Wednesday, Jul 23, 2008
Like Fonzie before him, this too-cool thug in a leather jacket has diverted a good show from its original mission: To celebrate the uncool outcasts of the world.
May 13, 2003 | A once-good show becomes a bad one through the unexpected popularity of a posturing, vaguely thuggish minor character in a black leather jacket. In television, as in life, events tend to repeat themselves. First there was "Happy Days," where a charming show about growing up in the '50s was revamped to focus on the Fonz. And now there's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," which has been all but destroyed by the Fonzie of our time: Spike.
As "Buffy" comes to an end, its fans are debating where to place the blame for the mediocrity of this season. Was it the introduction of a team of Slayers in Training, all of them so annoying that fans were happy to see some of them get killed? Was it the overemphasis on irrelevant new characters like Kennedy and Principal Wood? Was it the decision to build the season around a villain (the First Evil) who can't touch anything or do anything at all except talk and talk and talk? Well, that's part of it.
But the problems with this season can be traced to a moment at the very end of the last good episode, "Conversations With Dead People." That's the moment when Buffy found out that Spike, blond vampire, attempted rapist, and current possessor of a soul, had somehow been killing people despite his souled status. From that point on, the show has no longer been about Buffy and her friends, or Buffy and her mission, or anything that used to be interesting on this show. It's been about Buffy and Spike. And that's about all.
Look at the record. The next two episodes after "Conversations With Dead People" involved Buffy trying to find out why Spike was killing again, following which she spent two more episodes focusing her attention on freeing Spike from a dungeon. Since then, we've discovered that a new character (Principal Wood) has a vendetta against Spike, seen an entire episode devoted to filling out Spike's back story, and sat through various other plot threads about Spike. Even when Spike isn't on-screen, characters are talking about him.
Meanwhile, the characters who used to matter on this show -- Willow, Xander and Giles, who with Buffy formed what is called the "core four" -- are getting nothing storywise; Willow gets a token lesbian relationship, Xander gets his eye poked out, and Giles gets to look like a bad guy for wanting to kill Spike (which, on the contrary, made some of us love Giles even more). In the words of "Sep," who recaps "Buffy" episodes for the famously snarky Web site Television Without Pity, "Watching episode after episode about Spike's journey when Giles has become a prick and I don't know a goddamn thing about what Willow or Xander are thinking, or even who they are anymore, and will likely never find out, breaks my heart."
It would be less of a problem if Spike were getting brilliantly fascinating stories, but he isn't, despite the potential inherent in the story of an evil creature trying to reform. At every turn, the "Buffy" staff has copped out on Spike's story, whitewashing his past (a flashback in a recent episode shows that even when he was turned into a vampire, he wasn't initially a vicious killer -- something that contradicts all the previous vampire mythology on the show) and making no attempt to show that having a soul has changed him one way or the other. By the evidence of this season's episodes, Spike is still a wisecracking punk who likes to hit women (he's hit Buffy, Anya and Faith so far this year) and isolate Buffy from her friends, yet we're still somehow supposed to sympathize with him, because ... why? Because he got a soul in the hope that Buffy would forgive his attempt to rape her and sleep with him again. Except for a couple of throwaway lines, Spike has never been made to seek redemption for his crimes; he doesn't even apologize to Principal Wood for having murdered his mother. The assumption appears to be that Spike doesn't need to atone because having a soul makes him a different and better person. But the writers haven't shown us that; all they've shown us is the same Fonzie figure from Seasons 5 and 6, only without the viciousness that made him moderately interesting.
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