Episode 9
SOMETHING BLUE: Rehearsal Dinner
- Willow & Spike – Buffy &
Riley – Anya & Xander
– Buffy & Spike – Bugs in amber – Change and
choice – The nature of the spell
– Conclusion – Spicy extras for James Marsters fans -
Something
old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. Let’s see . . . I’d say “old” is Willow
& Oz’s relationship, “new” is Buffy & Riley’s relationship, “borrowed”
is Giles’ bathtub, and “blue” is Willow.
But Spike isn’t very
happy either – as a guest at Motel-Giles, he’s chained in a bathtub, drinking
pig’s blood from a novelty mug. Though
a web-site I stumbled upon doing the Pangs analysis suggests not
everyone would mind this treatment, Spike decides his accommodations don’t
“rate huge in the Zagut’s Guide.”
So poor Spikey is also blue. And
foreshadowing both Willow’s slow tumble into darkness, and Spike’s slow climb
toward the light, many other parallels are drawn between the two:
BUFFY IS
EXASPERATED BY BOTH OF THEM:
THEY BOTH LONG TO
GET BACK TO THE PAST: Spike and Willow
are both yearning for what they’ve already lost - Oz and chip-free vampirism,
respectively. They are both miserable, and
hoping for a quick fix. Symbolic of his
still strong desire to return to the dark side, SPIKE literally claws at the
ground above The Initiative’s lab, saying, “Let me in! Fix me!”
WILLOW tells Buffy, about the pain of Oz’s departure: “Can’t I just make it go poof?”
THEY BOTH ARE AN
INCONVENIENCE: Giles plainly thinks of
SPIKE as a bother. He calls Willow,
leaving a message on her answering machine hoping she’ll come over and do a
truth spell: “Among other things, I’d
like to shower sometime today. Alone.” (What’s this? Showering with Spike is an option at Motel-Giles?? Zagut’s, Schmaguts – book me
immediately!) When Giles next sees
WILLOW, she says to him about her pain:
“Oh, you care. Everybody
cares. But nobody wants to be
inconvenienced.”
It isn’t just
Willow’s descent and Spike’s ascent that is foreshadowed in Something Blue. We also get a sneak preview of what’s ahead
for Buffy & Riley, Xander & Anya, and Buffy & Spike:
BUFFY
& RILEY: This
episode features many uses of words relating to the intellect: brain, genius, crazy, insane, nuts, think,
thought, etc. We also hear about
feelings, as Willow mourns and our various couples spoon and smooch. But when it comes to Buffy & Riley, the
images are much more about the ego than the id, more about sense than
sensation:
Buffy: “We were talking about having a picnic?”
Riley: “Was that a conversation I actually had, or
one I was just practicing?”
Buffy: “Practicing?”
Riley: “OK, yes.
I have been known to do a little prep work before our
conversations. It’s not easy, you know,
talking to you sometimes. It’s like an
oral exam.”
Riley tells Buffy
she’s “like an exam” and “needs puzzling out” (brainwork). Later, Buffy and Willow have this
conversation about Riley:
Willow: “So he’s nice?”
Buffy: “Very, very.”
Willow: “And there’s sparkage?”
Buffy: “Yeah, have you seen his arms? Those are good arms to have. I really like him, I do . . . I really like
being around him . . . but can a nice safe relationship be that intense? I know it’s nuts, but part of me believes
that real love and passion have to go hand in hand with pain and fighting.”
Hmmm. As she makes that comment about passion and
fighting, she stands in front of a tombstone marked “Mary Christian, Beloved
Mother.” Immediately after the comment,
she stakes a vampire. The scene suggests
that Buffy’s “love equals pain” attitude comes from the prevailing Christian
culture, her own mother’s history (the divorce) and of course, from her
experience with Angel.
Note also that in
response to Willow’s question about sparkage with Riley, Buffy responds with a
comment that does little more than establish her as a heterosexual female;
“nice arms” is something a woman might say about a picture of a good-looking
model in a magazine. It’s not the
personal comment of a woman falling head-over-heels for a particular man.
At the end of the
episode, she tells Willow that she wants a “nice relationship” with a “decent,
reliable” guy. Having a relationship
with Riley is the sensible thing to do.
Someone, somewhere (I wish I could remember so I could attribute this)
said that whenever she looked back on a relationship, she could always see that
she had known, right from the start, how it would end. We are getting that sort of foreshadowing
here. We can almost chart the course of
the relationship, and we can certainly take a very good guess at how and why
Buffy & Riley will eventually fail as a couple. Genuinely liking Riley, and being possessed of a healthy
heterosexuality that attracts her to his physical attributes, will not, in the
end, be enough.
ANYA
& XANDER: OK.
Let’s look at what happens between these two. Earlier, and unbeknownst to Xander, Willow inadvertently used a
spell to send demons after Xander. Anya
& Xander are now in his basement bachelor pad. They are trying to start a make-out session, despite previous
interruptions from Xander’s mom. Then
Xander brings up Willow’s problems:
Xander: “Willow was really upset. I shouldn’t have let her go away mad.”
Anya: (She grabs
Xander and kisses him.)
Xander: “Regaining focus.”
Anya: “We just got rid of your mom. Let’s not bring Willow into this. It’s time for just the two of us.”
Anya & Xander
start kissing, and it seems maybe it is, after all, finally time for the two of
them. But lo and behold!! Xander’s demons stop the proceedings
cold. They have to drown one of the
demons – an interesting image, the drowning of a demon. Earlier, Xander used the word “drown” in
regard to Willow, telling her she shouldn’t be drowning her sorrows in
alcohol. Drowning his demons in alcohol
is exactly what Xander will worry about in the future. And immediately after this scene – in which
Anya & Xander’s time together is sabotaged by Xander’s demons - we cut to a
view of a wedding cake topper. Buffy is
moving a tiny plastic bride and groom up Spike’s arm to the tune of the wedding
march. Interesting, no?
BUFFY
& SPIKE: Nearly
the entirety of their Season 6 relationship is foreshadowed. Buffy & Spike start out the episode
fighting and snarking and sparking at each other. Spike seems to enjoy frustrating Buffy with vague, smart-ass
answers to her questions about the commandos (“Well, they were human. Two eyes each, kind of in the middle”). Then Giles refers to Spike, in his chipped
state, as ”impotent.” When Spike balks
at the word, Giles tries to find a new, less sexually charged word. But Buffy seems to get quite a sadistic kick
out of the humiliating sex talk. Her
substitute word for Spike’s condition?
“Flaccid!” Then she leans right
in on Spike, and shows him her sweet-looking neck, saying: “Look at my poor neck. All bare and tender and exposed. All that blood just pumping away . . .” She hits the word “pumping” with special
relish. Oh man. What the hell is she doing?? Spike looks as if he’s about to burst his
chains.
So Buffy &
Spike seem to derive a rather unhealthy, but very intense, pleasure out of
getting each other all worked up. Then,
suddenly due to Willow’s spell, Spike is proposing marriage, and Buffy is
accepting. They coo and gaze. They talk silly lovers’ talk. But mostly they can’t keep their hands or
lips off each other. The smacking is so
loud, poor blind Giles takes a cue from Willow, and drowns his troubles in
scotch.
The Buffy &
Spike “marriage” is clearly being contrasted with what is happening between
Buffy & Riley. Spike isn’t a sensible
choice in any way. Giles calls the
relationship “nonsense.” We heard the
intellect-directed words “exam” and “puzzle” for Buffy & Riley earlier, but
now we hear Buffy use the words “crazy” and “nuts” in describing her engagement
to Spike. When she runs into Riley, she
talks about her engagement – let’s compare it to what she told Willow about
Riley earlier:
Spike and Buffy
are all about the id, not the ego, all about sensation rather than sense. Beyond the references to how “crazy” the
pairing is, there is the fact that Buffy & Spike are completely unable to
understand they are under a spell, even after it’s clear to everyone else. Perhaps they would make the realization, if
they were able to stop and use their brains about it for even a second.
It seems that
tossing both Buffy & Spike’s intellects, common sense and discretion to the
wind, and allowing free rein to their emotions, is exactly how the spell is
working to accomplish its end. We can
almost chart the course of this relationship as well – because wild passion
alone won’t prove to be enough.
Notice that
Spike’s Buffy-love brings out his good side.
His characteristic insight and sensitivity was demonstrated earlier when
he said about Willow, “Are you people blind?
She’s hanging on by a thread.
Any ninny can see that!” But
now, instead of using his smarts to insult others or cause grief, he uses that
quality to try to help Giles. He
comments with genuine feeling: “It’s
almost like you’re my father-in-law, isn’t it?”
But notice also
that Buffy’s Spike-love brings out her dark side - as evidenced by her casual
decision to put red paint on her plastic bridegroom’s mouth, to symbolize the
blood of the innocent. Spike’s response
- “That’s my girl!” - is the same response Faith gave Buffy when she
provoked Buffy into revealing her dark side (by punching Faith) in Season 3’s Consequences. And they are the same words that Spike
will say to Buffy as she beats his face black-and-blue in Season 6’s Dead
Things.
Several references
to gender roles – whose got the “stones,” whether or not Buffy will continue
working, and “the girl power thing” foreshadow the back-and-forth, “whose on
top” gender-bending we will see with Buffy & Spike once they actually
consummate the relationship.
Something Blue also foreshadows the way Buffy’s
involvement with Spike in Season 6 will obsess her. In this episode, she gets so involved with Spike that she’s
cavalier about Giles’ blindness (Giles:
“So the plan is to cure my total, incapacitating blindness . . .
tomorrow?”). And when Xander & Anya
are unsuccessfully battling a demon in the crypt, Buffy doesn’t even notice –
she runs to where Spike has been knocked to the floor, and they begin
kissing. Xander cries for help, but
Buffy doesn’t hear him - not when she’s in contact with Spike-lips. And speaking of
foreshadowing, how about Giles' comment, "If those two don't kill
each other, I might lend a hand"? Yikes.
There is also some
very direct foreshadowing of a particular Season 6 episode: Smashed.
Amy appears briefly in the exact same position she will appear (more
permanently) in Smashed, and one bit of dialogue caught my ear:
Giles (referring
to Spike’s chipped harmlessness, after Spike threatens him): “What are you going to do, lick me to
death?”
Buffy (in Smashed,
referring to Spike’s chip when he refuses to get out of her way): “What are you going to do? Walk behind me to death?”
So
. . . lots and lots of foreshadowing: Willow’s wicked rampage, Xander & Anya’s
break-up, and Buffy & Spike’s tumultuous affair. All will come to pass, but not right here and now. The fact that this isn’t the time or the
place - but that, in fact, there will be a time and a place - is
emphasized by constant references to time and location. References are continual, in a manner that
suggests time and/or location is important.
When we get to the right time and place, que será must será. Some examples among many:
Spike: “How long am I gonna live once I tell you?
(not to mention his response to Buffy’s “Flaccid?”, which is, “You are one step away, Missy!”)
Buffy: “How about a daytime ceremony? In the park?”
Spike: “Fabulous. Enjoy your honeymoon with the big pile of
dust.”
Frequent mention
of the word “stop,” and Willow and Spike’s longing to return to their former
selves, suggest that people attempt to force time and space into doing their
bidding. But we learn that the
conditions must be right or it’s a no-go, and further, when the conditions are
right, there’s no stopping what must be (Spike to Giles about the blood in the
mug: “It’s about time. I hope you got it warm enough.”).
Willow mentions
“the grand scheme of things,” and we get an aerial shot of Sunnydale, that
zooms down to the outside of Giles’ place, and then into Giles’ bathroom. We watch Spike from above, through our TV,
as he strains upward to reach “the telly”.
Buffy mentions 1 million years BC, Anya mentions her demon past, and
Willow mentions her own past and Xander’s (and there is more foreshadowing in
Willow’s not-yet-truly-wicked, but insensitive, comments to Xander). There is a lot of kissing and sucking
(Spike’s straw) and smoochy smacking, lips are mentioned often, and the mug
says, “Kiss the Librarian.” With
Spike’s comments about telly-time, it all reminds me a bit of The Zeppo, with
its images of eating and cutting and reflections on a TV. The characters are pulling their world,
slurping it, and each other (and, in a way, us), into themselves, creating
their own internal worlds and individual identities. Yet I also feel very outside the action, like a creature in the
fourth dimension, looking down on 3-D characters and seeing the entirety of
their lives, all at once. I’m able to
view their lives at any point in Time & Space. They are caught in the course and moments of their lives, like
(to quote Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five) bugs in amber.
The
only constant in their lives, as they travel from one end to the other
of their individual, frozen, amber rivers, is change. The references to time are such that the inevitability of change
is a definite component (e.g., Buffy to Willow: “It seems that way now,” or Willow to Riley: “Your apples are turning brown, the way they
do.”) But many references to identity
(names in particular) suggest that though our surroundings and circumstances
change with time, some things about us don’t change. We have individual identities and qualities that play a part in
determining the course of our lives.
They are so constant in fact, that even a spell doesn’t change them.
The (so far)
Season-long “freedom of choice” theme is also an undercurrent in this episode –
though our characters seem, in a sense, to be trapped and fated, we also watch
them making the individual choices that will determine their fates. Yes, our fates are at some point sealed, but
people play active roles in determining them.
The results of
Willow’s spell itself force us to examine the question of freedom of choice –
which of our characters’ actions are spell-induced, and which are simply about
who they are?
After
several viewings of the episode, I’ve come to the following conclusion
about Willow’s spell: Her will is
coming true only when the spell can get a toe-hold in reality. Notice that when she asks that her heart be
healed, or a book speak to her, or a Q-tip straighten itself, nothing
happens. The spell’s nature seems to be
such that it cannot create reality, only bend it. All on their own, hearts don’t heal, books
don’t speak, and Q-tips really don’t do anything much at all. But:
The spell makes
Giles blind, but he chooses how to deal with it – have some scotch, and
put in a call to Willow. Xander can’t
keep the demons from coming after him, but he can drown one, and decide to seek
out Buffy for help. And though Buffy
& Spike have no choice but to be engaged, it is they who are deciding on
the details of the wedding plans, and it is they who choose to indulge in a
non-stop cuddle-fest so kissyface obnoxious that Giles moans for mercy, and
Xander begs for blindness (speaking of foreshadowing - oh Xander!).
When Buffy & Spike are released from the spell,
we see, in their "eeww, ugh, icky-pooh" reactions to each other's
kiss that, indeed, these two have definite - albeit as yet wholly negative
- feelings for one another. Note:
Good God. The only way these two
could ever get together is if real love and passion go hand-in-hand with
pain and fighting. (I want to note here that Spike's
"Buffy-taste" comment has suddenly reminded me of his suggestive
words to her the morning-after "Smashed": "I know where
you live now, Slayer. I've tasted it." Sounds like he needs a
cookie - or at least a breath mint.)
My conclusion - that the spell can only work with
what already exists - is also based on the following:
A POINT IS BEING MADE ABOUT THE POWER OF
WORDS: Spike has a touchy reaction to Giles' use of the word
"impotent" because "impotent" is precisely how he's
feeling. Words have power, and Willow's spell taps into the power of
words- what she says comes true. But we are clearly getting the message
that words alone are not enough - over and over, people utter words that
are meaningless as anything but a joke or a counterpoint to reality:
Riley (joking to Buffy): “Yes, I am a lesbian.”
Willow (when she turns Amy to a rat and back
again): "I could never do
something like that."
Buffy: “One
more word outta you, and I swear –“
Spike:
“Swear what? You’re not gonna do
anything to me. You haven’t got the
stones!”
Buffy: “Oh,
I got the stones! I got a whole bunch
of . . . stones!”
Spike:
“Yeah? You’re all talk.”
Willow (to Giles, offering a cookie): “Oatmeal?”
Giles:
“Yes, very funny. They’re
chocolate chip, I can see that.”
Words can be misinterpreted and change meaning, as
when Riley starts out talking about taking Buffy driving, but ends up talking
about taking Buffy to Happyland. Words
are often inadequate: "I don't know what to say!" says Buffy
excitedly after Spike proposes. “I
don’t think ‘no’ is a strong enough word,” says Riley about whether or not he
believes Buffy is engaged. Overall, the message seems to be that words
can help shape - but cannot alone create - external reality.
THE WORD "OFF" IS USED FREQUENTLY. It emphasizes the spell's M.O.
Post-spell, it’s still Giles, it's Xander, it's Buffy and it's Spike, but their
actions are "off." The word is used eight times (one example,
from Spike about what will happen if Buffy wears a frilly skirt to the
rehearsal dinner: “The whole thing’s off.”).
The use of this word also underlines the fact that the events are
"off" of where they should be, in time and space.
BUFFY'S SONG CHOICE FOR THE FIRST DANCE IS ALL
ABOUT HER: Buffy is
embarrassed when Spike reveals that she wanted
“Wind Beneath My Wings” for their first dance. Buffy claims “that was the spell,” but who believes her? The look on her face clearly suggests her
secret affection for the sappy song has been found out. The spell worked only with what was already
there.
And speaking of Buffy's
choice for a song, it's interesting to note that the song title uses the word
"beneath" to describe the loved one's position relative to the
singer, that it is about an unsung hero, and that it begins: "It
must have been cold there in my shadow, never the sun upon your face . .
."
Something Blue is packed with
foreshadowing and underlying themes and messages. But more importantly than that, it is also pure, unadulterated
fun. There are too many wonderful
moments to even begin to list them.
Watch, laugh, enjoy. Everyone
involved shows off amazing comedic talent, and we get to benefit from their light. I lift my glass to them all.
Spicy
extras for James Marsters fans