[buffy@pylduck.com]

[2:12:02 PM]

Buffy:

I don't understand. I don't know how to live in this world . . . if these are the choices . . . if everything just gets stripped away. I don't see the point.

. . .

Tell Giles . . . tell Giles I figured it out and I'm okay. And give my love to my friends. You have to take care of them now. You have to take care of each other. You have to be strong. Dawn, the hardest thing in this world is to live in it. Be brave. Live. For me.

It seems so sappy when you're not watching it (and maybe even when). But these questions, these feelings about life and living, are definitely ones that I find myself struggling with all the time. Because sometimes things seem so pointless, attempts to shore up meaning in one's life futile. Maybe that's why I like the fantastic world of Buffy so much -- things have meaning. Things have purpose. Things are prophesied. And yet, they're not. And Buffy is also very aware of this paradox between a world in which The Powers That Be exist (and control) and one in which we can determine what happens. It's never a question completely of one or the other, of fatalism or free will.

But it always returns, always has, to the central existential quandry: why live? What's the purpose? Buffy's story has always been interesting in that respect because she lives for many reasons (as we all should), always trying to reconcile these sometimes (or always) contradictory modes of being and acting. And she has been successful in negotiating the push and pull of events around her. But always there must be something more than the mere need to survive. Saving the world from apocalypses is great. But why bother if the world is a "sorry world" (in Giles's words)? Is it simply avoidance of pain and suffering (that collapsed dimensional barriers inevitably threaten)? Or is there something we actually invest in life?

I'm not sure Buffy has exactly answered this question definitively, nor that it suggests there is such an answer. But Buffy's injunction to her sister, to live bravely, is something powerful resisting the spiralling into nothingness of a purpose-less world.

I think the next season and the future of Buffy will take a turn towards what it means to create a life. In the past, it's been about saving lives, averting the apocalypse time and again. But in all the hullabaloo, Buffy has repeatedly seen her attempts at creating a life for herself wrenched from her hands. Everything is stripped away from her. And in the end, she sees her role as The Slayer, her one true gift to the world and her friends, as simply death. It is the constant deferral of The End for others, even at the cost of her own living and her own life. But this all still leaves unanswered the much more difficult task of living. Of what it means to be brave and to make a life that counts. How do you decide the criteria? How do you make things matter?

I think Joss has suggested that at the center of meaning is an understanding of desire. Desire for others. Desire for happiness. Desire for contact. Desire for fulfillment. Desire for going on. And how we characterize this desire, how we negotiate it in relation to other desires (our own and others') is the demand of life.

o0o

[10:31:34 AM]

R.I.P. I need to watch the season finale again. So much in it. I should've seen the ending coming, and I guess I did in a way. But it did work for me. It made sense. It was painful.

I guess in a way Buffy does defeat Glory not by beating her up (though there was the extended fight sequence on the crane-thing), but
by doing something different. Death is her gift, but not slaying. She takes action, but in some ways it's action antithetical to what she usually does. She sacrifices herself. It's the whole idea of the ultimate sacrifice of love. I'm always amazed at how Joss can take very conventional, even trite, stories and make them immediate and viscerally appealing.

o0o

[11:56:36 AM]

Ah, so they finally explain why Dawn didn't say anything about Ben being Glory. That's a nice little detail, the separation of the two beings accompanied by forced forgetting by humans who would see evidence of their unity. I like this sense of things breaking down, the barriers between memories, identities, collapsing. Emotions, feelings, flooding Glory's otherwise ruthless and unfeeling actions. One of the better scenes this season, I think, when Ben and Glory had their argument in the alley with Dawn watching in confusion and fear.

I'm intrigued by what Willow's become, what she is capable of now. She is fully telekinetic now, able to throw Spike and Xander apart. Before, she could barely lift a pencil. How things change. But as we keep hearing, powerful magics never come without powerful consequences. I'm excited to see what stories we will see with Willow in the next season, how she will cope with these increasingly greater transgressions against the order of things.

I like, too, how Willow took charge in the episode. Shows how much she has come into a sense of herself as an actor rather than merely a follower.

I even liked Anya this episode, the "good luck" bit -- although her coming into a sense of humanness has been largely a comic-relief endeavor, there are moments that slip through (like this, and when she cried about Joyce's passing) that reveal the depths of what meaning is, what life is.

And Glory's guilt, her questioning of what good life is with all its pain and suffering. Though a bit hokey and trite, still strikes a chord with me. Because sometimes it does seem easier just to be carefree, to trample over things and people in that pursuit of pure pleasure, power, fun. But always the check, the ties to affect, to consideration, to wanting to be a part of others' lives.

I'm not sure I understand the whole "your gift is death" thing for Buffy, though. It seems a little too simplistic for the crisis of Buffy's life to be realizing that Dawn needs to be killed to save the world(s) from dimensional collapse. But I'm equally sure that Dawn will survive as her human self. So how will Buffy stop Glory? Will we see a move entirely away from physical combat and to some sort of mental / emotional showdown in stopping Glory? That would be quite an interesting twist to Buffy as Slayer. Maybe Glory will go the way of reclaimed Faith? (And when is Faith showing up again, anyways?)

o0o

[9:33:07 PM]

Not sure why this past week's Buffy was slightly disappointing. I did like Willow's wicca power. Poor Tara is still loco. Spike was wonderful. Burning hand, oh it's okay it's not even smoking anymore. Grabbing the sword. He's better than Angel was in the first two seasons of Buffy. Weird how I love that kind of self-sacrificing, hopelessly in unrequited love kind of character. Hmmm . . . .

I guess we know more about Ben/Glory now. Ben is human. His body got taken over by / inhabited Glory. She manages to manifest through him every once in awhile. Why does she turn back? Because she doesn't feed off a mind quickly enough? Fun whenever Glory turns into Ben. Seeing Ben in those skimpy dresses. Hee hee.

Dawn is awesome as usual. So much conflict in her mind. So wonderfully played by the actor.

Poor Giles. Stabbed by the jousting spear. It was a strange episode, I suppose, because all the things that could go wrong in every situation did. There was that sense of inevitability, but it didn't feel quite organic enough. Maybe because Buffy, Dawn, and the Scooby gang jumped from situation to completely novel situation so quickly that the writers didn't have time to build the inevitability, the tension and conflict. Two more episodes this season. Wow. Somehow the big evil of the season (Glory) doesn't seem as daunting. Even with the whole Key thing. If we had a sense of how the Key could cause really HELL, maybe it would be more tense. The Key just remained so vague for the whole season. Sure, the "unknown" can be quite a freaky thing. But it wasn't built up enough to signal big BAD.

o0o

[4:21:26 PM]

Watching Buffy makes me happy. Especially when [other stuff] in the world sucks. And even when Tara gets brain-drained by Glory, I can't help but enjoy the show.

Poor Tara. I was so very sad when Glory stuck her hands into Tara's head. Tara, the good witch; the strong, centered person; Willow's lover. But we all knew Glory would get to at least one of the Scooby Gang sooner or later (Spike was just an appetizer). Though Willow's vengeance attack on Glory was, in my mind, a bit out of character (though I suppose it was to show just how much Tara matters to her -- that she would do something so unlike herself), I loved her resoluteness, the marshalling of powers beyond her ability to control or invoke without dire consequences (and there will be consequences, no doubt).

I'm dying to find out what the deal is with Glory/Ben. Are they sister/brother? The same kind of god? Where do they come from? Why are they stuck in the same body? Who controls whom? Can Ben take over Glory's body like she seems to do with his?

o0o

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