Act Three
13OO) "She's possessed." LESSON LEARNED: Xander has obviously learned his lesson from Teacher's Pet, namely that if a woman who under normal circumstances doesn't (in Buffy's case) or shouldn't (in Miss French's case) love him, suddenly shows interest in him, in a provocative manner, something is definitely wrong. In Teacher's Pet, Xander initially wouldn't admit the possibility that Miss French might not be sexually interested in him. In this episode, he fools himself for a moment, but then quickly puts his emotions in check. It is this maturity that will serve him well in Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered, when he refuses to take advantage of the love-spell-zonked Buffy (see 28DD).
13*1) "I mean, why else would she be acting like such a b-i-t-c-h?" CURSY WILLOW: See 33Gx4.
13PP) "...the explanation for her behavior may be something more, more mundane." REAL LIFE: This is one of the rare times that Giles will advocate a non-supernatural theory to explain some Sunnydale weirdness. Interestingly, last time it also involved a person behaving out-of-character, in The Pack, in which Giles thinks Xander's bad behavior is probably just caused by teenage boy-itis (see 6Y). In this episode, however, he is right. It is not possession, but rather the psychological problems Buffy has to deal with by the end of the episode that are causing her meanness.
13QQ) "Okay, that's just about enough!" XANDER THE STRONG: Along with his role as the "Heart" of the Scooby Gang comes the fact that Xander is the one who time and again tells it like it is. Huge crush on Buffy or not, he is the first to finally stand up to her. He does this again in Becoming, when he accuses Buffy of ignoring Jenny Calendar's death so she can get her boyfriend back, when she wants to try to restore Angel's soul (see 33Ex4). Dead Man's Party, when he does very little to hide his anger at Buffy having abandoned them after the events of Becoming. Perhaps this is because Xander holds Buffy to an extremely high standard, possibly higher than anybody else; whenever she disappoints him, he is crushed, but at the same time, not shy about vocalizing his discontent.
13RR) "I smell expulsion, and just the faintest aroma of jail." "BECOMING" FORESHADOWY GOODNESS: At the end of the season, Buffy will indeed be expelled, and face the possibility of jail, when a warrant is put out for her arrest, for the alleged murder of Kendra, and for attacking a policeman.--KdS, Sun, 11/17/02 at 06:18:48, paraphrased by Rob See 13O and 13WW.
13SS) "...this is very unclear, of the closest person..." INTERPERATIVE PROBLEMS: This is yet another reminder of the problematic territory one can enter when one does not correctly translate or interpret a prophecy or a ritual in the Buffyverse. We, of course, encountered this difficulty in a variety of episodes, including the last one, Prophecy Girl. Another example is the first season finale of Angel, To Shanshu in L.A., when Wesley's mis-translation of one word, shanshu, ends up yielding very different meanings regarding Angel's fate. Wesley's first translation, that it means "to die," leads the gang to believe that the vampire with a soul will die; later, however, he realizes that it means "to live and die," meaning that Angel, according to this prophecy, will become mortal. In another example from Angel, Wesley's interpretation of the prophecy, "the father will devour the son," leads him to believe that Angel will kill his son, when it might have just referred to the fact that he will drink his son's blood, which he is tricked into doing. The present episode is another example of one word or phrase being misunderstood. Interestingly, in this case, it is due to Giles not thinking literally enough. By "closest," the ritual refers to the most literal, and paradoxically, least likely explanation.
13TT) "They're gonna cook her dinner?" GRAMATICALLY SPEAKING: Xander actually shouldn't be blamed too harshly for his mistake here. The vamps' phrasing of the sentence was gramatically tenuous at best. Word placement is very important in phrasing sentences; by placing the subject, "her," immediately after the verb "make," it sounds like something is being made for the subject. The correct way to phrase this sentence, creating the least possibility for confusion, would have been "make a meal out of her."
13UU) "I can't look after the three of you guys while I'm fighting." YA GOTTA HAVE FRIENDS: In Buffy's alienation of her friends, she ignores the key fact that her friends are what make her such a strong Slayer. She would have died long ago if not for them. In fact, she would have died pretty recently had Xander not been there to revive her. In this episode, Buffy must go about re-learning the message that the lone warrior is not as powerful as he or she might think, without a support team.
13VV) "Should I say 'undead American'?" POLITICALLY CORRECT: Here, Buffy is mocking the concept of "political correctness," which acknowledges that some terms may be inherently offensive to certain groups of people. Many people, however, in their attempts to be unoffensive end up going overboard, which has inspired a move away from such practices. In the mid-nineties, at the height of political correctness, terms such as "physically challenged" were used for handicapped people, and "developmentally challenged" or "disabled," for retarded people, etc. Ironically, these terms themselves were proven to be politically incorrect later, because they implied that the "challenged" person was less complete than the "unchallenged" one. Back to Buffy's comment, this is similar to the parody version of the politically correct term for the dead--"metabolically challenged!" See 36SS.
13WW) "You think you can take me?" SLAYERS & SEXUALITY: "Buffy's confrontation with Angel outside the Bronze isn't just a challenge to fight, it's a come-on. This connection that Slayers have between violence and sex is something Faith will later explain. Buffy also notes in...[Never Leave Me] that vampires have a similiar attitude: 'sex and death, and love and pain, it's all the same damn thing to you.'"--Ponygirl, Sun, 11/17/02 at 20:51:56
FORESHADOWY GOODNESS: This scene is obviously full of foreshadowing for later in this season, when Angel will become Buffy's mortal enemy, once he loses his soul after a night of passion with Buffy. Later, of course, he will be the one encouraging Buffy into having a fight with him, rather than the other way around. Besides this, this episode is full of foreshadowing for the season finale, Becoming, Parts 1 and 2, a bookending that will continue to occur throughout the seasons. Here is a list of parallels between the episodes:
1) Both have a big library scene where Buffy insists on going alone into an obvious trap. In fact all the Scoobies are in roughly the same positions in both episodes with Kendra replacing Jenny. (And of course both have the honor of dying during the season.)
2) Both have Buffy returning to the library to find the Scoobies have been attacked in her absence with only Xander remaining. Also, both have Xander blaming Buffy for what happened.
3) Both have a smoking female vamp used as a messenger. In When She Was Bad, it's because of Buffy's cross; in Becoming because of sunlight.
4) Both have a Buffy/Angel fight (verbal in When She Was Bad)
5) Both have someone being tortured for information (Giles in Becoming, female vamp in When She Was Bad)
6) Both have Buffy in a big fight while Xander rescues the captured Scoobies.
7) Both have a scene where Joyce doesn't understand Buffy.
8) Both have a group of vampires trying to awaken something big and powerful, and in both the means is by blood.
9) Both have a vamp who hangs out of the big fight against Buffy (the Anointed One in When She Was Bad; Spike in Becoming).--Alvin, Sat, 11/16/02 at 18:38:30 See 13O and 13RR.
Act Four
13XX) "If they hurt Willow, I'll kill you." XANDER THE BRAVE: Strong words from a very non-Zeppoish Xander. Xander's words are shocking but heartfelt, and most importantly, they are spoken in a very big-brother/protective mode. Buffy hasn't been a very good friend to any of her friends lately. Xander has finally decided to waste no more time worrying about someone who is treating her friends so shabbily. He still loves and cares about Willow, and won't allow Buffy's stint as biggest bitca at Sunnydale High to threaten Willow's life.
13YY) "...how are we gonna pass the time till then?" FROM THE ORIGINAL SHOOTING SCRIPT: "XANDER AND ANGEL...Look on, obviously uncomfortably with Buffy's methods."--"When She Was Bad" by Joss Whedon, available from PocketBooks, Inc. as Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Script Book, Season Two, Volume One
TORTURED SOUL: "Although it's been implied on a few other occasions that our heroes have tortured people when necessary, this is probably the most explicit example in the series' history. Anybody who thinks Buffy is insufficiently aware of her own dark side - this is one of the key pieces of counter-evidence." This torturing is yet another example of Buffy not being not yet right in her mind since her resurrection; like her dance with Xander, it seems more along the lines of something Faith would do, another indication that Faith is one of Buffy's shadow selves.--KdS, Sun, 11/17/02 at 06:18:48, with some additions by Rob
13ZZ) "No, it's not." PERCEPTIVE XANDER: When it comes to human emotions, Xander is almost always more perceptive than Willow--again, the whole "Heart of the Scooby Gang" thing. This line, where Xander realizes that Buffy needs to do one more thing to rid herself of her demons, is reminiscent of one of the final scenes of Nightmares, where Willow asks "What are they doing?" when Buffy brings Billy to the Ugly Man to remove his mask, and Xander says, "I get it."
13AAA) "She keeps whaling on the Master's skeleton..." NOW THAT'S WHAT I CALL CLOSURE!: "It's almost as if the Master's body acts as a commentary on Buffy's emotions. She says to Giles: 'I went by his grave last night, and they have a vacancy.' She doesn't resolve her emotional absenteeism until she smashes the very physical body of the Master. A question in terms of the Show's mythology has always been why the Master left a body, unlike every other Vamp (see 12TTT). Well, as always on Buffy, the disjuncture is really important. It signals that [symbolically speaking] the Master isn't dead yet. And skeletons are associated with death. So the fact that his grinning skeleton is left behind is a very big sign that Buffy has huge issues with mortality. In fact, I think Buffy's afraid that she's so lost between the space of death and life (the distance of which is measured by a grave, the grave of the Master) that her fear is that her friends cannot see her, cannot understand her. That there's no more space left for her in life. Which is why in the last scene, Buffy gets some reassurance that Willow and Xander have saved a seat for her. And that in the first scene, the real point is not that Willow and Xander can't wait for Buffy to get back, but that she's not there, and she's worried whether she still fits into Sunnydale, the land of the alive."--Rahael, Mon, 11/18/02 at 06:13:25
13BBB) "I don't think I can face them." FACING FEARS: It is important to note that, right now, Buffy is just as fearful (if not more) about facing her friends whom she wronged than she was about facing the Master. Vampires are one thing, but the idea that she may have irreparably harmed her friendship with Willow and Xander is more scary to her than any monster.
LINKAGE: "Who does this sound like? Willow in [the seventh season's] Same Time, Same Place! She's afraid to face the friends she nearly killed--as Giles says, what if they won't take her back? Seeing them is more scary than a monster, namely Gnarl--her subconscious fears are so strong they cause her to cast a spell, without her conscious knowledge, to keep her & the other Scoobies from seeing each other, but her fear of dying slowly by having her skin peeled off in strips & eaten isn't strong enough to do anything to protect her from Gnarl? Does she think she deserves to have this happen to her? (Does Buffy think she deserves to be shunned by her friends? Or to be killed by the Master/his minions? If the threat had been to her rather than to her friends, would she have had enough motivation to defeat them?)"--anom, Wed, 01/01/03 at 18:08:20
13CCC) "It's entirely pointy." SCOOBY-SPEAK: This is one of the best examples of the way the characters on Buffy subvert the English language for their own grammatical purposes. Here Buffy modifies the meaning of the adjective "pointy," which can, in proper grammar, only be used to describe a physical surface. The word "point" however does not only mean "a sharp, narrow edge"; it can also mean an essential idea, a persuasive argument, or a reason. It is one of these latter definition to which the phrase "pointless" refers. Something that is "pointless" has no reason, or will accomplish nothing. Therefore, Buffy asks if something that accomplishes nothing is "pointless," why can't something that does be "pointy" (meaning "full of point")?
DECONSTRUCTING THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE 101: "Writers of any self-respecting teen show or movie routinely lace their lines with the latest slang, possibly even coining a few new phrases or words in the process so long as it sounds like the way teens speak. Buffy's writers have apparently never felt that obligation. Their dialogue is only loosely based on the reality of how anyone of any age communicates. 'Clever wordplay' doesn't begin to describe the phraseology on a show that makes every episode a love-in with the English language...Like reverse engineers hell-bent on uncovering the heart of a machine, the writers routinely dismantle parts of speech and jury-rig them back together however they please. In the free-for-all grammar-implosion of a particular episode, adjectives make themselves verbs (Buffy: 'Gee, can you vague that up for me?'), verbs force themselves on nouns (Giles: 'This leaves me flummoxed.' Buffy: 'What's the flum?'), nouns cling desperately to their turf (Buffy: 'I'm sorry, I've been crankiness all day.'), participles mutate with prepositions (Xander: 'They were in the ugly way [of] looking.')...[while] pop culture (Buffy: 'I'm the only one getting Single White Femaled here.') and consumer culture (Willow: 'He's a super-maxi jerk for doing it right before the prom.') fill in the remaining cracks. Familiar phrases and expressions don't fare much better, either willfully mangling (Cordelia: 'Well, you've really mastered the art of positive giving up.') or openly scrutinizing themselves (Giles: 'Buffy, can I have a word?' Buffy: 'You can have a whole sentence even.'). To further confuse matters, Buffy and pals speak to each other in a slangy shorthand, tossing unnecessary words overboard until their utterances are stripped down to the limits of sense and reason: Xander: 'We were expecting a boy, and here you are in a girl way.'
Buffy: So we're cool?
Willow: Way! That's why, with the party, 'cause we're all glad you're back.Buffy: Raise your hand if 'ew!'
This isn't the blather of kids who can't speak well...it's an honest reflection of the way our increasingly odd and perplexing world eludes easy expression. By pushing language to do what it's not supposed to, these lines capture the sensations and images of modern life that Webster's [Dictionary] hasn't caught up with yet."--"Laugh, Spawn of Hell, Laugh" by Steve Wilson, published in Reading the Vampire Slayer: An Unofficial Critical Companion to 'Buffy' and 'Angel', edited by Roz Kaveney, and published by Taurus Parke Paperbacks in London and St. Martin's Press in New York, 2001. See 35G.
13DDD) "...that wasn't quite as comforting as it was meant to be." FORESHADOWY GOODNESS: When Giles tells Buffy that this is not the worst mistake she'll ever make, it is very similar to the scene later on in the season, in Innocence, after Buffy has made yet another mistake, of a far more repercussiony nature, in sleeping with Angel and thus releasing his inner beast. And in that scene, Giles will be just as blunt but also just as ultimately forgiving of Buffy's transgression. Giles realizes that making Buffy feel worse for her actions won't solve any problems. In many ways, Buffy's behavior in this episode, in fact, is far worse than her actions in the latter episode. She acts cruel and cold in When She Was Bad, as opposed to Surprise (the episode preceding Innocence) where she acts out of love, resulting in something she never could have known would occur. In both cases, Giles teaches Buffy to take only as much responsibility for something as she truly deserves. In this episode, she should take full responsibility for her bad actions, but at the same time, have faith that her friends will forgive her. In Innocence, she must recognize that while her actions may have been rash, she is not responsible for Angelus.
LIFE LESSONS: As always, Buffy doesn't pull any punches about being completely emotionally honest. Giles, in particular, is brutally honest to Buffy about the dangers and hardships she will face in life. One of the most touching scenes in the show's history occurs in Lie to Me, when Buffy, for one, fleeting moment, asks Giles to lie to her and tell her that life is easy and smooth. He obliges that one time.
13EEE) "...but, gosh, we did that last night." FORGIVENESS: "The penultimate scene in the classroom shows how forgiving the Scoobies are, and how important their support is to Buffy. However she does not articulate the problems that led her to that point; she is instead relieved and allows a semblance of normalcy to return. But...[in light of her conversation with Holden, the psychoanalytic vamp, in the seventh season's Conversations with Dead People,] I suspect that the guilt Buffy felt over endangering her friends was not something that went away. Neither does the belief that they do not truly understand her. Her need for her friends and the isolation imposed upon her by her calling is a conflict that continues into season 7."--Ponygirl, Sun, 11/17/02 at 20:51:56
13FFF) "There's no course here." CONTINUITY CHECK: In Ted, an episode later in this season, Joyce, Ted (her new boyfriend), Buffy and the Gang visit a miniature golf course. So either one was built in Sunnydale since this episode, or there is the possibility that he drove them to a course outside of town. Or this is a tiny continuity error. Nah! ;o) But, seriously, things that are needed have a habit of popping up in Sunnydale, such as, later, an international airport, a mansion, and a university. This has become somewhat of a running joke on the show. --Rook, Sun, 11/17/02 at 23:36:44, paraphased by Rob