Buffy's Leap of Faith by Joyce Millman

From Salon.com - May 29th, 2001

(Note to readers: If you live in a place where the 2001 season finales of "The West Wing," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "The X-Files" have not been broadcast yet, stop reading now.)

Life-changing events -- births, deaths, and weddings -- are what May sweeps season finales are all about. But this year -- well, let's just say that things have gotten out of hand. Call it the Sopranos Effect: Network series made nervous by the no-holds-barred riskiness of TV's critical darling have upped the antes, entangling major characters in last-episode cliffhanger plotlines that seem to offer no way out. Here are some thoughts on three momentous finales and what they might portend for next season.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (May 22, WB)

(One last warning: Stop reading if you live in the U.K. or someplace else where the "Buffy" season finale has not yet aired.)

When you think back over this past season, you realize it had to end like this. Buffy had been obsessed with death, emotionally shut down, worried that slaying had made her hard, unlovable and incapable of love. She forced Spike to tell her how he killed two Slayers in his past; a Slayer is easy pickings when she develops a death wish, he told her. Death came home in the haunting February episode "The Body," in which her mother's sudden passing left Buffy unable to tap the depths of her grief. To try and shake the fog of gloom around his student, Buffy's mentor Giles took her on a vision quest to conjure the first Slayer, who told Buffy that, despite her fears to the contrary, she is "full of love." She also told her that death was her "gift."

Buffy would puzzle over that pronouncement for the rest of the season. She also labored to protect her "little sister" Dawn -- aka "The Key," pure energy made human -- from Glory, a glamour-girl hellgod cast out of her own dimension and bent on ritually bleeding the Key in order to bring about an Armageddon that would allow her to slip back home. This ritual could only be stopped by stopping the Key's blood -- killing the Key. After Glory snatched Dawn, Giles warned Buffy that she might have to kill Dawn with her own hands, to stop the apocalypse. But he knew, and we knew, that Buffy would never do it.

In the final episode, "The Gift," Buffy and her motley Scoobys mounted a valiant attack on Glory's minions in a race to free Dawn, but they were a moment too late; the bleeding had begun. Dawn wanted to jump from the towering scaffold where she'd been taken for the ritual, to stop her blood -- her heart -- and thus end the destruction. But Buffy got that scary-calm "I know what my destiny is" look on her face, and you thought, "Uh-oh." She had put the puzzle together: Death is her gift; Dawn was made in the image of Buffy, from her flesh and blood; Buffy could sacrifice herself to save her sister, and save the world. But it wouldn't come to this, would it?

It did. Buffy jumped from the tower; she was apparently dead, judging from the way Willow and Spike and Giles were all bawling like babies around her. The final shot was a slow zoom in on Buffy Anne Summers' gravestone, with its charming, and accurate, inscription, "She saved the world a lot." That was when I lost it. "The Gift" was the most heartbreaking, shocking season finale I have ever seen.

The presumed death of Buffy sent fans into a panic; immediately after the episode aired, message boards on "Buffy" chat sites started filling up with expressions of pain and anger. A rumor that the show's move from the WB to UPN next season was all a hoax and that the series was, in fact, over spread through the Internet (fueled, no doubt, by the WB's tacky insistence on calling the episode the series finale, rather than the season finale). The "Buffy" hoax theorists would have us believe that the long, bitter negotiations between 20th Century Fox (which produces "Buffy") and the WB was an elaborate set-up chummily played out by the highest-level executives at the WB, Fox and UPN, all to protect the series' surprise ending. To which I say, people, you've been watching too much damn television.

Wednesday morning, series creator Joss Whedon (who wrote and directed the finale) posted to the official WB "Buffy" board dispelling the hoax rumor. "'Buffy' will be back next season starring Sarah Michelle Gellar ... Tuesdays at 8 p.m. on UPN," Whedon wrote. "How will we bring her back? With great difficulty, of course. And pain and confusion. Will it be cheezy [sic]? I don't think so." Thursday, he further laid to rest the hoax rumor, and revealed some plans for next season, in an interview with TV Guide Online. Did you know that Giles is getting a BBC spinoff?

So how is Whedon going to bring Buffy back? "Buffy" fans have their theories. The most popular one (and the only one that Whedon dismisses outright in the TV Guide intervew, for what it's worth) is that Buffy plunged into a yawning, pulsing portal thingie when she jumped and is floating around in some other dimension or alternate universe. What if Buffy surfaces, alive, in another world -- a demon world? In this scenario, might some demon striving for redemption (that's you, Spike) sacrifice himself to bring Buffy back?

Another theory is that Dawn gets the chance to honor Buffy's final words. ("The hardest thing about this world is to live in it. Be brave. Live in it -- for me.") Glory existed on earth by sharing a human body with a mortal named Ben, so maybe Buffy would come back sharing Dawn's body. And if Buffy is made of the same flesh and blood as Dawn, wouldn't it follow that Dawn is part Buffy, and therefore, the new substitute Slayer?

There's also the possibility that Buffy's former lover, vampire-with-a-soul Angel, might work some mojo, although that storyline might be tricky, now that "Buffy" will be on UPN and "Angel" will still be on the WB. After all the bad blood between the WB and the "Buffy" producers, we probably won't be seeing any more of those swell "Buffy"/"Angel" crossovers.

There's always Willow, who has gotten to be a pretty powerful witch lately -- did you catch her telepathically communicating with Spike during the climactic battle in the finale? She might work some hocus-pocus to bring Buffy back. And let's not forget about Riley, Buffy's genetically engineered commando ex-boyfriend, who departed halfway through the season and who everybody seems to have forgotten about. Say, didn't he have knowledge of a secret government re-animation program?

I for one am going to sit back and wait for Joss Whedon to be brilliant again. The guy has pulled more rabbits out of his hat than David Copperfield. (OK, I don't think David Copperfield actually pulls rabbits out of hats, but you get my drift.) Buffy has died (momentarily) once before, and was brought back to life. Angel was trapped in hell, but now he's hunky-dory. Whedon even managed to pull off the old "hey, here's a family member you never heard about before" trick with Dawn. Whatever storyline Whedon devises to bring Buffy back to life, though, it will probably require patience on our part; it will be painful watching the Scoobys grieve through the first few discombobulating episodes next season. But I trust Whedon. Even more than that, I doubt that UPN paid $2.3 million per episode for two Sarah Michelle Gellar-less seasons of "Dawn, Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Sister."

So, we'll just have to wait for the two-hour UPN opener (no date yet), and pore over the finale for clues about the future. Most of all, we have the summer to marvel over how Whedon crafted this incredible past season, how he took his modern fairytale deeper and deeper into the unknown, plumbed the characters' psyches and devised new rites of passage for this singular, complex heroine and her family of beautiful misfits.

All of the characters learned the true, painful meaning of love this season. Willow and Tara, kissing full on the lips, were the most lovey-dovey lesbians on network TV. But that wasn't true love; true love was Willow spoonfeeding Tara, who had been rendered mentally disabled by a Glory brainsuck, poignantly caring for her "in sickness and in health," promising never, ever to leave her: "She's my girl." Then there was Spike, in the throes of unrequited love for Buffy, acquiring a Buffybot to get randy with. But when he saw how he disgusted the Slayer, he was ashamed and heartsick; he understood what he was really feeling, and he showed his love by protecting Dawn with his life.

Giles, thinking he'd been mortally wounded in battle, uncharacteristically told Buffy how proud she'd made him, how he couldn't ask for more in a ... He didn't finish the sentence, but you were sure he was going to say "daughter." Anya, the vengeance demon cursed to live as a human, finally developed compassion, realized the fragility of human life and, in bed with boyfriend Xander, contemplated the power of her body to make a new life. And finally there was Buffy learning to love Dawn, even though she was a pest, even though she was a burden, even though she brought inconvenience, trouble and pain. Buffy's love for Dawn struck me as more motherly than sisterly, especially in that final scene, when she gave up her own life to protect her.

Most marvelous of all was how Whedon challenged traditional notions of network storytelling. He distracted us with the death of a minor character (usually, a series can get away with one death per season, max), only to cap that with the death of the major character. The death of Buffy's mom Joyce (natural causes), you'll remember, was played out in a heightened reality, with no background music, with every moment seeming like an eternity. There is magic in this series, but Whedon showed us the limits of magic when Dawn attempted to resurrect Joyce, only to back off at the last second.

Joyce's death was an aching contrast to the cartoon monster deaths the Slayer metes out, and to the show's constantly rising from the dead vampires. Joyce's death, and Buffy's sense of loss, was permanent. But is that permanence, that realistic impossibility of bringing Joyce -- or Buffy -- back, only a diversion? Are we being drained of optimism, in order that we don't see the magic coming when it does? I hope so.