Season 5

Episode 9

 

LISTENING TO FEAR:  Safe and sound and fury

by Spring Summers – 31-May-04

 

- Bigger horizons – Overwhelming arrays – Just the facts – Where you belong - Dawn & Spike & Buffy – Tracks – Spicy extras for James Marsters fans -

 

When I was a child, safe in the bosom of my big Italian family, I believed in Santa Claus, and in all the tenets of the Holy Catholic Church.  I also believed, without question, that the flowers smelled sweeter, and the sky was bluer, in Italy.  It’s all so simple when you’re a kid. Your world is tiny; your library of knowledge is limited.  People that you love, that you trust and look up to - like your immigrant parents or your parochial school teachers or your parish priest - teach you things.  And you learn them. 

 

  • BUFFY (to Joyce, about Dawn):  “You’re the one who insisted on teaching her to talk.”
  • BUFFY (to Willow, about Dawn):  “You got her a book on spells.  The girl who can break things by just looking at them, now has a book to teach her to break things by looking at them?”

 

What do you believe in?  Who should you listen to?  Which of your inner voices deserves attention?  How do you choose?  This episode explores the process of choosing amongst the dizzying array of selections available in adulthood, and the meaning and consequences of the choices we make.  Part of growing up, of establishing a solid and independent identity, is about becoming far less insulated and isolated, and far more discerning.

 

IMAGES OF THE SAFETY OF HOME:

 

  • BUFFY:  “Listen, doctor, I don’t see why we can’t take her home, you know, just until – I mean, wouldn’t it be better for her to rest someplace where she felt safe and comfortable?”

Home.  The word home is used over and over in this episode:  The mental patient is going home, Joyce wants to go home, Dr Kriegel gives Buffy his home phone number, and  Xander tells us the University library’s astronomy section is the “home of aboveness.”

 

  • RILEY:  “This is definitely new territory.”  GILES:  “Perhaps we should explore a bit more, head into the woods a bit.”  XANDER (because the woods look scary):  “Who votes research?”

It’s fine and dandy to head for home sometimes, to seek out the familiarity of research instead of heading into the uncertain darkness.  Xander even complains of the lack of familiarity of the University library; he isn’t as comfortable there as he was in the High School library, or as he would be in the Magic Box.  But there are times when, in order to learn and obtain the information you need, you’ve got to venture away from the safe and familiar.  As the images of the starry sky and talk of our wide, wide Universe suggest, eventually, you’ve got to leave home, and head into the woods a bit.  There are times to listen to fear, and times to listen to that part of you that wants to take a chance.  (OK – who noticed the title of another episode here?  Next up:  Into The Woods.  Buffy leaves the safety and familiarity of Riley.  That is her first step; then the exploration of the darkness can begin.)

 

IMAGES OF BELIEFS CHANGING WITH GROWTH:

 

  • WILLOW:  “Oh, I feel just like Santa Claus, except thinner and younger and female and well, Jewish.”  BUFFY (after Willow has brought her a school assignment):  “Homework?  Oh.  I don’t believe in tiny Jewish Santa anymore.” 

The beliefs of childhood are replaced by a grown-up perspective.

 

  • XANDER:  “Primitive people used to believe that the moon was a cause of insanity.  Sometimes they would pray to the moon to send a special meteor to fix the problem the moon had caused.  The meteors were expected to ‘quell’ the madmen.”

Our more sophisticated civilization, with its greater understanding of the celestial bodies, has grown past such beliefs.

 

The Queller demon spews stinky liquid out of its mouth and onto its victim’s face.  If the victim is unable to remove the liquid before it clogs the air passages or solidifies, it chokes the victim to death.  It’s quite a picture, and to me, in the context of this episode, it says this:  In a world that bombards you with alternatives, in an environment that is often so full of such sound and fury that sensory overload can threaten to shut you down, it’s important not to internalize everything that spills out of someone’s mouth.

 

JOYCE (about the Jell-O on her tray):  “Help yourself.  There’s something about food that moves by itself that gives me the heebie-jeebies.”

DAWN:  “It’s good and wiggly.  This girl at school told me that gelatin is made from ground up cow’s feet, and that if you eat Jell-O, there’s some cows limping around with no feet.”

 

People can be full of misinformation.  The quality of our journey through life, and the character and identity of the person we become (as we go from Jell-O to solid so to speak), are dependent not just on what we are exposed to, but on what we choose to care about or pursue further, as opposed to what we choose to ignore  or leave behind.  With the repeated use of the words “care” and “forget,” nearly every line of dialogue and every image in Listening to Fear  is about someone being distracted or overwhelmed, and/or trying to cut through the smoke and mirrors to the truth.  Some examples among many are below:

 

IMAGES OF THE EFFECTS OF OVERLOAD AND DISTRACTION:

 

  • Giles, Xander, and Willow are fighting two vampires.  Giles becomes so focused on staking one of them that he nearly stakes Xander instead.  Both vampires are killed because they are so intent on killing the prey in front of them, that Willow is able to kill them from behind. 
  • BEN:  “The mental ward is booked beyond capacity, there’s literally no where to put them.”  The patients have to be sent home, and one of them is killed.
  • JOYCE:  “Buffy, no.  That light is too bright.  It’s too bright!”  It’s too much, and Joyce is hurting.
  • No one sees the Queller demon because it is up above their heads, and they are focused on what is in front of them.  The Queller can move about freely.
  • Buffy turns up the music to create background noise and block out her mother’s rambling.  (RILEY to the commander:  “Shouldn’t be too much background gamma radiation out here.”)  In the episode’s most heart-wrenching scene, Buffy finds that neither the loud and incongruously upbeat music, nor her attempt to focus on dishwashing, can keep the pain at bay.  But her tears and pain themselves serve as a distraction, and she doesn’t hear Dawn screaming at first.
  • Demon fighting distracts Buffy from pursuing her suspicions about Spike’s activity in her basement. 

 

IMAGES OF PEOPLE CHOOSING WHAT TO LISTEN TO, WHAT TO CARE ABOUT, AND WHAT TO IGNORE:

 

  • The still young and Jell-O-like Riley misses the Scooby Patrol in favor of being food-that-moves-by-itself in the vampire suck house – heebie-jeebies indeed.  (RILEY, to Xander:  “Heard I missed out on some fun.”) 
  • Buffy chooses mom-taking-care-of over patrolling.
  • Buffy tells Dawn to ignore what Joyce and other mental patients have been telling her about how she is a “thing.” 
  • The nurse turns to her work and ignores the screaming of her patient.
  • Dawn puts a pillow over her head to block out Joyce.
  • Riley chooses to call the commandos instead of working with Buffy, or her surrogates – Giles and The Scoobies.  (SPIKE:  “You missed a real nice time.”)
  • Buffy ignores Riley to run upstairs to comfort her mother and Dawn.

 

IMAGES OF PEOPLE TRYING TO DECIDE WHAT INTERNAL VOICE TO LISTEN TO:

 

  • WILLOW (about Riley):  “Oh piffle.  Who needs him when I’m dusting two at time?  (She staggers under the realization of it all.)  Whoops.  Maybe it would have been good if he’d shown up.”
  • DR KRIEGEL (about Joyce going home):  “It’s not the first thing I’d recommend.”  (He gives in soon afterward.)
  • XANDER (about the Queller goo):  “Oh yeah, touching it was my first impulse.  Luckily, I’ve moved on to my second, which involves dry heaving and running like hell.”
  • WILLOW:  “We can’t call Buffy.  I wanna call Buffy!”
  • GILES:  “Because it’s a killer snot monster from outer space.  I did not say that.”  (Hey, this is apropos of nothing, but didn’t Giles once turn into a snot monster of sorts?)

 

Cut through the gunk, before it hardens on your face.  Turn down the radio, before you miss what’s important.  Separate fact from fiction.  Listen to those flashes of truth that come to you.  Cut through all the noise in your mind.  Joyce and the mental patient (who is the guard that Glory brain-sucked in No Place Like Home) seem to have conditions that allow them to do just that:

 

  • JOYCE (to Buffy):  “I had – not a dream, exactly, more like I had this knowledge.  It just came to me, like truth, you know? . . . That Dawn – she’s not mine, is she?”  Joyce’s mental state has allowed her to see through the monks’ spell.
  • MENTAL PATIENT:  “Careful, the facts say a picnic is in order.  (He sees Dawn)  What is that thing?  There – there’s no data.  There’s no pictures on this here!  Where is the data?  There’s no one in there.”  Like Joyce, the mental patient is able to see the truth.
  • MENTAL PATIENT:  “And then it says, that, the facts says he’s got to go take a walk and get some fresh air and find some fresh spaces.” 

 

What else do the facts say?  Let’s try to Open Our Minds (notice the Open Your Mind poster behind Willow and Dawn and Buffy in the hospital, after they leave Joyce’s room), and clear our minds of the extraneous, and see the facts:

 

  • Riley trusts and believes in the commandos, more than he does Buffy & The Scoobies.  The military is home base for Riley.  He belongs with them.
  • Tara & Willow are getting comfortable together and feel safe with each other.  They belong with each other.
  • For Buffy, home is where Joyce and Dawn are, and even Spike seems to belong in Buffy’s world more naturally than Riley does.  The simple truth is this:  Spike has been there to help Buffy when Riley has not, for whatever reason, for the last three episodes in a row.  Riley was at Willie’s flirting with Sandy while an invisible Spike helped Buffy fight the Lei-Ach demon in Family; Spike was there to sit with Buffy after she learned of her mother’s potential brain tumor in Fool For Love; now Spike is there to help with the Queller while Riley is investigating with the commandos.
  • Dawn is not Joyce’s daughter, or Buffy’s sister.  But their words and actions show us how much they love her.  She belongs with them.

 

The importance of determining where you belong is emphasized with continual references to individual perspectives, and to groups of people who are linked by similar beliefs or perspectives.

 

IMAGES OF INDIVIDUAL PERSPECTIVES:

 

  • WILLOW (to Tara, about the stars):  “You know I used to love to look up at them when I was little.  They’re supposed to make you feel all insignificant, but they made me feel like I was in space, part of the stars.”  TARA (later in conversation, about constellation names):  “The real ones never made sense to me.  I sort of have my own.”  Along with words that emphasize individual viewpoints, the camera shots in this scene are also all about perspective.  We get Willow & Tara’s eye-view, as they each try to share their unique perspectives with the other.
  • THE QUELLER demon escapes his cocoon.  This in itself is an image of an individual shell that must be broken for growth, if there ever was one.  But further, the first scene is shot in Queller-Cam, as we get the Queller’s eye-view of the meteor’s fiery trail.  Queller-Cam is used throughout the episode, showing us the demon’s perspective.
  • XANDER:  “Look at how teeny Mercury looks compared to Saturn.  Whereas the cars of the same name –“  Which item is bigger depends on how you look at it.
  • SPIKE helps BUFFY stand up, and suddenly, the commandos rush in.  Significantly, Spike & Buffy share a perspective as the camera whirls from their perspective to Riley’s and back again several times.
  • JOYCE is being wheeled into surgery.  We see Buffy and the gang’s perspective as we watch Joyce move farther away, and we see Joyce’s perspective as well, as the others begin to recede from her.

 

MENTION OF GROUPS WHO SHARE COMMON BELIEFS OR PERSPECTIVES:

 

  • WILLOW:  “I feel just like Santa Claus, only thinner and younger and Jewish.
  • WILLOW: “You know what’s weird?”  TARA:  “Japanese commercials are weird.”
  • RILEY:  “This is Age– this is Riley Finn.  You have an Agent Miller.”
  • BUFFY:  “I’m not much of a sleep person anyway.”
  • SPIKE:  “Well yeah.  Can’t exactly work the counter at Burger Barn can I?”

 

With its emphasis on belonging, one message in this episode (meant to set us up for next week’s big Buffy/Riley break up) is that Riley & Buffy don’t belong in each other’s worlds.  When Buffy leaves the kitchen to help Joyce upstairs, we see a shadow moving on the basement door, suggesting someone or something is in her basement.  A shadow in Buffy’s basement?  It has to be Spike, and it is.  During this scene, we have Spike in the basement, Buffy on the ground floor, and Dawn upstairs. 

 

There are several parallels being drawn between Dawn and Spike:

 

  • JOYCE (to Dawn):  “Get away from me.  You’re nothing!  You’re a shadow!”  Nothing is a word we’ve heard repeatedly to describe Spike, most recently in Fool For Love.  And we’ve just seen Spike’s shadow, immediately before this scene.
  • DAWN (to Buffy, about Joyce):  “She hates me.  She called me a thing.”  BUFFY:  “She loves you, OK?  She’s not herself . . . “  DAWN:  “No, not just Mom . . . Why does everybody keep doing that?  What’s wrong with me?”  BUFFY:  “Nothing.  It’s not you.  I think there’s something that happens in people’s brains when there’s something wrong.  It’s like a short circuit, and it makes them feel like nothing is real except for them.  That’s all it is.”  This is all about Buffy trying to shield Dawn from the truth, but it is also very “Season 6 Spike & Buffy.”  Dawn is being called a thing; Buffy will call Spike a thing.  Dawn is taking it all to heart, as will Spike.  Buffy is trying to obscure the truth, and she is talking about the idea that when there is something wrong with people’s brains, they can feel like nothing is real except for them (which is exactly how Buffy will feel through most of Season 6).

 

I think all the parallels between Spike and Dawn are about this:  Dawn upstairs, Buffy on the ground floor, Spike in the basement.  Dawn and Spike each represent a side of Buffy.  Dawn is her light side – her girlishness, her innocence, her purity.  Spike is her dark side – her Slayer half, her attraction to violence, her baser instincts.

 

And lastly, there is another group of images in this episode that underline the importance of the paths we choose as we journey through life:  Continual references to tracking and the evidence of passage. 

 

  • WILLOW (to Tara):  “You know some of the stars we’re looking at don’t exist anymore?  In the time that it takes for their light to reach us, they’ve died.”  Effects linger.
  • RILEY:  “Look, there it is.”  A wide trench that appears to be hundreds of feet long has been left by the meteor.
  • TARA (about tracking the Queller):  “Let’s look around.  Maybe we can figure out where it went.”  A dead body provides evidence that the Queller has been at that spot.
  • RILEY (about tracking the Queller):  “Thing came from space.  Gotta be some trace radiation.”  The Queller is leaving a radiation signature behind as it passes.
  • BEN (to Dreg):  “I’m cleaning up Glory’s mess.  Just like I’ve done my whole damn life.”  Glory cuts a destructive path.

 

Your choices, the roads you choose, aren’t only about you – you leave footprints, you blaze trails or leave messes, and you can affect the world, and your loved ones, in a lasting way. 

 

And at the end of this episode, I watch Riley, knowing that he will soon say his last goodbye to Buffy.  I watch Joyce receding down the hallway, knowing that she will soon be leaving everyone behind.  I notice Tara standing sweetly by Willow, knowing that she will one day die in Willow’s arms.  And I think again of Willow’s words:

 

“In the time that it takes for their light to reach us, they’ve died.”

 

So that light – it matters.  It matters.  It matters that you shine your light, it matters how strongly you shine it, and it matters where you aim it.  Do it right, and your light will be here, providing illumination, long after you are gone.

 

Spicy extras for James Marsters fans

 

  • Ah, how about that shot of James’ outstretched hand?  Are those great hands or what?  Big man hands that give you that yummy feeling you can get sometimes, just from noticing a man’s hands – you know what I mean, fellow female  S’cubies?  How it is when maybe you’re holding a man’s hand, or his hand just happens to be lying on a table next to yours, and you notice how much different his hands are from your own?  So big.  So hairy.  So – so different.  So nice.  So good.  So warm.  OK.  So I have a thing about men’s hands.  And James has a very nice pair.  Of hands.
  • Spike:  He knocks away Buffy’s defenses, and as a result, the demon knocks her down and climbs on top of her.  But Spike is also the reason she ultimately defeats the demon.  And he’s the one who’s there to give her a hand up afterward (with the moment’s significance apparent in its framing).
  • Spike throws Buffy the knife.  He’s never about rescuing the damsel.  He’s always about being there, as constant as The Northern Star.  (And he had himself a real nice time.)
  • Buffy ultimately ignores this picture-stealing incident, much as she did the pile of cigarettes around the tree in her yard.  And I chalk it up the same way:  Buffy is distracted, not particularly worried, somewhat attracted to Spike underneath it all, and nowhere near ready to face the fact that she needs to deal with the Spike in her basement.