Hey Buffy...The movement you need is on your shoulder

5.20: Spiral
5.21: The Weight of the World
5.22: The Gift


As Buffy says in "Spiral," "It just keeps coming. Glory . . . Riley . . . Tara . . . Spike." As we discussed in class on Tuesday, Buffy IS staring her own mortality in the face and realizing that her super powers as the Slayer can only go so far. Most of the major elements of this season throw this concept into sharp relief: her feelings of futility against the amoral might of the hell-god Glory and her parallel struggle to protect Dawn both as a sister and as the Key, her mother's death and the ensuing difficulties, and even, eventually, the catatonic state into which she temporarily sinks after Dawn's capture. Each reflects the others and echoes the fact that being the Slayer plus being a human is really too much for even Buffy to bear.


Interestingly, it is Glory that first puts forth the concept that the state of actually being human is wretched and pathetic. "I'm crazy?" she scoffs. "Honey, I am the original one-eyed chicklet in the kingdom of the blind 'cause at least I admit the world makes me nuts." Once the barrier between her own demonic power and Ben's humanity begins to break down and she experiences some of his emotions, she rails at Dawn in her usual derisive way, trying to figure out why emotions (which, as a god, she claims to be above) should be getting in her way.


However, it is emotions that keep the good characters (or at least, the protagonists) on the show going; it's what makes them tick. I kept thinking of Buffy's line from so long ago: "Kendra, my emotions give me power." In "Spiral," Giles tells Buffy that he is very proud of her ability to "put her heart above all else." Clearly, the writers on the show value this part of humanity—and it's not too far to say that emotions define the characters' humanity. In "Spike is for Kicks," Michele Boyette points out that Spike is, quite frankly, not a very good vampire because he is simply too human. He allows emotions to get the better of him (literally), and for this reason (NOT because of any ol' chip in his head) is he ultimately rejected by other creatures of darkness. When he and Drusilla put the Judge back together (whose powers lay in "burning the humanity out of individuals"), it detected human qualities such as their affection for one another. "It stinks of humanity," he grumbled, and again and again we see this theme repeated, usually to contrast with the complete lack of conscience of powerful characters like Glory.


This idea extends to the situations of both Dawn and Ben: as humans, each was created by higher powers to hide something otherworldy from human eyes. In Ben's case, he is the casing for the hell god Glory to prevent her from overpowering her two fellow gods. Dawn is the Key, molded into human form so that the Key will remain protected. However, perhaps completely outside of the plans of their originators, both of these entities—Ben and Dawn—have come into their own, realizing themselves as actual thinking, feeling people, with true emotions and significant lives. Each tries to escape the original purposes of their creation: Ben, by desperately trying everything he can think of to escape eternal disappearance after Glory's return home(even if that means standing by while a human life bleeds away), and Dawn, by simply wanting to live a semi-normal life, with friends and her sister, trying to cope with everything else that has happened in her life.


"Death is your gift," the primal Slayer whispers to Buffy, over and over in her mind. Of course, in the midst of so much confusion and since her life is generally so entwined with death, she kept returning to the wrong conclusion: that she was made only to kill. She thought she had given everything, but what she discovered was the most anyone could ever give: "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." John 15:13. Self-sacrifice for the good of others has always been—and will always be—the ultimate expression of humanity.