‘Checkpoint’ is a wonderful episode. A transition in Buffy’s 5th season for many more ways than was
immediately apparent to me my first time through it. There is the introduction of the Knights,
the return of the loathsome Watchers, the clarity on Glory’s true nature, and one of Buffy’s best
speeches to date. But, on closer examination, I found something a little more fundamental.
Summary
We open on a Scoobygang meeting at Summers central with a quick reminder of where
the past few episodes have taken us. Giles says the Watchers are coming to
Sunnydale with info and Tara, who didn’t watch seasons one through three, asks a question
that is pretty relevant to the episode. “What’s so bad about them? Aren’t they
good guys? That’s just other Giles’ right?’” Btw, seriously digging casual Giles here in the
brown leather jacket with his man-mat sticking out of the top of his shirt. Yowza. Anyway,
as they talk about Dawn, the girl in question, still mastering the technique of over-hear-us
wrong-time-us from her sister, wanders downstairs in her yummy donut pajamas for some TMI.
Glory’s glam is looking a little off but she sucks a brain and it returns
to pristine while she and minion talk about getting the location of the key from Buffy.
Travers shows up to the Magic Box, entourage in tow, and begins critiquing Giles’ mishandling of
everything in the shop. “This statue has the ability
to melt human eyeballs…” Quentin takes 30 seconds to
find a justification before shutting the shop down and Giles points out an important detail.
8:30 “You knew you were going to do this before you even saw the place.”
Travers then sets up the premise of the episode: they have vital info about Glory
but aren’t going to share any of it unless Buffy and Giles jump through their hoops.
We get more evidence that Sunnydale U has terrible mean professors and Spike
interrupts Buffy’s emotional catharsis and then stirs her insecurities about Riley.
Or maybe ... your beauty's fading. The stress of slaying, aging you prematurely.
*cut to pre-glam Glory. Giles talks Buffy out of her panic
attack and Buffy hits me in all the feels with why threatening to deport Giles worked on her.
21:30 “Also, smart. They picked the perfect thing. I can’t lose you.”
The Watchers test begins in a montage that is absolute gold. After things don’t go well, Buffy
comes home to find Glory waiting for her inside in a genuinely chilling scene that evoked actual
dread for me. We’ve gotten so used to the house feeling like a sanctum from the baddies (rare
exceptions that Buffy could handle aside) but, not only is Glory unbeatable, she also doesn’t need an
invitation. This is about the scene where Glory started feeling more like the terminator to me.
An unstoppable terrifying glam-tastic terminator Schwarzenegger leaning in: “Give me the key.”.
Glory threatens everyone important to Buffy...and then...leaves.
Buffy takes Joyce and Dawn to Spike’s crypt for protection. I love the bits
where Spike seems to acknowledge Buffy’s genuine desperation by dropping the fencing tactics.
“All right then.”
And he and Joyce chatting like old friends while watching Passions might be one of my
favorite things on earth. Joyce and Spike have one of my favorite background relationships on
the show. Always, curiously kind and civil, almost since the beginning.
“Do I know you?” - “You hit me with an axe once…” Then there was the time she fed him cocoa and
listened to his depression over Dru. “Joyce...you got anymore of those
little marshmallows.” Spike definitely seems
to respond well to...uh...Buffy’s mom. On the way to her meeting with the Watchers,
Buffy gets attacked by some Ren Fair dropouts. “The nights of Byzantium.
If it takes a thousand we send a thousand.” “Cut off one head, two more shall take it’s place.
Buffy lets discount-Hydra go but takes his rockin’ mall sword. That thing is a hoss.
Remember what the swords Buffy and Angel dueled with looked like? She wanders into
the Magic Box thoughtfully and commences her yummiest Yummy Sushi pajama speech yet.
“People have been lining up to tell me how unimportant I am. And I finally figured
out why: power. I have it. They don’t.” Giles gets his job back. Travers caves. We
all applaud. And then things get real “Glory isn’t a demon. She’s a god.”
Slaying
the arc episode There’s always a point in
a Buffy season where that season seems to remember itself. The tying off of any hanging threads from
the previous is followed by the gentle unfolding of the new thematic structures (less gentle in the
episode 7.) After their introductory episode or two, the Big Bad tends to hang in the background,
making a handful of periodic obligatory appearances. And then, all of a sudden,
the season remembers the arc and we get a huge development episode or two. These are your Bad
Girls and Consequences. Your Whats My Lines, and your I-in-Teams and Goodbye Iowas of the
series. I have, at times, complained about the plotty ones. They can be creaky, ‘getting the
pieces into position for the finale’ episodes of Buffy. Not poor episodes, mind you, but certainly
not on the same storytelling level for me as a one-off Halloween, Band Candy, or Something Blue.
Fittingly, Season 5 of Buffy feels like the one where those arc episodes have
started to mature. And the next two, between Checkpoint and Blood Ties are really dang good.
Checkpoint was written by Jane Espenson and Doug Petrie. By a simple survey of
my personal Top 20, Espenson is easily my second favorite writer on the show. And,
even though he only had two previous writing credits in season’s 1-4, Checkpoint is Doug
Petrie’s third this season, including the absolutely spectacular ‘Fool for Love.’
Claire Kramer as the Glam-inator here is both fun and terrifying. Certainly everyone loves
a good montage. The chemistry between the Scoobs and Scoob-adjacent is just clicking.
Mainly, and unlike some of the previous season plotty-sodes that I mentioned,
(with maybe one minor exception) everything just seems to flow from setup to fist-pumping
payoff. I think that ending is one of Buffy’s best Steve Rogers speeches in the series.
I watch a Buffyverse episode at least twice for these reviews and both times I ended up giggling
with happiness during that part, even though I know the speech is coming from the season opener.
Son of the Return of The Patriarchy Part 6: This Time, It’s Personal
Much of the catharsis it offers is built off of just how infuriating the Watchers are,
lead with captivating and magnanimous condescension by Quentin Travers. My
impression of the terrific Harris Yulin’s career is of it being built almost entirely out of
playing bent men of power - notably the crooked cop in Scarface and the belligerent judge
in Ghostbusters 2. (He also has a terrific episode of Star Trek DS9 I recently watched
during a stream over on the Muppets, Sex, and Trauma Youtube Channel.)
Buffy’s moment of standing proud over Quentin and the Watchers has been a long time coming,
as they’ve been tweedy ball-bags ever since Doug Petrie’s first writing credit on the show,
Revelations. And, even though the reveal there was that Gwendolyn Post was in it for herself,
there's always been an undercurrent of derision in the way they supported Giles and his position.
I think we can even read it in the way Giles so readily endures Gwendolyn’s insults. He has an
air of familiarity with it. “That was bracing.”
In ‘Helpless,’ the council put Buffy through the cruciamentum and called it a test. But stealing
the Slayers power on her 18th birthday, without her knowing, and then throwing her in a cage with
a lion struck me much more as a system of control. If she dies, a younger more controllable potential
takes her place. If she doesn’t, she has been properly terrorized and knows that she
can be gotten to whenever and wherever the council wishes. She has been reminded that,
as Travers puts it in this episode: “The Slayer is the council’s instrument…”
And, of course, in ‘Checkpoint’ the Watchers are playing the same game. This is not an
examination but an exercise in control. They aren’t shutting the Magic Box down because they
actually care that Giles might be peddling eye melting statues to Sunnydale’ites. As Giles says
8:30 “You knew you were going to do this before you even saw the place.”
Institution-Envy The Watchers are
one of three forms of institutions in the episode that Tara’s question could apply to:
00:54 “What’s so bad about them? Aren’t they the good guys?”
Institutions that Buffy, more and more confronted by the complexities of adulthood,
is having to deal with. The Watchers Council represents a sort of governmental body.
By withholding information key to the Scoobies' safety, they engage them in a system built to
make them feel inferior - one designed to make them feel like they NEED the Watchers in charge
and to manufacture the consent for them to be. The Watchers essentially get the Scoobies to spend the
episode acting against their own self-interest - the weapon of a skillful politician.
Educational institutions are represented by Buffy’s professor.
Buffy has plenty of expertise and reasons to trust herself but the professor uses
his pulpit to shame and bully her into silence. “Maybe you'd prefer I step aside, so that you can
teach your own course. Speculation 101 perhaps?” You KNOW that dude’s got tenure. The gist of the
lesson we see him teaching is around Rasputin and it’s strongly implied that Buffy thinks
Rasputin was a vampire - a question that might come up in the Buffyverse again at some point.
The lesson is the 2nd Russian reference in the season after the very specific Tunguska blast
reference of Willow’s in ‘Listening to Fear.’ 10:28 “Rasputin was associated with a certain
obscure religious sect. They held the tenant that, in order to be forgiven one first had to sin.
Rasputin embraced this doctrine and proceeded to sin impressively
and repeatedly. The notion that he was in fact evil gained strength years later
when the conspirators who set out to kill him found it nearly impossible to do so.”
I so love the cart-leads-horse idea of ‘being forgiven; as such an end in-and-of-itself that
it justifies the necessity of copious sinning. But the reference to Rasputin, his peculiar form of
worship, and his striking inability to be killed, relates to the episode’s final institution:
The Knights of Byzantium. They are probably the episode’s pious religious representation.
In the name of avoiding getting too spoilery here: I’m not going to share many feelings about
the Knights yet. But the story of Byzantium goes back to 667 BC. The Megaran king’s son,
Byzas, was sailing to find land to settle for a colony. He had been told by an oracle from
the Apollon Temple in Delhi that he was going to settle his colony opposite the city of the blind.
On the surface of it, all three of the institutions represented in the
episode are ones that we’re used to putting our trust and faith in.
Not only that, but the Watchers, professor, and Knights all state
openly that they are the good guys “...some of us are here to learn.
Believe it or not, we're interested in finding out what actually happened.”
“The Council fights evil. The Slayer is the instrument by which we fight.”
“You think we align ourselves with the beast? You must be mad.”
Buffy sums up what their relationship to her is all about in her speech.
The professor talks down to her. Quentin patronizes and more than once refers to her
as a soulless instrument that needs to be played. The knight says their numbers make her irrelevant.
They all get their power by way of trying to convince Buffy that she doesn’t have any.
“Power. I have it. They don't. This bothers them.” We’ll talk more about power dynamics as the season
progresses but Buffy claiming authority in the episode is wonderful to watch. Though,
there is a sneaky detail slipped in. 19:50 “Giles that Travers guy is like
60. I can’t hit him. Can I?” I love that. Sarah’s delivery is
wonderful and theirs is a relationship that I treasure. But her asking Giles for permission
is a great way of showing that she still defers to her father figure in small ways. For now.
In his book, Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Myth, Metaphor, and Morality, Mark Field pointed
out some cool connections in the dummy exercise. In ‘Listening to Fear,’ Joyce
referred to Dawn using a particular term. “And she’s important to the world.
Precious. As precious as you are to me?” And Quentin tells Buffy to protect the dummy…
“Protect the dummy?”
“As if, it were precious.” Gollum: My precious…
So the dummy represents Dawn. And Buffy has been blindfolded by the Watchers both literally during
the test and metaphorically through them denying her all the information she needs to defeat Glory.
Then of course...there is the way the test ends. *axe to the dummy head.
Dawn on tower in VO: “Buffy!” Maybe my only persistent quibble
in ‘Checkpoint’ is the ongoing heavy use of the storytelling device where Dawn is
always in just the right place to overhear information she isn’t supposed to, combined with
the Scoobies continued refusal to have important conversations in rooms with doors they can
close. But I think I made peaceful headcanon with it this time when I realized Dawn is wearing a
Pink Panther shirt when she tells Buffy. “I’m going to figure it out, you know.”
The Clouseau reference is enough of a nod to make me accept that Inspector Dawn is engineering all
of these opportunities to overhear things, and the Scoobies are just too swamped for proper caution.
Temet Nosce The title of the episode is a little
more self-explanatory than perhaps is normal for the Buffyverse. The Watchers return at this point
in Buffy’s life to perform a check of her methods, before releasing important information to her.
Though, through the lens of the adolescence allegory, the check Buffy is going through
is about something else entirely. Quentin speaks to Buffy like she
is a child and he is an adult. “You’re dealing with grownups
now. Am I making myself clear?” Drawing that distinction between
he and Buffy got me to thinking about an important question that this season is,
at least partly, about: In what ways other than age do we define what it means to be an ‘adult?’
Since Buffy aired, there is now a word in the cultural vernacular for what that looks like in
action: adulting. But even the use of the word implies a separation between those actions and
how the speaker feels about themselves. And watching ‘Checkpoint’ this time,
I was struck by a paradox in something Buffy said that I’d never noticed before.
“They're going to expect me to be like the Slayer and know stuff. But I'm just me.”
I raced into my 20s believing I had some concept of what adulthood would feel like when it arrived
and then was struck by a deep depression in my early 30s - in part,
because I felt as though it never had. Surely it wasn’t just about paying bills and staying
organized. Finding a partner and settling down. Did I miss a ceremony, I wondered,
where someone was supposed to baptize me with adult confidence and sense-of-self?
Had I taken a wrong turn on the way to becoming the man I was supposed to be?
There’s a great scene in ‘The Matrix’ where Neo first meets the Oracle. Morpheus has brought
him to her so that she can evaluate if he is ‘The One,’ a Christ-figure in that story similar to the
Slayer. After the Oracle asks Neo if he believes he is, and Neo shrugs and says he doesn’t know,
she points to a sign over the doorway. “Do you know what that says? It's Latin. It means
know thyself. I wanna tell you a little secret, being the one is just like being in love.
No one needs to tell you you are in love, you just know it, through and through. Balls to bones.”
And that is the paradox that Buffy still hasn’t quite seen past yet. Sure, we can
learn to be better at the business of adulting, but true authenticity is about self-discovery
and acceptance. Knowing yourself. No one gets to hold the definition of what ‘Slayer’ is over Buffy
because being the Slayer isn’t about accumulated knowledge or living up to someone else’s tests and
standards. It’s who she is. Buffy IS the One.