has not). And in this, he still appears to be unique. Hopefully someday Mutant Enemy will explain this anomaly, but I1m not holding my breath.
So William lovingly takes his mother in his arms and drinks deep. But things don't always turn out the way you hope. His mother comes back as your stereotypical evil, soulless thing (the contrast with William is quite striking). She is the perversion of everything she was. She enjoys cruelty. And she knows precisely what to say to inflict the most damage. She reveals that she felt stifled by William's love (possibly true--other women have certainly felt smothered by the intensity and doggedness of his passion). She reveals that she did have some aesthetic sense and realised how pathetic William's poetry was. She wants to escape from her clinging son, the "sentimental, limp" parasite that crawled from her body and then latched on, never letting go. As a final blow, she insinuates that William has incestuous intentions, that he always wanted to return to the womb--her womb. Then, by way of final insult, she offers to fulfill these supposed desires. William, although ostensibly a twisted monster, reacts in disgust and realises that he must kill his mother. I don't think it's because William, at this point, understands the distinction between his mother and the demon that inhabits her body. He simply wants to remove the abomination from the world. He wants to make her stop saying horrible half-truths. So he kills her. But the damage is done.
William had always been sure of one thing: no matter what, his mother loved him. But after he vamped her, she said things that made him question her love. For years after this incident he wandered in emotional limbo, desperately seeking affirmation that he was worthy through people who didn't love him or were incapable of loyalty. Only after reliving the situation from a souled perspective, does he come to understand that his mother did love him.
And suddenly, we have a psychological
breakthrough. The persona of Spike was created in reaction to two things:
the ridicule he received from the elite (thus, the working-class accent
and anti-establishment attitude) and the message from his mother that he'd
always be "limp" and unworthy of love (sparking his macho fist and fangs
approach to life, his terrible reaction to rejection). But by finally realising
that his mother did genuinely love him, he is no longer a slave to love
or to anything else. As he tells Wood, "I got my own free will now. I'm
not under the First's or any one else's influences now." And this means
that he's free of Buffy too. He will no longer be the Slayer's lapdog,
a fool for love. That's why I hated to see him change his persona for her
in "Get it Done" reverting to his Big Bad attitude because Buffy had insinuated
he was weak (an unfortunate echo of his mother's and Nikki's statements
about his "limpness"). I want Spike to do things for himself, not for Buffy
or anyone else. And it appears I've gotten my wish. For the first time
in his unlife, Spike is a fully rounded person. And, in many respects,
he's become more . . . human.