Buffy the Vampire Slayer

I'd like it if someone could refresh my memory about something: in season 5 did they ever bring up the ethics of risking the whole world to save one person?

I think it was briefly discussed, but they didn't fully comprehend what Dawn-as-Key really entailed, like if her death would make her useless as the Key. All they really knew was that Dawn was genuinely human and functionally Buffys' sister despite the reality warping involved, she wasn't just some sort of construct that believes it's human.

It's discussed in "The Gift". When they learn that it might be necessary to kill Dawn to stop Glory from destroying the world, Giles thinks it's something they need to prepare for, but Buffy adamantly refuses, going so far as to say she'll kill anyone who tries to kill Dawn, and will let the world end if necessary.

Of course, this is framed as Buffy being so done with all the trauma, hardship, and loss she's been through (she spent the previous episode literally catatonic with grief, after all) that, to her, the world just wouldn't be worth saving if Dawn had to die. Despite what a lot of analyses of the episode have said, I don't think we're meant to agree with Buffy's position here, for the simple reason that Dawn doesn't agree with it. Once the portal opens, she's willing to sacrifice her own life to save the world, despite Buffy's efforts to hold her back. When you're weighing one person's life against the world, but you're ignoring what said person would actually want, I don't think you've got the moral high ground.

It also comes up in that episode when they discuss killing Ben in order to kill Glory. They briefly talk about it, Xander seems horrified by the prospect, but desperate enough to consider it, but then the topic gets shelved when they decide the opportunity will probably never come up. But then the opportunity does come up later: Buffy chooses to let a defeated Glory/Ben live, but then Giles kills Ben to keep Glory from coming back, and no definitive statement is made about who we're supposed to see as right.

Also it comes up again in the last season doesn't it? Something around killing Spike being compared to killing Dawn?

Yes it does, and in the original script for the episode, Giles even confesses to Buffy that he killed Ben. That did not make the cut though, if I remember corectly. What did make the cut was Giles asking Buffy about Dawn and Buffy telling him she would be prepared to sacrifice her, unlike in the past.

Was there an I Cannot Self-Terminate situation that prevented Dawn from just killing herself?

No, Dawn was totally going to jump, but Buffy pulled her back.

I meant before that.

Nope. Nothing to stop her doing so (she may even have threatened it, albeit emptily) earlier in the season (can't remember for sure).

Regardless, the debate was ethical rather than practical - being mortal, Dawn could be killed by anyone like any other human, including herself, at any point in the course of her existence.

I Cannot Self-Terminate is about the literal inability to take your own life (cyborg programming, physical exhaustion, magical clauses), the ability to work up the nerve to do so is a different thing altogether. The circumstances surrounding the last three episodes was about escalating desperation, and even in such supernatural circumstances basic moral people would be opposed to that option.

I haven't got to The Gift yet (currently rewatching both shows) so it will be interesting to look at that episode again and see everyone's state of mind in that current part of the story.

Honestly, The Gift is my absolute favorite episode of Buffy, partly because of the discussion of morality and sacrifice. Buffy taking Dawn’s potential sacrifice into her own hands and the double entendre of death being her “gift” is very fascinating. And Buffy’s sacrifice is such a moving tearjerker. Also, it just has the greatest quote I’ve ever heard on television. You know the one.

Sorry...I had to seize the opportunity to gush.

Since The Gift has been brought up, how would fans have felt if it was the series finale?

For me, I love The Gift way more as an episode but I like Chosen more as a finale, simply because Buffy gets the happy ending that she deserves.

Chosen is a frankly decent episode with moments that I love (Buffy and Angel’s final conversation, cookie dough speech, Buffy vs Caleb) and moments that I genuinely dislike (Anya’s death, any girl getting to be a slayer).

As much as I love The Gift, I don’t know if I like the idea of Buffy’s story ending in such a tragic way, especially when she spent her last days enduring serious amounts of trauma to the point that death is a release for her. It’s very poignant, but extremely sad and kind of makes the show a retroactively depressing experience.

It’s kind of the reason I cannot rewatch Angel.

Edited by deuteragonist on Aug 4th 2020 at 9:36:23 AM

Except for Season 6, every season finale was designed to work as a potential season finale (since they wouldn't find out whether they'd be renewed for next season until after writing it). Imagine how extra heatbreaking the end of "Becoming" would be if that was the series finale.

As far as I know, season three was already confirmed when becoming was being filmed.

The Season 3 finale and, ironically, the Season 6 finale would have made for decent endings if the show never got renewed.

I could accept the tragedy of The Gift because a long life expectancy was never part of the Slayer package, which the show goes out of its way to point out multiple times. In fact, Buffy had at that point already outlived most Slayers; it's implied that the Watcher tradition to take a Slayer's powers and make her fight a vampire on her 18th birthday is meant to get her killed so they can start over fresh with a new Slayer and not let her become self-dependent the way Buffy does.

Buffy was doomed to a short, violent life from the moment she inherited the Slayer's power. If anything, I thought it was actually kind of beautiful that she got to go out on her own terms. Buffy got to die rather than be killed like other Slayers.

I don't dislike that Buffy came back for her own story, but I do kinda wish she'd stayed dead and the show had continued without her. The rest of the protagonists inheriting Buffy's responsibilities was an interesting dynamic at the start of season six, and I'd have been down for that status quo moving forward.

Spike especially. Spike is a character with a very complicated and tumultuous history in the show, with the latter seasons offering some major high points and severe low points due to the extremely schizophrenic stalker/romance arc.

My all-time favorite Spike moment is from the season six premiere, before Buffy's resurrection. In the wake of the biker demon attack, Spike goes out of his way to protect Dawn. He's sort of inherited Dawn from Buffy because someone has to take care of her, and we see him openly lamenting that he can't engage in the carnage before settling his priorities and deciding to stick with her.

Spike wants to be out there causing destruction and mayhem. The chip isn't stopping him. It only activates if he tries to attack people. Nothing prevents him from smashing mailboxes, throwing bricks through windows, etc. He could totally get in on this if he chose to do so. But he has to think about Dawn first. This is a parent moment, where Spike's capacity for love (dripping romantic that he's been since we met him) overpowers his compulsion for evil.

More of this Spike would have been to the benefit of the series going forward. But then Buffy came back and things just got really weird.

This is an interesting perspective. Killing off the hero and replacing them with a new Legacy Character or continuing without them can be extremely hard to do, but I've seen it done well. Miles Morales is one of my favorite characters of all time, partly for this reason.

But it's hard to have Buffy The Vampire Slayer without...Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Not just because the show is about her but because a lot of the legacy of the show is defined by how groundbreaking a character Buffy was for her time. Also, there would have to be a completely new slayer and that would have changed things altogether.

I do sort of agree about Spike, but that does kind of contribute to the age-old confusion of Spike's morality pre-soul redemption. His devotion to Dawn makes sense, but because of the type of creepy vampire he is...I would be afraid that he would eventually fall in love with Dawn in place of Buffy.

Edited by deuteragonist on Aug 4th 2020 at 12:06:07 PM

That's one thing that bothers me about tv, actually. You are limited by the medium in certain regards. What you suggest sounds interesting but it would never have worked back then. (That is, if the execs had agreed to it in the first place)

That is true but it sad. You cannot just replace an established character with another character especially in a franchise like Buffy. I always wondered about Spike? What would have happened if he somehow removed the chip?

I think The Gift would have been much weaker as a series finale because we get to see the grief but we get no resolution on the rest of the characters. It's just a blunt "Well, she's dead now." The Season Six premiere demonstrates the exact problem with the finale, Buffy died to solve an immediate problem but did nothing to curtail underlying issues with the setting. With her gone Sunnydale becomes worst in the aftermath, which makes it an Inferred Holocaust if it ended early. If she died in Chosen destroying the Hellmouth, even if they didn't break the Slayer lineage into The Chosen Many, that would have been something that gives closure on the setting and characters, letting everyone move on.

We see what would have happened in the episode where it's revealed that the chip no longer stops him from hurting Buffy (because reasons). And the answer is he immediately reverts to an amoral monster utterly devoid of positive qualities because a soulless demon is incapable of good he remains a virtuous and noble cinnamon roll who looks damn fine in those leather pants it's complicated.

As soon as Spike realizes he can hurt people again (or, at least, mistakenly believes that to be the case), he goes right out and tries to devour a hapless victim.

And then has to spend like several minutes going back and forth with himself, talking himself up to doing this. He has malevolence anxiety and has a hard time convincing himself that he does actually want to go through with this.

But then he does ultimately decide to do it. It's kind of an interesting scene in that it demonstrates that Spike is actually capable of making a moral choice rather than merely compelled to it by his wicked soulless nature, while still having Spike make the choice to be the monster.

Shit like this is why I've always been fond of Spike as a character. We're told right off the bat that vampires are Always Chaotic Evil because they're soulless demons inhabiting the bodies of dead humans. Since the moment he and his lover's devotion to Drusilla walked in the door back in season two, Spike's always been this kind of weird phenomenon in that dynamic.

The series in general struggled with the Always Chaotic Evil vampire dynamic. Angel tells us that demons and vampires are incapable of love because love is a human emotion, but there's Spike and Dru. And even setting them aside, Angel's show gave us a pair of vampires so deeply in love with each other that one of them committed suicide to try and avenge the other's death. And that's really hard to explain from an "Always Chaotic Evil incapable of genuine love" perspective.

Spike brings a bit of nuance to "Vampires are incapable of love" by asserting that vampires are capable of selfish love. And that's what his feelings for Buffy are. He stalks her. Creeps on her. Breaks into her house to sniff her clothes. Spike doesn't love Buffy. Spike desires Buffy.

But outside of Buffy it once again gets weird. Because Spike does have healthy relationships with the people around Buffy that he doesn't want to fuck. He genuinely enjoys spending time with Joyce's mother, so much so that he attempts to leave an anonymous bouquet of flowers for her when she passes. The show goes out of its way to inform us that Spike wasn't trying to win Buffy Cred and was simply mourning Joyce.

Similarly, he seems genuinely affectionate towards Dawn. Spike has a very protective relationship with Dawn; he is, at one point, literally willing to die for her which is again very hard to explain from an "Always Chaotic Evil incapable of genuine love" standpoint. It could perhaps be written off as Spike just wanting to score those Buffy Affection Points, but then we see him months after Buffy's body is cold and in the ground, still protecting Dawn (making the choice against his own demonic nature, no less).

Spike. Is. Interesting. Because Spike is Evil.

But he is capable of not being Evil, in stark defiance of what we're told again and again about vampires. He can make the choice to not be Evil.

But unless it endangers someone he cares about, he'll choose Evil. We are told that vampires are compelled to Evil. But Spike is Evil because he genuinely wants to be Evil.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Aug 4th 2020 at 5:09:00 AM

Another layer revealed in Angel is that human blood is like a potent drug to Vampires. When Angel gets his blood spiked after being on pigs blood for a couple of years, within seconds he is irritable and throwing things; when he is swilling it earlier, he goes berserk and becomes a danger to everyone around him, in spite of his soul. Later on, Harmony demonstrates a similar reaction. Vampires have no conscience, generally poor impulse control, and are constantly cycling between crashing and getting a fix when they murder someone. Pretty easy to see how that could screw up even a blank slate, let alone individuals who seem to spring out of the coffin as selfish, starving sadists with little or no empathy.

Edited by ViperMagnum357 on Aug 4th 2020 at 9:00:09 AM

The sense I got is that vampires are capable of caring about individual people, it's the abstract idea of people they have no compassion for. If a vampire gets to know someone, develops a relationship with them, they can come to want what's best for them, but it never occurs to them that anyone else might deserve the same empathy.

Vampires seem to run on a sort of reverse conscience. While humans feel good about themselves if they think they're doing the right thing, vampires feel good about themselves when they're doing the wrong thing; being evil is a source of pride, and being good a source of shame. In that dynamic, loving your friends or family is a morally neutral motivation; just as some humans will do evil things to protect the people they love, some vampires will do good things to protect the people they love. The Judge established that Angelus, being completely devoid of love or any other human passions, was unusual even among vampires.