Notes on Buffy 3.07: Revelations, part 1
Standard disclaimer: I'll often speak of foreshadowing, but that doesn't mean I'm at all committing to the idea that there was some fixed design from the word go -- it's a short hand for talking about the resonances that end up in the text as it unspools.
Standard spoiler warning: The notes are written for folks who have seen all of BtVS and AtS. I'll be spoiling through the comics as well. Basically -- if you are a spoiler-phobe and haven't seen or read it all, read further at your own risk.
Standard Credits: I've written the material in black; Strudel (aka my Bro) writes in blue; local_max writes in purple. Or at least, that's what they've done when I finish editing and formatting.
We had to do this in two parts. The first covers the confrontation in the library. The rest is dealt with in part two.
Buffy 3.07 Revelations, In Which Many Fault Lines Are Revealed
So we’re to the mystical 7th episode. In the first season, it revealed that Angel was a vampire, which turned out to be just the start of the many revelations about him. In the second season notion the lies we tell each other and especially ourselves took center stage. This season, in Revelations, some lies come undone, with rather bad consequences due to the lies that are not yet undone.
Xander and Willow’s Secret. The opening scene is about the sexual tension between Xander and Willow and their attempts to deflect attention from their illicit whatever it is that they have going. When Cordelia asks what is up with them, Willow abruptly raises questions about whether Buffy has been acting strangely lately (in effect, she’s throwing Buffy under the bus). Buffy arrives, with Faith not far behind and they go off on a convivial ‘date’ to slay vampires. That’s the road map of the episode. Xander and Willow’s guilt about what they are up to strongly shapes their reaction to the revelation that Buffy has been lying. And the effect is to destroy the camaraderie between Faith and Buffy.
For how important it is to the episode, there’s little actual development of the situation between Xander and Willow. (They kiss for the second time on screen--the first kiss we know of after the original “fluke”) The key thing is the way their situation conditions everything that happens. Xander comes across Angel because he’s taken on a mission for Giles out of his sense of guilt. Willow is incapable of dealing with the breach of trust that’s happened with the revelation that Buffy has been harboring Angel because she’s conscious of being guilty of something similar. That guilt should be kept in mind when we turn to the confrontation. But first, we need a look at Buffy’s lies.
Buffy’s Lie. We can start with the sympathetic read on why Buffy feels compelled to lie. Buffy can’t trust the Scoobies to react with forbearance towards Angel, and wants to be armed with better facts (presumably about his ‘cure’) in order to mollify them. We’re just two episodes past Homecoming which sets up how not at home Buffy is at home.* She still needs a place that’s for her -- and for her that place is with Angel. So she needs Angel, and has a reasonable belief that it would be dangerous to him to reveal his return prematurely.
*We get very heavy reminders of Buffy’s social precariousness in this episode. Three times Buffy joins the gang only to find out they’ve been talking about her behind her back. The first and the last seem relatively innocuous (at the Bronze at the beginning of the episode; at school just before the end), while the second (the inquisition in the library) is heavy beyond belief. But note the repetition of the theme. Buffy is not really part of the group.
But as ever Buffy’s motivations are more complex than that. She’s keeping Angel a secret also because she’s being entirely irresponsible in how she’s dealing with him. She knows it’s a risk to be intimate with Angel. When their Tai Chi workout nearly leads to a kiss, Buffy knows she has to stop it. But midway through the episode she’s back, passionately kissing him. There’s a parallel to X/W -- whether it’s pheromones or true passionate love -- Buffy is succumbing to an urge to do something she knows is flat wrong. (Unlike X/W who only stop the smooching when Giles stumbles on to them, Buffy does at least attempt to break off the smooching with Angel; though given that the heavy smooching follows a previous attempt at stopping, the trajectory seems clear.) The problem is that the stakes are much higher. X/W are going to break some hearts. If Angelus is unleashed people will die. Buffy is endangering the world in pursuit of her personal emotional/sexual needs. That’s really quite dark.
I want to layer on top of this a question about the past few episodes. In Beauty and the Beasts, Buffy tried to determine whether Angel, first discovered as a feral animal with probably-human blood on his lips, could be redeemed. He broke free of his restraints and killed a monster in front of Buffy and whispered her name. This was apparently enough evidence for his rehabilitation for Buffy to stop restraining him. And then in this episode, she leaves him alone with the Glove, confident that he is fully trustworthy. We can look at the intervening episodes, which have shown Angel mostly puttering around his mansion and doing Tai Chi, and say Buffy was right. But certainly Buffy has personal investment in Angel, and by keeping him a secret, she is shutting out any voices besides her own, who might question her call and raise valid counterarguments.
Buffy is only implicitly lying to Giles and the Scoobies. (Though she has been lying to them regularly about where she is going, those nights where she goes to tend to Angel.) She flat out lies to Faith. And it’s this aspect of Buffy’s lie that ends up doing the most long run damage. We’ll come back to that below. Her motives are more reasonable here. Angel is freighted with so much emotional meaning for Buffy, it would really be hard to bring him into a conversation between two girls dishing about their exes. And she’s not going to confide in Faith, who is new in her life about a secret she’s keeping from the gang.
The Confrontation/ Scoobies’ Perspective. There are two very different narratives we can give to the confrontation in the library. We’ll start with the version favorable to the Scoobies. Xander’s arguments are all on point and needed to be made. Buffy tries to tell them that Angel is better now, and Xander replies with the question whether Buffy has even considered what happens if Angel doesn’t stay “better.” This is the guy who murdered Jenny and tortured Giles. On top of that he’s returned from centuries of torment which makes it hard to fathom who Angel is anymore. Like I said, Buffy was incredibly reckless -- and as both Xander and Cordelia emphasize, the people she was putting most at risk was them. (In fact, every person in that room save Oz actually had their life more directly threatened than Buffy, at least before the end of Becoming, with Giles’ torture and Angel’s attempts to kill Willow in Innocence, Xander in BBB and Cordy in Killed by Death.) Then Xander gets to the crux of the matter, which is that, not only is Buffy harboring a guy who can be seriously dangerous, she’s actively engaging in the exact behavior that unleashed Angelus the year before. Buffy dodges that charge, coming back at Xander for spying on her. In fact, Xander was doing no such thing. He’d tracked Angel back to the mansion, a reasonable move when one sees an evil guy at large, and is completely blindsided to discover that Buffy is kissing him passionately. (To be fair, Buffy couldn’t know that Xander’s actions were reasonable here. It’s a pretty big leap to get to Xander randomly following around so he can spy on her. But Xander did not reveal his presence then; so, while he didn’t intend to spy, he acted like one.)
The next exchange is arguably even worse for Buffy. She says she’d never put anyone in danger. But of course, she did exactly that last year when she wouldn’t or couldn’t kill Angel when she had a chance, and Jenny and others were in fact was murdered because of it. Her rejoinder in that moment is stunningly deaf to how that would sound to the people in that room, and is yet another reminder of how flamingly irresponsible she’s being. (I agree on the “stunningly” deaf, but “flamingly” irresponsible overstates what has happened thus far. She’s on a dangerous slope, but there’s no indication that she will succumb and give him a happy. Rather, she is prolonging and enhancing their frustrated unhappy.) (You’re right that what happened thus far is still several steps away from a happy, but I disagree that kissing him counts as “no indication” that she will give him one.)
Buffy’s final deflection is to argue that Xander has mixed motives in this... that he’s just jealous. As Cordelia immediately replies, that betrays an impressive hubris on Buffy’s part to assume that Xander would still rather be with her. (Cordelia’s reply leads to Buffy snapping at her.) It’s a bit more ironic given that Xander’s current irresistible attraction is to Willow, not Buffy. We can’t know how much of Xander’s ongoing animus towards Angel is rooted in his initial jealousy of Angel. But it really is irrelevant here because, as Xander says, he doesn’t need excuses to be against Angel.
I think there are a few missteps Buffy makes in addition to the major ones Maggie points out. Rather than confront Xander’s question about what would happen if Angel doesn’t stay better, she tries to leave the room. And then she stretches the truth twice. First, she says, “I was going to tell you” to the gang, which is pretty much a flat-out lie--she told Angel explicitly that she wasn’t going to tell anyone about his return. Second, when the question of her and Angel having sex comes up, she says “We’re not together like that.” It’s not entirely untrue. But she has just last night inched closer to that. The gang can’t know about the first, but they do know that the second is at least misleading, and that colours the escalation of the conflict. To a degree, Buffy, caught in a big lie (if of omission), tries to lie her way out of it. And this makes the gang all the less likely to cut her slack as the confrontation goes on.
After the confrontation ends, nothing has been resolved. The gang, and Xander in particular, have criticized Buffy harshly, but no real changes have been made, and further no one has really offered any prescriptions for change. Angel can still roam free. Buffy can still see him whenever she likes. And she can still sleep with him and unleash Angelus if she chooses to. Even Giles doesn’t try to tell Buffy what to do. And this hints at a real issue underlying the conflict, which becomes very important this season with Faith: there is no simple way to prevent a slayer from doing dangerous, reckless things. Giles and Xander both say (in effect) that she’s harbouring a murderer, a phrasing that suggests (rightly or wrongly) criminal behaviour, but there are no laws to deal with the territory Buffy’s in, and there is no authority with the power to restrain or punish Buffy if she did break a law. In effect Buffy can endanger everyone’s lives without anyone (physically) being able to stop her. Further, the slayer herself, as the strongest physically and as the one with a sacred birthright, is the main authority on the supernatural. “I am the law,” as Buffy says in Selfless. It’s no picnic for Buffy, to say the least, to have that kind of responsibility. But it is not easy for everyone else to have to accept Buffy’s judgement no matter what, when their own lives are on the line. In the case of Angel, it’s even harder because Buffy’s judgement really is in question. The gang has tremendous social power over Buffy, but she holds the power in almost every other way. And I think that’s the root of most of the anger underlying the conflict. For Giles and the Scoobies, the question of what to do about Angel (and whether or not Buffy sleeps with him) could mean the difference between their life or death. They already know that they get zero input about what Buffy decides. So for them not to be told about the decision is all the more galling.
It’s notable then that Giles has an opportunity to appeal to an authority besides Buffy (the Council) through Post, but refuses. From Giles’ POV, Post could well favour killing Angel and giving some kind of punishment to Buffy, maybe even trying to take her away from her home. Giles knows he can’t control Buffy, but he also knows (for now) that the Council shouldn’t, either. And I think this is part of why Faith isn’t invited to the meeting. Since Post is Faith’s Watcher, anything involving Faith would probably get back to Post, and Giles can’t let that happen.
Confrontation/ Buffy’s perspective. I think “confrontation” understates the harshness of the proceedings here; this is more like a firing squad or inquisition. The first thing to note is the timing. Xander sees Angel at night. Now it is day. Xander told Giles et al about this immediately and they have discussed, analyzed and judged, for hours. They seem to have done this despite Lagos and the glove being unaccounted for. All of them, including Cordelia and Oz, with all of the details (it was very telling that Oz, the relative outsider, brings up the kissing). Then, note the setting. The judge and jury are assembled, they have their game plan set (remember, “I statements” only), and they invite Buffy to sit in the chair before the star panel. While this is more orderly than the mass group attack in Dead Man’s Party, it is still the same dynamic. It is all of them against Buffy. She still thinks Giles at least is partially on her side, but otherwise she knows the deck is stacked against her. Xander gets free rein here (the only restraint is Willow, plaintively suggesting that Xander should be less direct in his attacks). Also note, they all start with accusations, not questions. Giles (it appears you lied), Willow (you need help), Xander (I think you’re harboring a vicious killer). As with the recriminations in Deadman’s Party, no one asks the questions: when did Angel come back, how did he come back, does he have a soul, how do you know he is not a threat, why didn’t you tell us? In other words, judge and jury have already decided the matter, and the defendant is merely present so they can issue her sentence. (Though to extend this analogy, the sentence actually given to Buffy is merely the admittedly considerable anger and disapproval of the jury.) They don’t appear to want to hear whatever Buffy might have to say.
Primarily, they are just venting. Well, more than vent. Xander is trying to hurt Buffy again. “Harboring a vicious killer” “give him a happy?” “what, you just tripped and fell on his lips?” “you would stop him, like last time with Ms. Calendar?” “leave tons of power with scary guy and leave us to clean up the mess.” “lots of dead people constitute a reason.” He is verbally pounding on Buffy and he gets in shot after shot without any censure. And while Buffy’s deception is a clear problem, all of these shots go above and beyond, and they all expose Xander. He gives Buffy no credit for having already killed Angel; he has never sympathized with her about what it meant that she had to kill Angel; and now he brushes that all aside, saying she’s harboring a vicious killer. He brings up the most painful memory of Buffy’s life in the most crass way possible (give him a happy). And of course, he tops the hypocrisy scales on his scornful rejection of her saying that kissing Angel was a mistake. This is over the top, and no one calls him on any of it (though Willow will -- finally -- step up by the end of the episode). I think your point about Xander’s complete blindness to what all this means to Buffy is well taken. But I’m not sure I’d call Xander’s last remark hypocritical because you’ve left out what he’s responding to. Buffy says kissing Angel was a mistake -- but that the gang has to believe her that she would never put them in danger - which is as I said above a rather breath-takingly oblivious reply on her part. Xander is being hypocritical, and blind, when he disparagingly says, “what, you just tripped and fell on his lips?” This, from the man who just tripped and fell on Willow’s lips. Xander called his Willow-kissing a fluke back in Homecoming, but in this episode, even before seeing Buffy with Angel, he acknowledges his guilt, if only to himself. And he doesn’t try to pass off his cheating as an accident after being caught. So I don’t think he’s hypocritical on the specific question of whether kissing can be an accident. I do; he simply doesn’t have the moral standing, given his very recent experience, to use such scornful derision.
And it’s this derision, in the context of an all-against-one confrontation, where Buffy is attacked from all sides (et tu Oz?), that reflects that repeated theme: Buffy is not really part of this group. It’s ironic, given that this is the episode where Faith will encounter that same realization, only she thinks Buffy is in while she, alone, is out. She and Buffy should have been each others’ bestest buds.
Aftermath: Willow’s Enabling. Strudel makes the point that Willow doesn’t shut Xander down during the confrontation, or at the very least makes only small steps toward that. But I think it’s worth remembering that it’s conflict-avoidy Willow we’re talking about. In Becoming she was 100% on Buffy’s side, but all she did to Xander’s harsh words was shoot him a dirty look; in Dead Man’s Party she pushed Buffy away in trying to avoid the possible argument that would inevitably result. I think we can be reasonably sure that the “I statements” were Willow’s idea, and her attempt to avoid the nastiness of confrontations (control over emotions) without avoiding the confrontations themselves. That she put forth a suggestion of how best to run the meeting is a sign of her growing social confidence, and that her response when things go off the rails is to plead to the adult present that the other kids aren’t playing by the rules is a sign that said confidence has only grown so much.
Anyway, while she tries to do so with a velvet glove, she does tell Buffy she can’t see straight on the subject of Angel. She assures Buffy that they will all help her (Buffy) face that. Two scenes later, we see what her version of helping Buffy face the truth is: to tell Buffy that she has zero anger; that secrets are good; and to offer tacit encouragement for Buffy to go off and rendezvous with Angel again. Talk about mixed signals. Willow is the Scooby most likely to feel favourably about Buffy anyway--she was the biggest cheerleader of B/A and sees Angel and Angelus as distinct enough that in the last scene of Becoming she could happily imagine an ensouled Angel and Buffy going away to be together. But in her rush to absolve Buffy, she misses on a real opportunity to have a nonjudgmental but firm conversation with Buffy about the impact her being close to Angel could have. Her normalization and encouragement of a Buffy/Angel as a potential relationship is somewhere between naive and irresponsible. And she moves herself into a sycophantic-of-Buffy mode wherein she denies any hurt feelings or sense of betrayal--which given her words in the library, are there to an extent. After this, she quickly returns to the role of the B/A cheerleader, with any discomfort she has about the pairing being pushed down to her subconscious.
So why the quick turnaround? We don’t have to work hard to see that Willow is drawing a parallel between Buffy/Angel and her whatever it is with Xander. Perhaps her library-scene assurance that no one was blaming Buffy (when, yes, they were) was a fantasy of the way she wants her own indiscretion dealt with by others when/if she’s outed. With that tactic collapsing, she evidently made a conscious decision to forgive Buffy entirely and brush past any remaining conflict, both to allow her some measure of self-forgiveness and also to bond with Buffy over their dirty secrets. She desperately wants to come clean, but despite Buffy having been outed for a more dangerous secret, she’s still convinced that the truth will make her no longer a good person in Buffy’s (or anyone’s) eyes. Her moral perspective remains skewed, which is hinted at when Willow gives her definition of a “good person,” which turns out to be based entirely on following-the-rules (like flossing!) rather than intrinsically moral behaviour. At least she knows well enough to know that opening her SAT booklet early would be less shameful to Buffy’s ears than cheating on Oz. (And of course, rule-follower gets a big thrill from breaking those rules--having a secret and being a bad girl is sexy. I don’t think this is why she and Xander kissed the first time, but I think this thrill for Willow is a huge part of why it’s continuing.)
Some kudos to Willow: she finally does tell Xander to shut up at the end of the episode. That’s the direct rebuke that’s been missing since Xander started his most venomous anti-Angel attacks after Jenny’s death. Too little too late, but at least she makes that stand before Angel saves her bacon, so we know she’s doing it “on the merits.”
Aftermath: Xander’s Treachery. If we just looked at the confrontation in the library, I’d say that the substance favored Xander’s side of the argument, but the tone was unfair. What happens next goes well beyond just being unfair. Xander basically attempts to murder Angel.
To talk about what Xander does here, we need a brief retrospective. I’ve argued that, before Becoming, Xander found purpose in taking on an increasingly personal stake in Buffy’s mission, more or less appointing himself her right-hand man. His strong investment in the mission is also where a lot of his energy came from on the Angel question: he not only felt he knew what should be done about Angel, but thought it was his responsibility to make sure it happened. His lie to Buffy was based on key premises that Angel morally should be dusted, that Buffy couldn’t be trusted to keep her head on Angel, and that Xander had the moral authority to make that call. It had a bit of a Watcher M.O., controlling the flow of information so the slayer does what he thinks she should.
Buffy’s skipping town after the fight with Angel meant that Xander lost his friend, the object of his focus, and his mission all at once, because of a betrayal he couldn’t be sure was the right thing to do. Then came a summer of not knowing what happened, whether he made the right call, whether he made the wrong call and destroyed someone close to him, and whether his personal feelings about Buffy and about Angel pushed him into making the wrong choice. So Xander dealt with the loss and doubt by doubling down on his presumed moral authority. The implications of him being wrong were unthinkable, so he didn’t think it, and over the summer he calcified his judgments of Angel (evil), Buffy (blind) and himself (righteous). In Dead Man’s Party he tore into Buffy for leaving her friends and her post. But whatever reconciliation happened with Buffy didn’t restore their late-season-two closeness and slaying has drifted out of his life.
Upon his discovery of Angel’s return, he doubles down even further. The fling with Willow is chipping away at his moral certainty, so he attacks Buffy’s blind spot with Angel and Angel’s status as killer all the more strongly. But when he gets to the Bronze, angry as he is that nothing has been resolved, he isn’t about to take any decisive action. When Faith asks about his rough day, he doesn’t tell her at first (he’d rather “just shoot” than talk). But after some light prodding, he tells her about Angel. He makes a half-hearted stab at noting Buffy’s perspective (“he’s clean”) but fully expects Faith to share his anger. But then Faith goes further and suggests they kill Angel. And Xander (immediately) signs on, essentially repeating the decision he made to try to have Buffy kill Angel in Becoming, this time unleashing Faith as his proxy weapon. He controls the information that Faith gets by not telling her, at this crucial moment, any of the extenuating circumstances making the Angel question so complicated. This time it’s much worse than in Becoming: Angel is souled with a chance at being unsouled, instead of the other way around (harken back to Giles’ exegesis of the two types of monsters, those that desire redemption and those that do not); and whatever danger Angel may pose with the Glove it’s nothing compared to the clear and present danger Acathla presented, which forced Xander’s hand. But Xander has spent months dealing with what he lost with the lie by convincing himself it was the right decision.
There’s another level to his siding with Faith: Faith herself. He’s hardened in his view of Angel, but it’s not clear that he can convince himself, deep down, that he has the moral authority to do anything about it (or that he had the moral authority to tell the Becoming lie). As I mentioned before, it’s implicitly understood that it’s a slayer’s jurisdiction to decide which demons get to live and which die. And so what Faith offers him here is irresistible. She validates his extreme position against Angel by pushing to kill him herself. She validates his betrayal of Buffy via the lie by being appalled at Buffy’s behaviour (“I can’t believe her!”) and suggesting they go behind Buffy’s back to kill Angel now. And by letting him tag along she gives him a chance to reclaim his position as the slayer’s right-hand man. There’s a power shot of the two entering the library side by side. She’s respectful to him and lets him pick out whatever weapon he wants. He’s back where he was in the teaser to Becoming, before the lie and the falling out, accompanying a slayer in an effort to kill Angel. And he’s also back where he was at the end of Becoming, betraying Buffy because he knows it’s better for the world for Angel to be dead.
But this return to a more comfortable story line is a fantasy. The house of cards Xander has built comes crashing down when he finds Giles, unconscious. When presented with a present danger, and not the abstraction that Angel has mostly become, Xander loses his urgency on the Angel question to tend to Giles. (Since an alternate version of the scene could have had him saying, “I’ll take care of Giles while you go, pussycat, kill kill” he does seem to be showing some ambivalence here.) We’ll talk about Faith’s motivations shortly, but for Xander, Faith is mirroring his own attitude back to him. She uses Giles’ injury as a reason to go after Angel, rather than to help Giles (much like the insensitive way Xander has thrown Jenny’s name around in arguments); she has no patience to wait until all the facts are in; she uses Angel’s status as a demon as proof positive that he’s responsible for whatever bad that’s happened. Each one is something Xander has done, and arguing against Faith on each point makes his own judgment errors sink in. His view of Faith as a moral authority collapses, as does his brief tenure as Faith’s right-hand man.
When Buffy and Willow arrive, he seems to know that he’s screwed up, though he still tries to hang onto justifications for dear life. (He seems resigned to what he has done. There’s something subtle going on with him here. He seems to have an inkling that he regrets having shot his bolt, but Angel’s prospective death has become an unreal and neutral possibility, rather than a just cause or a potential tragedy.) (I wonder if the resignation is Xander just shutting down; he’s been holding onto his self-righteousness basically non-stop since Becoming, and doesn’t really know how process giving it up.) Then, when he and Willow get to the mansion, Angel saves Willow’s life, and Xander’s attempt to intervene in the Buffy/Faith fight he helped cause leads only to Faith tossing him casually against the wall. (The sequence of Faith letting Xander get close, discarding him, and then violently reacting to his attempt to help gets repeated closely in The Zeppo through Consequences.) So: wrong about Angel, wrong about Faith, and his moves here led to Faith fighting Angel, allowing Post, the actual scary person, to get a hold of the Glove.
So, Xander loses a lot in overstepping his bounds here. He stops pushing Buffy on the Angel issue, even waving a white flag in Amends. And, perhaps more crucially, after this disaster resulting largely from his presumption of moral authority in the slaying mission, I think he stops trying to regain the right-hand-man status that he was aiming for in season two. He is still part of the gang, still animated to an extent by Buffy’s mission, but the mission is less central to him and he’s forced to start carving out niches for himself elsewhere. The Zeppo, explicitly about Xander’s attempt to cope with feeling on the outskirts of the gang, is a few episodes away. In Xander’s Restless dream, Spike claims that Giles is training him to be a Watcher, and Xander responds by saying that he was into that for a while, but now has other stuff going on, a likely reference to Xander’s having attempted to make helping the slayer his primary purpose in life, and his attempt afterwards to distance himself from it. Anyway, Xander loses a lot of his sense of purpose in this episode, but it could be worse. At least he still has Willow and Cordelia, right?
Part 2 can be found here.
Standard spoiler warning: The notes are written for folks who have seen all of BtVS and AtS. I'll be spoiling through the comics as well. Basically -- if you are a spoiler-phobe and haven't seen or read it all, read further at your own risk.
Standard Credits: I've written the material in black; Strudel (aka my Bro) writes in blue; local_max writes in purple. Or at least, that's what they've done when I finish editing and formatting.
We had to do this in two parts. The first covers the confrontation in the library. The rest is dealt with in part two.
Buffy 3.07 Revelations, In Which Many Fault Lines Are Revealed
So we’re to the mystical 7th episode. In the first season, it revealed that Angel was a vampire, which turned out to be just the start of the many revelations about him. In the second season notion the lies we tell each other and especially ourselves took center stage. This season, in Revelations, some lies come undone, with rather bad consequences due to the lies that are not yet undone.
Xander and Willow’s Secret. The opening scene is about the sexual tension between Xander and Willow and their attempts to deflect attention from their illicit whatever it is that they have going. When Cordelia asks what is up with them, Willow abruptly raises questions about whether Buffy has been acting strangely lately (in effect, she’s throwing Buffy under the bus). Buffy arrives, with Faith not far behind and they go off on a convivial ‘date’ to slay vampires. That’s the road map of the episode. Xander and Willow’s guilt about what they are up to strongly shapes their reaction to the revelation that Buffy has been lying. And the effect is to destroy the camaraderie between Faith and Buffy.
For how important it is to the episode, there’s little actual development of the situation between Xander and Willow. (They kiss for the second time on screen--the first kiss we know of after the original “fluke”) The key thing is the way their situation conditions everything that happens. Xander comes across Angel because he’s taken on a mission for Giles out of his sense of guilt. Willow is incapable of dealing with the breach of trust that’s happened with the revelation that Buffy has been harboring Angel because she’s conscious of being guilty of something similar. That guilt should be kept in mind when we turn to the confrontation. But first, we need a look at Buffy’s lies.
Buffy’s Lie. We can start with the sympathetic read on why Buffy feels compelled to lie. Buffy can’t trust the Scoobies to react with forbearance towards Angel, and wants to be armed with better facts (presumably about his ‘cure’) in order to mollify them. We’re just two episodes past Homecoming which sets up how not at home Buffy is at home.* She still needs a place that’s for her -- and for her that place is with Angel. So she needs Angel, and has a reasonable belief that it would be dangerous to him to reveal his return prematurely.
*We get very heavy reminders of Buffy’s social precariousness in this episode. Three times Buffy joins the gang only to find out they’ve been talking about her behind her back. The first and the last seem relatively innocuous (at the Bronze at the beginning of the episode; at school just before the end), while the second (the inquisition in the library) is heavy beyond belief. But note the repetition of the theme. Buffy is not really part of the group.
But as ever Buffy’s motivations are more complex than that. She’s keeping Angel a secret also because she’s being entirely irresponsible in how she’s dealing with him. She knows it’s a risk to be intimate with Angel. When their Tai Chi workout nearly leads to a kiss, Buffy knows she has to stop it. But midway through the episode she’s back, passionately kissing him. There’s a parallel to X/W -- whether it’s pheromones or true passionate love -- Buffy is succumbing to an urge to do something she knows is flat wrong. (Unlike X/W who only stop the smooching when Giles stumbles on to them, Buffy does at least attempt to break off the smooching with Angel; though given that the heavy smooching follows a previous attempt at stopping, the trajectory seems clear.) The problem is that the stakes are much higher. X/W are going to break some hearts. If Angelus is unleashed people will die. Buffy is endangering the world in pursuit of her personal emotional/sexual needs. That’s really quite dark.
I want to layer on top of this a question about the past few episodes. In Beauty and the Beasts, Buffy tried to determine whether Angel, first discovered as a feral animal with probably-human blood on his lips, could be redeemed. He broke free of his restraints and killed a monster in front of Buffy and whispered her name. This was apparently enough evidence for his rehabilitation for Buffy to stop restraining him. And then in this episode, she leaves him alone with the Glove, confident that he is fully trustworthy. We can look at the intervening episodes, which have shown Angel mostly puttering around his mansion and doing Tai Chi, and say Buffy was right. But certainly Buffy has personal investment in Angel, and by keeping him a secret, she is shutting out any voices besides her own, who might question her call and raise valid counterarguments.
Buffy is only implicitly lying to Giles and the Scoobies. (Though she has been lying to them regularly about where she is going, those nights where she goes to tend to Angel.) She flat out lies to Faith. And it’s this aspect of Buffy’s lie that ends up doing the most long run damage. We’ll come back to that below. Her motives are more reasonable here. Angel is freighted with so much emotional meaning for Buffy, it would really be hard to bring him into a conversation between two girls dishing about their exes. And she’s not going to confide in Faith, who is new in her life about a secret she’s keeping from the gang.
The Confrontation/ Scoobies’ Perspective. There are two very different narratives we can give to the confrontation in the library. We’ll start with the version favorable to the Scoobies. Xander’s arguments are all on point and needed to be made. Buffy tries to tell them that Angel is better now, and Xander replies with the question whether Buffy has even considered what happens if Angel doesn’t stay “better.” This is the guy who murdered Jenny and tortured Giles. On top of that he’s returned from centuries of torment which makes it hard to fathom who Angel is anymore. Like I said, Buffy was incredibly reckless -- and as both Xander and Cordelia emphasize, the people she was putting most at risk was them. (In fact, every person in that room save Oz actually had their life more directly threatened than Buffy, at least before the end of Becoming, with Giles’ torture and Angel’s attempts to kill Willow in Innocence, Xander in BBB and Cordy in Killed by Death.) Then Xander gets to the crux of the matter, which is that, not only is Buffy harboring a guy who can be seriously dangerous, she’s actively engaging in the exact behavior that unleashed Angelus the year before. Buffy dodges that charge, coming back at Xander for spying on her. In fact, Xander was doing no such thing. He’d tracked Angel back to the mansion, a reasonable move when one sees an evil guy at large, and is completely blindsided to discover that Buffy is kissing him passionately. (To be fair, Buffy couldn’t know that Xander’s actions were reasonable here. It’s a pretty big leap to get to Xander randomly following around so he can spy on her. But Xander did not reveal his presence then; so, while he didn’t intend to spy, he acted like one.)
The next exchange is arguably even worse for Buffy. She says she’d never put anyone in danger. But of course, she did exactly that last year when she wouldn’t or couldn’t kill Angel when she had a chance, and Jenny and others were in fact was murdered because of it. Her rejoinder in that moment is stunningly deaf to how that would sound to the people in that room, and is yet another reminder of how flamingly irresponsible she’s being. (I agree on the “stunningly” deaf, but “flamingly” irresponsible overstates what has happened thus far. She’s on a dangerous slope, but there’s no indication that she will succumb and give him a happy. Rather, she is prolonging and enhancing their frustrated unhappy.) (You’re right that what happened thus far is still several steps away from a happy, but I disagree that kissing him counts as “no indication” that she will give him one.)
Buffy’s final deflection is to argue that Xander has mixed motives in this... that he’s just jealous. As Cordelia immediately replies, that betrays an impressive hubris on Buffy’s part to assume that Xander would still rather be with her. (Cordelia’s reply leads to Buffy snapping at her.) It’s a bit more ironic given that Xander’s current irresistible attraction is to Willow, not Buffy. We can’t know how much of Xander’s ongoing animus towards Angel is rooted in his initial jealousy of Angel. But it really is irrelevant here because, as Xander says, he doesn’t need excuses to be against Angel.
I think there are a few missteps Buffy makes in addition to the major ones Maggie points out. Rather than confront Xander’s question about what would happen if Angel doesn’t stay better, she tries to leave the room. And then she stretches the truth twice. First, she says, “I was going to tell you” to the gang, which is pretty much a flat-out lie--she told Angel explicitly that she wasn’t going to tell anyone about his return. Second, when the question of her and Angel having sex comes up, she says “We’re not together like that.” It’s not entirely untrue. But she has just last night inched closer to that. The gang can’t know about the first, but they do know that the second is at least misleading, and that colours the escalation of the conflict. To a degree, Buffy, caught in a big lie (if of omission), tries to lie her way out of it. And this makes the gang all the less likely to cut her slack as the confrontation goes on.
After the confrontation ends, nothing has been resolved. The gang, and Xander in particular, have criticized Buffy harshly, but no real changes have been made, and further no one has really offered any prescriptions for change. Angel can still roam free. Buffy can still see him whenever she likes. And she can still sleep with him and unleash Angelus if she chooses to. Even Giles doesn’t try to tell Buffy what to do. And this hints at a real issue underlying the conflict, which becomes very important this season with Faith: there is no simple way to prevent a slayer from doing dangerous, reckless things. Giles and Xander both say (in effect) that she’s harbouring a murderer, a phrasing that suggests (rightly or wrongly) criminal behaviour, but there are no laws to deal with the territory Buffy’s in, and there is no authority with the power to restrain or punish Buffy if she did break a law. In effect Buffy can endanger everyone’s lives without anyone (physically) being able to stop her. Further, the slayer herself, as the strongest physically and as the one with a sacred birthright, is the main authority on the supernatural. “I am the law,” as Buffy says in Selfless. It’s no picnic for Buffy, to say the least, to have that kind of responsibility. But it is not easy for everyone else to have to accept Buffy’s judgement no matter what, when their own lives are on the line. In the case of Angel, it’s even harder because Buffy’s judgement really is in question. The gang has tremendous social power over Buffy, but she holds the power in almost every other way. And I think that’s the root of most of the anger underlying the conflict. For Giles and the Scoobies, the question of what to do about Angel (and whether or not Buffy sleeps with him) could mean the difference between their life or death. They already know that they get zero input about what Buffy decides. So for them not to be told about the decision is all the more galling.
It’s notable then that Giles has an opportunity to appeal to an authority besides Buffy (the Council) through Post, but refuses. From Giles’ POV, Post could well favour killing Angel and giving some kind of punishment to Buffy, maybe even trying to take her away from her home. Giles knows he can’t control Buffy, but he also knows (for now) that the Council shouldn’t, either. And I think this is part of why Faith isn’t invited to the meeting. Since Post is Faith’s Watcher, anything involving Faith would probably get back to Post, and Giles can’t let that happen.
Confrontation/ Buffy’s perspective. I think “confrontation” understates the harshness of the proceedings here; this is more like a firing squad or inquisition. The first thing to note is the timing. Xander sees Angel at night. Now it is day. Xander told Giles et al about this immediately and they have discussed, analyzed and judged, for hours. They seem to have done this despite Lagos and the glove being unaccounted for. All of them, including Cordelia and Oz, with all of the details (it was very telling that Oz, the relative outsider, brings up the kissing). Then, note the setting. The judge and jury are assembled, they have their game plan set (remember, “I statements” only), and they invite Buffy to sit in the chair before the star panel. While this is more orderly than the mass group attack in Dead Man’s Party, it is still the same dynamic. It is all of them against Buffy. She still thinks Giles at least is partially on her side, but otherwise she knows the deck is stacked against her. Xander gets free rein here (the only restraint is Willow, plaintively suggesting that Xander should be less direct in his attacks). Also note, they all start with accusations, not questions. Giles (it appears you lied), Willow (you need help), Xander (I think you’re harboring a vicious killer). As with the recriminations in Deadman’s Party, no one asks the questions: when did Angel come back, how did he come back, does he have a soul, how do you know he is not a threat, why didn’t you tell us? In other words, judge and jury have already decided the matter, and the defendant is merely present so they can issue her sentence. (Though to extend this analogy, the sentence actually given to Buffy is merely the admittedly considerable anger and disapproval of the jury.) They don’t appear to want to hear whatever Buffy might have to say.
Primarily, they are just venting. Well, more than vent. Xander is trying to hurt Buffy again. “Harboring a vicious killer” “give him a happy?” “what, you just tripped and fell on his lips?” “you would stop him, like last time with Ms. Calendar?” “leave tons of power with scary guy and leave us to clean up the mess.” “lots of dead people constitute a reason.” He is verbally pounding on Buffy and he gets in shot after shot without any censure. And while Buffy’s deception is a clear problem, all of these shots go above and beyond, and they all expose Xander. He gives Buffy no credit for having already killed Angel; he has never sympathized with her about what it meant that she had to kill Angel; and now he brushes that all aside, saying she’s harboring a vicious killer. He brings up the most painful memory of Buffy’s life in the most crass way possible (give him a happy). And of course, he tops the hypocrisy scales on his scornful rejection of her saying that kissing Angel was a mistake. This is over the top, and no one calls him on any of it (though Willow will -- finally -- step up by the end of the episode). I think your point about Xander’s complete blindness to what all this means to Buffy is well taken. But I’m not sure I’d call Xander’s last remark hypocritical because you’ve left out what he’s responding to. Buffy says kissing Angel was a mistake -- but that the gang has to believe her that she would never put them in danger - which is as I said above a rather breath-takingly oblivious reply on her part. Xander is being hypocritical, and blind, when he disparagingly says, “what, you just tripped and fell on his lips?” This, from the man who just tripped and fell on Willow’s lips. Xander called his Willow-kissing a fluke back in Homecoming, but in this episode, even before seeing Buffy with Angel, he acknowledges his guilt, if only to himself. And he doesn’t try to pass off his cheating as an accident after being caught. So I don’t think he’s hypocritical on the specific question of whether kissing can be an accident. I do; he simply doesn’t have the moral standing, given his very recent experience, to use such scornful derision.
And it’s this derision, in the context of an all-against-one confrontation, where Buffy is attacked from all sides (et tu Oz?), that reflects that repeated theme: Buffy is not really part of this group. It’s ironic, given that this is the episode where Faith will encounter that same realization, only she thinks Buffy is in while she, alone, is out. She and Buffy should have been each others’ bestest buds.
Aftermath: Willow’s Enabling. Strudel makes the point that Willow doesn’t shut Xander down during the confrontation, or at the very least makes only small steps toward that. But I think it’s worth remembering that it’s conflict-avoidy Willow we’re talking about. In Becoming she was 100% on Buffy’s side, but all she did to Xander’s harsh words was shoot him a dirty look; in Dead Man’s Party she pushed Buffy away in trying to avoid the possible argument that would inevitably result. I think we can be reasonably sure that the “I statements” were Willow’s idea, and her attempt to avoid the nastiness of confrontations (control over emotions) without avoiding the confrontations themselves. That she put forth a suggestion of how best to run the meeting is a sign of her growing social confidence, and that her response when things go off the rails is to plead to the adult present that the other kids aren’t playing by the rules is a sign that said confidence has only grown so much.
Anyway, while she tries to do so with a velvet glove, she does tell Buffy she can’t see straight on the subject of Angel. She assures Buffy that they will all help her (Buffy) face that. Two scenes later, we see what her version of helping Buffy face the truth is: to tell Buffy that she has zero anger; that secrets are good; and to offer tacit encouragement for Buffy to go off and rendezvous with Angel again. Talk about mixed signals. Willow is the Scooby most likely to feel favourably about Buffy anyway--she was the biggest cheerleader of B/A and sees Angel and Angelus as distinct enough that in the last scene of Becoming she could happily imagine an ensouled Angel and Buffy going away to be together. But in her rush to absolve Buffy, she misses on a real opportunity to have a nonjudgmental but firm conversation with Buffy about the impact her being close to Angel could have. Her normalization and encouragement of a Buffy/Angel as a potential relationship is somewhere between naive and irresponsible. And she moves herself into a sycophantic-of-Buffy mode wherein she denies any hurt feelings or sense of betrayal--which given her words in the library, are there to an extent. After this, she quickly returns to the role of the B/A cheerleader, with any discomfort she has about the pairing being pushed down to her subconscious.
So why the quick turnaround? We don’t have to work hard to see that Willow is drawing a parallel between Buffy/Angel and her whatever it is with Xander. Perhaps her library-scene assurance that no one was blaming Buffy (when, yes, they were) was a fantasy of the way she wants her own indiscretion dealt with by others when/if she’s outed. With that tactic collapsing, she evidently made a conscious decision to forgive Buffy entirely and brush past any remaining conflict, both to allow her some measure of self-forgiveness and also to bond with Buffy over their dirty secrets. She desperately wants to come clean, but despite Buffy having been outed for a more dangerous secret, she’s still convinced that the truth will make her no longer a good person in Buffy’s (or anyone’s) eyes. Her moral perspective remains skewed, which is hinted at when Willow gives her definition of a “good person,” which turns out to be based entirely on following-the-rules (like flossing!) rather than intrinsically moral behaviour. At least she knows well enough to know that opening her SAT booklet early would be less shameful to Buffy’s ears than cheating on Oz. (And of course, rule-follower gets a big thrill from breaking those rules--having a secret and being a bad girl is sexy. I don’t think this is why she and Xander kissed the first time, but I think this thrill for Willow is a huge part of why it’s continuing.)
Some kudos to Willow: she finally does tell Xander to shut up at the end of the episode. That’s the direct rebuke that’s been missing since Xander started his most venomous anti-Angel attacks after Jenny’s death. Too little too late, but at least she makes that stand before Angel saves her bacon, so we know she’s doing it “on the merits.”
Aftermath: Xander’s Treachery. If we just looked at the confrontation in the library, I’d say that the substance favored Xander’s side of the argument, but the tone was unfair. What happens next goes well beyond just being unfair. Xander basically attempts to murder Angel.
To talk about what Xander does here, we need a brief retrospective. I’ve argued that, before Becoming, Xander found purpose in taking on an increasingly personal stake in Buffy’s mission, more or less appointing himself her right-hand man. His strong investment in the mission is also where a lot of his energy came from on the Angel question: he not only felt he knew what should be done about Angel, but thought it was his responsibility to make sure it happened. His lie to Buffy was based on key premises that Angel morally should be dusted, that Buffy couldn’t be trusted to keep her head on Angel, and that Xander had the moral authority to make that call. It had a bit of a Watcher M.O., controlling the flow of information so the slayer does what he thinks she should.
Buffy’s skipping town after the fight with Angel meant that Xander lost his friend, the object of his focus, and his mission all at once, because of a betrayal he couldn’t be sure was the right thing to do. Then came a summer of not knowing what happened, whether he made the right call, whether he made the wrong call and destroyed someone close to him, and whether his personal feelings about Buffy and about Angel pushed him into making the wrong choice. So Xander dealt with the loss and doubt by doubling down on his presumed moral authority. The implications of him being wrong were unthinkable, so he didn’t think it, and over the summer he calcified his judgments of Angel (evil), Buffy (blind) and himself (righteous). In Dead Man’s Party he tore into Buffy for leaving her friends and her post. But whatever reconciliation happened with Buffy didn’t restore their late-season-two closeness and slaying has drifted out of his life.
Upon his discovery of Angel’s return, he doubles down even further. The fling with Willow is chipping away at his moral certainty, so he attacks Buffy’s blind spot with Angel and Angel’s status as killer all the more strongly. But when he gets to the Bronze, angry as he is that nothing has been resolved, he isn’t about to take any decisive action. When Faith asks about his rough day, he doesn’t tell her at first (he’d rather “just shoot” than talk). But after some light prodding, he tells her about Angel. He makes a half-hearted stab at noting Buffy’s perspective (“he’s clean”) but fully expects Faith to share his anger. But then Faith goes further and suggests they kill Angel. And Xander (immediately) signs on, essentially repeating the decision he made to try to have Buffy kill Angel in Becoming, this time unleashing Faith as his proxy weapon. He controls the information that Faith gets by not telling her, at this crucial moment, any of the extenuating circumstances making the Angel question so complicated. This time it’s much worse than in Becoming: Angel is souled with a chance at being unsouled, instead of the other way around (harken back to Giles’ exegesis of the two types of monsters, those that desire redemption and those that do not); and whatever danger Angel may pose with the Glove it’s nothing compared to the clear and present danger Acathla presented, which forced Xander’s hand. But Xander has spent months dealing with what he lost with the lie by convincing himself it was the right decision.
There’s another level to his siding with Faith: Faith herself. He’s hardened in his view of Angel, but it’s not clear that he can convince himself, deep down, that he has the moral authority to do anything about it (or that he had the moral authority to tell the Becoming lie). As I mentioned before, it’s implicitly understood that it’s a slayer’s jurisdiction to decide which demons get to live and which die. And so what Faith offers him here is irresistible. She validates his extreme position against Angel by pushing to kill him herself. She validates his betrayal of Buffy via the lie by being appalled at Buffy’s behaviour (“I can’t believe her!”) and suggesting they go behind Buffy’s back to kill Angel now. And by letting him tag along she gives him a chance to reclaim his position as the slayer’s right-hand man. There’s a power shot of the two entering the library side by side. She’s respectful to him and lets him pick out whatever weapon he wants. He’s back where he was in the teaser to Becoming, before the lie and the falling out, accompanying a slayer in an effort to kill Angel. And he’s also back where he was at the end of Becoming, betraying Buffy because he knows it’s better for the world for Angel to be dead.
But this return to a more comfortable story line is a fantasy. The house of cards Xander has built comes crashing down when he finds Giles, unconscious. When presented with a present danger, and not the abstraction that Angel has mostly become, Xander loses his urgency on the Angel question to tend to Giles. (Since an alternate version of the scene could have had him saying, “I’ll take care of Giles while you go, pussycat, kill kill” he does seem to be showing some ambivalence here.) We’ll talk about Faith’s motivations shortly, but for Xander, Faith is mirroring his own attitude back to him. She uses Giles’ injury as a reason to go after Angel, rather than to help Giles (much like the insensitive way Xander has thrown Jenny’s name around in arguments); she has no patience to wait until all the facts are in; she uses Angel’s status as a demon as proof positive that he’s responsible for whatever bad that’s happened. Each one is something Xander has done, and arguing against Faith on each point makes his own judgment errors sink in. His view of Faith as a moral authority collapses, as does his brief tenure as Faith’s right-hand man.
When Buffy and Willow arrive, he seems to know that he’s screwed up, though he still tries to hang onto justifications for dear life. (He seems resigned to what he has done. There’s something subtle going on with him here. He seems to have an inkling that he regrets having shot his bolt, but Angel’s prospective death has become an unreal and neutral possibility, rather than a just cause or a potential tragedy.) (I wonder if the resignation is Xander just shutting down; he’s been holding onto his self-righteousness basically non-stop since Becoming, and doesn’t really know how process giving it up.) Then, when he and Willow get to the mansion, Angel saves Willow’s life, and Xander’s attempt to intervene in the Buffy/Faith fight he helped cause leads only to Faith tossing him casually against the wall. (The sequence of Faith letting Xander get close, discarding him, and then violently reacting to his attempt to help gets repeated closely in The Zeppo through Consequences.) So: wrong about Angel, wrong about Faith, and his moves here led to Faith fighting Angel, allowing Post, the actual scary person, to get a hold of the Glove.
So, Xander loses a lot in overstepping his bounds here. He stops pushing Buffy on the Angel issue, even waving a white flag in Amends. And, perhaps more crucially, after this disaster resulting largely from his presumption of moral authority in the slaying mission, I think he stops trying to regain the right-hand-man status that he was aiming for in season two. He is still part of the gang, still animated to an extent by Buffy’s mission, but the mission is less central to him and he’s forced to start carving out niches for himself elsewhere. The Zeppo, explicitly about Xander’s attempt to cope with feeling on the outskirts of the gang, is a few episodes away. In Xander’s Restless dream, Spike claims that Giles is training him to be a Watcher, and Xander responds by saying that he was into that for a while, but now has other stuff going on, a likely reference to Xander’s having attempted to make helping the slayer his primary purpose in life, and his attempt afterwards to distance himself from it. Anyway, Xander loses a lot of his sense of purpose in this episode, but it could be worse. At least he still has Willow and Cordelia, right?
Part 2 can be found here.