Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Choices

"Why couldn't you be dealing drugs, like normal people?"

As often happens in Buffy, the title refers to more than is immediately apparent. Yes, there's Buffy's choice, or lack of, about whether to go to uni somewhere other than Sunnydale. But this episode is also about other choices. Willow makes a positive choice to stay in Sunnydale for the right reasons, because fighting the baddies is what she wants with her life. And Faith has to deal with the consequences of the choice she's made. She and the Mayor may get on fine at the moment, but he's very much the controlling type. This relationship is going to get more and more abusive, and Faith is trapped.

The plot is rather straightforward and blah, really. Its purpose is to get the inevitable and showdown between Buffy and the Mayor out of the way, as it has to happen at some point before the finale, and also to enable the Scoobies to learn more about the Mayor's plans. But the interesting stuff, as ever, is all about the characters.

In the way she responds to being captured, Willow shows herself to be brave and resourceful, yes. But there's more to it than that; this is the episode where it suddenly becomes manifest that she's no longer one of the civilian-type Scoobies; the way she uses that levitating pencil (nice shout out to earlier in the season, that) to stake that vampire shows us that she's beginning to be useful in the field. She's the fully-fledged magic user to the D&D party that is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Er, sorry. Also, she gets the important pages from the Books of Ascension for Giles. That's big. Whatever the increasingly marginalised Wesley might say, the Scoobies are not back to square one at the end.

Of course, the best character moment ever is Oz's angry and eloquent reaction to Wesley's suggestion of not bartering to get his Willow back!

A lot of this episode is about how teenagers' lives are punctuated by huge responsibilities and big decisions which can seem almost crushing in a stage of life where you don't have the experience, and the accumulated confidence that comes with hears, to deal with it easily. I have far more responsibility in my life today than I did when I was the Scoobies' age, but it doesn't cause me stress in the way that pretty much everything did when I was eighteen, on the school-uni-career conveyor belt, where it seems that the slightest mistake will ruin your life forever. Kids that age are experiencing these pressures without any of the benefit of experience which allows us adults to deal with pressure so much less stressfully, and sometimes we forget that. This is an episode about big choices about one's future, and that's scary.

On a more functional note, of course, it's also an episode which begins to hint at how the series can continue after everyone finishes school. They're not all going to disperse to universities all over America, but choose to stay for reasons similar to Willow. Except Xander, of course, who clearly isn't going to college. And what's up with Cordelia? Why is she working in a shop?

The Mayor's little monologue about the doomed nature of Buffy's relationship with Angel is, of course, ominous. He is, as Willow says, evil, but he's also, as no one wants to admit, right. This is clearly foreshadowing. Their relationship is not long for this world.

Oh, and that rather disgusting McGuffin full of spiders… what's all that about?