"I'm not even sure I could take you."
"That all depends on your meaning."
So, we get a Giles episode that really focuses on his unemployed, mid-life crisis, spare part existence. It's a good episode, as we'd expect from the pen of Jane Espenson. But Giles' issues, worryingly, are not really resolved. And we're left with the troubling idea that the Initiative may not be entirely a good thing.
This is only emphasised by the fact that, for everyone else, things are going great. Birthday girl Buffy and Riley are rather endearingly besotted in these early days of their actual being an item, with Riley gradually coming to understand what a big deal it is to be the Slayer, just how superhuman Buffy is, and how brilliant a tactician she is on top of that. He's a little awed. Plus, she's his girlfriend. I suspect the seeds may just have been planted for a future conflict of loyalties.
Also rather endearing is the rather gentle courtship between Willow and the very lovely Tara, a person you just want to hug. That spell with the rose is an obvious metaphor for romance, and possibly also for sex. The whole thing certainly ends with a bang.
Oh, and in other news, Spike has been evicted from Xander's basement to find a lair of his own. This presumably means that Xander and Anya will be doing a lot more, er…
Giles, though… it's rather clever how the first half of the episode sees his spare part status constantly highlighted. Everyone says the wrong thing to him at the party and it's made very clear just how directionless his life is. The worst thing is everyone's obvious sympathy for his predicament. And not only had Buffy failed to realise that she'd failed to tell him about the Initiative (even Spike knew!), even I, as a viewer, hadn't noticed his out-of-the-loop status on things Initiative. I suspect I wasn't the only viewer to have been surprised by this either. That's a clever bit of misdirection over the last couple of episodes.
He and Maggie Walsh are a hilarious double act in their mutual loathing, circling around each other with barbed comments as their weapons, and Giles doesn't exactly get the upper hand. "Buffy clearly lacks a strong father figure"- ouch.
Enter Ethan Rayne. Seldom has he been so much fun. He's constantly coming out with comments that nicely undercut the narrative, and you know how I love me a bit of metatextual fun. He's pretty much the writer's mouthpiece here, and the writer is Jane Espenson. That guarantees us a lot of fun. Ethan gets all the funniest lines.
The fact that Giles would let down his guard to far as to get completely rat-arsed with someone as dangerous as Ethan shows us just how far his standards have fallen. Not that there's anything wrong, or un-Giles-like, about getting blotto every now and then, of course (it's the British way!), but Ethan is hardly an appropriate person to get pissed with. He really could have spiked Giles' drink with poison. And it's notable that the scenes of Giles and Ethan, two old has-beens talking about being sorcerers, are juxtaposed with a scene of Willow and Tara practising real sorcery, and being young to boot. No wonder Giles wakes up with a massive metaphorical hangover.
I love Spike's attitude- although his evilness is definitely slipping. I love Giles' scaring Maggie Walsh for the sheer Hell of it. I love "the mucus thing". The second half of the episode is pure enjoyable farce, although the extrajudicial imprisonment of Ethan certainly raises one's eyebrows in these… I was going to say post-Guantanamo and rendition days, but these things are very much still with us. 2000 wasn't that long ago. But in some ways it feels a more innocent age.
Or perhaps we're supposed to wonder a little. Could there be something rotten in the heart of the Initiative? And what's in the dreaded Room 314…?
No comments:
Post a Comment