"I have to believe in a better world."
Well, we certainly needed a rather less heavy episode at this point and we certainly got one. This episode is pure fun, plus it has Evil Willow in it. Mmm… Evil Willow…
But before we get to the alternate universe stuff (which manages to pack an awful lot into not very much screen time in an impressive piece of structuring), there's a lot of fascinating character stuff. Xander is the more self-indulgent of the two, but both he and Willow spend their time obsessing on their own need to do something about their guilt, without considering that, actually, it's the needs of the people they betrayed that count. Oz rightly calls Willow out on this; her need to feel better about herself is indeed not his problem. Nor should we have much sympathy for them not being able to be as innocently tactile with each other as they once were.
Cordelia doesn't take things anywhere near as well as Oz does, though; not only has she lost her boyfriend, she's lost her place in the school hierarchy. Harmony (how long has it been since we last saw her?) tries to set her up with Jonathan, and the mockery just continues. The worst moment comes when she's knocked into a pile of rubbish as Buffy fights a vampire, just before Harmony walks along with her gang and a cruel quip. Obviously this is all ultimately Buffy's fault and it would be better if she'd never come to Sunnydale.
Unfortunately, Cordelia's new friend Anya (no doubt a one-off character, right?) turns out to be a vengeance demon who acts on behalf of women scorned. As you do. And a Sunnydale without Buffy is a dark, dangerous place, ruled by the Master from Season One, where the classes are half-empty from those who have died and the streets are not safe after dark. Only the desperate "white hats", consisting of Giles, Oz, Larry(!), and Redshirt Girl, stand in the way of the undead, although not very convincingly. It's all very bleak. Buffy, meanwhile, is in Cleveland, which apparently has a huge demon problem. Undead Xander and Evil Willow, interestingly, are two of the Master's most prominent lieutenants, and both of them are clearly, somehow, the same people. Angel is kept chained up as a "puppy" to be regularly tortured by Evil Willow. Er, part of me wishes I was him. Did I really just type that?
This is an alternate reality, so naturally Cordelia dies pretty soon, as Giles watches, horrified. Of course, pretty much everyone dies- why waste a good alternate reality? But we'll come to that; by far the most interesting character in this reality is Buffy, scarred, brusque, cynical, humourless, battle-hardened and played extraordinarily, and so very differently, by Sarah Michelle Gellar. Faith may not be in this episode (interestingly, there's an early line about her going AWOL), but symbolically she isn't needed, as she pretty much symbolised what Buffy would be like without the support network of her family, her friends and her life. Here, we have the real thing, and she's harsh, withdrawn, without hope, and as inwardly dead as any vampire. Without hope, or anything to live for, she embarks on a kamikaze mission, with no plan, and dies.
The one person who refuses, stubbornly, to lose hope, and the true hero of this reality, is Giles. He saves the world with hope. And yet this is juxtaposed with slow-motion shots of all the characters we know and love- Willow, Xander, Angel and, finally, Buffy, dying pointlessly. Hope and despair are side by side. Not a bad metaphor for Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
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