Normal Again - or, Give Up the Hero Trip, Buffy

by Klytaimnestra

First things first. Spike. Or that should be, SPIKE!

I'm hopelessly in love with him and even more so after this episode. Could he be more of a mensch? Rocks!Back Spike FINALLY makes a reappearance. He gets to be the truth teller, the one who puts his finger on the problem. "Figments of her imagination? Well that would explain a lot. Puts a chip in my head to make me all soft, makes me fall in love with her. Then turns me into a sex toy." And all of this delivered as they wander through a graveyard, deep dark foggy night, twisted trees, evil demons - THIS is the Slayer's subconscious? Scary place!

It was like watching - it WAS watching - the characters suddenly realise they're on a stage, and refuse to accept the script. If this is Buffy's Hero's Journey, then all of the other characters are indeed projections of various unintegrated parts of her psyche. But if it isn't - then they're real. And damn it, they WANT to be real. Especially Spike. Willow and Xander are happy to be parts of the Buffy Story. But Spike wants Buffy to be part of HIS story, too. This is the Hero's Journey - the Whedon Rewrite. I truly cannot wait to see what happens next.

I was afraid that after the breakup Spike wouldn't get many lines, but there he is, large as life, twice as beautiful, and nowhere near as pathetic as the Scoobie-ettes. And all of his scenes were great. That speech to Buffy, where he states in simple terms what she needs and what he wants. It was the mirror-speech to hers in Smashed, where she accuses him of being addicted to pain. He admits he was wrong: she isn't attracted to the dark. She's addicted to misery. She was hiding their relationship because she was afraid to be happy. If she'd told her pals, he could either have stood beside her and helped her out, OR she could have joined him in the shadows. (Not the dark, you notice; the shadows. On the edges of the light, but not entirely divorced from it.) He was happy to do either one for her. Redemptionist much? He will do what Buffy needs; including getting out there into the light with her, or as close as he can come, if that's what she needs.

The scene where he and Xander hunt down the demon to get the stuff that will save Buffy from insanity - this is the mirror episode to "Earshot", where Angel does the same thing for her. Key differences, however. In both, it's the vampire lover who's there when she's taking the antidote. But in "Earshot", the relationship is known and accepted by her friends. In "Normal Again", he tells her she has to admit their relationship or he will - and she refuses the antidote, chooses to retreat into a world where she has to admit she's insane, rather than accept her Shadow and actually deal with Spike. Denial!Buffy at, one hopes, her worst extreme. But then I've been hoping she's hit her lowest all year.

Other Spike effulgence: Angel kills a demon for the woman he knows loves him. Spike risks his unlife to trap a demon for the woman who rejects him, treats him with contempt (yet again one more time, after that brief moment of decent behaviour in Hell's Bells), denies their relationship and treats him like a pathetic hanger-on in front of her friends. Who's the hero here?

And just to mention one more time, Rocks!Back Spike finally puts in another appearance. He says the same thing as he did in OMWF, only now he's angry. From "You have to go on living" he's come now to "LIVE a little, already!" Both times, of course, he's right. And he's also right about admitting the relationship. Even the ex-relationship. He can't help her if she won't admit she knows him.

Buffy

Okay, what about the parts of the episode in which Spike does not appear? Usually I have less interest in those, but this time I have to admit, they were riveting. Perfectly balanced scenes: which is the illusion? And everything the doctor, and her mother, tell her is actually true. It's the part of the illusion that she wants that's keeping her there. In Sunnydale, it's her friends, whom she loves. In the asylum, heartbreakingly, it's her mother. And her father, of course. It's the dream of having a united family with parents who are alive and available and supportive and will love her no matter what.

It's a powerful, heartrending picture. In the asylum, her parents and the doctors will help her get well. And all she has to do is let them take care of her. In Sunnydale, she has to fight her own battles, protect her friends, her sister about whom her feelings are decidedly ambivalent, and deal with her beautiful vampire ex-lover, whom she hates. She says. Which way will she go?

Happily, Buffy the Hero does come through. Believing that she's descending into madness, she still does it, to save her friends. She accepts a reality in which her parents are no longer there to help her; in which she has to grow up. In this episode, if we can see nothing else, we see Buffy finally accepting that her mother is dead, and that the 'loving family' she would have so liked to be a part of doesn't exist. This is a heartbreaking and genuinely heroic choice.

And it's a tribute to the writing and acting here that I was actually afraid it wasn't going to happen. I don't know any of the spoilers, though I know people are upset, so I was watching and thinking "oh my gosh, does she stay in the asylum?" Not to mention, since I do know that there's a BSD rumoured and I don't know which, "oh my gosh, are they going to kill them ALL off?" And finally, when Buffy grabs Tara's feet on the stairs and deliberately trips her, I thought "oh no, no wonder people are upset - BUFFY kills Tara?!!" Of course Tara is not dead; but I really didn't know.

So is Spike right? Should she give up being the hero? That's what her mother and the doctor said too. It must have been very tempting to her - it WAS very tempting to her - to give up all responsibility for her life, and allow herself to be taken care of by parental figures, as an invalid from whom nothing is expected.

And I think in this context it's telling that Spike does NOT force her to drink, or even hold the cup to her lips. He allows her to make her own choices, like an adult; as he always does. And he tells her he expects her to act like an adult as far as he's concerned, too. And then he walks away. It's up to her. Yay Spike, one more time. Daddy Angel holds her up and holds the cup to her lips. Spike will be her lover, sure; but he's not going to be her father.

And she fails the test. She refuses the antidote, runs away rather than face her relationship with Spike. in fact, is willing to trap all her friends and set them up for death rather than admit her relationship with Spike. That heroic choice - it took her several tries to make it.

If she'd followed Spike's advice, and given up heroism completely, her friends would have died. Spike is half-right: it's the martyrdom she has to give up. Heroes don't have to be martyrs. She hasn't figured that out. There is however more she hasn't figured out. Spike is in fact entirely right: she has to give up the "hero" trip. On which see below. But you can be "heroic" without believing you're a "hero".

Strange and Disturbing Stuff

The doctor said a number of disturbing things: enough that you have to ask yourself, really ask yourself, is she actually just a crazy girl in an asylum? Dawn WAS created to give her family bonds. And things HAVE been coming apart since then. This year the friendships are falling apart; the supervillains are just pathetic little men she went to high school with; there is less and less to keep her wanting to be in Sunnydale. The illusion, if that's what it is, is breaking down. The 'ideal reality', however, doesn't have much going for it either, beyond an intact family and a total lack of responsibility. Which is "real"?

As BtVS watchers, we have a vested interest in believing that Sunnydale is real. But the last shot, of a catatonic Buffy, gives an objective reality to the asylum world. Doo-DOO-doo-doo (insert Twilight Zone theme here) ...

And while we're in the "disturbing stuff" section - Buffy as Psycho Killer stalking Dawn, the archetypal Innocent Virgin Victim of Weirdo Supervillain we've seen in all those teen horror movies - waaay too convincing. Buffy as the Psycho was genuinely frightening. The scene where she somersaults across the bed faster than the eye can follow, and traps Dawn against the wall? I honestly thought she was going to kill her. Dawn was at the greatest risk of death, because she was the only family member. And the last thing you want is a superpowered hero going insane on you. (There is, incidentally, a classical archetype for this: the madness of Herakles, who killed his wife and his children under the impression that they weren't his. And then performed the labours in penance. Do I think Joss has read Apollodorus? Very likely the Classic Comics version, at least - he was a big comics fan in adolescence.)

And to close, a little more about Spike

Let's accept for the moment that this is Buffy's Hero's Journey. As a hypothesis. Then her friends are externalized aspects of her psyche. And those are the things she's trying to force into integration by, uh, tying them up in the basement and letting the demons loose ... somehow I can't see a psychoanalyst recommending this particular psychodrama, but okay ... well then, here's an interesting thing.

Where's Spike?

Sure, she's already broken up with him (though are we entirely sure of this? "Tell your pals about us" was present tense. "A girl who's sleeping with a vampire she hates" was present tense. Who was wandering through the graveyard near Spike's crypt trying to maintain deniability? Not our denial!girl, surely? If she's broken off with him, she is having second thoughts, or at least second urges...) But she insists to him that he isn't part of her life. So when she's finding the parts of Sunnydale that might be keeping her there, it's her 'friends'; the Scoobies; plus a demon, because, hey, Slayers need demons. And this Slayer needs HER Demon, her demon-lover to be exact. But she isn't into admitting that, even now. So he's not in the cellar with the rest ...

Only I don't think that's what's going on; or not all of it. I think on Buffy's hero's journey, the Scoobies are the externalized bits of her psyche, sure. And so is that evil non-speaking demon-thing. So they're all in her subconscious/basement. Her insistence that they're all part of her hero's journey is what nearly gets them killed; when Spike says "give up the hero thing" (I paraphrase) it really does mean "It's not All!About!You, Slayer!" She has to stop thinking of herself as the "hero" and the rest of them as bit players in her drama, or no one here is going to get out alive.

Still, where's Spike?

He's the one that doesn't want to follow the script; the one who will help her, but increasingly only on his terms; the one who's in her life only because he was forced to be, originally, and only later by choice.

I think Spike isn't in her basement because he's on a hero's journey of his own.

Redemptionist much? You bet.

And one final note

SMG ROCKS. What a fine performance!

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Klytaimnestra