“Wrecked,” by Marti Noxon
It’s the morning after, bigtime, for Spuffy, and it begins with Tara and Dawn waking up to discover that neither Buffy nor Willow has come home. The house is empty, and their improbably well-made beds haven’t been slept in. This is apparently unusual and worrisome, even though they could conceivably have been called upon for Slay duty.
In fact, though, they’re both slacking. Buffy is in the basement of a wrecked house, dealing with Spike’s post-sex happy dance. She’s not so delighted, and as he continues to warble the “Yay, we finally done it,” song, she ends up telling him he’s convenient.
“I may be dirt,” Spike ripostes, “But you’re the one who likes to roll in it.”
Ah, her shame is great.
I can’t help but be happy for Spike here. He’s gotten much of what he wanted, and he feels hopeful that he’ll get the real prize—Buffy’s heart—in time. And learning that she’s not an entirely straight-laced vanilla sex princess has clearly brightened his vision of the immediate future.
It’s strangely nice to see him happy.
I’m simultaneously sad for Buffy. Her sex life has been so messed up. There was the disastrous one-true-love coupling with Angel, then the one-off with Parker. Riley, as we know from his convo with Faith in Buffy’s body, really was a straight-laced etcetera.
Now she’s having naughty sex with a bad boy and feeling super-guilty about it.
And sure, there are reasons: there’s no love on her side, it’s a way of avoiding her feelings and, chip or no, the’s man got that lamentable chaotic evil alignment. But I wish she’d cut herself a break on the kinkiness.
Since everyone is agreed that the fifteen-year-old can’t be left alone in her own locked house, Tara stays yet longer and commences making pancakes. When Willow shows up, it’s awkward, naturally. It gets worse when Amy brags up Willow’s magical abilities in a big way.
Buffy’s arrival gives Tara an opportunity to escape. Then everyone’s left floundering over why Buffy and Willow were out, and all the things they don’t want to share about the previous evening. They agree the important thing is Dawn’s okay, and she is very gracious about it all. (In many ways, this is a rocking Dawn episode.) She’s so nice, so very “don’t give me another thought,” that they don’t. Willow turns in and is surprised to find that she’s emptied her magic tank. She actually has to pull her curtains using arm strength. That’s not good and she knows it.
Over at the Magic Box, the search for last week’s diamond-snatching demon continues. The only visible progress since the last research session is that Anya now has curly blonde hair and an emergent case of weddingbrain. She’s bored by the research for the museum thieves, which is getting them nowhere, and far more interested in bridesmaid dresses. This leads to Buffy saying: “Can I weigh in on me wearing larva?”
I know a lot of you aren’t big Marti Noxon fans, but she can write a decent laugh line.
Xander expresses worry about Amy encouraging Willow to use even more magic: Tara at least had slowed her down. Buffy replies with a low-key defence of her friend which is really more about herself, and her continuing confused feelings about the night of raunchy passion with Spike.
Speaking of Amy, guess who is now trying to get Willow to the next exciting stage of magic abuse? She takes her to see Rak the dealer in his magical lair. He slurps a little magic out of her, and is all creeperlike and “oooh, you taste of strawberries” before he gets the girls well and truly stoned on magic.
During the trip, Willow has a vision, with a demon in it. She sees herself, with black eyes, just outside the magic shop. It’s her future. Does she also previsit her feelings in that moment? I wonder.
She wakes up at home, gets in the shower, and has a shocked, grossed-out cry. Then she encounters a box of abandoned Tara stuff and feels even worse. She lays out Tara’s clothes—we all remember her cuddling Oz’s jacket, right, after he left?—and makes an inflatable Tara-mannequin to hold her. It’s really sad.
By the time she gets up, Dawn is downstairs being cute with peanut butter based dinner options. Willow apologizes for leaving her alone and offers to take her for a fun night out. Dawn is so unabashedly delighted by this that it’s a little heartbreaking. They leave a note on the fridge and go.
Buffy gets back, and finds Amy is stealing things. She’s all twitchy and desperate. She spills her guts about Willow and Rak, and then she just spills her guts.
She’s right about Willow needing a fix, though. After having taken Dawn for a burger, Willow pumps her for info about Tara and then takes her to Rak’s so she can get a quick pick-me-up.
This leaves poor Dawnie stuck waiting in Rak’s skuzzy outer room while Willow is having visions of being in space. (I’d say we’ve all been there, or somewhere like it, but I hope that’s not actually true of every single one of you.) Anyway, it’s awful, and boring, and stressful.
Buffy is now in hot pursuit of her sister, and has been obliged to turn to Spike if she’s going to find Rak. Why she didn’t tie a halter on Amy and drive her through downtown in search of him? Maybe she just wanted to see Spike again. But while they’re searching, unsuccessfully, they talk about the night before. Spike’s feeling pretty smug. He feels he’s gained exciting new insights into her character. Buffy claims that the only thing that’s changed is that she’s reached the pinnacle of self-loathing.
Willow finally turns up to reclaim Dawn, well after their movie is over. She’s all stoned and indifferent to Dawn’s distress, even though Dawn’s very clear about what’s wrong and how she feels. The monster from the stoner vision interrupts them just as Willow’s getting kinda mean. I’m grateful for that.
Since Willow thinks the thing is a hallucination, it falls to Dawn to kick him. And she does. Yay, Dawn!!
Willow throws them into a stolen car and attempts to flee. Instead they get into a big magic-drunken wreck and the monster catches up. (It took Don Draper of Mad Men multiple seasons to cover the addiction low points we’ve zoomed through in this episode.) Dawn fights hard, gets her arm broken and screams her head off. Luckily, Spuffy are within earshot.
Willow gets out of the car weeping and crying and trying to apologize. Dawn slaps her. Yay, Dawn again!
Then Spike takes the kid to the hospital. Having hit bottom, Willow pleads with Buffy to save her. She says she can’t help herself and begs for mercy.
We can see that Buffy relates, even as she claims to not understand. But Willow’s taking responsibility now. She admits that the trouble started before Tara left, and talks about how the magic took her away from her fears and feelings of inadequacy. She vows to give it up.
And, even though she doesn’t know it, Buffy’s vowing right along with her. They’re having a parallel conversation about doing the right thing, even if it doesn’t feel so good. But Willow’s the only one actually getting the support she needs to succeed. Secret vows lack accountability, Buffy.
The night ends with Dawn sleeping off painkillers, Willow sweating through withdrawal and Buffy in her bedroom, surrounded by garlic garlands and clutching a cross.
A couple weeks ago I asked how you’d take the addiction out of this story arc. That essay hasn’t gone live yet, so I don’t know your answers as I write this. But if a person were going to retcon the addiction story out of this season, “Wrecked” would have to be entirely gutted and rebuilt—and this current version of Amy the junkie would have to go along with it.
It seems to me that this could have been managed without a complete overhaul of much else.
One of Willow’s forward leaps as a witch came when she and Tara joined forces. What if not having Tara around anymore, to practice with, lessened Willow’s access to magic and the power it brought? It would add an interesting dimension to Tara’s departure. And just wanting the magic to be easy or accessible again could have been additional motive for Willow to de-rat Amy, and later to go to a slightly retooled Rak, someone who would give her access to a free-flowing source of power.
If that font or battery was somehow tainted—more explicitly evil magic and less like heroin—Willow could get into plenty of trouble without all the drug withdrawal story architecture.
Either way, she’s on the hard road to reforming herself, or so it appears.
Next week: Hide and Seek
A.M. Dellamonica has three stories up here on Tor.com, with two more on the way! 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 story 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.
I don’t know if I’d take the addiction out of the story, but I think I’d change it from addiction to magic drugs to an addiction to power, which is essentially what’s happening any. Willow was a meek geeky girl who had no power to make Xander love her, and then had no power to keep Oz around and is discovering more and more that she has power. I would have liked to see more of her subtly trying to take over the lives of the people around her (as with “Tabula Rasa”) and realizing what that abuse of power is doing to herself and her loved ones.
I never actively disliked the addiction story line, but it is heavy handed and much too fast moving. People don’t discover drugs one day and then leave their kids unattended at the dealer the next (at least I don’t think they do).
I never liked the addiction-to-magic storyline because it felt like an easy out from the much more interesting, and longer-building, addiction to power. I might have felt differently if they hadn’t, as both this essay and the first comment indicate, crammed the entire unhappy “Trainspotting”-style cycle into an hour’s episode, but it feels rushed and unrealistic. I’ve known people with substance abuse problems and this element of the story just doesn’t ring true. It felt like the writers were running out of ideas and looking for a quick fix, as it were.
Like we said last time: the problem was how it was literal, nigh-chemical addiction, instead of the subtler power-addiction. (And yes, they slammed the whole thing through way too fast. Like, DARE-program “just say no because even one hit will mess you up for life” fast.)
I never minded the addiction/magic storyline. Willow’s magic tended to come with “feel-good” side effects, particularly when it was the stand -in for lesbian sex. I can buy the idea that magic gives yuo some sort of high, and the stronger the magic, the stronger the effect.
I agre that there probably should have been more build-up to the idea that magic is addictive; starting at the very beginning of the show. Of course, I doubt the writers envisioned it that way in the beginning. And that’s the problem.
It very much feels like Joss, et. al. sat down and said “Oooooh! let’s have Willow be the big bad this season. That would be so kewl! But we love her, so Buffy can’t kill her or anything…”
They needed a way to have Willow do horrible big-badly things and still be blameless enough to be forgiven. So we get the it’s-not-her-it’s-the-addiction storyline.
That said, the stuff she does? Pretty standard addiction behavior. Leave poor Dawn in the waiting room? Every year we read about kids that die when their parents leave them in hot (or cold) cars to get drunk or high or gamble.
I never minded the story being about addiction, I just wish they’d kept it as subtext instead of turning it into text. A story about a witch struggling to control powers that she was coming to realize were damaging to her and her loved ones — that could have been such a powerful, resonant metaphor for addiction, if they’d restrained their obviousness just a little. But a story where she goes to a magical drug dealer in a squalid part of town, gets high, abandons a child in her care, wrecks a car, and ultimately admits in so many words to being an addict and needing to go cold turkey? That’s just Go Ask Alice with special effects.
Most of what I could say about this episode I already said about last week’s episode. I disliked the magic-as-addictive-drug arc, and agree that the power-is-addictive alternate arc that some of you are sketching out would have been much better instead. Evan H hits it on the head–it’s lazy writing. All they had to do was take tropes already familiar (in fact, already OVER-familiar) from dozens of cop shows/soap operas and translate them into Buffyverse terms, so that heroin becomes magic; everything else stays the same.
It’s becoming clear, and becomes even clearer in the next couple of episodes, that Great Sex isn’t enough for Spike–he wants Love and Romance instead. What he REALLY wants is the approval of somebody he values–something he never got in his human life as William the Bloody Awful poet, the object of everybody’s mockery and scorn.
You have to wonder if Amy is such a powerful witch that she can accomplish all of these marvelous things with a wave of her hand or a twitch of her nose, why she’s so afraid of Buffy here. You’d think that she could transform Buffy into a rat without breaking a sweat.
Dawn shows herself to be level-headed, brave, and resourceful here–although as a sop to the Dawn-haters, I will admit that she becomes annoying in the last half of the season, when she insists on blaming Buffy for everything that’s wrong in her life. That’s pretty realistic for a troubled teenager, though.
Alyx, I like your s6 way better than what we got!
In last week’s discussion, I mentioned certain parallels btwn Bangel and Spuffy. This is one of the big ones. Remember all the hurtful, hateful things Angel(us) says to Buffy? Here it’s Buffy saying hurtful, hateful things to Spike. “Convenient” cuts awfully close to the bone.
OTOH, there’s a big difference here as well. Not only is Spike still there when Buffy wakes, he tries to talk her into staying with him. Of course, she can’t get away from him fast enough. Still, I give him some credit for using his words, and resorting to force only after verbal persuasion has failed him.
From 1001 Dreams: An Illustrated Guide to Dreams and Their Meanings, “a house is a symbol of the self, the house often more specifically represents the body. An abondoned house in disrepair may indicate the dreamer’s neglect of physical or emotional health. At a mental level, a house all shuttered up can suggest that we are blind to what is going on in the outside world. [Empasis mine] Now that’s how you do a metaphor, dammit! Powerful stuff, and it describes Buffy’s situation to a T.
I agree that Willow’s real problem is her thirst for power without responsibility, not addiction per se. However, it sort of works for me that she’d find a way of framing her problems that way so that she doesn’t have to take real responsibility for them. “It’s not that I’m a horrible person who hurts my loved ones without a care, I just have this condition.” In perfect parallel, Buffy is trying to frame her problem as her attraction to Spike, when in reality it is her depression — her inability to fully engage with life.
When I look at the end of this ep, it seems clear that both women are lying to themselves, and are unreliable narrators for their own stories. The problem for some viewers is that there aren’t enough cues that our protagonists are not giving us is the facts, ma’am. We’re used to Buffy having some oddball insight that nobody agrees with, and yet is proven to be true. That’s not happening here. I’m okay with the subtlety, but it does come back to bite the writers and viewers at various times when these things aren’t spelled out. (For instance, was Xander correct when he told Buffy that she was making a huge mistake in letting Riley go? Buffy seems to think so, and so the viewers think that’s what the writers want us to think, too. However, I know very few viewers who actually think that, so either the writers failed to convince us, or they knew all along that it was just Xander’s opinion. I digress.)
Further to this point, Buffy says she doesn’t love Spike. Does her saying it make it so? Maybe. Maybe not. See above re: unreliable narrator. Sex, kinky or otherwise, is no proof one way or the other. These discussions always devolve into people trying to define what love is, an undertaking guaranteed to result in disagreement. She clearly doesn’t WANT to love Spike. I’m not sure I buy that there’s NO LOVE on her side, though. Whether she wants to admit it or not. (I’m old fashioned enough to think that sex without love is perfectly fine, so I don’t judge Buffy. Poor thing. She’s one of those modern girls who thinks there needs to be an emotional attachment in the mix. Too bad her emotions are so detached at the moment.)
P.S. Love your unwritten implication that Riley is an “an entirely straight-laced vanilla sex princess”. Hee.
Poor Buffy, indeed. Stuck in her role as Good Girl. Faith’s the one who has sex w/o love. Aside from the meta of it, I never really understood where that came from. Joyce never struck me as that repressive, and they’re not religious.
Spike has had decades to learn new skills and perfect his craft. For instance, he was turned in 1880. The first English translation of the Kama Sutra came out in 1883. Plus, his insecurities drive him to try harder.
If I may indulge in a digression of my own: Intentionally or not, it seems to me the way they set up Angel’s curse implies that he is a selfish lover. I have nothing concrete on which to base this assumption. It’s just, you know, his moment of perfect happiness. His change in attitude. That sort of thing. Plus, as Angelus, he broke Dru to the lash. She can’t get off w/o a certain amount of pain. Angel even taunts Spike about not being able to satisfy her (s2). Mostly that’s so Spike would stake him, but it seems, given her reaction, there maybe some truth to it. Spike raction makes it clear he’s genuinely concerned that this is in fact the case. It makes sense that Angel would be better @@@@@ pushing Dru’s buttons, since he’s the one who installed them.
My understanding vis a vis Riley is that Noxon was hung up on him as the perfect guy for Buffy – never mind that he left her during an incredibly painful and difficult period in her life, inadvertently making it that much worse. They way she moons around after him in AYW is just pathetic.
Unsurprisingly, I’m not a fan of Noxon. She made a few comments back in the day that made it clear she didn’t understand the importance of Buffy’s relationship with Spike to Buffy’s character arc. OTOH, I hold Whedon partly responsible for this. He should’ve made it clear to his writing staff. Otherwise, how could they effectively communicate it to the viewers? D’oh!
I firmly believe that Buffy has affection, if not outright love, for Spike. He comes to be one of her biggest supporters. He can make her smile when she’s down (“knew I could get a grin”), and she confides in him. He listens to her w/o passing judgement on her (unlike the others), and he loves Dawnie almost as much as she does.
Plus, he is changing. She isn’t conciously aware of it (to be fair, neither is he, really), but it must register on some level. I can’t imagine she would’ve taken up with him otherwise. She’s not well, and she’s not making the best choices, but who’s more qualified to help her navigate the darkness in which she finds herself? They’re both groping (and I do mean groping) their way back to the light.
@8, Because Amy is faking.
@10, Exactly, the addiction “metaphor” was a head fake by the writers. The audience, not used to being unable to trust the main characters, bought it hook line and sinker. But they weren’t supposed to. This is mainly the writers fault, they didn’t telegraph it well enough.
But it was a fine line to walk. The characters accepted it, even Tara, who is supposed to be the reliable observer for the audience here. And with them accepting it, and no Giles around to correct them, the audience doesn’t have any indicators that things aren’t hunky dory, until scary veiny time.