Buffy: Seeing Red (6.19)

Season six is usually regarded as Buffy's 'dark' season, the year in which everyone's miserable and seem to do stupid things that go against the characters as we know them. For me, the biggest problem with season six is that the writers never had the conviction to actually make things real dark. I bring this up because Seeing Red and, to an extent, Dead Things are two of the most daring and fascinating episodes this year. But both are rendered awkward and gratuitous because the events captured in both episodes feel too self-contained to be truly genuine. Buffy and Spike's actions during each hour at odds with their respective characterization in the episodes surrounding the two I just mentioned, which make all the rape dreck here seem so ridiculous.

I have numerous problems with that bathroom scene. Yes, Spike and Buffy's 'thing' this season has been marred by physical abuse and the crumbling of their mutual self-worth. It's been a quasi-relationship formed on self-hatred and dissatisfaction -- we can all pretty much agree with that. But Spike's actions here cross into a horrible area that feels entirely unrelated to what we know about him as a character. They smacked each other around back in Smashed, but it's always been a mutual deal. Buffy's horrific attack on him in Dead Things wasn't at all about sex, but about disgust. Here we have Spike literally forcing himself on Buffy, pinning her down as if this was their foreplay. No, show, that was never their foreplay. Maybe if Smashed and Dead Things were the only episodes to feature their coupling, but their various sexual encounters away from those two stories featured nothing like that.

Similarly, I hated that the show went out of its way to make Buffy injured and therefore vulnerable to a sexual assault. It's another example of the show stumbling into ridiculous contrivance to ensure a 'metaphor' occurs. The Willow arc at the start of the year was so fascinating, but the writers decided to make it, mid-story, some horrible drug metaphor, sacrificing any internal logic along the way. The same thing occurs here. For some reason the writers wanted Buffy to experience that assault. Was it for us to think how awful Spike is? Was it to make Buffy seem like an innocent victim in this doomed love affair? Was it to make us sympathize with Xander? Or was it merely a clumsy motive for Spike to bail on Sunnydale for the next couple of episodes? Whatever their reasoning, it's a horribly written scene that makes little sense on a character level and brings the whole show down. Ugh.

There's also a weird misogynist streak that radiates through the rest of the episode. Warren, now the most hideous caricature of cowardly male brutality in the history of the world, gets his hands on some 'magic orbs' and proceeds to beat the crap out of Buffy, yelling at her "you never fight a real man before?" Before this, he comes on to random women and calls himself 'daddy' to them, in the process implying some hideous issues with females and forced submission. When Buffy destroys the orbs and Warren's pitiful existence comes to the fore once again, he ends up getting hold of an automatic weapon, the one thing he can think of that can actually do some damage to her.

In general, this is an episode that seems to be making some kind of grand statement on gender and sexuality. But everything is so muddled that you lose track of any kind of moral. Warren has always been a creep, but his actions here turn him into this absurd monster of epic proportions, while Spike's behavior is similarly gross, taking him so far away from any of his prior 'incarnations' that he becomes completely muddled as a character. Maybe if the writing were particularly strong this could have all worked in some way, but by contriving to make Buffy physically weak after a vampire attack, the whole thing falls into a weird area that is difficult to understand. It's a total misfire and one of the lowest points of the series.

Of course, I haven't even started with Tara. I actually haven't got a problem with the show killing her, since it's a remarkably effective scene of abject shock and horror -- one of the most arresting game-changers I've ever seen on television. And while it provoked intense controvery among fans of Willow and Tara, it would have been just as much a problem if the show didn't inflict Joss Whedon's trademark 'relationship misery' on the two of them simply because they were a gay couple. It's unfortunate and tacky that Tara ends up shot to death in the same episode that opened with her half-naked in bed with her girlfriend, but it's foolish to consider her death a homophobic gesture of any sort.

My problem with her demise is actually the story that it's part of. More discussion of that will come in later weeks, but it stinks of the needless dismissal of one of the show's strongest characters -- Tara being reduced to 'annoying plot device' in order to justify events that prove to be ultimately ridiculous and trite. That is the real injustice of Tara's death. You can also argue that her murder is hideously grotesque as a plot point. Coming so soon after Xander and Anya's break-up, Buffy's depression, Willow's addiction and only minutes after the bathroom assault, it's just more abject misery dumped on us. Remembering that audiences had to originally see all of this unspool over several months instead of the short-term vacuum of a DVD collection furthers that feeling that this was just too much depression. With that in mind, you can understand why feelings of hatred still linger in the minds of certain fans when season six is brought up in discussion.

Seeing Red is like something out of an alternate dimension, an episode that tries desperately to fold in with the overarching themes and story arcs this season but ends up backfiring in the most hideous form. Along with Willow's 'crack addiction cold turkey' thing, it's the lowpoint of the season and one of the few times that Buffy got it embarrassingly wrong. D

Credits
Guest stars Danny Strong (Jonathan Levinson); Adam Busch (Warren Meers); Tom Lenk (Andrew Wells); Amy Hathaway (Christine); Nichole Hiltz (Diana)
Writer Steven S. DeKnight Director Michael Gershman