“Spiral,” by Steven S. DeKnight
“Spiral” is one of those episodes that starts right where its predecessor left off. Dawn’s secret has been exposed, and so Buffy scoops her up and runs like a terrified antelope. It shouldn’t work, but Willow slows Glory briefly. Then, after running at super-blurry cheetah speed to catch up with them, she foolishly pauses for the traditional pre-victory exchange of taunts… in the middle of a busy road.
This turns out badly for Glory when a big truck smashes right into her, and very well indeed for Buffy when the impact then causes Ben to take over custody of the shared BenGlorious bod. It’s nice for us because we get Ben in a dress again. There are worse things, though it’s not a fabulous dress.
As you’ve all pointed out, Buffy needed to take off for Europe with the Dawnster ages ago. Or at least five minutes after Joyce’s funeral ended. This is only just occurring to her now, as she and the others debrief at Xander’s.
Giles attempts to look on the sunny side: “You’re safe for the moment!”
To this, Buffy’s all: “Um, no.” She points out the obvious—Glory has kicked her can every time they’ve clashed.
Anya, endearingly, suggests they drop pianos on Glory, Bugs Bunny style. But Buffy’s idea is they should continue with the overall flee like the wind theme. Anya likes that even better.
Back at the Condo of Unspeakable Evil, Ben is now chit-chatting with a female member of the Scabby Gang. She’s complaining about having to wash the eighteen wheeler out of Glory’s dress, not-so-subtly asking about the Key and taking time out to find Ben hot. I was momentarily annoyed—of course the minute they need someone to sew, there’s a Scabby Girl—but I did laugh when she was perving on the poor doomed boy.
There is an answer to Ben’s problems, and it’s to kill Dawn before he gets cast aside like a husk. Babe Scab asks if he has the will to kill the Key.
So, does he? It’s not like he’s going to get an opportunity, is it? Self-pity is definitely a better option. While Ben’s pondering that, the gang throws a few weapons together and Spike picks them up in a sun-screened campervan.
As if coping with a sudden onset road trip and the reintroduction of Spike into the inner circle isn’t enough for the Scoobies to deal with, we are now obliged to remember that there are old-school warriors in the mix as well. Two badly disguised Knights of Byzantium are back at the hospital, liberating their brain-sucked buddy Orlando. Orlando knows Dawn’s identity, remember, and he happily spills the truth. “Pretty little shiny girl!”
And just like that, many many extras in medieval garb are grimly marching on Sunnydale like it’s the second march against Saracen. They’re carrying pikes and arrows and riding horses!! I know I already made fun of the Knights of Byzantium. But really, horses?
It turns out that I couldn’t get past that, and it also turns out this was fantastic.
My enjoyment of media isn’t always dependent on whether it’s good. There’s a huge degree to which my expectations figure into the equation. I know I’m not alone in this. When I watch something like Merlin, a show whose average episode makes about as much sense as a national election, I go in dialed low. There will be attractive people in revealing clothes, I tell myself. Tony Head will chew scenery! Merlin will hide his magical abilities, the villains will always turn out to be an easy day’s ride downhill from the castle… and the dragon will look for chances to be pretentious and unhelpful.
Somehow, it’s pretty easy to have fun.
I come to BtVS, on the other hand, with my narrative filter set for “The Zeppo” and “Graduation Day.” This does not serve me well when I’m watching “Go Fish.”
But when I saw the Knights who Say Key ride/marching on Sunnydale, this time, it was so dumbly, darkly hilarious that my mental switch snapped itself down to Merlin levels… and I have to tell you, if you aren’t looking for sense or characterization or the wit that characterizes so many BtVS episodes, watching a bunch of horse-riding guys from the Middle Ages run down a campervan, with straight faces no less, is deeply wonderful.
Xander is barfaliciously carsick! They have to frontload that the camper can’t move above the land speed of a golf cart, because otherwise it’s Step On It, Giles and the story is over. Instead, we get Buffy fighting the knights on the camper roof and it’s a decent fight sequence. Anya even fends off a knight with a frying pan! She wishes they’d taken that right turn at Albequerque. Yayyy!!
Then Giles gets it in the mid-section, just like Wash in Serenity. There’s a spear through the front window and he’s very badly hurt. The campervan crashes and the fun grinds to a halt.
The Scoobies evacuate and head to an abandoned gas station. Buffy’s trying to come up with another plan when the knights show up again. There are a lot of them. Boss Knight gets pretty close to Dawn before Willow puts up a barrier. She’s getting pretty handy with the locking people out spell.
I am seeing as I watch this how the year of facing down her Blindingly Scrumptious Luminescence robs Willow of any real chance of not becoming Dark Willow a year later. Yes, she makes her own choices—especially when she grabbed up the scary books looking for the immense power she deployed in last week’s revenge attempt. But we cannot deny that the team needs Super-Willow right now. A god isn’t someone a Slayer can defeat alone.
Willow had to power up.
One might even argue that Buffy’s true destiny, as a Slayer, is the unlocking of Willow’s enormous cache of magical yowza, and the revision to the code of the Slayerverse that they enact together in “Chosen.” One can easily imagine see a retelling of this story where Buffy is just the facilitator, the warrior/bodyguard who protects the developing sorcerer until she can mature and hack the Buffyverse’s Good/Evil protocols at their source.
Anyway, the trapped and imperilled Scoobies interrogate Boss Knight. He advocates destroying Dawn. “The link must be severed,” he says. “It is too dangerous be allowed to exist.”
Dawn hears all of this, of course. It’s great for her ego.
And speaking of self-esteem, over at the hospital, Orlando’s fellow brainsucked zombies decide if he can get out, they can get out.
Between bouts of bleeding and groaning, Giles gives Buffy snaps for placing her heart above all else. He tells her how proud he is and how wonderful she is. To save him, Xander and Buffy negotiate with the Knights, who agree to allow some medical assistance through their lines.
Sadly, Buffy then phones Ben, of all people, and asks him to come treat Giles. He decides a field trip would make for a lovely break from wondering if he can bring himself to kill Dawn . . . and shows up promptly.
After a marvellous Xander/Spike scene—of which there aren’t nearly enough—Boss Knight starts offering up information. He tells us about Glory being from a dimension of unspeakable torment. He reveals that a newborn male was created to be her prison on our world.
“Kill the man and the god dies.” This evens up one part of the situation—now Buffy has the chance to consider killing a (relative) innocent, too.
Dawn asks about herself. Why didn’t the monks destroy the Key? Boss Knight says they thought they could harness its power for the forces of light. This is pretty much why Nick Fury kept that shiny blue cube thing, isn’t it?
There’s one happy second where it appears Glory just wants to use Dawn to get back home. That sounds so very okay to Buffy until he adds that all the dimensional gates will open when she does so. But Jeez, guys. If they’d known six months ago maybe they could have chipped in for a nice safe bus ticket, or a chance to chat with Anya’s wish-granting former boss D’Hoffryn.
Too late now, I guess. Buffy promises Dawn she won’t let anything happen to her.
That’s not strictly true, though, is it? Ben changes into Glory and kills Boss Knight. (I was tired of him anyway, weren’t you?) She grabs Dawn and breaches Willow’s barrier, killing all those pesky Giles-stabbing soldiers. Then she runs off.
And Buffy totally collapses like a flan.
Next: Reinflating Slayers—not for the faint of heart!
A.M. Dellamonica has tons of fiction up here on Tor.com! Her ‘baby werewolf has two mommies,’ story, “The Cage,” made the Locus Recommended Reading List for 2010. There’s also “Among the Silvering Herd,” the first of a series of stories called The Gales. (Watch for the second Gale, too—“The Ugly Woman of Castello di Putti”!)
Or if you like, check out her sexy novelette, “Wild Things,” that ties into the world of her award winning novel Indigo Springs and its sequel, Blue Magic.
One can easily imagine see a retelling of this story where Buffy is
just the facilitator, the warrior/bodyguard who protects the developing
sorcerer until she can mature and hack the Buffyverse’s Good/Evil
protocols at their source.
So Buffy is Finaly Fantasy X? I’ll buy it.
Of course it’s not Willow powering up that’s the problem, it’s what she does with it, but that point begins to get obscured about the time Amy gets back(which is a brilliant bit, and if you’re looking you can see the groundwork for her S7 & 8 characterization being laid).
Just saw a rerun of How I Met Your Mother (“Slapsgiving II”) where Dark Willow guest starred. Classics never go out of style…
“Condo of Unspeakable Evil” – best thing I’ve read all week. Make that month. Possibly longer.
Knights – I’d always thought it’d have made more sense for their kit/armament if there was some reason when e.g. fighting Glory’s minions (if not Glory herself) swords and such worked better than modern firearms…
Spike – loved how he looked in those goggles (almost like a biplane aviator?). Also, one more example of him being actually more useful to the goals of the team than the “full members” of the team – he’s the one who’s immune to the “forgetting Ben = Glory” magic (I’m remembering also that time when Tara made everyone blind and Spike showed up and (arguably) saved Buffy when she couldn’t see the attackers in the training room).
Yet another example of “the difference between Buffy and other Slayers” – the others (including Doppelgangland-Buffy) were alone and didn’t last very long. Buffy has a team, and the broader the scope of the team (including “reformed”/reforming vamps – I count Angel too, many a time he saved/helped her too) the better it works?
Love Spike in the googles…like a demented WW I Flying Ace (thanks, Rahirah). Also, his oh-so-smug expression when Buffy tells the others in no uncertain terms that he’s staying.
The scene btwn Spike and Xander in the old gas station is made of win. They were a great team, when they forgot how much they hated each other. There weren’t nearly enough of these scenes, tho’ we’ll get a couple more (The Gift, Normal Again).
I, for one, hated the whole Willow’s addicted to magic thing. To me, that’s like saying someone’s addicted to electricity. It’s really Willow’s need to fix/control things that’s the problem. Blaming magic (or Spike, in Buffy’s case) as the writers seem to do, strikes me as a bit disingenuous at best.
@dianthus the need to fix/control things to me equates to the need to have power over everything which in a way magic does. Its a power you can feel all the way to your bones in the very air you breath. I could see how you could get addicted to magic i.e. that false feeling that you have control over the universe (life, death, people etc).
Overall i dont think they handled the addiction storyline very well but i could see what they tried to do.
I wish i could get to a headspace where i could laugh and enjoy the horse men but its just a facepalm everytime
@build6 – yes. The bigger the team got, the more evil-fighting power it had. Good leadership and strength in numbers FTW.
@Dianthus–the addiction schtick wasn’t my favorite either.
@huntece – I see your point, but to me, magic is a force, a tool (like Xander’s hammer analogy, but with a different emphasis). It wasn’t so bad when it was just a metaphor, but then they made it literal.
Still, you use the tool, the tool doesn’t use you.
In addition to the scene btwn Spike and Xander, there’s also the scene btwn Spike and Willow (he knows what it’s like to care for someone who’s not all there) and btwn him and Dawn.
Dawn: keep the pressure on.
Spike: always do, Sweet Bit.
My enjoyment of media isn’t always dependent on whether it’s good. There’s a huge degree to which my expectations figure into the equation. I know I’m not alone in this. When I watch something like Merlin, a show whose average episode makes about as much sense as a national election, I go in dialed low. There will be attractive people in revealing clothes, I tell myself. Tony Head will chew scenery! Merlin will hide his magical abilities, the villains will always turn out to be an easy day’s ride downhill from the castle… and the dragon will look for chances to be pretentious and unhelpful.
Somehow, it’s pretty easy to have fun.
This is how I try to go into every movie and tv show, and it helps my enjoyment level tremendously! (random side note is that one thing that I’ve never understood is why people who seem to not even enjoy a tv show bother to review it. I mean, sure, you watch a few episodes of a show and then you decide it’s awful, can’t you just ask for a different show to review or something?)
Meanwhile, back in the camper. It’s funny; I’ve seen all of BtVS (and most episodes two or three or seven times), but I’ve only seen this segment – the part leading up to the grand, “She saved the world a lot” finale – once. It makes it extra special to read this part of the rewatch because there are so many little tidbits that come flooding back as I read through.
And the idea of a Willow – Sorceress of Sunnydale tv show sounds awesome. Somebody get on that!
Willow Episode 3: Attack of the Smoochies-by-Proxy?
But the Big Bad is always Cordelia…
Despite its zaniness, this episode has some serious laugh-out-loud moments. Gile’s dead serious “what’s he doing here?” when he sees a fantastic, goggle-bedecked Spike and Spike’s response: Just out for a a jaunt, thought I’d swing by and say howdy, and the smug smug look Spike gives him and Xander when Buffy insists he’s staying. Anya’s fruitless attempts to bring cheer to the situation by acting like they’re on a family roadtrip — shouldn’t someone be saying “are we there yet?” and her insistence that snacks will be the solution to all of their problems. Also, her moment with the frying pan. “It’s not a piano, but it’ll do!”. Willow’s urgent “don’t hit the horsies!” when their under attack and Buffy reassuring her they won’t, only to whisper in Gile’s ear: aim for the horsies.
Buffy gets serious props, by the way, for fending off that entire unit of men more or less by herself on the top of a moving van. No matter how kooky the content of this episode, that’s pretty epic and you gotta admire her fighting spirit. She may be on the run because she knows she’s beat, but that doesn’t mean she won’t dive into a seemingly hopeless situation to save the day, no matter the outcome.
Major love for Spike this episode. Yes, he’s chock full o’snark, but he has so many little gentlemanly moments sprinkled throughout. Offering to drive them, for starters, being understanding when Tara musses with the blinds and he’s burned by the sun: “It’s okay… see? Skin’s already stopped smoking.” Grabbing the guy’s sword and holding onto it long enough to give Buffy the advantage. Letting Dawn wrap up his wounded hands and calling her “Sweet Bit”. Taking on the General once they’re in the gas station even though his chip fires (and just generally throwing himself into the fray despite his wounds).
Even Xander can’t fully hate on him this week. If anything, there’s this weird sort of comraderie there. They both share a certain unrequited love for Buffy and now they’re in this seemingly doomed situation because of it. It almost feels like they’re both acknowledging that, even though it’s all in subtext.
Also, the moment between Buffy and Giles is seriously touching.
Plot-wise, this episode is a bit overblown, but it’s full of so many great character moments that I’m willing to forgive the plot. Ultimately, I love Buffy for the characters.
Quick check-in on the Buffy re-watch from Billyburg, VA:
It took me a long to time to get there, but get there I did about the fourth re-watch, maybe. :)
Second-to-last-day in VA — then off to the Carolinas.
Virginia — it smells so good!
Love, C.
@10. The characters really are key here, aren’t they? Even if you can’t relate to Buffy (tho’ I do somewhat), there’s someone else, Xander, Willow, or maybe even Spike, who speaks to you – or for you. I’ve gotta give huge props to the actors here. Even when the writing was uneven, the cast really sold it.
Yes, the cast keeps me coming back for more, no matter how ridiculous/grim/cheesy/convoluted things might get.
Also, @Alyx: The line “Dawn hears all of this, of course. It’s great for her ego.” gave me a big laugh.
there’s a kickstarter project with Amber Benson and Neil Gaiman in a vampire movie –
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2126085206/blood-kiss
@14. Neat. I contributed to the Veronica Mars movie campaign. I’m really looking forward to it.
I saw Benson’s indie film Chance. It had it’s moments, but I had a hard time buying JM as the lovable loser type. Lovable? Yes. Loser? Nuh-uh. There was even an (inadvertant?) homage to Intervention with two characters stretched out on the floor wrapped in a quilt/blanket.Benson and Marsters both go drag in the movie, so yes, you get JM in a dress. Andy Hallet was in it too. He left us too soon.
As I said awhile back, the solution to the Glory problem is both easy and obvious–leave town, go far away, and stay out of her reach, moving around constantly, until the clock runs out on her. Considering that Glory can’t even find them for months in ONE SMALL TOWN, when she knows that’s where the Key is, she certainly couldn’t find them in time if they fled to Canada or Mexico or France, and she had no idea where they’d gone. Hey, why couldn’t Buffy and Dawn go hide with the Council in England? You wouldn’t think the Council would want the world to come to an end either, and they know that Glory is a god and what she’s trying to do and what the consequences are if she succeeds, so it’s not as if they don’t have everything to lose too; you’d think they’d want to help. Buffy finally realizes that she should skip town, but she’s left it too late, just as Glory left it too late to make a serious attempt to find the Key, even though she’s known that Buffy was the Slayer and even where she lives for weeks.
None of this makes a lot of sense, but I enjoyed Glory enough as a Big Bad, far more than I enjoyed Adam, that I was willing to wink at it.
The Knights struck me as silly from the beginning right to the end, and I was glad to see them go. There’s no reason why they should be wearing cheesy-looking armor instead of modern dress and be trying to fight a god with swords and spears. The horsie chase down the highway is just as silly, as if even a camper van couldn’t outrun horses over a straightaway; they’re only there to provide a reason why Buffy and crew can’t successfully get out of town and hide, and to give Buffy somebody to pummel.
Spike had some fine interactions with practically everybody this episode, especially, as has been pointed out, with Xander.
@16. To add to the fun, since it’s blood that opens the portal, isn’t it convenient that the Monks made the Key into a person who can bleed?
Genius? Not exactly, but it still beats s7.
hrm, I’d interpreted it as “it’s *because* the Key is in the form of a human, that it’s the human’s blood that opens the portal”
in any case I’m prepared to accept it as “the requirements of the story and not quite too stupid to accept”. I just watched the new Star Trek and there were some bits in it I have more problems accepting (since it’s supposed to be *science* fiction).
@16, International travel on the spur of the moment is prohibitively expensive, sure they had Joyce’s insurance money, but she’s also got CPS on her back, she can’t just jet off with Dawn, in the middle of a school year, and not face problems for it. She was probably, pointedly advised that leaving town could jeopardize her custody.
Also, Buffy has more of a calling than just “protect Dawn”, it is her duty to protect everyone on the Hellmouth, this whole time Glory’s NOT finding them, she’s killing vampires and run of the mill demons whose exploits aren’t exciting enough for the show anymore.
She can’t just leave.
Also, @18 build, I agree with you on that. If the Key had been given different form, it would have opened differently. When she was still all glowy and green, it probably had to placed in the spot her blood accumulated.
JW was already thinking of Firefly, billed as a western in space. But that concept tended to be disappeared more and more quickly, very quickly. Maybe this was a dress rehearsal for what became the first ep., the train robbery — of which overtly western homage sort of thing we never saw again.
Which is why the only tolerable way to watch these stoopid knights in this Buffy season is to laugh all the way through.
Love, C.
Virginia — still smellin’ good — the air that is.
@19–If so, then Buffy needed to prioritize. Killing vampires on the Hellmouth might be her job, but certainly keeping everyone in the world from being destroyed, by keeping the Key away from Glory, would take precedent. Regretable that people might be killed by vampires while she was gone, even tragic, but better that than EVERYBODY in the world being killed, something she was in a position to prevent. Even if the Council didn’t fund her to come hide with them, which I still think would have been sensible, international travel isn’t THAT expensive; surely Giles, who is shuttling back and forth to England all the time, could have lent them the money. For that matter, it’s not that expensive to take a Grayhound bus to Maine, which would have also done the trick. For that matter, from Southern California, you can drive deep into Mexico in a few hours.
Everybody in the world dying also trumps the threat of losing custody of Dawn. If Dawn dies, along with everybody else, then it hardly matters whether Buffy has custody of her or not.
@23. Back then you didn’t even need your passport to cross the border into Mexico. I’m with you on this one, for what it’s worth. Save the world first, then worry about the fallout.
I’m gonna agree with Aeryl here in that “Buffy can’t just leave” (and not just because she’s agreeing with me too :-P)
If you run, who and what do you take? For most of the season they know Glory doesn’t know what the Key is. “It could be anything”. Glory wasn’t quite prepared to toss through every last item in their home (the rug? the chair? floorboards?). If they’d made a run for it right off, unless you’re betting that by running, Glory would *never* be able to find them, they’re actually narrowing things down for Glory. If Buffy is gonna run, is she supposed to leave Dawn behind? If while they’re on the run, Glory catches them together – what happens? “If you won’t talk, I’ll start ripping your little sister’s arms off” – what can Buffy do then?
For most of the season Glory is very much of an unknown – yes we know she’s powerful, in that Buffy outright loses to her in fights. But I think our “hindsight” is being coloured by our knowing the outcome. At the end of Checkpoint, we know Glory’s a God, but we don’t know she’s completely without weaknesses etc. And it’s not like Buffy has ever met a foe that *couldn’t* be defeated before. Why admit defeat right off? That’s not very Buffy is it.
also, Glory leaving things till very late to amp up the search for her key isn’t all that unfathomable – plenty of college students leave working on their determinative-of-their-future term papers till the very last night…
But part of this show HAS always been how mundane things get in the way of Buffy doing her job, like Joyce not wanting her to go out on a school night when she has to duel her exboyfriend to the death. And that shit has consequences, a fact Buffy is very aware of. I can completely believe that she would hold off going on the run until she had to, because of the mundane concerns surrounding her life.
And don’t forget, Whedon intelligently sent the one other person, who might have been able to help her during this, to another dimension at this time, so he and his crew are unavailable. It’s never shown, but I can completely imagine that her backup plan was always to run to LA and hideout at the hotel if it came down to it, but when she called Angel to tell him she’s coming, there was no answer.
In spite of these ingenious arguments, I still think Buffy’s best option would be to get out of town, especially since Glory is a villain with a clock running on her. Run the clock out, and you essentially defeat her. And if Glory can’t find the Key even in a town as small as Sunnydale, then clearly she doesn’t have any magic locating ability that tells her where the Key is. So if Buffy and Dawn break clean and go somewhere far away at random, and don’t tell anybody where they’re going, they ought to be safe from Glory tracking them down. Then all they have to do is wait. Far better than taking a chance with the end of the entire world if it turns out that Buffy CAN’T defeat Glory, which she has had several indications that she can not.
But if she breaks off with Dawn, that’s also letting her know EXACTLY who the Key is, and she can use magic to track the Key, and nearly successfully did.
I think the show did a good job of believably cutting off escape routes for Buffy. YMMV of course.
Once Glory knows the Key is in human form, it shouldn’t be hard to figure out who it is anyway–nor was it.
Other than finding out that Sunnydale was where the monks had sent the Key, I don’t see much indication that Glory could magically track its location. Certainly not with any kind of precision.
There was that horrible CGI snake.
@29 –
if Buffy ran, I think it would spur Glory into action – less time taking baths, more time moving at superspeed, likely with no oncoming trucks conveniently available. It shouldn’t be assumed that we’ve seen the full extent of Glory’s powers OR servants.
Running to Mexico – well they’d stick out like a sore thumb. I’d imagine they’d be more visible, not less. They’d be pretty noticeable as newcomers pretty much everywhere.
Running out the clock – it wasn’t until pretty late that they knew exactly *when* the clock ran out? It’s pretty hard to plan on homelessness/”life on the run”, it wasn’t even feasible until you knew the time frame.
And again, if you’re running it pretty much precludes trying to find a way to fight Glory, you’ve basically cast all your chips down on the “running away” gamble. Right up till the end I’m sure they were hoping to fight and defeat Glory in some direct way, as opposed to “winning on points” –
If you don’t beat Glory, BUT succeed in waiting her out and so “saving the world”, what happens next? You’ve got a pissed off God who’ll stop at NOTHING to take revenge (don’t forget this is what Giles did what he did to prevent). Buffy is still at risk, Dawn is still at risk. And Dawn being at risk, even if the rest of the world isn’t, is not an acceptable outcome for Buffy.
I don’t think it’s a given that Buffy taking off with Dawn would raise a red flag for Glory. Seems to me the Council really dropped the ball here. Not that they were ever all that useful. They show up to jerk Buffy around and then what?
Lydia probably would’ve stayed, had it been an option. Research, dontchaknow.
Geez. It’s so obvious, it’s staring us in the face…Buffybot. Get her back up to speed that much sooner (an easy fix, right?), deploy her as a decoy, Buffy and Dawn slip away quietly, Glory’s none the wiser.
There’s so much in the show that might’ve been different/better, if only the characters were more proactive:
* Nikki Woods got pregnant having unprotected, anonymous sex (per the comix).
* Jenny stays late at the school, alone and unprotected.
* Giles never puts up wards around his flat or The Magic Box.
* Giles never takes Willow in hand, re: magic use.
* No one thinks to dig up Buffy prior to the resurrection spell, forcing her to claw her way out of her own grave. Thus she is badly traumatized, leading to much badness.
Details really do matter sometimes!
Also, the ending of this episode is about as literal a Deus Ex Machina as one can get. They’re trapped in an abandoned gas station, surrounded on all sides by scores of knights who plan to kill them all, and how do they end up making it out? Glory the God literally busts outta the “machine” that’s trying to keep her in (Ben), and kills the entire legion with a wave of her hand, neatly dealing with the problem so Buffy can promptly collapse and provide fodder for the next episode’s plot.
@36. LOL! Brilliant.
Something I don’t see brought up about this episode. Buffy kills at least one human being. She throws an ax into one of their chests which almost certainly kills him. Later, the leutenient says they lost ten soldiers that day, some of which were likely in the trailer fight. I am all for defending oneself and family and friends, but Faith really did accidentally kill the mayor’s lackey and it was a huge deal. No one even stops to worry about the fact Buffy killed humans, no matter how misguided they were. Even if I killed someone with a knife to my child’s throat, I would have many a sleepless night, and I have no super powers giving me more responsibility.
Running from Glory as a long term plan was a no go for me. If she missed her window, she would have gone on a killing spree. Other than Buffy, Willow and the sphere, there would have been no hope whatsoever of stopping her carnage. The all you can eat buffet would have kept her going for years, and unless someone decided to kill Ben during a Glory lull, which would have been fewer and farther between, the body count would have been staggering, if not apocalyptic. You can’t tell me that a hell god would not have found a different way to destroy the world once she got bored. Buffy had to face her at some point no matter what.
While that’s true, I think it was a reasonable thing to try, given what she had on the line. Often in these things we do ask “Why didn’t they just run?” because it seems obvious–especially when the bad guys are trying to hit a window–that it’d solve the problem.