prophecy – Only Mostly Dead

Giles, I’m sixteen years old. I don’t wanna die.

So I finally get to the end of season 1. I guess in some ways I’ve been putting this off and I’m not sure why. I think I wanted to give it my full attention as it’s a good episode and deserves it. Also I have been busy with writing, exercise and DIY (yes really!). Anyway I got around to it.

I always think of Prophecy Girl as the best ep of season 1 and the start of a step up in quality that carried on into the next season or two. Now that I re-watch it I’m not so sure. It is still one of my favourites but what strikes me is how much it really is a climax to all the themes and story lines of season 1. Particularly the Buffy-Angel-Xander-Willow quadrilateral.

It’s not hard to see why I would like this episode. It’s got that four-way love mismatch played out to its consequences (Xander is rebuffed and takes refuge in country music). It’s also got a couple of those “moments” that I mentioned about The Pack. There’s a beautifully acted angsty one between Buffy and Giles where she finds out she’s going to die. There’s a cheesy-but-it-still-works one where she power-walks to her show-down with the Master to the tune of the theme song, not breaking her stride to deal with a vampire (“Oh look, a bad guy!” cool). Then there’s the running gag about Buffy’s dress. Xander going to get Angel to help. (“You’re in love with her/Aren’t you?”) and that heart-breaking moment when Willow describes how it “wasn’t our world any more, they made it theirs”. And that bloody hand on the TV still feels creepy and wrong.

Of course there are also things that don’t quite work and never did. Less than a minute after telling Xander, between panting, that Buffy is dead, Angel informs him that he has no breath. That’s ok, I’m very forgiving of such things. It irks me more that the “prophecy” concerning the Anointed One turns out to be that he’s able to lead Buffy to the Master because Buffy knows that’s what the prophecy says and decides she wants to face the Master anyway. Doing what some text says you will do because you read it is not a prophecy it’s a to-do list. But I guess that’s the nature of prophecy in the Buffyverse – tricky as the Master points out.

Those are things that I’ve always known about. What was new to this viewing, was the degree to which the special effects and CGI really were quite poor. That rubber tentacled monster? Did that ever seem state of the art? Perhaps the effect of 11 years of continuously improving special effects has caused me to forget what was normal back then. Or perhaps I had my fan-goggles on and was concentrating on characters and story – which are now so familiar that I’m forced to consider the wallpaper again, as it were. A bit of both probably.

Anyway to sum up. It holds up as a good episode, still probably the best of season 1. I’m not sure it’s as good as what we’re about to see in season 2 though (unless that’s faded with age too). However it has some pleasing interaction between the characters, some unrequited and requited love, a cool fight, some jokes and Buffy dies. Buffy dies and it really matters. OK she’s resussitated two minutes later and much much later she’ll sing about having “died twice” with a glibness that doesn’t fit the impact here – and that’s all fine, but it doesn’t take away from the power of having her die.

8/10

Which means that season 1 has an average of 7.5 – pretty decent. Let’s see how that holds up against coming seasons.

“Clark Kent has a job. I just wanna go on a date.”

“Never Kill…” is an important episode. It dramatises something I think is one of the core ideas of the show. Not “High School is Hell” or “Monsters as Metaphors” those are the how. The what is encapsulated in that quote I began with – the conflict between being The Slayer and being a normal girl. The show in the early years did a great job of using the horror genre to talk about every day problems the audience could identify with. Later on it got harder to do that and not repeat themselves, until by season 5+ these were pretty much just telling stories in that world, without so much the direct parallels. However one thing that runs all the way through from Welcome to the Hellmouth to Chosen is the way being the Slayer isolates you and yet how Buffy still tries to live a normal life, connecting to those around her. To varying degrees she succeeds but often at great cost.

It’s this conflict that’s not only at the heart of the show but, I believe goes a long way to making it what it is. After all, the danger with something that wears its feminism so clearly on its sleeve as BtVS does is that you become po-faced and preachy. What rescues it from that, apart obviously, from humour and lots of it, is the fact that Buffy is not just a hero she’s an ordinary teenager. She likes boys and shopping and chatting with her friends. She gets frustrated with adults who don’t understand what’s really important, like dates and having the right shoes. So this instantly gives us a way in, makes her identifiable and makes us care.

Another way Never Kill… is also a key episode for the Season 1 over-all arc. It introduces the idea of the Annoying One who has a lot to do with the finale. So given how important this episode is it’s a shame it’s not a better one. I mean it’s still very good, there’s lots to enjoy. But that’s mostly Joss’s humour and some good performances by Sarah and Tony Head, but still on a BtVS scale it lacks something. Partly I think it’s that the show is still finding its feet. I think you can tell that there’s still a lot they haven’t figured out yet. It hasn’t yet quite broken out of the mode of a teenage show, albeit a slightly quirky one. You can see this in the costumes (some very short skirts) and even some of the dialogue –

“You’re acting a little overly, aren’t you?”

“Tonight! Isn’t that so?”

“Yeah, so it is. It sure is so.”

I’m not sure but this sounds to me like it’s deliberately intended to sound teenage-ry. Joss talks about trying use real teenager slang at first and then gradually developing something else, something that was unique to the show, so-called “Buffy-speak”. So compare the above with for example:

“Ooo, two points for the Slayer, while the Watcher has yet to score!”

Giles: Well, you know what they say. Ninety percent of the vampire
slaying game is, is waiting.

Buffy: You couldn’t have told me that ninety percent ago?

In season 2, 3 and beyond the skirts get longer and we get more of the second kind of dialogue. That’s when I feel the show has found and is playing to, its own audience rather than chasing a “demographic” or some-such. Not that there’s a lot of that, but it’s not completely absent.

Perhaps another reason for me personally not to out-and-out love this ep is the prophecy. Prophecies in the Buffyverse have a habit of being self-fulfilling. In fact a major part of a seasonal arc in Angel was built around just such a concept. I don’t mind a prophecy having that sense of irony that the outcome is changed by the telling itself, but in order to be called a prophecy there needs to be an element of genuine mystical foresight. Telling a group of vampires that on a certain night five people will die and then having those vampires go out and kill five people on that night, is an instruction not a prophecy.

One final reason is that Owen is, despite the way he’s cast, a bit wet. They got the right kind of boy that you can imagine Buffy and Cordelia drooling over, but that whole shy, Emily Dickinson reading, talks about bees thing seems out of line with that somehow. I get that he’s supposed to have more depth but he just seems a bit too other-worldly in a weird way. And of course at the end the script requires him to do a complete 180 and want to become a danger-thrill-seeker. Now I can see how that might happen, reaction to his earlier, don’t get out much lifestyle but… I dunno, it just makes him overall seem much less impressive than he could have been. Probably that was the point but it left me wanting a better foil for Buffy. Oh wait Angel’s waiting in the wings, maybe he’s the one to… 😉

This is getting long so just a couple of note-worthy things to erm, note before I wrap it up:

pedants and continuity types, notice that Giles says “I don’t have an instruction manual”. Later on we find out about the Slayer Handbook

more Willow-Xander-Buffy-Angel love quadrilateral hints – with Owen and Cordy thrown in too – not so much as with Witch but still cool.

“OK at this point you’re abusing sarcasm” is one of the few BtVS quotes that can be easily re-used in everyday life. Trust me I’ve tried and most Buffyspeak, however cool, are too specific to work out of context.

first of a run of gags about the Library – the ‘batcave’ of the Scooby gang – actually being used as a Library.

So, overall, it’s an episode that deals with a, if not the, major theme of the show. It comes from a season where it’s not yet become the show I fell in love with but it’s still full of a lot of fun stuff.

7/10