The Key, the Goddess, and the Abdication of Reason: Why BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER Season Five Is Overpraised

There is a peculiar standard by which works of popular art are sometimes praised: the more misery they inflict upon their characters, the more profound they are assumed to be. A heroine cries; therefore the writing is "mature." A family collapses; therefore the season has "depth." A supernatural mythology grows more arbitrary; therefore the story has become "epic." A character behaves irrationally; therefore he has become "complex."

This is not depth. It is the aesthetic equivalent of confusing a nervous breakdown with a philosophy.

Season Five of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is widely treated as one of the series' supreme achievements. I regard that reputation as inflated. It is not a worthless season; it contains good scenes, several strong performances, an audacious central idea, and at least three episodes I find genuinely enjoyable: David Fury's "Real Me" (Episode #80), Jane Espenson's "I Was Made to Love You" (Ep. 93), and Espenson's "Intervention" (Ep. 96). But taken as a whole, Season Five represents a decline from Seasons Two, Three, and Four--a decline not merely in wit or consistency, but in the series' underlying dramatic method.

The end of Season Four promised expansion. "Restless" (Ep. 78), whatever its obscurities, suggested that Buffy's identity, the history of the Slayer, and the psychological structure of the Scooby Gang were about to be explored with greater imaginative discipline. Season Four itself had already attempted something ambitious: to move Buffy out of high school, alter the social world around her, confront her with institutional power in the Initiative, and force her to discover what remained of her identity once adolescence ceased to provide the framework.

Season Five opens the door on that promise--and then places a teenage sister behind it who did not previously exist.

Dawn is not merely a new character. She is a retroactive metaphysical insertion. Everyone remembers her. Photographs include her. Buffy possesses an emotional history with her that the audience knows never occurred. The monks have rewritten reality so that the Key can be protected in human form.

As a speculative device, this is clever. As drama, it is perilous.

The problem is not that fiction may alter reality. Fantasy exists partly to make such alterations possible. The problem is that an alteration must earn its emotional consequences. Season Five asks the audience to accept a relationship first and discover its justification afterward. Buffy is told, in effect: this person is your sister because reality has been rewritten so that you feel she is your sister.

That distinction matters enormously.

A genuine human relationship grows from accumulated choices, conflicts, memories, discoveries, and values. The Buffy-Dawn relationship is manufactured by supernatural decree. The season later insists that the emotional bond is real because Buffy experiences it as real. But this is precisely where the show begins sliding from fantasy into irrationalism: subjective feeling becomes its own proof.

One might argue that this is the point--that love can become real regardless of its origin. Fair enough. But the story rarely investigates the philosophical horror of what has actually been done to Buffy. Her memory has been invaded. Her identity has been altered. Her mother's consciousness has been rewritten. Her friends have false personal histories. An entire network of human relationships has been forged inside their minds without consent.

That premise is more disturbing than Glory.

Yet the season largely uses it to give Buffy an annoying younger sister.

"Real Me" works precisely because it treats Dawn on a smaller and more intelligible scale. David Fury understands the comic potential of an adolescent resentfully observing a group of older people who regard themselves as the center of reality. Dawn's diary narration gives her a perspective; her jealousy gives her an understandable motive; the episode permits her to be irritating without requiring the audience to treat irritation as tragedy. It is one of the few times the character feels less like a metaphysical device and more like a person.

The larger season is less successful.

Then there is Glory.

A god ought to enlarge a story. Glory reduces one.

Her premise is not without possibilities: a banished deity trapped in a human dimension, sharing existence with Ben, needing the Key in order to return home. But the character is chiefly written as a combination of narcissism, petulance, violence, comic vanity, and mental instability. She behaves like a spoiled celebrity with supernatural strength.

This is supposed to be frightening.

Sometimes it is entertaining. It is rarely profound.

Compare Glory with Angelus in Season Two. Angelus is frightening because he knows Buffy. He takes intimacy and turns it into a weapon. His evil emerges from a relationship the audience has watched develop; every act of cruelty carries personal meaning. Mayor Wilkins in Season Three combines paternal warmth with monstrous ambition. His affection for Faith makes him more, not less, disturbing because goodness and evil coexist in him without canceling one another. Even Season Four's Adam, who is hardly the series' greatest villain, represents an idea: the manufactured being analyzing humanity from outside it, treating organisms as components and attempting to redesign life according to a cold system.

Glory mostly wants a magic key.

Her narcissism provides attitude rather than philosophy.

Calling a villain a god does not make her grand. Putting her in expensive dresses and giving her unstable moods does not make her psychologically complex. If anything, Glory illustrates one of contemporary popular culture's lazier habits: substitute pathology for motivation, then call the resulting behavior "layered."

Here is a provocative proposition: a villain who cannot explain her values is often merely a special effect with dialogue.

Glory possesses desires, certainly. She wants to return to her dimension. She fears disintegration. She torments people. But the season rarely makes her worldview intellectually interesting. She is not an ideological opponent of Buffy. She does not challenge Buffy's conception of heroism, justice, independence, or love. She overwhelms her physically.

That is not the same thing.

This becomes important because Season Five increasingly replaces rational conflict with mysticism.

Ayn Rand objected repeatedly to mysticism--not merely religion in the conventional sense, but the broader philosophical surrender of reason to revelation, instinct, ineffable truth, collective feeling or alleged realities inaccessible to rational demonstration. She regarded much twentieth-century culture as increasingly attracted to fragmentation, irrationality, fatalism, anti-heroism, and emotional states treated as self-validating.

One need not accept Rand's philosophy wholesale to see why her criticism is relevant to Buffy.

The series had always contained magic. That is not the issue. Fantasy is not automatically mystical in the philosophical sense. A fictional world may contain vampires, spells, demons, gods, and prophecies while still operating according to intelligible causality. The important question is whether supernatural events are integrated into a comprehensible dramatic structure--or whether "the mystical" becomes a license for whatever the writer wishes to happen.

Season Five moves noticeably toward the latter.

Dawn exists because monks altered reality.

Glory is a god exiled from another dimension.

The Key is an ancient energy transformed into a human being.

Blood has metaphysical properties because "the blood is the life." [Ep. 100/"The Gift" by Joss Whedon].

Dimensions can collapse through ritual conditions whose rules arrive as the plot requires them.

Buffy ultimately confronts a mystical destiny in which her own death becomes the solution.

One can defend every one of these devices individually. Collectively, however, they shift the series away from the lucid metaphorical architecture of its earlier years.

In Seasons Two and Three, supernatural threats generally intensified recognizable human problems. Sex, trust, jealousy, conformity, adulthood, betrayal, loneliness, authority: the monster gave physical form to something psychologically intelligible. The fantasy enlarged reality.

In Season Five, increasingly, reality serves the mythology.

That is a reversal.

The audience is asked to care because something has been declared cosmically important.

Dawn is the Key.

Glory is a god.

Buffy is the Slayer.

The blood opens the portal.

The sacrifice must occur.

The machinery of destiny grows louder, while individual causality grows weaker.

Rand would have hated this tendency, and in one respect she would have been right: once "destiny" enters a story as an all-purpose causal agent, characterization is in danger. Characters cease to make events and begin to receive them.

Riley Finn is one of the clearest casualties.

The Riley of Season Four is not an extraordinary character, but he is intelligible. He is earnest, disciplined, physically courageous, socially conventional, somewhat naive, and gradually forced to recognize that the institution to which he has given his loyalty is corrupt. His arc involves an actual conflict of values: obedience versus independent judgment.

Season Five turns him into a man increasingly defined by insecurity about Buffy's emotional self-sufficiency.

Again, insecurity is not inherently bad writing. A strong man can be insecure. A rational person can behave irrationally. But transformation demands causes proportional to its magnitude.

Riley begins seeking vampire bites, engaging in behavior that is self-destructive, humiliating, and bizarrely disconnected from the comparatively grounded man of the preceding season. The writers appear to need him removed from the series, and so his psychology bends conveniently toward the exit.

This is one of Season Five's recurrent weaknesses: characters sometimes behave less as people pursuing values than as emotional instruments required by the season's predetermined tragedies.

Buffy herself suffers from this.

She remains sympathetic--Sarah Michelle Gellar's performance guarantees much of that--but the writing increasingly surrounds her with suffering rather than revelation. Her mother is ill. Dawn is endangered. Riley leaves. Glory attacks. Buffy feels overwhelmed. Buffy doubts herself. Buffy suffers some more.

There is a fashionable critical assumption that suffering automatically deepens a protagonist.

It does not.

Suffering is raw material. The artistic question is what a character does intellectually and morally with it.

Buffy in Seasons Two and Three is constantly required to make painful judgments: about Angel, Faith, Giles, her mother, the Watchers Council, her own responsibilities. Her suffering is bound to choices. In Season Five, she is more often buried beneath circumstances.

The result is a strange paradox: a season conventionally praised for making Buffy more "human" sometimes makes her less psychologically legible.

I found it increasingly difficult to understand--or even particularly like--many of the central characters. Their emotions are certainly displayed. But emotional display is not characterization.

This is where Spike becomes disproportionately interesting.

Spike is hardly rational, moral, or admirable. Yet he possesses something many Season Five characters temporarily lack: direction.

He wants.

He chooses.

He schemes.

He adapts.

He is frequently grotesque, sometimes pathetic, and often morally repellent, but his actions emerge from identifiable desires. His obsession with Buffy is unhealthy, but it develops through a recognizable chain of perception, attraction, fantasy, frustration, and self-deception.

Even when Spike behaves badly, one can usually understand why Spike behaves that way.

That is characterization.

"I Was Made to Love You" succeeds for related reasons. Jane Espenson takes an absurd premise--a robot girlfriend created to love her owner--and uses it to explore a clear human question: what does "love" mean if one party has been designed to provide unconditional emotional gratification? April is funny because she behaves with literal programmed devotion, but she becomes poignant because her devotion exposes the selfishness of the man who created her.

The episode's fantasy serves an idea.

Its climax is quiet. April's failing machinery becomes an image of abandoned attachment, and Buffy--who knows what it is to be discarded--sits beside her.

This is what the series once did best.

"Intervention," also by Espenson, works because the Buffybot takes the same problem and turns it comic, sexual, disturbing, and finally revealing. Spike's fantasy version of Buffy exposes Spike; the real Buffy's response exposes her; the confusion between authentic person and manufactured imitation creates actual dramatic irony.

Again, fantasy is subordinate to characterization.

Season Five needed more of that.

Instead, its admirers frequently point to its final run of episodes and "The Gift" as proof that the whole design works. The finale is undeniably powerful on the level of performance, music, momentum, and sacrifice. Buffy's decision to die for Dawn has emotional force.

But even here one should ask an unfashionable question:

Does a beautiful sacrifice retroactively justify the contrivances required to produce it?

I do not think it entirely does.

The season creates a sister by magical retroactive fiat, spends twenty-two episodes insisting upon that relationship, then asks us to experience Buffy's death for her as the ultimate proof of love. The emotional question is effective because Gellar sells it magnificently. Yet it also possesses something suspiciously circular:

Dawn matters because Buffy loves her.

Buffy loves her because magical memories made Dawn her sister.

The magical memories are validated because Buffy's love is real.

And Buffy proves the love is real by dying for Dawn.

This is emotional metaphysics chasing its own tail.

Here is the second provocative proposition: Season Five sometimes mistakes the involuntary intensity of a feeling for evidence of the value of its object. That is not romantic profundity; it is precisely the philosophical mistake by which irrationalism enters art wearing the costume of sincerity.

The earlier Buffy was often smarter than that.

Season Two earned tragedy through choices.

Season Three earned its emotional climaxes through conflicts of loyalty and principle.

Season Four, uneven though it was, attempted to expand the conceptual world of the show and concluded with the genuinely strange promise of "Restless" (Ep. 78).

Season Five too often substitutes mythology for development, anguish for characterization, and supernatural importance for earned significance.

This does not make it a failure.

It makes it overpraised.

There are fine episodes. There are memorable images. There are affecting moments. There is Spike, increasingly difficult to look away from. There is Joyce's illness and death, which at its best strips away supernatural metaphor altogether and confronts Buffy with something no Slayer strength can solve. There are Espenson's marvelous comic mechanisms and Fury's gift for character-centered humor.

But greatness cannot be established by assembling great moments and ignoring the tissue between them.

A season is not profound because it contains death, gods, sacrifice, insanity, mystical keys, family trauma, and existential dread. The question is whether these elements emerge from an intelligible vision of human beings acting according to values.

Too often in Season Five, they do not.

The tragedy is that Buffy the Vampire Slayer had already proved it could do better.

Seasons Two through Four understood, at their best, that fantasy is most powerful when it clarifies reality. Season Five increasingly asks reality to kneel before fantasy.

And perhaps that is why its reputation has grown so large. Mysticism has always offered one seductive promise to art: that mystery itself is depth, that suffering itself is significance, that the incomprehensible is automatically profound.

It is not.

A locked door is not deep because one has lost the key.

And Season Five, for all its Keys, gods, portals, and sacrifices, too often leaves the far more important door--the door into its characters' minds--only half open.