Joss Whedon: The Biography (37 page)

In fact, not only did she never take over full creative control of the series, she says, “to be honest, I didn’t really want it. It belongs to him, and I’m the last person who wants to, like, ruin it. I wasn’t waiting in the wings for my opportunity. I was like, ‘Thank God Joss is in control.’ I was scared to death.”

The complaints about the season, however, were not without merit. Even Sarah Michelle Gellar had concerns about the well-being of her alter ego. She was not known to try to control the story direction for her character, so when she did have an opinion it mattered more. Gellar told Noxon that she felt that Buffy was losing her “hero-ness” and losing her way. “It wasn’t who Buffy was, or why people loved her. You don’t want to see that dark heroine; you don’t want to see her punishing herself,” Gellar told
Entertainment Weekly
. “It didn’t feel like the character that I loved.”

Gellar singled out the episode “Dead Things” as her least favorite of the series. On a rare night off from all her responsibilities, Buffy joins her friends at the Bronze. She makes her way up to the balcony for a quiet
moment alone and is soon joined by Spike, who physically takes her from behind and forces her to watch her friends down below as they have sex.

“I really thought that was out of character. And I didn’t like what it stood for,” she said. “Joss always explained that season as being about your 20s, where you’re not a kid anymore, but you don’t know what you want to do [with your life]. He always said that I didn’t understand … because I’ve always known what I wanted to do, and I didn’t have that confusion, [that] dark, depressive period. But I think the heart of the show lies in the humor of the drama. I felt like Buffy’s spirit was missing [in the sixth season].”

Joss’s comment seems dismissive of Gellar, someone who had lived and breathed the television Buffy for almost as long as he had. It is certainly true that Gellar never had to kill her boyfriend, blow up her high school, or return to a miserable life on Earth after being pulled from heaven, but she brought Buffy through all those emotional journeys believably. Once again, it feels as if the writers were so determined to tell a story about a young woman’s descent into extreme depression and self-abuse that they didn’t fully consider the world or the characters they were telling it in.

In fact, all of “Dead Things” seems like a huge disconnect from the positive and empowering emotional core for which
Buffy
is known. Its storylines seem to smash away at the morals of the series minute by minute: The Trio, the three nerdy college students who serve as the season’s previously comic Big Bads, develop a “cerebral dampener” that removes its target’s free will. They then go out to pick up women to turn into sex slaves. Buffy beats Spike to a bloody pulp while railing at him for being evil and soulless. And finally Warren, the leader of the Trio, kills his ex-girlfriend when the “dampener” effects begin to fade and she became aware that they’re attempting to rape her. The Trio get away with the murder, although their attempt to pin it on Buffy fails.

As the season proceeded in this grim fashion, online fandom responded with overwhelming disapproval. “That’s where having feedback from the fans can be really useful—when you start to see a kind of consensus that stays consistent through episodes,” Noxon says. “Certainly there are times when you just have to say, ‘We know you don’t like this, but we’ve got a plan, don’t worry.’ There are often episodes where you’re like, ‘This is the medicine. You’re not going to like it, but it’s good for you.’” But there was enough of a critical groundswell from fans who loved the show and had supported it for six years that, combined with
Gellar’s concerns, convinced Joss that they needed to course-correct a bit. “A little less descending,” Noxon says. “A little more ascending.”

Before it began ascending, however, the show would hit rock bottom in many ways, with “Seeing Red,” the nineteenth episode out of twenty-two. In an infamous scene set in Buffy’s bathroom, Buffy returns from a rough night of patrolling and is looking to relax with a long soak. Spike shows up uninvited, and in a wildly misguided attempt to convince her that she does in fact love him, he overpowers Buffy and attempts to rape her. Though wounded, she fights him off, ending their battle by kicking him through a wall. He is immediately horrified and apologetic, but Buffy insists that the only reason he halted his attack was because she had the physical strength to stop him.

It is a painful scene to watch—and it was a painful scene to portray. James Marsters has called it the worst day of his professional career, one of the hardest things he ever had to do and something he will never do again. “The truth is the writers on
Buffy
were being incredibly brave,” Marsters said. “Joss was asking each of them to come up with their most painful day, their most humiliating day, the day that they made the biggest fools of themselves or the day they hurt someone else the most, and then put a patina of fangs and blood over that. Basically that’s why I think the series is so delightful, because of the bravery of the writers on that score.” But even though he understood why the writers did it, “I still think it was a mistake.”

Several writers have insisted that the attack was crucial to Spike’s emotional arc. “Spike’s a villain,” Noxon says. “At his core he is bad, let’s not forget.” Jane Espenson saw the attempted rape as the impetus for Spike to look at himself and truly see the demon inside, and then make a choice of what to do—which is to search for a way to restore his own soul and become a man worthy of Buffy.

To be sure, Spike’s arc needed a vivid climax to push him onto such a dramatic new path. But it’s questionable that it needed to be the attempted rape of the series’ main character. Joss and his writers, ordinarily so devoted to the “Buffy of it,” seemed to have subordinated her role in these events to the needs of a supporting character’s storyline. And in doing so, they reframed the Buffy/Spike relationship, changing the hero
of their story from a willing if conflicted participant in their sexual exploration into a mere victim. It comes off as a cheap and narratively inept way to start the next chapter in Spike’s life.

In seven seasons, “Seeing Red” is one of
Buffy
’s most controversial episodes, if not the most controversial. It also angered viewers because at the very end, Trio leader Warren shoots and kills Willow’s girlfriend, Tara. Fans were devastated and furious that Joss had allowed such a groundbreaking, beloved example of a happy lesbian couple on television to come to such a brutal end—after they sent him a toaster to thank him for it! Angry viewers claimed that
Buffy
had fallen into the “dead lesbian cliché,” by which TV series often introduced lesbian characters just so they could be killed off. As with the attempted rape, the writers insisted that Tara’s death was necessary to the larger story—she needed to die so that Willow would be motivated by grief to return to dark magic and go on a murderous rampage, setting her up as an antagonist for Buffy in the final episodes of the season.

Yet Tara’s death—and the deaths of Joyce Summers, Doyle, and quite a few other ill-fated characters over the course of Joss’s writing career—are not merely narrative necessities. They all speak to Joss’s need to ground his tales in truth and human experience. Prior to
Buffy
, television series, especially sci-fi series, often put their characters in danger but rarely exposed them to true peril that might lead to death.
The X-Files
regularly set up Mulder and Scully to be attacked by assorted monsters and creatures, and they always made it through to the following week. Viewers had become conditioned to this; they would watch each episode through the veil of “she’s a main character, she won’t die”—their emotional attachment still strong but their fear muted.

But in real life, everyone dies eventually, and many will die suddenly, leaving loved ones behind to deal with an intense devastation in a very personal way. Joss knows what it’s like to be forced to deal with such a loss, with no possible explanation that can make sense of the pain or ease it in any way. He lost his mother to a brain aneurism, and several years later a Riverdale friend, the writer Joe Wood, went missing on Mount Rainier and was never found. Joss designs each death in the Whedonverse to make viewers feel the despair and ache of loss—because he spent so much time creating an emotional connection that brought them joy and love in the first place. When Joss kills a character, it hurts because it is designed to hurt.

Still, fans took Tara’s death particularly hard—in part, perhaps, because of a trick Joss played on viewers at the beginning of her last episode. He added Amber Benson, who had played Tara on a recurring basis for the past three seasons, to the opening credits, a position usually reserved for full-time cast members. “I realized, just the other day, that I have this terrible reputation for killing people not just because I killed Tara, but because I was such a dick about it,” Joss laughed. “[Adding her to the credits] was just
mean
. Tara may be dead, but she haunts me still, because now all anybody ever talks about is the fact I kill characters off, and I think, ‘I do other things as well!’”

Another episode from late in season six felt like a return to form for the series—and it came from outside the current writers’ room. Diego Gutierrez had left his job as Joss’s assistant at the end of the previous season to pursue his own writing career, but years earlier, he’d pitched the idea for “Normal Again.” He’d been fascinated by the idea of psychosis and mental breakdowns, which led him to imagine how Buffy would look to someone unaware of the hidden world of magic and demons. “If you heard her talking [about her life] at a restaurant, you’d think she’s totally nuts,” he says.

He conceived of a story in which Buffy is attacked by a demon whose venom puts her into an extreme hallucinogenic state. She then floats between two worlds: one in which she’s a Vampire Slayer in Sunnydale; the other in which she’s a patient in a mental hospital, where she has been in a schizophrenic catatonic state for six years. Both of Buffy’s parents attend to her at the hospital, hoping that she’ll break free from her deranged beliefs that the world is filled with demons and she is a Vampire Slayer.

Joss liked the pitch, but for a long time, nothing came of it. He told Gutierrez later that he’d been trying to find a plausible way to do the story. When Gutierrez’s assistantship was nearing its end, he was working on a packet of spec scripts in hope of landing a staff writing job, and one of the scripts was a spec version of his asylum idea. He was excited when Joss agreed to read the script and give him notes. However, he did not expect Joss to say that he wanted to buy the script and bring him back the following season to work on the episode.

A year later, Gutierrez took a short break from his new job writing for
Dawson’s Creek
to return and work on the script with Joss. He suggested
that they scrap his original, ambiguous ending, which instead of showing Buffy in Sunnydale, fully recovered from the demon’s venom, closes on a shot of her in the mental hospital. Joss surprised him when he said, “Let’s end it in the asylum … let’s fuck with them.”

“Joss never undermined the intelligence and the respect between the fans and the show,” Gutierrez says. “He was always making sure that even if he wasn’t giving you what you wanted, you were always getting something that was cool and interesting.”

In the end, Buffy chooses to leave her parents and a chance at happiness behind to live in a nightmarish world filled with demons and daily battles. The final scene, in which she has returned to her catatonic state in the hospital and the doctor declares her “gone,” is indeed jarring. The viewers are left to wonder which of the two worlds is real for Buffy, and thus
Buffy
.

“Normal Again” would have been a brilliant ending to an uneven and uneasy season. It could have set up questions about sanity and reality that echoed throughout the following year. Instead, the brain-twisting events were confined to a stand-alone episode, like Joss’s despised “reset television,” in which storylines never really progress and characters never learn any lessons.