Season 3, Ep 15
Added 2022-02-11 17:21:08 +0000 UTChappy double header day!!
a nice fun one for this lovely fri - uh tuesday morning. :)
Comments
Sadly, I agree :(
R J Walker (FumblesMcStupid)
2022-02-20 19:01:41 +0000 UTCUnfortunately I think it highly believable that Giles wouldn't think about that. Partly because he's middle class and partly because he never seems to take much notice of Xander's personal life. Willow ought to be more aware though. And tbh, the line quoted above is a bit odd, since how does he know, but I actually think that at the end Giles does try to make Xander feel better. He, I suspect, knows how brutal it would be to hear what Buffy said (although ffs so should Buffy since Angelus pulled that on her). The reason I think he tries is that he asks Xander to help him research. This is pretty unusual and I think he's doing it to distract him from that painful conversation. Buffy on the other hand really does lay it on thick and that does bug me. I know she's trying to make a point but, wow, tactless.
R J Walker (FumblesMcStupid)
2022-02-20 19:00:23 +0000 UTC"What's with Giles saying "of all of us, you've arguably spent the least time with [Faith]"? How would he know?" It's always rather bothered me that nobody in that scene seems to consider, even for a half a second, that Xander might be referring to class solidarity. He and Faith are both strongly coded as working class, as opposed to the overwhelmingly middle class coding of the rest of the main cast. It wasn't, in fact, actually what Xander meant, but the fact that Giles doesn't even seem to stop to consider it as a reason that Xander might feel he shares a special rapport with Faith, one that Faith would not share with, say, Willow... Eh. I dunno. Just bugs me a little bit somehow.
SK Elkins
2022-02-15 23:45:45 +0000 UTC(sorry, browser issue. Continuing…) …it's just building up Angel for his spinoff. "Sure, he's a mass-murderer, but he's better now! He cares about people! He ADMIRES them! He said so!" Yeah, save the puff pieces for the commercials, Marti. As for the rest of the speech, that "to kill without remorse is to feel like a god" bit seems like Angel kind of misses those days, so… Still, a very good episode. Enjoyed watching it with you.
Jessica Roth
2022-02-15 15:25:41 +0000 UTCI grant you that Buffy not apologizing and only coming to Willow to have a shoulder to cry on does mirror Angel's lack of amends and only seeing Giles because he needs a favor, so perhaps those two assholes really ARE soulmates, after all. But at least Angel seems to make an effort here. I mean, he does save Xander, after all. Sure, he seemed to be taking his sweet time about it…but maybe he needed to think of an excuse why he was hanging around outside Faith's room and peeking in? (Perv.) And I still rather love the part of his speech when he goes "time was, I thought humans existed only to hurt each other. But then I came here, and I found out that there are other types of people; people who genuinely wanted to do right." This can't be about Buffy and Giles (this is a JOB to them, which means Angel shouldn't generalize about "people" based on that), so it feels like an Ode to Willow and Xander (and, I guess, Cordelia) and that makes me go "awww…" Except then I sober up and remember that it's FIFTEEN episodes into the season and Angel hasn't said ONE WORD to Willow yet. (And the only time he spoke to Xander, he dismissed him and told him to stay away.) So this "Angel really admires Willow and Xander" reading is probably a bit of a stretch. More cynically, it's just building up
Jessica Roth
2022-02-15 15:11:10 +0000 UTCPoor Willow. Oz is…somewhere, Xander is occupied, and Buffy is actively dumping her. (And we have her mention Michael to remind the audience that her other friend, Amy, is currently a rat. Not that we've seen Willow be upset about that before…). She practically cringes when Buffy comes to talk to her in Act I. And when Buffy does come by, is it to apologize for dumping her? NAH, it's because she's having trouble with the girl she DUMPED WILLOW FOR. Gee, I'm sure Willow really cares that Buffy's having problems with Faith. In fact, Buffy NEVER apologizes to Willow; Willow has to apologize to her. Yeah, THAT's fair. (She also doesn't apologize to Xander for not realizing how out of control Faith was. Hell, she doesn't even show any sympathy, or even interest, in the whole "Faith tried to MURDER me" business. Grr.)
Jessica Roth
2022-02-15 15:01:25 +0000 UTCBuffy also doesn't come off so well, either. It's nice that she FINALLY cares about innocent people dying again (as opposed to leaving HUNDREDs of slaves behind in Ken's dimension, dismissing people killed IN HER OWN HOME as "a slow night, ha-ha, Mom", or being bored that Spike is killing shopkeepers), but it seems less about Allan qua Allan as it is about Faith/herself. This "let's save Faith" crusade gets a bit one-note even before Willow has to call her on it and point out the "she nearly KILLED Xander" part. Not that Buffy had treated Xander well before that, of course. Why does she keep cross-examining him about his statement of "having a connection". Wtf do you care about when and where Xander and Faith hung out, Buffy? Can't you just take your friend's word for it? And then she craps all over Xander's emotions by pulling that "Faith doesn't take the guys she sleeps with seriously, they're just a joke" garbage. In front of Giles and Willow, no less. Really sensitive there, Buff. I guess it's a good thing YOU weren't treated like crap by the person YOU gave YOUR virginity to last year and didn't need Xander to tell you it wasn't YOUR fault…oh, wait. Seriously, Buffy's lack of empathy here disgusts me. She could at least wait to speak to Xander in private, and maybe not be so unequivocal about "you're just a joke to Faith, loser!" Sheesh. Of course, she's also being a shitty friend to Willow by barreling on about "We need to help Faith" when Willow is CLEARLY about to fall to pieces because of Xander's news. (Even GILES can see that; he keeps his eyes on Willow as he wraps up the meeting ASAP. But Willow's "best friend" doesn't even think about her. FFS.)
Jessica Roth
2022-02-15 14:52:29 +0000 UTCI'm still a bit salty about the character usage, though. Yes, Seth is busy, so Oz is absent. But Cordelia still gets only one scene (more than two lines, though) and while Xander is a key part of the second half of the episode, he's entirely absent from the first half. Which means that Nick isn't seen for more than an entire episode (he's not in the second half of "Bad Girls", you might recall). Even people who aren't that fond of Xander might find that excessive. I, of course, AM fond of Xander. He's my second-favorite character. Which is why I don't really like that Buffy and Giles treat him so poorly in the cafeteria scene. What's with Giles saying "of all of us, you've arguably spent the least time with [Faith]"? How would he know? Is he tracking Willow and Xander to see which of them spends more time with Faith after school? Willow has a boyfriend, where Xander is single…maybe he's more likely to chase a lonely hottie than she is? Just take Xander's word for it, why don't you? (We saw scenes of Xander and Faith together in "Revelations", not to mention last episode's…encounter. Haven't seen a Willow/Faith scene yet…) Plus Giles is hardly one to talk about "spending time" with Faith. We don't see him training her; I don't know that he ever sees her if Buffy isn't around. He seems to treat her as a spare part and make no effort to engage with her on a personal level. I'm not expecting "in three months, he goes from not understanding Buffy to wanting to sacrifice his life to keep her safe" again, but it's been longer than that with Faith now…you might think he'd have established SOME sort of bond with her by now. But no. Giles doesn't seem at all upset that Faith lied to him, much less that she went and killed a man. All that reassuring that Giles gave Buffy about how there's still hope for Faith, the Council will just have her rehabilitated? Why doesn't he tell that to FAITH? (He doesn't even have to challenge her "it was Buffy" lie; he can just "discuss" what might happen to Buffy, ask if she's ready to do all the work herself, etc. Maybe even guilt her into confessing.) But no. He makes no attempt to deal with Faith directly. He just lets her stew in her motel room all day and then lets XANDER go stick his head in the lioness's jaws. No wonder the Council fired his ass.
Jessica Roth
2022-02-15 14:41:16 +0000 UTCGood catch seeing them repeat the shot of "a vampire dusting and revealing that Faith saved Buffy" shot from 3.14. But there's also a nice contrast of Faith looking WAY more frazzled and worn-out than she did last time. Nice work by Eliza. I used to complain about how people couldn't tell if Faith has gone to the dark side or if she's going undercover to bring down the Mayor, and compared it to how last season, they had the Judge around just to specify that YES ANGEL IS EVIL, HE'S NOT FAKING and keep the show's emotional focus in the proper place. But of course that's only necessary if Faith has deep, emotional scenes with Buffy coming up (as in the "Was I…Not Good?" scene where Joss wanted us to know that Angel was breaking Buffy's heart on purpose). If she's just playing the Mayor, there's no harm in playing the audience for a bit, too. We'll see what happens next. As long as they don't overdo the misdirection, it should be all right.
Jessica Roth
2022-02-15 14:24:34 +0000 UTCOh, Hellmouth! Today is Tuesday, isn't it? (Except on Jupiter, I suppose.) Better give my notes now, then. Last episode I mentioned Christian Clemenson (Balthazar) was in "Bad Influence", playing James Spader's brother, and that there was another connection here. Well, in that movie, Spader's secretary was played by Kathleen Wilhoite, who while mostly an actress (perhaps best known as a nurse on "E.R."), also sings. That's her doing "Wish We Never Met", while Willow is sobbing in the bathroom. This is a very good episode. I mean, Marti's not writing pointless scenes this time. (Unless you count interrupting the Angel/Faith scene to have him give Buffy a brief update, which accomplishes nothing.). And the story builds logically, rather than Marti "writing for the climax" as she's done before. But there are a few minor things, and a few larger issues. Small things first: • Everybody talks about Allan dying "last night". Buffy, Faith, the cops. Wrong and wrong. Buffy ran out on the chem test on Friday (Willow specifies the test day at the start of Act I of "Bad Girls") and B/F broke into the shop that night. The next day is Saturday (Joyce says so over waffles, and while I don't exactly think Joyce is a genius, she probably knows what day it is…most of the time) and Allan dies on Saturday night. The next morning (it's daylight again) is when Buffy visits Faith, sees Faith washing her hands (she just dumped the body) and Faith says "I don't care". That's Sunday morning, Buffy has her nightmare on Sunday night, after the body is found. (Nice job "dumping", Faith. The town is full of empty graves that vampires came out of…why not put a spare corpse in there?). She sees the Mayor speak, and then we're at school on Monday. So not "less than 24 hours ago", girls. Sigh. Now you can blame Marti for this (she wrote it, after all), but the show's supposed to have "continuity" people ("script supervisor", they're usually titled) and catch this sort of thing is their job, Sloppy work all around. • It's good you noticed Faith mentioning the docks early on and you were right that this was a "Chekhov's gun", they were setting it up for later use. But…I didn't see Mr. Trick lurking around there, so how did HE know the Slayers would at the docks for the climax? Much less that they would walk under a cargo container if he had it winched up, just so he could drop it on him. Sounds like "an unnecessarily ornate and easily-escapable death-trap", to quote Dr. Evil. (Now in charge of General Motors, apparently, lol.) Of course, Seth Green is in "Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery". Indeed, he's filming it at that moment, which is why Oz isn't in the episode. As Seth/Scott Evil memorably says in the film, "why don't you just shoot [them]?" Mr. Trick knows about guns; he was just scolding Vincent for not using an Uzi last episode. Yet now he's relying on Buffy and Faith coming to the docks and just happening to walk under a particular crate? Yeesh. How very Wile E. Coyote of you. No wonder you're dust. That's what you get for being a chump, chump. Sigh.
Jessica Roth
2022-02-15 14:17:12 +0000 UTCI'm not sure how I'd feel about Faith if it were someone other than Eliza in the role. It's like it was made for her.
Melissa
2022-02-13 21:43:13 +0000 UTCi kinda do too 😌
darciesnothere
2022-02-13 19:22:53 +0000 UTCagree agree agree!
darciesnothere
2022-02-13 19:22:40 +0000 UTC👀👀👀 haha thanks rhi!!
darciesnothere
2022-02-13 19:22:32 +0000 UTCi like it, thats what ill go with too!!
darciesnothere
2022-02-13 19:21:41 +0000 UTCdamn Eliza's beauty and performance are just... incredible, fantastic, mesmerizing and hypnotizing
angelcakes
2022-02-12 21:33:26 +0000 UTCHah! Good point--she very well may have!
ghostofdurruti
2022-02-12 21:27:30 +0000 UTCWell, as I've noted, Joss himself started this, doing "a gay arc" for Buffy in "Becoming, Part 2", as he confirmed to Emily Almond. He probably felt it was fine to have some subtext, but things were getting out of hand. What has me wondering is why Marti loaded the argument in "Dead Man's Party" with…suggestive lines like this: BUFFY: You found out what I was and you couldn't deal! JOYCE: Buffy, you didn't give me time! You hit me with this big news… Was she just following up on Joss's subtext…or did she know Faith was coming and wanted to get in on it? (Marti has two moms, but she herself is straight.)
Jessica Roth
2022-02-12 20:14:47 +0000 UTC"did she save her....or did she just kill a vampire?" great comment, Darcie! And loved the reaction :)
x_Rhi_x
2022-02-12 17:38:00 +0000 UTCAgreed haha. Just goes to show how much a show like this is a collaborative work rather than the sole creation of the guy in charge.
ghostofdurruti
2022-02-12 16:22:14 +0000 UTCRemember in Amends when they showed Faith lying badly about this big party she'd been invited to ? Now we can see it come back in this episode . I love this show
L R
2022-02-12 15:24:17 +0000 UTCFantastic write-up! I really enjoyed this. I agree that Angel seems as if he's projecting in his initial approach to Faith, and that she only starts to listen to him when he gets back to the issues they genuinely share. And I love that writing choice, because it still allows Angel to be the hero of the hour and still shows him to have the chops to get through to people like Faith, yet it does all that without making him seem infallible or setting off the same "why is Angel suddenly getting such overblown hero treatment?" alarms that bothered me so much in the previous ep. It's what 'setting Angel up for a new narrative role' looks like when it's done *right.* I still find it weirdly hilarious that Joss Whedon seems to have been just about the only person involved in these episodes who *wasn't* deliberately stoking the fires of Faith/Buffy. Petrie and Noxon and Greenwalt were all gleefully piling high the subtext, Dushku was smoldering her bedroom eyes at Gellar in every other shot, and apparently Whedon was meanwhile busily engaged in...telling fans on online fora that they were imagining things? Jeez.
SK Elkins
2022-02-12 10:47:22 +0000 UTC"It doesn't matter what kind of vibe you get off a person, cause nine times out of ten, the face they're showing you is not the real one." --Faith, taking a page out of Spike's book and directly announcing one of the main themes of the episode Whew. Well that (unofficial) two-parter certainly ended up being pretty damn heavy! And it started out so fun, too... There's a lot that happens over the course of these two (very good) episodes--notably, we finally get some movement on the Mayor and Watchers' Council storylines--but I'd argue that at their core they're about Buffy and Faith's relationship. Or more specifically, the destruction thereof. At the start of "Bad Girls" the two Slayers are getting along about as well as they ever have. Faith's more reckless style still leads to some friction, sure, but they're in a much better place than they were after "Revelations" since they made their amends in... well... "Amends". And as the episode goes on, Buffy seems to come more and more around to Faith's way of thinking--that slaying is what they're built for, that if they're *not* having fun while they're fighting the forces of darkness, they're doing something wrong. There are a couple of different ways to read Buffy's rebellious turn in part one. Ditching school in the middle of an exam to slay vampires with Faith? Breaking into a hunting goods store to steal weapons--granted, with the utilitarian justification that it will allow them to take on Balthazar faster? Both are pretty far outside the realm of her usual behavior. (Though to be fair, there's some precedent... Buffy's certainly skipped out on classes to deal with supernatural threats before, and as Buffy said in the flashback in "Becoming, Part 1", "You're not from Bullock's, are you? Cause I meant to pay for that lipstick.") It could be interpreted as a delayed and frankly somewhat muted reaction to both of the major authority figures in her life betraying her within the span of a week. But honestly--and maybe this is just me watching the episode through "shipper" goggles--her behavior makes a lot more sense if she's a little bit into Faith. There's been subtext between them from the beginning, especially from Faith's side. As Jessica pointed out in her comment on part one, Whedon didn't originally intend it, but some of the other writers definitely did, and Eliza herself played into it with her acting. (For an example from part one: the way Faith looked at Buffy after she dusted that vampire that had her by throwing a stake into its heart from across the room? Tell me she wasn't at least a little bit smitten...) This is the first hint I've seen of Buffy reciprocating it beyond a few casual jokes, though. But alas, it isn't to be (despite what over a thousand fics on Ao3 would have happen...) Thinking he's a vampire, Buffy throws Deputy Mayor Allan Finch against a wall, Faith drives a stake through his heart... and it's all downhill from there. They experience firsthand what the consequences of embracing Fath's more reckless approach can be, and neither handles it well. Buffy, as hard as she tries to get through to Faith throughout the episode, does make one key mistake--she frames it as if the killing was Faith's doing alone, when the truth is that, as Faith says, she was a part of it too. Faith may have been the one to deal the killing blow, but Buffy set up the kill by grabbing him and throwing him against the wall. Though it's impossible to know for sure, I think an acknowledgment of that may have been what Faith needed from Buffy in order to let her in. Faith, meanwhile, shuts down, refuses to let Buffy in, and starts to spiral. I don't believe for a second that Faith is telling the truth when she says that she doesn't care. There are way too many little hints of how guilty she's feeling underneath the front she's putting up throughout both episodes. I do, however, believe that she's *trying* very hard not to care, first through her various rationalizations ("I'm telling you, we did the world a favor, this guy was about as interesting as watching paint dry", "we just saw he was mixed up in dirty dealings", "in the balance, nobody's gonna cry over some random bystander who got caught in the crossfire"), and then through a sequence of increasingly horrible actions that are all as bad as or worse than the first. Killing the Deputy Mayor was a tragic accident--caused by her recklessness, perhaps, but an accident nonetheless. Trying to frame Buffy for murder (note how Faith can barely look at her while she's doing that...)? Ignoring Xander's lack of consent and then nearly choking him to death when he came to her to try to help her? Those were deliberate. Angel comes the closest to getting through to her, but I think he misses the mark in some important ways too. His whole idea that she has a "taste" for killing now that she's taken a life strikes me as him projecting his own issues onto her. He's a vampire--he has a demon in him that wants to hurt, to feed, to destroy human life wherever it can and make way for the Old Ones to return, and he constantly has to fight that side of him. The Slayer side of Faith may give her a tendency to enjoy violence, but I doubt very much that it comes anywhere close to that of a vampire. It's notable that she doesn't really respond well to him while he's going off on that subject. It's only later, when he starts talking about his perspective on people--how he thought they existed only to hurt each other for a long time, until he came to Sunnydale and witnessed the heroism of Buffy and her friends--that she seems to start listening. I think that's the point at which he was starting to touch on her actual issues. Of course, then Wesley and his Watchers' Council goons arrive, and everything goes to hell. The final confrontation at the docks is really interesting in how it plays with your expectations. The Mayor's vampires attack the Slayers just as it seems like their argument might come to blows, and in the end, Faith saves Buffy from Mr. Trick, not being *so* far gone that she would just let Buffy die. Only... was saving Buffy really her motivation? Or did she just see an opportunity to replace Trick as the Mayor's right hand, thereby solving her problems with the law (since the Mayor controls the police force)? That was a great part of your reaction by the way--how you went from cautious hope to just complete shock when the final scene came along. As for whether Faith has *really* gone over to the Mayor's side and if so, how far she'll be willing to take this... time will tell. (I wrote a damn essay about this, I realize. But in my defense it's a meaty pair of episodes and I didn't leave a long comment on the first one, so there's a lot to talk about!)
ghostofdurruti
2022-02-12 03:50:23 +0000 UTCThe cops that picked up Faith and Buffy for robbing probably had no idea what their names were as they didn't have IDs on them I'm sure. Plus they may be in the hospital for all we know and not coherent enough after the accident to pick them out of a line up. That's what I always went with!
Steveo
2022-02-12 02:32:35 +0000 UTC
