Season 4

Episode 14

GOODBYE IOWA: Hello Life

By Spring Summers 22-Jun-03

- Riley and reality – Buffy’s morning after – Who and what you are – Stories on the telly – Conclusion – Spicy extras for James Marsters fans -

In Goodbye Iowa, sheltered farm boy Riley Finn meets and greets the real world. In an earlier Season 4 episode, Pangs, he compares his boyhood in Iowa to a Grant Wood painting. But life is not a Grant Wood painting – with its clean clear lines, and its accompanying suggestion that the wheat is simple to separate from the chaff. Buffy, Riley’s girlfriend, has been harboring Hostile 17. His idol, his mother figure and his leader, Maggie Walsh, tried to kill Buffy, created an evil monster, and now she’s dead. Riley’s struggle to process this new reality is in the foreground of the episode, though we watch all our characters deal with the slippery, often slimy - but always undeniable - nature of truth.

With images of Xander’s mirror ball symbolizing the many angles at which the world can be reflected back, we listen and watch as, in nearly every other sentence, our characters are processing information and spitting back out their own special interpretations, based on what they’ve seen, what they know, and their own preconceived notions of the world. The words say, tell, think, guess, know, imagine and the like are used over and over. They guess right, and they guess wrong, but they aren’t shy about making the leap to a conclusion. We get two mentions of the word jump, and we watch Adam jump down to the floor of The Initiative.

Everyone makes assumptions and they take action based on those assumptions – they have to, that’s how human beings work: We see, hear, and otherwise absorb information, and run it through our own personal mills. The product may be right, it may be wrong, others may find it palatable, or it may be sit on the shelf with no takers. But we all do it. We come to our imperfect conclusions and treat them as truths - until we know better and maybe even after. Here are a few examples, among many (many, many), of characters in this episode taking a stab at discerning reality and understanding others:

• Spike (to Buffy): “Do you think Riley was out knitting booties for your future offspring while Maggie was stringing you up?”
• Riley: “Look, this isn’t Professor Walsh. There must be something making her act this way. Something – I don’t know. Something controlling her.”
• Buffy: “The Polgara demon had a skewer in its arm. That’s the one Maggie insisted we bring back alive.” Giles: “She must have sent it after you.”
• Forrest (to Riley): “Hey, where you been all night? (Riley gives him no answer.) Well. Congratulations. I see you and Buffy have gotten past the shy phase.”
• Willow (guessing wrongly that Tara may feel used): “I hope you don’t think that I just come over for the spells and everything. I mean, I really like just talking and hanging out with you and stuff.” Tara (guessing correctly): “I know that. But you want to do a spell.”
• Buffy: “I’m going to have to punch you, aren’t I?” Willy: “Just once, and it don’t have to hurt.” Buffy begins to raise her first – Willy “jumps to the conclusion” and yells “Oww! Oh!” before Buffy even has a chance to move her fist forward.

They all, especially Riley, struggle to shape reality for easier swallowing – so it doesn’t hurt so much going down. But it is actually they who must adapt – because the truth is ultimately rigid, and swallow it you must, if you intend to live anything close to happy life. As Buffy says to The Initiative’s Dr Angleman when she corners him for information: “Now, I don’t generally like to kill humans, but I’ve learned it pays to be flexible in life.”

Yes, Buffy, you bet it does. It’s either bend or break, because reality is a series of freight trains, and you’re always trapped on the tracks, waiting. While we watch the inexperienced Riley crack and break during his first head-on collision, we notice that Buffy has acquired some flexibility – she has grown and changed since her High School days with Angel. Her first sexual encounter with Riley has also resulted in disaster, but Buffy is no longer a child whose first instinct is to continue hang on to an idealized view of others, and find a way to blame herself.

Goodbye Iowa is the episode immediately following Buffy & Riley’s first time, and some subtle parallels are drawn to Innocence (the episode following the Buffy/Angel sex). As he did in Innocence, Giles wonders aloud what could have caused the disaster (Maggie trying to kill Buffy), and later, when there is more fallout (a little boy dies), he tells Buffy not to blame herself. And just as Angel did, Riley blames Buffy for what has happened to him (“You’re doing this to me, aren’t you?”). But we find that Buffy is flexible – she quickly faces the facts: The Professor she admired was not so admirable, and Riley’s problems are due to his own inexperience and limitations. In Season 2, Giles’ gentle suggestions that Buffy had no cause to feel guilty fell on deaf ears. And as recently as the beginning of Season 4, Buffy blamed herself for Parker’s post-sex transformation. But in this episode, her response to Giles’: “You mustn’t blame yourself,” is “I’m not going to.” The idea that her relationship with Riley is at all causal does not even cross her mind.

Riley is changing and growing, and Buffy is doing the same, though she’s a few apocalypses ahead of him. But the struggle to reach adulthood involves more that just allowing yourself to unflinchingly grasp the nature of the world. It also involves understanding your own nature and human nature in general. We learn that Adam has killed and mutilated the body of a young boy after asking him how “he works.” Dr Angleman mentions that Washington is sending a team to The Initiative’s facility to do an “internal investigation.” And Xander says “Ewww! I don’t want to see that!” when he misunderstands Buffy’s comment that she will be getting a “retinal scan” to enter The Initiative’s elevator. And listen to Adam as he talks to Buffy, Riley, and Xander:

Adam: “I’ve been thinking about the world. I wanted to see it. Learn it. I saw the inside of that boy and it was beautiful. But it didn’t tell me about the world. It just made me feel. So now . . . I want to learn about me. Why I feel. What I am. So I came home. (He pulls a diskette out of his pocket and inserts it into a drive slot in his chest). I’m a kinematically redundant biomechanical demonoid . . . Which tells me what I am, but not who I am.”

We hear the question “What am I?” twice:

Buffy (to Riley, about Spike): “But he’s not bad anymore.”

Spike: “What am I? A bleeding broken record? I’m bad. It’s just, I can’t bite anymore. Thanks to you wankers.”

Adam: “What am I?”

Boy: “You’re a monster.”

Adam: “I thought so. What are you?”
Boy: “I’m a boy.”

People spend time “internally investigating” not only who and what they themselves are, but the identity of others:

· Goaded by Forrest, who (in his role as Riley’s shadow) gives voice to Riley’s own suspicions, Riley questions Buffy: “I want you to tell me, who are you?”

· Riley, at Willy’s bar, points a gun - tellingly directing his rage at a middle-aged woman: “Like if I shot you right now, I don’t know if I’d have a corpse on my hands or one pissed off vampire . . . I mean, who do you believe? First it sounds like lies. Then it sounds like truth.”

· Anya (about Xander, when Buffy says he has military experience): “It’s not like he was in the ‘Nam. He was GI Joe for one night!”

Though it’s a blurry line, what people are seems to be defined by their physical characteristics, and their function – i.e., how they appear and how they impact the external world. Whereas who they are is about their identity – where they belong, where they fit in, who and what they identify with, where their place is in the world (Xander invites everyone over to “Xander’s Hideaway,” Willy has renamed the bar “Willy’s place,” Spike complains to Willy that the “army blokes” ran him out of “his place”).

How does one answer the question “What are you?” I think I might answer, “I’m a human being” or “I’m a writer.” But how does one answer the question “Who are you?” Maybe I’d answer: “I’m Spring Summers” or “I’m Nick’s mom” or “I’m with The S’cubies, Officer.”

The nearly total way our identities (who we are) can become entangled is represented by Anya’s obvious and extremely anxious attachment to Xander. Why is she so afraid of losing him that - with no real cause - she reminds Buffy, several times, that Xander is HER boyfriend? It’s because she doesn’t know who she would be without Xander. Because she’s deathly afraid of touching that black, yawning, lonely void that denotes her lack of an individual identity. Listen to this exchange between Buffy & Anya:

Buffy (about Riley): “I’m already at the ‘I hurt when he hurts, I smile when he smiles’ stage.

Anya: “I hate that part.”

You said it, Anya. That’s the scary part. When you’re both young and unformed, you can smoosh together so thoroughly that you develop a deep down, unconscious, but very real, confusion about who you are. Are you YOU? Or are you HE? Or are you some hybrid creature now, a kinematically redundant beast with two backs that lives and breathes in each of you, as each of you, even when you are physically apart?

Identity – we all seek it anxiously in our connections to groups and individuals. People can become so enmeshed in one another, that they can, through others, impact the world even after death. Many images convey the message that the dead remain always inside us, and therefore actively among us. Some examples:

• Adam finds a use for his dead victim by mutilating him to try to learn about the world.
• Spike (himself an image of the walking dead) uses the long-dead body of the person entombed in his crypt – he hides under it when the commandos come calling.
• When Forrest and Riley are arguing outside the room where Maggie’s dead body lies, Angleman effectively stops them by saying: “Show some respect! Listen, everybody’s upset. But arguing isn’t going to help anything. And it’s certainly not what Professor Walsh would have wanted.”

Early in the episode Anya comments about Maggie’s attempt to kill Buffy: “It didn’t work, but they are all upset anyway.” The death of a loved one, even the idea of their death, upsets us, makes us as anxious as Anya at the tiniest suggestion that she might lose Xander – because when we lose others, we lose a part of ourselves. And that is what knocks us to our knees, that is what hurts. Riley’s distress over his loss of Maggie Walsh is as much about his loss of self, his tumble into that dark void, as it is about drug withdrawal. He grasps at straws, trying to retain some small portion of his former view of her and what it meant to him, but reality is unrelenting. And when Spike is tossed out of Willy’s bar by an angry demon, his look of utter dejection is as much about touching that fearful and lonely place as it is about the bloody beating he has just received.

Like Anya, Spike is one who lacks a clear individual identity, who feels like nothing without a partner. But he has forcefully rejected Giles and The Scoobies (earlier reminding Buffy that he is still bad, and reinforcing that message by giving Riley two thumbs up on the idea of killing Buffy). In his crypt, he’s nearly discovered and would surely have been killed by Forrest and Graham. Now the demon world won’t have him either. Look at what he’s done to himself: He’s made sure the humans won’t have him by identifying himself to them as an evil demon. But by fighting with Buffy, he’s made sure the demons won’t have him either: “Word’s out! You’ve been making war on the demon world . . . with The Slayer! You kill other demons and the rest of us don’t hold with that stuff.” Spike is entirely at sea – who is he now? The words Buffy uses to describe Riley at the end of the episode also apply to Spike:

Willow (about Riley): “I’m sure he’s OK.”

Buffy: “There’s no way he can be. Everything he’s ever believed in has been taken away. He’s alone. He has nothing to hold on to.”

In future Season 4 episodes, we’ll see what each of Buffy’s boys does about that. But for now, let’s stick with Goodbye Iowa: We get another message in this episode, about how our internal expectations of external reality are shaped not just by others or by our real-life experiences, but by the mass media. Some examples:

• The little boy is intrigued and dangerously unconcerned about Adam. We might expect a child to show alarm, to run back to the house behind him at the sight of the grotesque Adam. But the boy, who is playing with a plastic monster, has been desensitized by the media. His instincts have been warped – and it leads to his death.
• Anya, Buffy, and Willow are watching Road Runner cartoons, where The Road Runner is never caught, and Wiley Coyote survives all forms of violent onslaught. Buffy, we see, is not like the little boy though: “That would never happen,” says Buffy.
• When Buffy and Xander are sneaking into The Initiative by pretending to be a scientist and a commando, Xander suggests they “pretend to make out” when they are almost noticed by others. He explains this very bad plan by saying: “Well, you know, in the movies, the guy and the girl have to hide?”
• Spike says to Buffy & Riley, as he leaves Giles’ apartment: “Leaving you swabs to your dramatics. I’ve got my stories on the telly for that.” This suggests not only that the media colors Spike’s world-view, but also that he is substituting the television for real-life experience. (And indeed, an ailing Spike does seem to be trying to withdraw from the dramatics of real life – but that never works, those freight trains never stop coming, and Spike has a dramatic “pisser of a day” instead of a day watching his stories on the telly – in fact the Forrest smashes his “still warm” telly).

So, speaking of being unable to let the telly substitute for real life, and as much as I sometimes wish I could stay immersed in the Buffyverse, I must leave you swabs to go tend to the Springverse. Seems the dog wants out, the weeds are threatening to choke the Italian parsley I planted, and . . . yes . . . I think I hear the faint sound of a freight train in the distance. Must go stretch for ultimate flexibility.

Spicy extras for James Marsters fans

• Not enough Spike!
• I like the way he calls Buffy “Goldilocks.” You remember the story of Goldilocks, don’t you? The third one she tried was always just right. I can just see how our Blondie Bear might fit into that story.
• James does such a great job in this episode, and throughout Season 4. He manages to be funny while still conveying Spike’s evil nature – yet he allows us to see and feel Spike’s underlying fear, loneliness, and confusion. We see it all in Spike’s face, tone of voice, and manner – how desperately he wants to avoid getting emotionally attached to the humans, how scared he is of the commandos, how much he wants a place to belong when he walks into the bar and chats up Willy – and how deeply defeated he is after his beating.
• Nothing on the Tight Pants report, but I will say my favorite shot of Spike is when he flashes that wicked smile (with the two thumbs up).