History Headscratchers / BuffySeason5

* In S05E21, Glory states that she's been stuck in this dimension for 25 human years. So, what exactly was she doing for the first 24 years? Furthermore, where was "the Key" during those 24 years, and why wasn't she looking for it?

Am I the only one who's skeptical about the idea of William (aka human Spike) being so disliked by his peers? Granted, we know very little about him, but from what we see, he's a perfectly nice guy. Moreover, he's rich, inoffensive and horribly unconvincing wig aside, played by James Marsters, so therefore good-looking. If nothing else, I find it weird that especially women would dislike him so openly. Socially awkward is hardly the worst thing a person can be.

* Maybe it's just me, but I sincerely didn't understand why Riley kept complaining that Buffy didn't show him affection. Yeah, Buffy had the tendency to lock people out when she's upset, but she does that to literally everyone. She did it to Angel too, as well as her mother, sister and friends. It's certainly a character flaw of hers, but it's not at all something that was only directed to Riley--she only told Spike about Joyce first because he happened to be there, not because she sought him out or avoided Riley. I legitimately saw nothing wrong with the way she treated him and was utterly baffled when Xander told her off for it, I found his observations about their relationship completely unfounded. I just don't get what the problem was and why the fault of it seemed to get entirely foisted onto Buffy.

** More like the Monks were Morons. Since the Key needs to be activated under very specific circumstances it's not like her bleeding a little here and there would be a problem. It's not like a bloody nose is gonna get us sucked into hell. Why didn't they install I dunno every known martial and magical art into her. . .maybe some super strength as well? Something where the concept of self-defence wouldn't be entirely outside her abilities.

*** They also gave Dawn school records, a medical history, a birth record and they changed the Summers family's financial records along with everything else that would legally clue them in that Dawn's not a real girl. And they did it all in one spell, presumably without actually knowing in advance the names of every classmate Dawn would've befriended, or the California state tax rate for a divorced self-employed mother with two dependents. They might not have actually changed the past, but "reshaped reality" is a pretty fair description of what their spell did to the present-day world, as much so as it is for what Jonathan did in "Superstar" or what Wolfram & Hart did for Connor.

Okay. I've got a macguffin. Instead of storing it in say a helpless infant or an adult anything more emotionally stable than a teenaged girl. Really? She could have put into Buffy's father, probably into any of the main cast. We don't have any information on any of the limitations for what the key has to be. Clearly it doesn't HAVE to be a living being as it was formerly a ball of swirling green energy. It's possible that the key could have been put into a brick in King Tuts tomb or satellite. It could have been Bob Barker. Glory claims it couldn't be him because he's old and the key is new. The thing is that the spell that was used for Dawn is the similar to the Superstar spell. It rewrites history. There is no more reason why Bob Barker couldn't have been six months old with decades of memories rewritten to remember a television show than there is reason to believe that Dawn couldn't be six months old with a decade and a half of imaginary history. They chose pretty much the WORST option for what to put the key in. Sure they could have put it into a male adrenaline junkie but that aside they made a fantastically horrible choice. Not to mention the fact that as strong as the Slayer is she's not the strongest thing on the planet. Given their desire for the apocalypse to happen on their terms giving it to Wolfram & Hart would have been a better option. Or Drogan the Battlebrand and adding one more coffin. Heck all information we're given it doesn't really make sense that Glory had managed to key in on the location and that the Slayer had it within the six months she was given. We know that locator spells are accurate enough to give you a block by block thing. I really should stop thinking about this.

Granted it probably wouldn't have let him keep the Buffy bot and it definitely wouldn't have let him get the recognition from Buffy as someone who honestly cared about her but Glory probably/possibly would have let him go if he'd simply said that wasn't Buffy it was a robot that looked just like her. I have a perverse interest in the slayer come along now I'll show you.

* Both the Aprilbot and the Buffybot are technological wonders. How come no one thought to CutLexLuthorACheck ? I can think of tons of applications to that technology.

* In "Tough Love," Ben is transforming into Glory. You get a close-up of his hand. No nail polish on his nails. He becomes Glory. Nail-polish on his nails. Why? It's not like they change clothes when one takes over.

Within the show, Glory mentions that the key has to be someone innocent. Throughout the show Dawn self-mutilates, engages in kleptomania, and other things. Then in the comics she cheats on her boyfriend. Question: if the key is supposed to be an innocent, how could she do these things? Or does her engaging in the actions mean she's no longer technically the key?

* So, in "The Gift" Buffy's suicide closes the dimensional portal even though Buffy is (as far as we know) not a Key and Dawn is still bleeding. Isn't that a plot hole? Even if Dawn is made of Buffy, a conclusion that Buffy pretty much pulled out of her ass, this still wouldn't have made Buffy a Key, would it? Isn't Dawn a combination of a mystical Key energy and a human? Presumably the Key part comes from her energy days, not Buffy. In other words, the cause and effect chain is in the opposite direction - if Buffy was made of Dawn she would have a case but not vice versa. And even if Buffy was somehow a Key, the blood of Dawn was still flowing when the portal closed. It would have been nice if Buffy had tried to, you know, put some bandages on Dawn first and see if that wouldn't close the portal...

** RuleOfCool

* Dawn really got screwed over. Every other avatar of a primordial force in the Buffy universe can at least ''do something'' a normal human couldn't (see: Illyria, Glory, arguably Cordelia etc.). Dawn's blood opens a ''single particular portal'', and for some reason that also makes Buffy's blood close it. You think as a manifestation of the Key she'd at least have the ability to magically open and close any lock, door, portal, or gate anywhere at will or something along those lines.

** Whedon has hinted... HINTED, mind you, and nothing more... that since she was "made from Buffy", Dawn would have been a Slayer, except that being the Key overrode it to the point of Dawn losing her "potential", as it were.

* Buffy "seems" to have died as soon as her body passed through the portal. I don't think that her soul went anywhere as a result of the portal, but as the above troper noted, it went where souls go when someone dies. It was magically caused death so Willow's spell worked to bring her back (tho one could argue that any death could be reversed if the writer's wanted it to happen). The fall may have still killed her either way. But as for her soul going to heaven, it is never clearly stated that her soul went to heaven. She simply thinks where ever she was, was a very nice place to be. Note: the place where she was enters nightmare fuel territory if you think about the episode Normal Again. Being in an asylum, crazy for years, in a moment of clarity, was Buffy's "Heaven".

* It bugs me that the first Onscreen kiss of our Lesbian Couple is not one that is adorable and loveable, but one in a high stress, high anxiety, sad episode.... just my personal belief.

** I think that putting their first onscreen kiss as a ShutUpKiss in "The Body" is a reaction to the fact that Willow and Tara were [[GetBackInTheCloset not allowed to kiss]] for many episodes because of ExecutiveMeddling. If the kiss had been made a sweet, memorable moment, it would have implied that that was the couple's ''actual'' first kiss. By making it a comforting gesture in a stressful situation, it shows that these two are incredible comfortable with one another, just like any other loving couple would be after the amount of time they'd been together.

** I took it to mean whatever breed of demon she was their powers only manifest in the females. Like those fire demons in Angel and I'm sure plenty of other species we never see.

Why did Spike have Warren program his sexbot to act nothing like the woman he's supposedly in love with? She didn't even act like a Buffy who returned Spike's feelings, she acted like April with some {{Interplay Of Sex And Violence}} thrown in.

He's 19 years old, doesn't have a college education, has never held down a job for more than a few weeks before, and has only been doing construction work for three months. Yet suddenly he's being put in charge of a carpentry crew and is making enough money to afford that ultra-nice apartment. Unless he's the Rain Man of carpenters, that's some absurdly fast corporate ladder climbing. I'm starting to think Suave!Xander may've had some mind-whammy powers after all.

Okay this is only hinted at once during the episode "No Place Like Home" when Buffy performs a ritual to see spells. When she does that she doesn't find anything around he rmother because what's wrong with her mother is natural not magical but Dawn fades in and out of photos. That's fine, she wasn't actually in those photos (which occasionally makes for some awkward placement for the two people who ARE in the pictures. Instead of the entire photo being fake she was added is my point). When Buffy enter's Dawn's room though seeing through the spell not only makes Dawn fade in and out but all the things she did to what was obviously a storage room before her retcon existance took place. If she was inserted, when we all assume she was, right before Season 5 started why aren't the changes to her room real? Hell why doesn't she show up as what she is, a glowing ball of light, instead of fading in and out of existence? My guess is she wasn't originally planned to be a permanent part of the cast and just ended up sticking and this would have come full circle at the end of Season 5 as she took her own life because she wasn't real to begin with.

*** This exactly. It's unclear just when his infatuation started, but it was well before his EroticDream LoveEpiphany in season 5. Spike is an obsessive romantic; it's the twisted holdover from William's hopeless romantic qualities, which he later regains post-soul. In "Lies My Parents Told Me", Spike's shown immediately after his transformation and he's already hopelessly devoted to Drusilla and Cicely--who'd he'd been mooning over just days prior--is just an afterthought. That's kinda just the way he is, he falls in love hard and fast.

Were we supposed to buy his "I'm a tortured good guy doctor" thing? Because he summoned a demon that murders mentally ill people just because...there were a bunch of mentally ill people.

In "Shadow", Giles unwittingly sells Glory the ingredients she needs to summon a demon to find Dawn. This is mitigated by the fact that Giles had no idea what Glory looked like at the time, but this just shows a serious issue with the gang using the shop at all. That they're unintentionally providing people with the means to carry out wicked deeds. Why didn't this ever come up in conversation?

Why is Giles killing Ben considered so bad? Yes, technically Ben was innocent, but keeping him alive is a terrible idea. Buffy's whole "don't kill humans" thing is generally okay, but Ben was sharing a body with Glory who was taking over for longer and longer periods of time. If Ben had remained alive, Glory would probably have taken him over again and wreaked havoc. We don't know what would have happened to her after the portal closed, but I assume her situation would have remained the same as before. She was just trying to get home, it wasn't a time limit for her existence on Earth. Maybe she would have eventually gone completely crazy, but she still would have been a huge danger. Leaving Ben alive simply because he's a human and not evil is not a good enough reason to endanger the whole world.

BTVS has several TheScrappy over the course of it's run--Riley and Kennedy I get, though I personally don't have particularly strong feelings against the former, I get why he's in that position. Dawn, I admit, I don't get why she's so hated. She's acted fine and has good chemistry with the other actors, I found the premise of her character actually pretty unique and compelling. My only issue is that she's treated as younger than she is by the other characters early in the season, but other than that, I thought she was perfectly fine.

Maybe it's just me, but I sincerely didn't understand why Riley kept complaining that Buffy didn't show him affection. Yeah, Buffy had the tendency to lock people out when she's upset, but she does that to literally everyone. She did it to Angel too, as well as her mother, sister and friends. It's certainly a character flaw of hers, but it's not at all something that was only directed to Riley--she only told Spike about Joyce first because he happened to be there, not because she sought him out or avoided Riley. I legitimately saw nothing wrong with the way she treated him and was utterly baffled when Xander told her off for it, I found his observations about their relationship completely unfounded. I just don't get what the problem was and why the fault of it seemed to get entirely foisted onto Buffy.

** He's an anti-magic bigot, so it makes sense that they'd be persecuted for being [[DealWithTheDevil evil]] [[OurDemonsAreDifferent witches]]. Which is ridiculous, 'cause wicca's good and love the earth and woman power [[EarWorm I'll be over]] [[MusicalEpisode here]].

* I think Ben ultimately commits the same - moral - mistake as cancer guy did when he wanted to become a vampire. Sure, Buffy stakes cancer guy only after he's been sired, but it is quite clear that she expected him to take the crappy lot in life he's been dealt in stride. So for Ben that would've been either a "TakingYouWithMe" suicide to rid the world of Glory, or - yaknow - not opening the portal. I think Giles is not entirely wrong in his IDidWhatIHadTo justification of doing what Buffy cannot do. That said, the question what would have happened to Glory and Ben had Ben not been killed then and there is interesting.