"You
still don't understand, do you? I am free because you fear it. Because
you fear it, the world is crumbling. Your nightmares are made flesh.
”
--The Master
"Nightmares" gives us something new: our first genuinely creepy episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Although the
series is set in an area of mystical convergence that causes all sorts
of monstrous things to manifest, whether they’re vampires or
demons or giant praying mantises (or living ventriloquist dummies), and
these things should ostensibly be scary, they really haven’t
been, up until now. Partly that’s a deliberate choice on the part
of the writers; they constantly undercut the potential scares with
humor. The Master is a good example of this: he’s a centuries-old
vampire, much more powerful than any of the other vampires we’ve
seen, and Buffy and the gang have been dreading what would happen if he
were to be set free since the first episode. But he’s sarcastic;
he’s glib. He doesn’t take himself as seriously as he
might, and the world seems to amuse him. He’s an interesting,
post-modern take on the megalomaniacal bad guy, but his dry wit has
made it, up until now, rather difficult to take him seriously as a
major threat. Intellectually, we know he is
a major threat--Giles told us he was, and besides, the Master’s
minions seem afraid of him, and while the Master’s minions are
mostly a pack of buffoons, Darla and Luke and the Three were afraid of
him too. But emotionally, it was hard to see him as a threat.
Until now. "Nightmares"
opens with as chilling a scene as we’ve gotten in this series so
far (though it will be eclipsed by the end of the episode): Buffy walks
down into darkness, into the Master’s lair. It’s deserted,
or so we think; a clawed hand appears behind a pillar, a shadow slinks
into frame. Buffy is being stalked. She turns, her stake ready--and
sees the Master. Until this moment in the series, he’s been
defined by his dialogue, that quirky blend of clichéd,
self-important speechmaking and snarky, very dry, very modern
(especially for someone who’s about six-hundred years old) humor.
Here, all he does is hiss, and show Buffy his fangs. The Master was
always frightening to look at; his look is based on Nosferatu, and
unlike that other famous movie vampire, Dracula, who could be suave and
alluring, Nosferatu was always unnerving, always more monster than man.
The Master’s dialogue mitigated the creepiness potential in the
excellent make-up and prosthetics used to bring him to life, but that
potential was always there, and we see it in this scene: we see it in
Buffy’s eyes, as she shrinks away from him, mesmerized by his
eyes and freezing in terror, and drops her stake without even putting
up a fight. She backs up against a wall, helpless before him, as he
grabs her by the throat. The scene is all the more powerful because of
the complete lack of dialogue up until this moment; the only words we
get are Buffy pleading, “No...no!” as she looks up at him,
fear and resignation in her eyes, and he throttles her. She’s too
powerless to fight back, as he prepares to drain the life from
her...and then Buffy wakes up. It was a nightmare. There will be more
coming, for everyone.
Later on at
school, dozens of huge spiders jump out of a student’s book in
the middle of class; Giles gets lost amidst the stacks in the library
and can’t find his way out, and later loses the ability to read;
Buffy is late for a test she never studied for, in a history class that
she has hardly ever attended, and before she even manages to write her
name on the test her time is already up; Xander goes to class fully
clothed but is suddenly standing in front of the entire class in his
underwear; and a girl sneaks down to the school basement for a quick
cigarette, only to be brutally attacked by a monstrously scarred,
bald-headed man with a deformed club arm. But while the first sequence
with the Master was definitely a dream--Buffy woke up from it in her
bed--these things are all actually happening. What’s going on?
One clue is Billy Palmer, the sad, cryptic boy who appears in
connection with these incidents; he appears to Buffy in class when
spiders start crawling out of the student’s book, and he appears
to her again when she’s attempting to take her history test. He
also appears as the girl is about to wander down to the basement for
her ill-timed cigarette. “You shouldn’t go in there,”
he says softly to himself. More creepy kids? We’ve already got
the Annoying One. But unlike the Annoying One, this creepy kid is
actually given something to do, and he’s effective both in
contributing to the steadily building atmosphere of unease, and in
being a sympathetic character in his own right, especially once his
connection to these events is finally revealed.
Things quickly
spiral out of control, as nightmares begin to overtake reality, and the
gang is left scrambling to catch up. Once again, as she’s done
all season, Buffy uses her head just as much as she uses her fists, and
eventually manages to put the pieces of the puzzle together, realizing
that Billy is somehow causing all of this. But before the gang can get
to Billy and solve the mystery once and for all, they’ll each
have to survive their own nightmares first.
Showing a
character’s nightmares is a quick and easy route to character
development, but it works here and I’m not complaining.
Xander’s nightmare, in which he’s being chased by a
deranged clown who scared him during his sixth birthday party (and made
sucky balloon animals) is the least interesting of the batch, and
resembles a dream that anyone could have. I would have preferred that
he have a nightmare that actually tells us something about his
character, and I think the writers missed an opportunity there. But
Willow’s nightmare is better; while it also feels like the kind
of dream any of us might have (she’s suddenly onstage, having to
perform before an audience--in this case, she has to sing opera), it
still rings true to her character. Willow has always been afraid to be
the center of attention. But as is only fitting, the most fascinating
nightmares are Buffy’s, and they provide some illuminating
insights into her character. They also prove to be the best scenes in
the episode.
Buffy
experiences a number of these waking nightmares (not counting the
legitimate nightmare that began the episode) and though the history
test nightmare she experienced in act one was a standard dream that
many people have had (I myself have that one fairly often, actually,
and it’s frigging annoying) the three nightmares Buffy
experiences beginning in act two are hers and hers alone.
The first, and
in its way the most disturbing of the three, involves her father
arriving at school to pick her up for the weekend. His impending
arrival was mentioned earlier in the episode, and Buffy was nervous
about it: she was nervous that he wouldn’t show up. But
unfortunately for her he does show up, arriving early and walking right
into the library and asking if he can talk to her someplace private.
(This is one of only three appearances Buffy’s father would ever
make on the series; he appeared again in "When She Was Bad" at the
beginning of season two, and wouldn’t appear after that until the
sixth season’s excellent "Normal Again",
by which point Hank had been refashioned into a stereotypical deadbeat
Dad. Joss Whedon’s baffling hatred of parents once again rears
its ugly head.) Hank and Buffy sit outside on a bench together, and
Hank tells Buffy that she was the reason he and Joyce divorced, that he
couldn’t stand to live in the same house with her. He makes it
clear that she isn’t the daughter he wanted, the daughter he
hoped she would be, and, though he (mercifully) doesn’t say the
words, that he doesn’t love her. Then he tells her that he
doesn’t really get anything out of their weekends together, and
that he doesn’t want to do them anymore...and he walks away,
leaving Buffy in tears. The men in Buffy’s life, without
exception, would always let her down: Angel went bad, Spike tried to
rape her, Riley left when Buffy couldn’t return his love to his
satisfaction, Billy Fordham planned to kill Buffy in return for being
made into a vampire by Spike, Parker was simply a dick, Xander betrayed
Buffy’s trust more than once, and Giles drugged Buffy and took
her powers away in season three’s "Helpless".
I don’t think Whedon and his writers had that pattern in mind,
when they brought Buffy’s father in for this episode; I’m
fairly certain Hank became a deadbeat Dad because the writers simply
didn’t want to have to write for his character and it was an easy
way to explain his absence. Nevertheless, the pattern begins here, and
it would continue for the rest of the series, defining Buffy as a
character just as surely as she was defined by her heroism, or her
intelligence, or her strength, or by the burden of having the fate of
the world on her shoulders.
Buffy’s
next nightmare is the most frightening scene of the entire episode--and
in fact, one of the most frightening scenes the series ever gave us.
Buffy has caught up to Billy, or Billy’s astral form at least,
and they’re both being chased by the monstrously scarred man with
the club arm from act one (whom Billy calls “the Ugly
Man”.) The Ugly Man is too strong for Buffy to handle, and as
they try to outrun him they end up, somehow, in a cemetery at night,
even though they had been on school grounds during the day just a
moment before. They find a freshly-dug grave, with an open coffin
inside, waiting for an occupant...and the Master, waiting for Buffy.
He’s escaped from his prison in the bowels of the Hellmouth, and
he’s free on Earth. “I am free because you fear it,”
the Master tells Buffy, when she refuses to believe he’s real.
“Because you fear it, the world is crumbling. Your nightmares are
made flesh.” Just as it happened in her dream, Buffy can’t
resist him as he throttles her. He lifts her off the ground, and throws
her into the coffin, and the lid slams shut. Buffy pounds at the lid,
but it won’t open...and the Master shovels dirt into her grave,
cackling like a demon, burying her alive, as she screams, pleading for
help.
Giles, Willow
and Xander arrive at the cemetery soon afterwards, and before we see
Buffy’s final nightmare, we get to see Giles’ nightmare,
and it’s his worst one, much worse than getting lost in the
library stacks or suddenly not being able to read: he discovers
Buffy’s gravestone. Buffy is dead. Literally dead: although these
are nightmares, they’re actually happening. Giles kneels in front
of Buffy’s grave, and knows that he’s failed in his duty to
protect her. But there’s still one more surprise: Buffy’s
final nightmare. A hand shoots up out of the dirt, grabs Giles, and as
Giles wrenches himself away, Buffy rises out of her grave...as a
vampire.
Interestingly,
when Giles makes Buffy aware of the situation, and of the fact that
there still might be a chance to fix it if they can find a way to get
to Billy, who in actuality is in the hospital, lying in a coma, Buffy
controls herself and her new vampiric urges, and doesn’t
immediately try to kill them all. Even though she knows solving this
problem will lead to her no longer being a vampire. Buffy seems to want
to be human again, which rather contradicts everything we’ve
learned about vampires from this series. Since she is literally a
vampire (for the moment), one would think she no longer has her soul.
So why should she care particularly about fixing the world, and helping
her friends, and becoming human again? But she does care: the moment
she realizes she’s a vampire, when she runs her hands across her
face and feels the deformities there, she hides her face from her
friends in shame.
But when they
race to the hospital to try to wake Billy up, Buffy shows that, vampire
or not, she’s still Buffy: though her vampire strength comes in
handy when she needs to dispatch the Ugly Man, who has followed them
all the way to Billy’s hospital room, it’s her human
qualities, her intelligence and her empathy, that win the day.
(It’s interesting that in Buffy’s nightmare, she’s
actually physically stronger as a vampire than she was as the Slayer;
could it be that’s how she thinks of vampires? Does she think
they’re stronger than she is? Is that perhaps a metaphor for her
feelings of being overwhelmed by her duties as the Slayer?) As the
world is literally falling apart around them--the entire hospital is in
chaos as people’s nightmares are coming true, Willow sees giant
(and unfortunately very fake-looking) insects swarming through the city
when she looks out the window, and let’s not forget that the
Master is still out there somewhere--Buffy manages to solve the puzzle,
and figure out just who the Ugly Man is, and why Billy is so afraid of
him. In the end, Billy’s nightmare, the thing that terrified him
so much that he ultimately became trapped by it, his consciousness
marooned in the realm of nightmares while he unwittingly inflicted
nightmares on the whole world, had a very human face.
The things that really scare us always do; one reason Buffy the Vampire Slayer
was never a particularly scary show was that the villains were
monsters, and we all know monsters are make-believe. But human beings
are real, and sometimes they do terrible things... nightmarish things.
The nightmares Buffy had that gave us insight into her character--being
stalked and rendered helpless by the Master at the beginning of the
episode, being rejected by her father, being buried alive by the
Master, and finally, becoming a vampire herself--aren’t really
about external threats; they aren’t about monsters. The Master is
a monster, and Buffy’s father acted like a monster, and Buffy, in
the end, became a monster herself. But those nightmares were about
Buffy and her own insecurities, not the external things that prey upon
them. She’s afraid being the Slayer has robbed her of her family,
and that it will someday rob her of her life. She’s afraid being
the Slayer makes her so different from her friends, and so isolated
from them, that she feels deformed; she might as well be a vampire.
"Nightmares" has the distinction of not only being the creepiest episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer
up to this point in the first season, but also the best. It isn’t
a perfect episode, but it’s close: my only real quibbles are that
we should have gotten a more interesting nightmare for Xander,
something that gave us some insight into him, and it might have been
nice if Angel made an appearance. Especially now that the gang is aware
that he’s a vampire, you’d think he might have featured
prominently in someone’s nightmare (probably Xander’s, come
to think of it.) In fact, it would have been nice if this episode had
been expanded to two parts; there are so many fascinating things you
could do with this theme that it could have easily supported another
hour. I would have liked to see more of Willow’s nightmares, and
I would have liked to see the world crumble awhile longer. A bit more
humor would have been nice too; there isn’t as much humor here as
you’ll find in many, perhaps most, other episodes, but then again
in an episode concerned with people’s nightmares, that may be
expecting too much. (We did get Cordy being dragged to the chess club
with her Roseanne Roseannadanna hair in her nightmare, and Buffy referred to
Billy’s astral form as his “asteroid” form; I suppose
that’s enough to tide me over.) And in the end, "Nightmares"
succeeds admirably in what it sets out to do, which is to make us
uncomfortable, and give us some insights into the characters. The
greatest insights, and the most uncomfortable moments, are reserved for
Buffy, and the most significant thing "Nightmares" does is show us what Buffy is really
afraid of: she’s afraid of herself. She’s afraid of the
Slayer, and of what she’s lost because of it. She’s afraid
being the Slayer has separated her from the people she
loves...she’s afraid of becoming a monster.
