Adam and Riley are having a chat.
Apparently Professor Walsh put a behavior modification chip in his chest?
"So it’s chips all around is it?"
Adam’s plan is to trap demons, humans and Slayer alike
in the Initiative and use their corpses to create more Adams.
At Casa De Giles, the Scoobs are experiencing the fallout from the previous evening.
The awkwardness is palpable
and Tara politely smiling through it,
...adorable.
But I think the intense "morning after" sensation the scene leaves you with
is a testament to that wonderful final scene in 'The Yoko Factor'
-both hilarious and painful.
"Bloody hell!"
Xander is struggling to find the motivation to get out of bed.
I absolutely love this overhead shot as Anya considers his nakedness.
"So they all think you’re a lost, directionless loser with no plans for his future."
"Pfft."
"Anya, you can’t..."
"'pfft'"
"...that stuff away?
"Why not?"
"Cause I think maybe they’re right."
"So what if they are?"
"You're a good person and a good boyfriend and..."
"...and I'm in love with you."
I like that.
And what it has to say about the barbs that generally stick with us
-the insults that hurt the most are the ones that validate insecurities we already have in ourselves.
The power and dignity to withstand ridicule
is mostly found through mastering and understanding your own heart.
Buffy wanders into Adam’s lair
which is filled by MANY pounds of monitors.
None of which I think were compatible with that
...teal G3 Power Mac.
The lack of realism really undermines the pathos and themes of this episode for me.
In a secret lab in the Initiative, we discover that Adam
has turned Maggie Walsh into a Franken-drone.
Along with Who Cares.
I wonder if...
"This is all how she planned it,"
"...except she thought she would be alive."
...is the writers saying,
"This was our ORIGINAL plan for the ending"
"except we thought Maggie would be monologuing now instead of G.I. FrankenJoe."
WOH.
That is one painful looking circumcision.
Spike accidentally reveals to Buffy that he knows she and Willow had a falling out
...a scene he wasn’t privy or present to.
This causes Buffy to reunite the team.
They figure out Adam’s plan of carnage.
"Does anybody else miss the Mayor,"
"...I just want to be a big snake?"
Back at the lab, Franken Forrest and Riley are getting reaquainted.
"I'll never let that happen."
"You don’t get it, brother,"
"you don’t have a choice."
"Your will belongs to us now."
Those of you playing along with 'Buffy Guide' Bingo, I hope your ears just perked up.
More on that in a moment.
"She's coming."
During a rewatch we did with the community, someone was wondering at Adam's powers.
How he could see through Jonathan’s spells
and how he can sense Buffy incoming here in this scene.
T'would be interesting if parts of him were from a seer like Drusilla.
Maybe a side effect of the assembly that Maggie wasn’t aware of.
The Scoobies devise a plan for attacking Adam.
"So no problem,"
"...all we need is Combo Buffy."
"Her with Slayer strength,"
"Giles’...multilingual know how"
"...and Willow’s witchy power."
As they descend into the Initiative,
Willow, Buffy and Xander make up after their dramatic first year in college.
"You know we love you right?"
"We TOTALLY do."
"Oh God,"
"...we're going to die, aren't we?"
The Initiative captures the Gang.
Adam locks the base down and releases the monsters.
As Forrest and Buffy face off,
Riley cuts into his pectoral muscle to remove a...
...mind control chip?
...before beating Fraken Forrest
...who was just defeating his super-powered girlfriend?
OK.
"Buffy!"
[ouch]
“Shut up."
"Watch me kill your girlfriend, Finn.”
[Forrest Subtext Bugle]
[farty bugle noise]
[EXPLOSIVE FINISH]
And, while the other Scoobs sit around and execute a spell,
Buffy faces off with Adam.
[in Sumerian] "We are heart."
"We are mind."
"We are spirit."
""From the raging storm, we bring the power of the Primeval One."
Combo-breaker Buffy is the best Buffy.
Right before the Gang gets slaughtered
...Spike comes to the rescue.
"You probably just saved us so we wouldn’t stake you right here."
"Well, yeah."
"Did it work?"
"Well, then everything's alright."
"And we all get to be not staked through the heart.
"Good work, team!"
There is an incredibly odd edit where it seems like we might get a Buffy action montage
...and instead it hard cuts.
This roundtable discussion of people we've never met
polishes off the season arc with what is essentially just exposition shorthand.
The last throes of a bizarrely uneven season.
And with a cut to static, 'Season 4'’s main arc comes to a close.
It feels abrupt and a little lacking in emotional catharsis,
save for the elevator scene,
...but plenty of that is still to come
...with the dazzling 'Restless',
There is,
a lot of wonderful
and a lot offff
...iiit was okay
...it was fine.
I was jjjust waiting to watch Buffy punch
...Robo Zip drive in the face some more.
We’ve spoken at length this season about how the Initiative represents institutionalized identity.
The trick here is that the season hasn’t strictly been talking about military institutions,
...although the Initiative certainly provided a framework for examining the trappings of homogenized identity.
But the season has actually been loaded to the brim with groups that ask for conformity and submission,
...including college itself.
Remember the poster game in 'The Freshman',
and what it said about the clichés of the college identity?
"Do we have a Klimt?"
"Yes!"
“Big score for Klimt.”
Or the round table of pseudo intellectual bros from 'Beer Bad'.
Or the Gentlemen, who together formed their own dark and terrifying hive mind.
Or the wicca group that patronized Tara into submission.
In 'Superstar', everyone in town conforms to Jonathan’s desires.
And in the final two-parter,
Adam reveals that Walsh’s last stage for the Initiative
was to break everyone into parts
and reassemble them into one common, uniform shape,
...ultimately monstrous for not being individual.
"And when everyone's super,"
[evil laugh]
“...no one will be.”
The very name "the Initiative" was no doubt a joke by the writers
as the dictionary definitions of the term
...are the exact opposite of what the Initiative was meant to embody:
"the ability to assess and initiate things independently."
"the power or opportunity to act or take charge before others do."
Within the show’s central metaphor of progressing through adolescence then,
Buffy’s defeat of Adam is a symbol for her rejection of conformity.
This is not, however, an argument for the...
...'Into the Wild' style pursuit of isolation.
In the previous episode, I made the comparison between what Forest called family,
...and what the Scoobies call family.
One is a family created by an institution that emphasizes conforming to that institution's ideals…
“I am how they train me.”
And the other...
...is chosen.
In fact, the final showdown emphasizes that Buffy needs the people she loves in her life, in order to become her best self:
Maximum Combo-breaker Buffy.
And I’ve shown the spell scene previously
as the most explicit example of each Scoobies metaphorical relationship to her.
And together, they summon what translated from Sumerian reads as "Primeval one".
Slayer.
Adult.
Metaphorically, of course.
Literally, they summon something else
...but we'll get into that in 'Restless'.
But in this case, magic defeats technology.
I noticed a few comments in my previous video from people who bristled at
the magic versus tech, feminine versus masculine interpretation.
But, as my friend Mark Field points out in his book, 'Myth Metaphor & Morality in Buffy the Vampire Slayer',
it’s important to point out that when we talk about these things we’re not talking about a person’s sex or gender
but conventional inherited or imposed ideologies.
As I pointed out earlier, Giles is as tech inept as they come.
And Professor Walsh is the creator of the Initiative.
It’s not about boys vs girls
but, as a feminist parable,
'Buffy' is at least partially about celebrating feminine identity.
We’ve covered what went awry this season outside the show’s control
but there are a few things to mention.
'Season 4' has been cribbing from 'Frankenstein' and some its motifs.
The most obvious reference, other than the fact that Adam is a...
...big mess of body parts,
was when he came upon the child in the forest which
...I mean,
who let's their kid play alone in a forest in Sunnydale?
This wasn’t in Shelley's book
but in the 1931 classic film
in which the monster runs into a little girl who isn’t afraid of him.
When he runs out of flowers to throw into a lake
he tosses the girl in instead and she drowns.
More directly,
in the original book, the monster says to Dr. Frankenstein,
“I ought to be thy Adam.”
With 'Frankenstein', the season had incredible potential to make literary connections to
its bedrock of philosophy that had been built up to this point,
...and some of the themes still work.
In 'Season 4',
every one of the Scoobies is experiencing a crisis of identity.
Buffy wondering what in her drives loved ones away.
Giles facing parental obsolescence.
We’ve been over it.
Frankenstein had to wonder at what and who he was.
Problem is, Adam pretty much gets his answer early on
“What am I?”
“You’re a monster.”
“I thought so.”
...and then sits around until the final few episodes.
Shelley's 'Frankenstein' contains themes of
family,
lost innocence,
the toxic effects of isolation on the human heart.
But most of those themes spring from the relationship between Frankenstein
...and his monster.
And once Maggie was out of the picture
it seemed like the writers weren’t sure what to do with Adam until the end.
Even then, we find him monologuing about mother and HER plans.
I think the necessity of Maggie Walsh to making all this work never feels more apparent than it does
when she's a speechless zombie and Adam is giving us a crash course in why "show don’t tell" is a thing.
For comparison, consider Faith and the Mayor.
In 'Season 3', I argued the Mayor was a little impenetrable as a Big Bad.
Entertaining, certainly,
...but lacking in complexity or humanity.
And, from her first patrol with Buffy,
the Ragin' Slayer’s arc felt like a bit of a foregone conclusion to me.
But once Faith and the Mayor were in each other’s orbit
their loving relationship created warmth and empathy for them both,
even as that very thing allowed them to hide in each other’s darkness.
Another issue was Riley
and how much of the broad dramatic strokes of this season’s arc were channeled through him
...rather than any of the Scoobies.
Buffy struggled with the idea of conformity briefly in 'The I in Team'
but then, at the heights of bad-assery said to Walsh:
“--you really don’t know what a Slayer is."
"Trust me when I say you’re gonna find out.”
Seemingly then, Buffy has been pretty solid since that episode.
And in 'The Yoko Factor', there isn’t a section where Spike drives her from the Scoobies,
...but instead drives the Scoobies from her.
And so here in the climax, most of the significant thematic lines get delivered to Riley.
And the problem is, the writers of their own admission
struggled with how to make Riley
(a Clark Kent character)
...interesting.
Mostly, he’s either too much on the Scooby side,
or so on the Initiative side that it makes him look stupid and petulant.
“Maggie’s dead.
Happy now?”
He doesn’t seem to have an underlying personality or pathology of his own,
...other than “Nice Guy.”
Consequently, when he cuts into his
...whatever
...so that he can stand up and
...whatever
we just...
...whatever.
Simple comparison:
"Take all that away,"
"...and what’s left?"
"Me."
"Oof."
And I’m not saying these themes had to be threaded through Buffy to make them resonate.
What if, at the end of 'Season 3', Xander, unsure of what to do after high school
...HAD enrolled in the military?
Because of the residual military knowledge left over to him from 'Halloween',
he was fast tracked through basic.
And, being a resident of Sunnydale, likely familiar with the supernatural,
was put on deployment for a special program called the Initiative.
Then Xander is the one torn between two worlds.
Xander is the one chipped by Walsh.
And Xander is the one who finds his individuality again
right before Buffy faces off against
...Douchenstein.
I’m reaching here and obviously a number of details would need to be adjusted
but it would still work, and, be justified by the previous seasons.
THOUGH that would still leave a more nebulous problem I had with the Initiative itself
and that is
that their portrayal on the show lacks ANY sense of authenticity whatsoever.
Authenticity is a difficult thing to quantify.
More of a gut feeling...really.
You just know it when you see it.
And the Initiative never actually FELT like military.
Something more of the 'Bad News Bears' variety.
That underlying sense of camp or silliness to them
coupled with the lack of a captivating avatar for us in Riley,
eventually lead to me just being kind of bored with any scenes that had anything to do with them.
Counting the seconds until the next Scooby scene.
Spike and Riley’s chips were a metaphor for what the Initiative does to the individual
and their individually finding ways to defeat it
were both a statement about how essential identity will always find a way.
"That a beast this powerful cannot be contained."
“Inevitably it will break free and savage the land again.”
But I yearned for a bit of the old ultraviolence and some of that Kubrickian commentary from 'Clockwork Orange'.
Still though, even if the themes got a bit jumbled up
and the plot accidentally backed the wrong character,
'Yoko Factor' and 'Primeval' are incredibly entertaining.
And what IS here feels smart,
...if a little unearned.
The final scene of 'The Yoko Factor' was well-written
and I love the poetic parallels of
the Scooby Gang being dismembered,
and then reassembled in 'Primeval'
...as something more than the sum of their parts.
Kind of like Adam.
Even if the theme of alienation within the team that caused the schism in 'The Yoko Factor'
hadn’t been particularly well developed since 'Fear, Itself'.
But even if it rushed to us there,
'Primeval' restores some of the intimacy and love between the Scoobies
...that has felt absent at times this season.
The scene with Xander and Anya in bed together exudes a warm glow,
and the elevator shaft hug feels like it
shakes off a lot of the inertia and rust the show has developed this season
"Giles, hurry up!"
“You definitely wanna get down here for this!”
HOORAY!
They love each other again.
Now let’s go magic gourd the hell out of that asshat Adam.
Even if 'Season 4' has felt hollow dramatically
in comparison to the previous,
...it has still been damned entertaining.
This is, taken as a whole, probably the funniest season in the entire series.
And, I have to say that, in spite of its struggles
'Season 4' was thematically ambitious,
...perhaps even above and beyond what’s come before.
It’s just that when theme flows through characters we love it can feel
...powerful and intimate.
When it flows through those we don’t
it can creak and feel a little mechanical as
...well
...Adam.
And 'Restless', the episode that follows,
which Whedon referred to as his coda,
...strips away all of those mechanical elements.
If 'Season 4' is an exploration of the identity that the world tries to hoist upon us,
...'Restless' is about how we see ourselves.