Buffy The Vampire Slayer - S06x18|♡Uncut Reaction &Review♡
Entropy
Anya, secretly a demon again, attempts to get vengeance on Xander but fails. She finds comfort by sleeping with Spike, but the Geek Trio's cameras reveal the tryst to the gang. Meanwhile, Willow and Tara arrange a coffee date.
Link to the reaction:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/5ukavv693aoa5e0/Buffy%206x18.mp4?dl=0
Comments (21)
I love your reactions (in fact, as I said, your reaction to the previous episode was one of my favorite things ever), but I am puzzled over this one, and over a couple of things you said in the last one, all about one thing, your apparent belief that Xander shouldn’t be forgiven for leaving Anya at the altar. Is that the greatest sin ever? Buffy tries to kill her friends (under the influence of a demon who gave her an alternate vision of reality) and she should be forgiven. Willow rapes Tara’s mind (and, as far as we know, multiple times) and she should be forgiven. Why not Xander? I know the metaphor stands for a problem he’s had for awhile, but, as happens in real life (the demon standing for the violence of his parents, and all his family – something, earlier, in “Restless”, and other places, for which you had sympathy for him), he experienced a form of PTSD when the demon showed him the reality of what his life *could* become. Seeing his parents (it would have been better if they had eloped!) – it was a violence that he couldn’t have predicted. Buffy understands the principle of the show (and our own universe): XANDER: I screwed up real bad. BUFFY: Hey. We all screw up. Why is Xander, alone, not to be forgiven? When Xander is flailing, trying to express that he’d still like to be with Anya, you ask, “Is this normal, I don’t think it is.” No, it is not. Forgiveness is not normal. Normally, we escalate our grievances and things get worse and worse. I doubt you really want that with Xander and Anya, but it *seems* that way. I don’t think it was normal for Tara to forgive Willow, or for them all to forgive Buffy, or for Buffy to forgive Giles, back in “Helpless”. I think the list could go on and on. Why do you think Anya is funny when she is literally trying to torture Xander (“I wish you had tentacles where your beady eyes should be! I wish your intestines were tied in knots and ripped apart inside your lousy gut”). Don’t get me wrong. Anya is funny. Her attempt at cursing him are some of the funniest segments of the series. But why don’t you think Xander should be given any kind of break? You say that Xander “expects” her to get back together with him but he never says any such thing. He asks her, he doesn’t expect. He wants to “pretend everything is normal”: no indication, whatsoever, of that. If room is not given for a resolution, then everything stays the same or gets worse. It is evident that both Xander and Anya still have feelings for one another, just that Xander cannot face getting married. He does nothing wrong (at this point – he does later, at episode’s end) in trying both to apologize and say he’d still like to try to work it out. (Nope, not normal. Normality has always been overrated. And it would be a pretty damn boring show, if things were normal.) You say that no one sympathized with Anya, until Spike. The others weren’t on “Xander’s side”. Nothing any of them said indicated that. Anya was asking them to curse Xander! There was no room given for sympathy. And I think they have all, mostly, come to believe in forgiveness, but, as always, in real life, it is hard to hold to that belief. When you said “poor thing” that Anya had been scorned before, by a man (in the last 1000 years!), I’m assuming you’ve forgotten Olaf and that that was why she became a vengeance demon. Xander did wrong at the end. Nobody can doubt that. Buffy hid her thing with Spike for so long (and Buffy doesn’t stand up for Spike when Xander calls him an evil thing) – and Anya has tried to curse Xander most of the episode – so, until next episode, Spike is the only one who didn’t do anything wrong. Xander was scapegoating Spike at the end of this episode. Hell, it’s something they’ve all done for years. You asked if he forgot that Anya was an evil, soulless demon for 1000 years, but she no longer is. Spike is without a soul. Buffy is the only one (besides Dawn) who has made any strides toward seeing that that doesn’t mean Spike is pure evil, and that recognition seems to flicker off and on in her. This is the mythology of the show (the soul thing) and like all mythology it should be demythologized, but that is never easy. We create mythologies in order to live with our own wrongdoing. I’m sorry, as I’ve said many times, I love your reactions, but this (which was a large part of this one) just makes no sense.
I'm intrigued by your thought that vengeance demons are soulless. I don't recall the show ever expressly stating one way or the other and I always just assumed that they do have souls. I wonder if anyone knows if this is a question that's been answer or not. I will say that I think what may have led me to believe that they have souls is that who Anya is as a "person" doesn't seem to fundamentally change when she loses/gains her demon aspect in the same way that Angel/Angelus, Spike/William, or any other vampire does. In any event, if they are soulless then Anya is again.
I mean, Liam/Angel, Harmony, Darla - their core identities are all pretty contiguous. Angel has no concept of being somewhere else when his body doesn't have a soul - the way Buffy recalls being in heaven. There's disorientation at the moment of restoration, but other than that, the memories and consciousness for vampires is entirely tied to their body; and they have a singular sense of self that spans seamlessly from humanity to vampire - as Dru demonstrates, carrying her psychological trauma with her as a vampire, Liam/Angel's daddy issues. Harmony continues to be Harmony after she's turned. Darla runs the gamut of human to vampire to human to vampire again, and she's just Darla the whole time. There's no "other," there's no demon consciousness (just as Doyle was just Doyle). The show makes the suggestion early on that vampirism is like some sort of form of possession, but then refutes that again and again over the course of both shows. "I've Got You Under My Skin," shows that humans can be alive without a soul, and that they're as bad if not worse than some of the worst demons; making the Ehtros that tried to posses the *kid* terrified and long for death. The soul, by all rights, acts more like the Super-Ego, reconciling behavior with conceptions of applied morality. Without it vampires largely act on impulse and the pain-pleasure principal. The soul doesn't create or instill a different personality or supply memories.
As for the rest of the season, here we go...
Y'all...
I have wondered whether or not Anya had a soul when she was originally a vengeance demon; because just being a demon doesn't mean you don't have a soul. It would certainly make everything she did as a vengeance demon worse, but then it also raises the question, if she didn't have a soul, does that necessarily mean she got it back when her power center was destroyed; and does she not have a soul again now?
I have a fan theory - or fanfiction - where we actually see Xander and Anya get married, the demon doesn't attack Xander and they're actually doing pretty well - until Anya gets sick. The doctors don't know what's happening, but it's like every organ in her body is failing simultaneously. The Scoobies explore every reason or solution, but they've got no answers. Xander's final resort is calling up D'Hoffryn. Xander figures if vengeance demons have the power to bend reality to their will, they can help Anya. D'Hoffryn tells Xander that he knows exactly what's happening to Anya. When she came to grant Cordelia's wish 3 years ago, she assumed the guise of a rich socialite teen, someone very much modeled after Cordelia herself, in an effort to appeal to Cordelia's own vanity. Anyanka even "borrowed" some of the Chase wealth from across time and space to help her sell the part more. When she lost her powers, the money stayed with her (which she talked about running out of in season 5) and is also why the Chases lost everything. But more importantly, when she lost her powers Anya was stuck in that persona - but, D'Hoffryn tells Xander - it was never designed to be a permanent body. It was a borrowed form, after all. One that was, again, modeled after Cordelia and her passions in life; which at that time boiled down Xander and money. And sarcasm. So much sarcasm. Little by little though, this form, which was just a shell, was deteriorating. There were signs, like the fact that she had a car in season 3 and fully knew how to drive, but in season 5 said she was only just driving for the first time. Her core Cordelia-like personality traits also started becoming more condenses and caricaturized. Xander understands. He's heartbroken, but he's also resolute. He insist he knows that D'Hoffryn has the power to save her. "You know my price?" D'Hoffryn asks. "I think I have an idea," Xander says. "Well then, all you have to do is say the magic words." "... I wish..." And just like that, Anya lives, but at a price.
So, I really don't like Xander. He's a tool. Even when he makes a valid point about something, it's usually in the most assholish way possible. That said, one of the major issues I have with "Hells Bells" is the divided reasoning for the wedding not to happening. On the one hand you have Xander walking out because he got cold feet; which is really what they're running with and playing up in the aftermath, especially in this episode. But then on the flip side of that, we have a demon having Xander *experience* the worst possible future, from the firsthand perspective, that plays on all his insecurities; AND culminates in him swinging a frying pan at Anya's head, which would at the very least seriously harm her, if not presumably killing her. It wasn't just having doubts or fears about the future, he lived out those fears, he felt the weight of the frying pan in his hand and the rage building in his body to the point that he released it all and physically aimed it at Anya, the woman he loves, brutally assaulting her. Knowing that it wasn't real doesn't magically take away an experience that was probably more real than any dream - it would probably be as close to reality as you can get without it being real; possibly on par with what Buffy experienced in Normal Again. Something like that would be incredibly traumatizing for any one of us - I would hope. But even though you find out it didn't happen, that it wasn't real, that's arguably the sort of experience that's going to stay with you for a while; especially if it's playing on existing insecurities and fears. You're not going to be okay right after something like that, maybe not even for a while after that. And I do think, regardless of however else Xander felt about getting married in general, it wasn't okay to expect him to just shrug it off and proceed with the wedding as if nothing happened. He was emotionally abused by this demon and was not okay. But the frustrating thing is, they do that and then they basically pretend it didn't happen; and act like he just got nervous and had second thoughts. Like, why even bother including it? On a semi-related note though, I think there's also a disparity in how we perceive Xander's actions and his and Anya's relationship, by virtue of how old the actors are by this point in the series; and how old they were supposed to be. Xander would have been 20, maybe 21 in Hells Bells; whereas Nicky Brendon was 30, and *looked* 30. While there are some people who are mature enough to get married at 21, and people who are in their 30s are who complete fuck-ups, I do think it skews our general perception of the characters and the stage of life they're in now. Basically, picture season 1 Xander, then shave off another 5 years, and THAT's the guy putting on the tux or deciding he's not ready to get married... 🤷♂️ Still hate the guy, for which this episodes gives at least a few reasons.
Be patient
What's the watch order from here? Is it back to Angel or continuing Buffy? I'm really hoping for a run out of Buffy. Buckle up it's a wild ride!
The watch order has the final four episodes of Angel S4 next and then the final four of Buffy S6 followed by the first 3 of Buffy S7.
Can't wait for the next few episodes
Well here we go! The rest of the season is wild. I can’t wait for your reactions Sofie! x
Oh man, these final episodes of the season are insane, can't wait for your reactions!
Alison Krauss, That Kind of Love https://youtu.be/ZPATw2aNSfw
Thank you.
entropy : lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder 😬
The show in a nutshell.
Wow here we are
Very excited to see your feelings to this one!
Team Anya all the way!