'Buffy' is a show that could easily collapse under the weight
...of it’s own dire themes
...and apocalyptic melodrama.
One of the things that constantly keeps the dramatic methane from overfilling the balloon of an episode
...is the show's humor and self awareness.
I’d mentioned previously that Xander is the most razor witted and sharp character on the show.
In 'The Zeppo',
...the Xander element is distilled from the episode.
Skimmed off the top
and the show is separated
...into component parts.
The result is a hilarious escapade of...
...nearly solo Xander.
But far from being a simple comedic romp,
there are very important questions at 'The Zeppo'’s core
- questions about masculinity,
about bravery,
...and heart.
The Gang is facing off against a horde of evil smurfettes,
...indicating the possibility of a greater danger following after.
Faith and Buffy do Slayer things
and Giles aides with his considerable experience
...before getting tossed aside.
Willow intervenes with a clouding spell
and the Slayers kill the last of them.
The group discusses what this new evil might be an indication of
and Giles curses having to put Willow and Xander at
...wait
...wait a minute
...where's Xander?
"I'm good."
"We're fine."
"Just a little bit dirty."
The next day, Xander,
...equally adept at sports
...drops a football into a school bully's lunch.
The bully, named...
...Jack O’Toole
threatens to cut Xander’s face off and then eventually lets him go,
...shamed and dominated.
Cordelia, witness to the whole thing, slices into Xander expertly.
We see the shaming power of the ex that had all our secrets,
as Cordelia completely nails Xander with his own 'Superman' reference that he made earlier.
“You must feel like..."
"...Jimmy Olsen.”
"But gee, Mr. White,"
"...if Clark and Lois get all the good stories I'll NEVER be a good reporter."
"You’re the Zeppo."
"Look it up.”
All righty.
The Marx Brothers were an American vaudeville and movie comedy act in the early 1900s.
Most commonly people remember the trio,
Groucho,
Chico
and Harpo
but there were actually
...five Marx Brothers,
that included
Gummo
...and Zeppo.
Zeppo Marx was always cast as the straight man in Marx Brothers bits,
...the one who doesn’t get any of the jokes.
The one who was patently unextraordinary.
It’s tempting to feel bad for Xander here.
Nicholas Brendon’s great performance begs us too.
But there’s always...
"You know, hey, I don't know what everyone's talking about."
"That outfit doesn't make you look like a HOOKER."
"What am I, mass transportation?"
"That's what a lot of the guys say, but it's just locker room talk."
"I wouldn't pay it any mind."
Of course, two wrongs might not make a right
...but as Cordelia says:
“There was no part of that that wasn’t fun.”
In the library, with Oz safely caged up for his monthly,
Buffy and Giles are discussing the implications of monsters they slaughtered earlier
...and Giles has realized they in the midst of an apparent incoming apocalypse.
"They intend to open the Hellmouth."
[growling]
[Oz howl]
I love this.
At this point in the episode,
...I hadn’t quite realized what was going on here
...so I was taking this entire scene quite literally.
And in literal terms,
the scene feels fatiguing and a retread.
I mean we’ve had what,
...one, two, three apocalypses now?
It hadn’t quite dawned on me yet what the writers were doing.
Xander decides that if Oz has being a Werewolf.
The Slayers have Slaying.
Willow has magic.
And Giles has...
Let’s be honest here,
Giles has Ripper.
Then he needs a thing too.
"Just need to find my thing."
To that end,
...he goes
...and borrows his Uncle’s car.
“You girls need a lift?”
“Is this a penis metaphor?”
Buffy shares with Xander regarding the incoming danger
...and he asks how he can help out.
“--take two glazed,
"two cinnamon,”
"couple cream-filled"
"...and a jelly."
Cordelia, in the right place at the right time again,
catches Xander on his donut run for the Gang's research night
...and uses the opportunity to cut into him
but Xander is bailed out
... by a female car nut interested in his new proxy penis
...which he knows absolutely nothing about.
At The Bronze, while having a drink and listening to her car talk that he can’t fake being interested in,
...Angel bursts in looking for Buffy.
Car Nut: "You know the look."
"Angel!"
"Buddy!"
"Friend-buddy."
Angel runs off after Buffy
...and Xander accidentally drives his car
...into Jack O’Toole.
Xander cops to driving without insurance
...and Jack pulls out a bowie knife,
...threatening Xander in front of his car girl date.
"Your woman looking on, you can't stand up to me?"
“You know what the difference between you and me is?
"Fear.”
"Who has the least fear?"
The cops show up
...and Xander chooses not to get O’Toole in trouble.
Xander’s refusal to narc makes Jack change his entire perspective of Xander.
O’Toole adopts him and asks him to drive them all to go and get his boys.
It just happens that the boys are dead bodies in the cemetery
...who O’Toole brings back to life through a touch of black magic.
"Buddy!"
"Bob!"
At the library, the rest of the Gang sans Xander
...are discussing in dire terms the coming dark fate of the world.
"--but I have to try."
“All we know is that the fate of the entire world rests on it."
"Did you eat all the jellies?”
Giles suggests Xander make another donut run for the team
and Buffy insists that,
after nearly injuring himself before,
...he needs to sit this one out.
Giles proceeds to the cemetery to talk to the spirits who reject his request for help.
He runs into Xander who tries to get Giles to take him with.
Giles refuses saying there is far too much danger.
"menace,"
“...something in the air."
"Stench of death.”
“Yeah, I think it’s Bob.”
Right about here was when I started to realize how the show was self satirizing itself.
Oz’s cliché howl was like a trumpet announcing its intention.
As if on cue, in the next scene,
...Buffy stands over the beaten body of Willy the Snitch
...who explains the apocalypse is here tonight.
The boys, with Xander, decide they want to bake a cake,
which is apparently degenerate speak for
...build a bomb.
At the hardware store, Xander tries to leave
...and the boys say they can initiate him into the group.
“What do I gotta do?”
[knife noise]
“You gotta die.”
Xander runs and stumbles on Faith,
...out fighting another evil smurfette on her own.
He drives Faith back to her hotel
...where Faith is feeling
...some pent up frustration from not being able to kill the smurf.
She jumps him
...and then tosses him out of her hotel.
“That was great."
"I gotta shower."
[door close]
Xander returns to his car and realizes the boys are planning to build a bomb.
He goes and finds Buffy and Angel
...who are knee deep in some choice Bangel speak.
“I can’t watch you die again.”
Xander interrupts.
The dramatic music holds for a moment.
He realizes his problem probably isn’t as big as the problem his friends are facing
...then leaves and the dramatic music begins again.
So.
Much.
Fun.
Xander decides his best course of action is to figure out
...where the boys wanted to put the bomb.
He manages to get the information from one of the degenerate undead
...and proceeds to the school
...where the rest of the Gang
...are in the midst of fighting the real apocalypse.
Xander finds the bomb in the boiler room,
...keeping (with) the show's penchant for making basements the sight of significant metaphorical or subconscious activity
“Who knows what's going to come up from beneath us?”
...and Xander has the final showdown with Jack O’Toole.
He doesn’t know how to stop the bomb
...but O’Toole does
...so he traps O’Toole in the boiler room with him,
...willing to sacrifice his own life to save his friends.
Jack defuses the bomb
...and Xander tells him never to come back again.
The next day,
the rest of the Gang,
battered and bruised,
commiserate over a struggle to save the world
...that demanded the very heights of unrestrained bravery and self sacrifice.
Or so we’re told.
Xander goes and gets snacks for everyone,
...running into Cordelia one more time.
Whose barbs,
...this time,
...fail to sink in.
Of all the characters on the show,
...Xander gets some pretty FANTASTIC one-offs.
'Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered' might be the most charming episode in all of 'Season 2',
...weird, magical roofie vibe aside.
And 'The Zeppo' capitalizes on everything that made 'Bewitched' great
...but plays with perspective and lore in such a fun and joyful way.
The episode was written by Dan Vebber,
who only wrote one other episode
- (the nearly equally fantastic 'Lovers Walk')
"Love isn't brains, children,"
"...it's blood."
"Blood screaming inside you to work its will."
...before he went on to become a writer on 'Futurama'.
It’s a shame.
Such an exceptional episode.
And there's something extra cool about these particular kinds of episodes in 'Buffy'.
Very rarely does the show completely divert from its own format
but when it does,
...it figures out a way to ground that diversion
...in either its own lore
...or its characters.
In a lot of other shows
where you have a musical episode
or an alternate timeline episode,
...there isn’t an internal reason for that storyline to actually occur.
People just sing for one single, inexplicable episode
...and then
...everything goes back to normal the next.
But stylistic departures in 'Buffy' are always justified in some fashion,
... and fit neatly within the season arc.
Here,
...we the audience witness things like
...the hyperbolic melodrama between Angel and Buffy
...and the indifference to yet another apocalypse
...because we’re watching the episode through Xander’s eyes.
The story is told completely from his point of view.
THIS is how Xander sees the world.
And Xander is by his nature,
...conflicted.
He's a boy who desires strongly to check the tick boxes of conventional masculinity
"No, but Larry was about to pummel me!"
"Forget about it!"
"Oh, I'll forget about it.'
"--maybe fifteen, twenty years when my rep for being a sissy man finally fades!"
"Xander, don't you think you're--"
--"A black eye heals, Buffy,"
"...but cowardice has an unlimited shelf life."
And yet,
...his two best friends are girls.
He shows no sign of relating well to any other male,
...quite the opposite actually.
With the exception of Giles,
...he lacks ANY positive male role model.
“Uncle Rory stacked up his DUI's“
"...let me rent this bad boy 'til he's mobile again."
And in 'The Zeppo',
...we see Xander grasping for the conventional male identity,
...and doing so in all the wrong ways.
'Zeppo' is an interesting pairing with 'Helpless' in its examination of gender.
In 'Helpless',
Buffy’s physical strength was taken from her,
...making her vulnerable
-something the male overseers in the episode suggested was a natural product of her gender.
“I throw knives like--"
--“A girl?”
In 'The Zeppo',
...common gender stereotypes are completely inverted from the very opening.
Faith and Buffy are the two warriors,
...slaying the powered Sisterhood smurfettes.
Xander is the weak and helpless one of the group
...which generates in him,
...massive insecurity.
From there, we get a magic carpet ride tour of Xander’s quest.
From his proxy penis,
...to joining O’Tooles gang.
O’Toole
...exudes all the loathsome characteristics of conventional masculinity.
He is always trying to be dominant,
...aggressive
...and mean.
And the magic carpet ride eventually leads to my favorite scene in the episode
...where Faith deflowers Xander.
Again,
...all conventions here are turned on their head.
Faith is the sexually aggressive one
-concerned mostly with her own pleasure
...instead of Xander’s.
Riding him to her own satisfaction
...and then kicking him out when it’s over.
In her book,
'Why Buffy Matters',
Rhonda Wilcox points out
...the very artful nature of this shot.
Xander has always been in love with Buffy
and here is a shot of him mirrored off the television screen of him having sex with Faith,
...who is a version of Buffy in some way we're not really clear about yet at this point in the season.
Simultaneously,
the image represents the entire episode.
A normal episode of the show
...reversed and flipped on its head.
If 'Helpless' was asking us to question our preconceived notions about...
...femininity,
...power
...and equality,
'The Zeppo' asks the same of us regarding masculinity.
In the world of 'Buffy' where women kick ass and are the frontline warriors,
Xander accepts it.
He doesn’t try to change or deny it,
...or walk away from it.
He embraces it.
In the end,
...he finds a firmer grasp of his own identity,
...one that doesn’t require any witnesses other than himself.
Love him or hate him,
Xander is a VERY important component to the show's discussion of gender.
As producer and director of the original 'Buffy' movie Fran Kuzuki said in an interview:
“You can educate your daughters to be Slayers,
"...but you (also) have to educate your sons"
"... to be Xanders”.
And 'The Zeppo' is the type of episode that makes 'Buffy',
...'Buffy'.
It’s a show that can look at it’s own developed clichés,
...point at them,
...and laugh.
As if to say to us,
“You thought THAT was the point?”
During the final standoff, Xander appears to defeat O’Toole on his terms.
"So I guess the question really is..."
"...who has less fear."
But really,
...what has changed from the opening confrontation to now?
Why was Xander able to face down O’Toole and his own possible demise so comfortably in the end?
I’ve always felt that the notion of fearlessness or people who feel fear being perceived as cowardly,
...was an idiotic one.
Fear is an essential survival mechanism.
It’s a valuable tool that tells us not to poke the bear
...or to run when the lions start chasing.
Total absence of fear isn’t courage.
It’s stupidity.
To quote author Meg Cabot,
“Courage is not the absence of fear"
"...but rather the judgement that something else is more important.”
And here,
...in the quiet of the high school basement,
...Xander puts everything on the line to save his friends.
What else would we expect...
...from Buffy’s metaphorical heart?