...but worse is more likely.

6.17: Normal Again
6.19: Seeing Red
6.20: Villains


Throughout the sixth season, we have been following the path of what has been called Willow's "selfishness" or her "addiction." In the first two episodes, "Bargaining Part 1" and "Part 2," we saw her taking charge to head up the attempt to bring Buffy back from the dead. Once Giles discovers the success of the spell, he makes it very clear to her that she has stepped beyond the bounds and done something both very foolish and very dangerous, calling her a "stupid girl." While the disgruntled, overconfident Willow promises to think about what he said, the events throughout the earlier episodes show that she didn't give much thought to what she said even then.


Willow has, of course, come a long way since being a nerdy, shrinking schoolgirl. However, since her experimentation with magic began, she seems to have leapt over several critical levels of self-awareness and common sense and jumped right into the ultra-self-confident stage. The relentless fears of being the nerd up at the front of a laughing class we last saw in her dream in "Restless" at the end of Season 3 seem to have dissipated, leaving her appearing far too comfortable in a world of which she's still fairly ignorant, even though she won't admit it.


Willow's relative success at bringing Buffy back from the grave is tested several times, first by Giles, then by Buffy's admittance of the truth in "Once More, With Feeling," and although at the beginning of the episode "Tabula Rasa" she remorsefully tells the Scoobey Gang that she had been "selfish, " she still fails to fully recognize the implications of either confrontation. Her dependency on magic grows, in spite of Tara's doubts and warnings. Then, incredibly selfishly, she uses it to make her girlfriend forget their argument—Tara, the person who was most against it. Also, as seems to be a running theme in both life and the show, "you always hurt the ones you love," and in trying to keep their relationship "artificially" comfortable, she ultimately pushes away the one who was most dear to her. This, like her determination to make everyone surrounding her forget what she had done with yet another spell in "Tabula Rasa," shows her deafness to the voices of others and her misplaced trust in something much larger and infinitely powerful than herself. By "herself," I mean the real Willow—the Willow who used to dream of marrying Xander, who is Buffy's best friend, and whose real strengths lie outside of her connection with magic.


After that, Willow became officially addicted to using magics, and after an accident with Dawn, had to cut herself off to save both herself and everyone around her. The real tragedy when Tara dies is that Willow immediately, without even thinking but letting herself be ruled by dark rage, becomes what Tara has feared she would be for the past couple of seasons: a powerful and dark witch. Although in the past Willow was praised for her power, she just got too much of a good thing, and now is drowning in its darker side. Sometime many episodes and maybe 2 seasons ago, Tara said with her usual uncanny prescient abilities, that Willow was moving through the study of magic so quickly it was "almost scary." It is fortunate for her that she never saw what Willow became the moment she realized Tara was gone: everything about which Tara had warned her and from which she had also tried to rescue her. True, "grief makes people do strange things sometimes," but Willow's reaction is so completely the opposite of what the person she loved and lost stood for, it has the feel of total selfishness—so much so, that it can only be countered by a selfless act.