“After Life,” by Jane Espenson
Biker demons are fleeing Sunnydale, and WillTara and XandAnya are rushing back to the Summers house to see if the newly resurrected Buffy is there. They’re worrying that she’s broken or dangerous. She sure didn’t seem like her old self after she clawed her way out of the ground and defeated the hellions for them.
They are headed the right way. Buffy is, in fact, home, having been brought there by Dawn. There’s a nice echo of the scene last year where the girls bring Joyce home before her tumor surgery—like Joyce then, Buffy now finds the light a bit too bright. Dawn’s freaking out but trying to hide it, tour guiding her sister through the slightly altered terrain of their home, and helping her clean up.
Spike, meanwhile, has been on a frantic search for Dawn that has led him right to their doorstep. He mistakes Buffy for the ‘bot for all of a second and then it hits him. Oh. He knows what’s wrong with Buffy’s hands, and sets to helping the girls. He’s very stunned, very sweet, and very kind. Now that they’ve both come back from the dead, they have a lot in common. There’s a connection that wasn’t there before.
It’s an important shift for Spuffy, but Spike—perhaps fortunately—doesn’t perceive it. And when the Scoobies come rushing in, full of questions and worry, he bails, making it only as far as his favorite stalking tree in the yard before he breaks down.
Buffy is in no shape to handle an onslaught of “OMG, Concern!” and “Hey, what was Hell like?” Dawn is obliged to run interference for her. I love that she’s doing this—it’s neat to see her being the grown-up in this scene.
By the time Buffy retreats to her room, Spike is furious with the Scoobs. He lays into Xander, declaring that Willow kept the resurrection plan from him because she knew it could go horribly wrong. He raises the ugly image of Willow having to dispose of a badly resurrected Buffy, and reminds us all that magic has consequences… that there will be a price for this.
Back in the house, WillTara are worrying and winding down. Willow is wishing Buffy would snap out of it and offer up some evidence that she’s okay, preferably with something along the lines of a thank you for the rescue. In time they go to sleep, and they’re accosted by a Buffy-shaped apparition. She’s deeply angry, throwing things, and accuses them of meddling with forces beyond their control. Across town, Xander’s on the phone hearing about this turn of events when Anya appears to hack into her own face with a butcher’s knife. Then she faints.
Clearly, something demonic is ahoof.
The four of them gather to debrief and plan. Buffy walks in on the meeting, and they tell her it’s okay, they’ve got it. Also, they’re so happy she’s back from Hell! Right, she thinks. That Hell thing again. She doesn’t offer enthusiastic agreement.
As everyone starts making a list of demons who could have hitched a transdimensional ride with Buffy, she, feeling the need for some space, heads out on patrol. By patrol she actually means it’s time to go whisper in a dead man’s ear—she makes her way to Spike’s crypt, where he essentially tells her he’s sorry he didn’t save her. The face-slicing demon, meanwhile, is hanging around in the Magic Box, checking out the cozy confines of Dawn’s head, snooping for intel and, when that gets dull, breathing fire on the gang.
The Scoobies put out the flames and eventually work out that they created the demon. Hey, there’s that price Spike was talking about! Their main option for getting rid of it is to give back Buffy.
Dawn flips out at the mere suggestion. Why shouldn’t she? Even if the others are secretly thinking that Resurrected Buffy isn’t quite as fun as Original Recipe, losing her again would be just too much to bear.
Plus, they already called Giles and told him to haul butt back to California. Nobody can imagine greeting him at the airport and saying “Um, there were parts missing so we shipped her back.”
Luckily, the refund policy on raising a dead friend has a time limit. Willow’s reading reveals that if they can keep the demon from killing Buffy for awhile . . . oops! They just told the demon, who’s camping within Xander now, that it needs to kill Buffy.
The demon zooms off to Chez Summers to see if it can do just that. It has only existed for a very short time, so it can be forgiven for not realizing how very much the odds are not in its favor. Even so, it has a good go at demoralizing Buffy by telling her she doesn’t belong in the real world anymore, that there’s no place for her. XandAnya and Dawn rush over to help with the fighting as WillTara buckle down to work on a spell to make the thing solid.
Once they do, she beheads it pretty handily.
So, hurrah! Right? As prices for a resurrection go, some lost sleep, a few scares, and another round of ‘clean the demon blood out of the bedroom carpet’ basically make for a steal of a deal.
Except, of course, we’re nowhere near the real price yet.
I wonder if S6 might not be, in a sense, the Year of the Decoy. “After Life” is meant to imply that the price of Buffy’s resurrection is this invented straw man of a ghostly monster. With it decapitated, we are invited to imagine that things will fall into their usual BtVS seasonal pattern. You know how it often goes: Buffy returns from wherever she’s been all summer, and then a bad guy comes to Sunnydale. The villain is temporarily backgrounded as the Scoobies develop and struggle with some more internal-to-them problem—like Faith, in S3, or their alienation from each other in S4.
Finally, there’s a renewed commitment within the group followed by a build-up to the big combat showdown.
There have been decoys aplenty on the show before: Spike and Drusilla appear to be the big bads in S2 for just long enough to hide the looming problem of Angelus, and in the following year Mr. Trick waltzes onstage to warm us up for meeting the Mayor. Even Glory is, in a sense, a bit of a decoy—the truly rotten apple in the S5 barrel is Ben, who sells out Dawn because he’s unable to resist the temptation to save himself.
I’m not saying that BtVS was locked in one predictable story arc. There were tons of variations and surprises. In S5, the team conflict is dialed down. After the big bonding that helped them defeat Adam, the Scoobies are all about finishing the process of incorporating Tara and Anya into the team—then expanding even further to include the far more problematic Spike and Dawn. But now in this sixth year, there’s all this sleight-of-hand meant to hide the fact that the world-ending evil of the season—the real threat—is truly homegrown.
But before that can happen, there are so many other days to be gotten through. Buffy starts hers by making lunch for Dawn, demonstrating her determination to return to the world of the normal for the sake of her loved ones. Especially the innocent loved one who didn’t yank her out of the afterlife.
In return, that innocent loved one tells her, without realizing it, what the Scoobies want from her. They want to see her being happy.
So Buffy immediately, dutifully, unenthusiastically goes to the Magic Box and delivers the validation and thank you that Willow in particular has been waiting for. She tells them she was in Hell (or a Hell) and that they pulled her out of there and she’s grateful.
She’s so lying.
She flees before they can question her sincerity or her facts, and finds Spike lurking outside. He heard the whole thing. He asks if there’s anything he can do to help her. Sometimes Spike is geniunely awesome. He would make a great mom.
Buffy tells him the truth. She was in Heaven, or something like it, and her friends jerked her out.
Damn, Spike. What do you say to that?
Next: And plus, she’s broke.
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I always understood the desire to have Buffy back, for the group, but never logic that it was for anything other than selfish reasons, nor the thought (or lacktherof) by any of the 4 involved that she probably didn’t get sent to (a) hell for sacrificing herself to save the world.
Anya, the former demon of all people, should have offered up the argument that just maybe Buffy is in a BETTER place, not a worse one.
I can understand the belief. Regardless of whether Buffy deserved to be rewarded with a happy afterlife, the fact is, she died jumping into a doorway that led to a hell dimension, so I can forgive them for believing that’s where she was.
What gets me is Willow’s expectations of gratitude.
Anyone else thinks it looks like Xander is smelling Buffy’s hair in that hugging photo.
But to move onto the real thing. It seems like all they want her to do is act “normal”. Errrmm Hello just returned from a hell demension here! It really feels like oh you just went through something but you’re the slayer so you should already be over it vibe.
(Not sure if we are avoiding any spoilers, or if this is strictly for re-watchers)
I always read this sequence of events (beginning S6) as the jump-start of Dark!Willow. I see it as a case of the more you use the dark stuff, the more you want it, while it slowly changes you. So, when willow tapped into the Osiris power, it sort of made her more selfish (expecting the gratitude, as you say Aeryl), and more proud (her confrontation w/ Giles in “Flooded”), and…well, we know where it goes from there.
I tend to agree that the act itself was mostly selfish. No, they didn’t know she was in a sort of heaven. But they also didn’t try too hard to find out. If they did, over the Summer, then it was never mentioned IIRC.
By the way, I’m a fairly new Buffy fan. And this is one of my favorite episodes because of Spike’s reaction and his scene w/ Buffy at her house.
@Aeryl – I don’t buy the belief thing, mostly because her body stayed in the same dimension as she fell through, landing on the ground below. It wasn’t physically and immediately transported to the hell dimension. And the series has shown pretty well up to this point that when people are sent to a hell dimension, it happens bodily and nothing is left behind to bury.
yes – the part where Buffy descends the stairs and Spike is there (and the little bit of “private talking time” they had together after)… I’ll not lie, I semi-regularly load up that episode and forward to that bit :-)
“Spike … look”
@5: I always figured they meant her soul was trapped after her death, not like how Fred was in Pylea.
@@.-@: No need to avoid spoilers. We’re all re-watchers here.
And I agree — my favorite moment in this episode is Spike’s reaction to seeing Buffy alive for the first time (once he realizes she’s not the Buffybot). Like a blind man who can see again. The best part is that it’s all in his eyes, the sheer depth of what he feels, soulessness be damned (um… no pun intended?).
And then how he treats her. Just perfect. He’s so quiet, like he understands how jarring the world must feel to her; how it’s too bright and loud and foreign. It breaks my heart a little every time when the Scoobies burst in and Spike flees. It’s great drama, of course, but a part of me would love to have seen that interaction play out in full. There’s a lot of Spike being bad in this season, but I was always more intrigued by Spike being good, however fleeting the moments might be.
I do love when he confronts Anya and Xander about his lack of involvement in Buffy’s ressurection. I think it’s ironic and yet very telling that Buffy’s souless stalker is more concerned for her genuine wellbeing than her loyal friends, who are too blindsided by grief and need to consider what Buffy might have wanted. It speaks to how little Spike is concerned with himself; how genuine his love is for Buffy that he would rather she stay dead than risk her coming back altered in anyway.
His obsession is still very clear, though. “Every night I saved you” is a touching speech, as is his continued devotion to the fight against evil and the Scoobies, but it’s all done out of his love for Buffy, which quite literally consumes him. He has nothing else, and although it’s changing him, and for the better… that’s not fair to Buffy in the end, to pin his entire world on her.
I also agree that Willow’s upset at not being thanked always blows me away… that she could be so into herself and her own power that she can’t see what’s going on with Buffy at all. Good foreshadowing, certainly. I understood the Scoobies reaction on the whole — their devoted to the fight against evil, but without the Slayer at their front, what can they possibly do? Some, but not much. They need her, not just as a friend, but as a leader, to continue the fight. With Faith AWOL/put away, there won’t be a new Slayer to rise to the occasion and head on down to Sunnydale (although that would’ve been a fun subplot — Watchers attempt to suss Faith out and kill her, to awaken a new Slayer… would certainly drive home the ideal that the Slayer is just a “tool” to them).
The world still needs Buffy around to save it, even though it isn’t fair to her at all.
Kiz, I get the “act normal” thing. It’s very hard not to put pressure on loved ones who are down (she said, oversimplifying greatly) to perk up.
What seems manifestly true is the Scoobies probably had the resources to find out if Buffy was in a hell-dimension before resurrecting her. That had to be a less complicated spell. But there’s no good story in, “Oh, she’s in Heaven, bully for her!”
This season (up through “Normal Again”) is a great illustration of one person battling depression (Going through the motions, indeed) and how it affects those around them. Especially those loved-ones not understanding what’s going on inside them.
@9 – re. the Scoobies reactions and the story implications. Remember that Willow has been looking for the quick fix to her emotional issues since Oz left (or before? not sure). So, even if Buffy was in a good place, I am not sure Willow would want to hear it. She just could not deal with her emotions in a healthy way. And IIRC, some of the Scoobies were having second thoughts in S6E1 but Willow bsically railroaded them. IMO this event was well set up character-wise.