“Nothing’s
ever simple anymore. I’m constantly trying to work it out. Who to
love or hate. Who to trust.”
--Buffy
Now this is more like it. “Lie To Me” is just what I’ve been waiting for.
I’ve been saying all along that Buffy
season two is better than season one, that the stakes become higher,
the characters grow, the mythology deepens, and the show really hits
its stride. And that’s all true, but so far season two has been
all talk, no walk. The season premiere, “When She Was Bad”,
was great--except for the blatant, inexcusable plot-hole that
enabled the good guys to win. But the next episode out of the gate,
“Some Assembly Required”, was one of the worst the series
ever produced. “School Hard” makes a real splash,
introducing Spike and Dru, dumping the Annoying One and sending the
series rocketing off in a new direction, but the episode works far
better in my memories than it actually does in execution and I found it
consistently disappointing. “Inca Mummy Girl” was a missed
opportunity, and though “Reptile Boy” was good solid stuff,
it didn’t set anyone’s world on fire.
“Halloween” could’ve been something special but it
collapses under the weight of lazy writing and had to settle for being
merely fun. I’ve been waiting all season for this show to hit on
all cylinders, but so far it’s sputtered along in fits and
starts. Now, finally, we have a winner: an episode that works the Buffy
formula perfectly but leaves the lazy writing by the side of the road.
“Lie To Me” speeds down the track and doesn’t hit a
single speed bump along the way.
After Buffy eavesdrops on Angel having a clandestine late night meeting
with a beautiful mystery woman, a childhood friend of Buffy’s
from L.A., Billy “Ford” Fordham, shows up out of the blue
at Sunnydale High the next day and reveals that he’s just
transferred there. Who is Billy Fordham? When we first meet him,
he’s a breath of fresh air: Buffy’s fifth-grade crush from
Hemery High who is refreshingly different from Xander. It’s nice
to get a new teenage character who doesn’t talk in
Whedon-speak--a dialogue style which, now that the show has been off
the air awhile, seems an artificial, hokey contrivance in hindsight,
and it’s sounding increasingly artificial and hokey to my ear
with each passing year--and at the start Ford really does look like a
great potential new member for the Scooby Gang. Buffy certainly agrees:
when Ford suddenly shows up Buffy is practically ecstatic. You can see
in her eyes that the crush has never gone away. Here’s a
potential love interest for Buffy who seems like the perfect match for
her--he’s good-looking, he seems smart and pleasant and funny,
Buffy is obviously attracted to him, he doesn’t end every word
with the letter “y” and he even has a soul. An invitation
to join the gang at the Bronze that night swiftly follows--actually,
Buffy pretty much dragoons him--and everyone’s happy. (Except
Xander. “Jeez, doesn’t she know any fat guys?”
he whines. But I’m happy, specifically because Xander’s
unhappy.) Ford seems even more perfect when Buffy learns, while staking
vampires outside the Bronze, that he knows she’s the Slayer--that
he’s known it ever since they went to school in Los Angeles
together, and he’s fine with it. Here, finally, is the
“normal relationship” Buffy has always wanted, and
he’s even fine with her being the Slayer in the bargain--but is
Ford too good to be true? Given Buffy Summers’ track record with
guys, what do you think?
Buffy is letting Ford into her inner circle pretty quickly, but we
certainly can’t blame her: Angel’s meeting with that
beautiful mystery woman--whom the gang has never met, but whom we know
is Drusilla, and whom we also know from her previous appearances is bad
news (in a delightfully entertaining way) rattled Buffy, and brought
her worst fears about Angel to the surface. He was a ruthless, sadistic
killer for more than a century--and even though he’s reformed
now, could she really trust such a creature with her heart? And astute
viewers will also know, from the season one episode
“Nightmares”, that Buffy has issues with the men in her
life leaving her, which certainly make her relationship with Angel even
more complicated.
Though Buffy may be falling in love with Angel, she isn’t sure
she trusts him yet--he’s a vampire, after all, and one of the
worst ones in history in the bargain. But Buffy’s trust issues
with Angel are part of a larger problem. Buffy is still struggling with
her role, and her destiny, as the Slayer, and the fact that she was
destined to die, and did in fact die, at the end of season one has
changed her. A part of her has stopped trusting: stopped trusting that
her ultimate destiny as the Slayer would necessarily be a good one,
stopped trusting that her power could always protect her, stopped
trusting that her mother or her friends or her Watcher could help her,
or even really understand her burden. Buffy’s alive again now,
but she’s been through a traumatic, life-changing event: she was
murdered. To make matters worse, her Watcher knew it was coming but
chose not to reveal that fact to her, and you can bet Buffy
hasn’t forgotten that, either. Even as Buffy is making strides
now in season two to include her friends in her mission and not take
their contributions for granted, she still feels, in a very real way,
alone and under siege, and utterly betrayed by her calling: she had all
the strength of the Slayer at her disposal, but it’s not like she
was given a choice. And no one told her she might be dead at age
sixteen. And now, just as Buffy is starting to get her bearings again,
the arrival of Billy Fordham will bring the worst betrayal of all. This
is an episode about the necessity of trusting people, of allowing
yourself to be vulnerable, of taking risks with your heart, all the
while knowing you’re giving these people the power to hurt you.
Because sometimes our trust is betrayed. Sometimes the people we care
about lie to us.
As Ford begins to insinuate himself into Buffy’s life, every
scene explores this theme. When Buffy runs into Angel at the Bronze
while she’s basking in Ford’s shiny newness, and casually
asks him, without hinting that she’s onto him, what he was up to
the night before, Angel lies and tells her he was home reading. Later
on, Buffy will find out from Giles that Drusilla is actually more than
a century old (and, therefore, a vampire)--and that she’s
Spike’s girlfriend too, information which will come in handy by
the end of the episode--but all Buffy knows for the moment, as she
watches Ford playing pool with Xander and Willow at the Bronze, fitting
in with them the way a normal person would, while Angel sort of just
stands there brooding, is that Angel has just lied to her about meeting
another woman. And more than that, he can never be someone like
Ford--he can never give Buffy the life she wants, a life in the sun.
When things start to get awkward at the Bronze--Angel tends to have
that effect on social gatherings--Buffy leaves with Ford. When Ford
asks her if Angel is her boyfriend, her answer is, “No. Um...yeah. Maybe. Could we lay off the tough questions for awhile?” In “Lie To Me” everyone is telling lies--even Buffy.
We find out there’s definitely more to Ford than there seems when
we see him show up at a goth club later that night, talking with his
dorky friend “Diego”, who probably reads a lot of
Tolkien--and whose real name is actually Marvin, but Marvin thinks
“Diego” sounds cooler--about “the plan”, and
Ford says, “A couple more days
and we’ll get to do the two things every American teen should
have the chance to do: die young, and stay pretty.” Like
Angel, it would seem Ford is hiding something too. But what is it? A
moment later we see Ford watching Jack Palance making an evil speech in
a vampire movie playing on a monitor at the club and mouthing the words
as Palance cackles them. Could Ford possibly be...a bad guy?
Absolutely, and it becomes obvious very quickly. Angel thinks
there’s something off about Ford, and he enlists Willow’s
help, visiting her in her room at night (Willow is in her nightgown
getting ready for bed--with, perplexingly, a lot of makeup on--and
she’s just the cutest thing when she gets all shy and nervous in
front of Angel, not because he’s a vampire, but because
he’s a guy seeing her in her nightgown) to do some research on
her magic computer without telling Buffy. Willow agrees to do a little
digging, and she finds out that Ford isn’t registered at their
school. Angel and Willow agree not to let Buffy in on this until they
find out whether or not there really is something wrong about Ford, and
the next day at school Willow does an adorable impression of a wanted
criminal as she practically jumps out of her skin when Buffy says hi to
her. (Whedon-speak might be past its sell-by date but Willow-speak
has managed to retain its cuteness.) “Are you drinking coffee again? ‘Cause we’ve talked about this,” Buffy cautions her, as Willow squirms around like Joe Pesci is waving a gun in her face and shouting Do I amuse you?
over plates of linguini. But Buffy just assumes that Willow has simply
discovered a new way to be cute--Willow’s discovering them all
the time--so she leaves it at that and goes to play with her new toy
Ford. That night, when Buffy and Ford are strolling along outside the
school, Buffy notices a couple of vampires, and as she chases after one
of them Ford manages to get the drop on the other one, and instead of
staking her, he lets her go on the condition that she “tells him
what he wants to know”. When Buffy comes back, Ford lies, telling
her he killed the vampire. His bad guy credentials are firmly
established now, but we can only wonder--what exactly is Ford up to?
Things fall into place when Angel, Willow and Xander visit the goth
club Ford likes to frequent, which is apparently called the Sunset Club
(which Willow found in her magic computer, of course, when she was
looking into Ford--but I suppose since Ford is a newbie bad guy he
didn’t really consider using a fake name when he rented out the
place) and it turns out that all the goth wannabes there are actually
vampire wannabes. The place is a good-natured poke at the whole Anne
Rice idea of vampires--that they’re a bunch of effete,
self-absorbed lounge lizards who just can’t stop being obsessed
with their own fabulousness, and I wholeheartedly applaud poking fun at
that tiresome cliché. While wandering through the club they meet
Chanterelle (played by Julia Lee), a girl who will have quite an
interesting character arc on this series, and then on the Angel
spinoff: starting here as a naïve, directionless girl with no
sense of self, she’ll return again at the beginning of season
three as a down and out waitress in L.A. who calls herself Lily, is
dating a loser drug addict, and still hasn’t figured out who she
is or what she wants from life. But after Buffy saves her from a hell
dimension where humans are kept as slaves, she’ll change her name
for the last time, taking Buffy’s middle name Anne, and ending
up, when we encounter her on Angel,
running a shelter for homeless teenagers and finally forging her own
identity. For now though she’s still just fallen off the turnip
truck and she calls vampires “the lonely ones” and explains
to Angel, Willow and Xander that, “They who walk with the night are not interested in harming anyone. They are creatures above us. Exalted!” Angel calls her a fool, which she most certainly is for the moment, and Chanterelle politically correctly pouts at him, “You don’t have to be so confrontational about it. Other viewpoints than yours may be valid, you know.”
Angel sums up his feelings about goth culture, political correctness,
and, probably, non-violent modes of conflict resolution by alternately
frowning and brooding at everyone in the room, and remarks, “These people don’t know anything about vampires. What they are, how they live, how they dress...” just
before he bumps into a vampire-wannabe kid who happens to be dressed
exactly like him. Angel frowns extra-hard at the kid, and while Xander
and Willow are too polite to laugh, I’m not, because Angel might
be cool but he really would fit perfectly in an Anne Rice book and he
can brood all he wants but we all know he’s as vain as Madonna.
If he were a girl Buffy’s age he’d probably be competing
with Cordelia to run the cheerleading squad. Angel takes off with
Willow and Xander in tow, probably hoping to find a good Irish pub
somewhere, and probably also hoping to ditch Xander on the way. But all
three of them are convinced now that something is definitely wrong
about Ford. And they know that they have to confront Buffy about it.
But Buffy already knows something is wrong--at the library, the vampire
that Ford told Buffy he killed--but whom he really let go--runs in and
steals one of Giles’ books for Spike. (You’d think, since
vampires are aware that the Slayer and her Watcher hang out at the
library and that they keep a bunch of important books there, and that
Giles knows the vampires are aware of this, since vampires have
attacked the library before, that maybe Giles would have transferred
the books somewhere safer--his house, maybe, which vampires would have
to be invited in to enter? Or maybe Giles is just dumb, which has been
my working theory for awhile.) And in the very next scene, we learn
what’s wrong. Ford tracks Spike down at his secret warehouse
hideout (interrupting a lovely little Drusilla moment when she tries to
convince her pet bird to sing, but unfortunately, as Spike points out
to her, the bird is dead because she never bothers to feed her birds),
and now we know exactly what information Ford squeezed out of that
vampire girl in exchange for her life. You’d also think Buffy
could use the same trick in order to track Spike down, since he’s
out there and he’s a threat and he’ll obviously keep on
coming after her, but Buffy’s as self-absorbed as any Anne Rice
character and the thought probably hasn’t occurred to her amidst
all her Angel pining. Spike, always churlish to everyone except
Drusilla (he even apologizes for pointing out that her bird is dead,
once she starts pouting) threatens Ford a few times for being cocky
enough to locate his secret hideout which is probably about five blocks
from Buffy’s house, but we can tell Spike’s sort of just
going through the motions because he admires cockiness, and he
ultimately starts listening when Ford makes him an offer he can’t
refuse: in exchange for being turned into a vampire, Ford will give
Spike the Slayer. Ford’s childish enthusiasm as he meets Spike in
his secret lair is telling: “This is so cool!” he gushes as he looks around the place. “I would totally live here.” And when Spike threatens him, Ford, still smiling even though he knows Spike could rip him to shreds, says, “I’m
pretty sure this is the part where you take out a watch and say
I’ve got thirty seconds to convince you not to kill me?
It’s traditional.” When Spike grabs him, and
Drusilla intervenes, sensing Ford can be useful, Ford goes so far as to
insist Spike actually say the line. “Oh, c’mon!” he pesters. “Say it! It’s no fun if you don’t say it.” The
scene is telling, a subtle, deft touch that hints at an explanation for
Ford’s betrayal of Buffy, or at least, an explanation for how he
can live with it: it’s like he’s playing a Jack Palance
movie in his head. It’s another kind of lie, one he’s
telling himself.
One of the things that separates the truly classic Buffy
episodes from the rest is consequences: in the classic episodes,
important things happen, the season-long story-arcs are advanced
significantly, the characters change and grow. Tucked into this
episode, which up until now has looked, on the surface at least, to be
solid but not particularly ambitious as far as long-term impact, is the
most important scene in this series since the moment in season one's
"Angel” when Buffy offered Angel her neck, risking her life to
give him a chance to redeem his own. Angel comes to Buffy’s house
(and in a nice touch, he asks her if he can come in, even though
he’s been invited before and doesn’t really have to) and
finally confronts her about his suspicions regarding Ford, and Buffy
confronts him about her suspicions regarding Drusilla. After Angel
tells Buffy that he and Willow and Xander have found out that Ford
belongs to a club full of people that seem to worship vampires, Buffy
asks Angel point-blank about Drusilla. “And don’t lie to me,” she adds. “I’m tired of it.”
When Angel tells her some lies are necessary because the truth is
worse, and Buffy responds that she can handle the truth, Angel asks
Buffy point-blank if she loves him. After taking a moment to consider
her answer, Buffy replies, “I love you. I don’t know if I trust you.”
It’s the most important moment in their relationship since the
moment she learned he was a vampire, and decided to accept it: now
Buffy has to be willing to accept the kind of vampire Angel was. But
trusting someone, loving someone, means giving them the power to hurt
you. Buffy gave Angel the power to hurt her in “Angel”,
when she offered him her neck. Now, Angel gives Buffy the power to hurt
him, when he finally tells her just who Drusilla is...and how she got
that way. “Well,” Buffy says, softly, when the story comes out. “I asked for the truth.”
And she stays with Angel. She doesn’t choose to end their
relationship. She can accept him, what he was, what he did, as long as
she knows she can trust him. Lies are easier, but relationships are
built on little truths: a brick at a time, those small moments of
trust, of leaving yourself vulnerable when you reveal a hard truth, add
up to a foundation.
Ford’s plan is fairly clever. The club he rented was originally a
bomb shelter, and even a Slayer won’t be able to escape once he
locks the door: the door has a specially-installed lock that allows it
to open only one way once it’s activated--from the outside. Buffy
will walk in, Ford will lock the door, and then Spike will arrive with
his gang to kill her in an enclosed space where she won’t have
any room to maneuver. The rest of the goth-wannabes at the club,
including Diego and Chanterelle, who are supposed to be Ford’s
friends, are cannon-fodder--Ford intended to throw them all to Spike
and his gang from the beginning. And everything goes according to plan:
Buffy arrives at the club (a little early, because she followed Ford
there rather than waiting for him to pick her up as he was planning)
and is trapped. Once Ford mentions that he’s going to become
“one of them”, Buffy immediately figures out that
he’s planning to offer her to the vampires in trade. When she
takes Ford by the throat and asks him what exactly is supposed to
happen tonight, he smiles and replies, “This is so cool! It’s just like it played in my head.”
Buffy tries to warn the ridiculous vamp-wannabes that they’re all
in deep, deadly trouble, but they’ve all drunk the Kool-Aid and
they really do think they’re about to embark on a wonderful
spiritual experience. Perhaps absinthe will be involved. Maybe the
vampires will recite poetry before they turn them. Someone will almost
definitely wear a cape. Buffy runs around pleading with the sheep to
please help her help them not to be slaughtered, but they’re too
dumb to see reason: “Why are you fighting this?” Chanterelle implores her. “It’s what we want! This is a beautiful day. Can’t you see that?” Buffy, who might talk in Whedon-speak but certainly isn’t dumb, replies: “What
I see is that, right after the sun goes down, Spike and all of his
friends are going to be pigging out at the all-you-can-eat moron
bar.” Chanterelle pouts at the fact that people always
say mean things to her while Buffy runs around alternately trying in
vain to escape the room and find out just why the hell Ford is doing
this. And here’s why: it turns out that Ford has inoperable brain
tumors. He’s going to die, and it sucks. He wants to live, and he
knows becoming a vampire will cure him. It won’t be living,
exactly--Buffy points that out to him--but it’s better than
nothing. “I look good, don’t I?” he says, with a venom approaching righteous indignation. “Well,
let me tell you something: I’ve got maybe six months left, and by
then what they bury won’t even look like me. It’ll be bald
and shriveled and it’ll smell bad. No, I’m not going out
that way.” When Buffy tells him she’s sorry but that what he’s doing is still very wrong, he whines, “Okay,
well, you try vomiting for twenty-four hours straight because the pain
in your head is so intense, and then we’ll discuss the
concept of right and wrong. These people are sheep. They wanna be
vampires ‘cause they’re lonely, miserable or bored. I
don’t have a choice.”
But he does have a choice, as Buffy points out to him: it’s not a
great choice, but it’s still a choice. He doesn’t have to
sacrifice these innocent people just to save his own skin. And Buffy
shows us just how much she’s changed from the first season when
she tells him: “I think this is
all part of your little fantasy drama. Isn’t this exactly how you
imagined it? You tell me how you’ve suffered and I feel sorry for
you. Well, I do feel sorry for you, and if those vampires come in here
and start feeding, I’ll kill you myself!” And Ford,
for his part, shows his true colors: as Buffy pleads once again with
Chanterelle and the rest of the sheep to pull their heads out of their
asses and wake up to what’s going on, Ford viciously attacks
Buffy from behind, knocking her down the stairs. He’s made his
choice.
But Buffy has made a choice here, too. We need to keep in mind that
although Ford wants to be a vampire, he isn’t one yet. He’s
still a human being, albeit a cowardly, worthless waste of a human
being. And Buffy’s threat to kill him here represents a
significant evolution for her character. She understands the stakes
she’s playing for now. Things aren’t black and white and
she has to make hard choices, and live with the consequences. In a very
real way, her threat to kill Ford shows that Buffy has grown up a
little. In “When She Was Bad” Buffy came off like a bratty
child next to Angel. Now she strikes me, finally, as an adult: willing
to accept her responsibilities, and make the hard choices...because,
like it or not, it’s her burden to make them.
Buffy isn’t just brave and determined, she’s smart: her
reference to Ford’s “little fantasy drama” shows that
she understands part of Ford is pretending, that he isn’t really
allowing himself to see the consequences of what he’s put into
motion. He’s lying to himself, while Buffy is embracing the hard
truths: she’s the Slayer, and sometimes she’ll have to be
willing to kill human beings. The bodies she leaves in her wake
won’t all turn tidily to dust. Buffy also shows us she’s
smart by turning the tables on Spike once he barges in with his gang.
In a moment that brought a smile to my face, Spike and his vamps scare
the hell out of Chanterelle and her brainless pals by savagely feeding
upon them, jerking them around and treating them like cattle as they
do. But as the room fills with vampires, Buffy notices Drusilla
standing alone at the top of the stairs by the door, and she remembers
what Giles told her (because even though Buffy often seems not be
listening, especially when Giles talks, she actually always is
listening, and she’s a quick study too) and instantly sees that
Dru is Spike’s weak link. She manages to vault up the stairs
before the vampires, distracted by the yummy all-you-can-eat moron bar,
can stop her, and she quickly overpowers Dru, grabs her from behind and
hold a stake to her chest. If Spike had personally gone straight after
Buffy instead of grabbing Chanterelle (though I’ll admit
Chanterelle does look yummy) he could’ve easily kept Buffy
occupied until enough of his vamp pals joined him to overpower and kill
her. But, nope. Spike, as always when he was a villain, goes down to
defeat once again through his own impatience and overconfidence. Buffy
manages to save the vamp-wannabes, and Spike even keeps his bargain
with Ford after the mayhem is over. Unfortunately for Ford, immortality
isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and Buffy stakes him the
moment he wakes up in his casket. He probably should’ve mentioned
in his will that he wanted to be buried somewhere the Slayer
couldn’t find him. Bit of an oversight on his part. But good
riddance.
This was an episode about trust, and the corrupting power of lies, and
the courage it takes to be honest. To tell its story, it focused on
three liars, and forced them to admit the truth. The first liar is
Angel: he’s keeping the worst excesses of his soulless past from
Buffy, because he’s afraid of losing her. But when Buffy tells
him she loves him, he marshals his courage and tells her about the
worst thing he ever did: Drusilla. And it’s hard for Buffy to
hear, but it doesn’t weaken their relationship; it makes them
stronger. The second liar is Ford: he’s lying to himself. His
childish role-playing serves as an emotional crutch so he can avoid
feeling responsible for his actions. But he finally admits the truth to
himself, by the end. He wants to live and he doesn’t care that he
has to kill innocent people to do it. The third liar is Buffy:
she’s lying to herself too. She’s trying to be someone she
isn’t...trying to have a life that isn’t for her. By the
end of “Lie To Me”, she finally understands that.
I need to talk a bit more about Billy Fordham before I wrap this up,
because he’s a unique villain. Not because he’s a human
being--the show has given us human villains before this, from Marcy
Ross in “Out of Mind Out of Sight” to Eric, the
sneering, two-dimensional dimwit who was smart enough to create
his own Frankenstein monster in “Some Assembly Required”
but not smart enough to keep the evidence out of his locker. Billy
Fordham is unique because he is so singularly contemptible. I’ve
seen every single episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
multiple times (though I closed my eyes and grit my teeth a lot during
season seven), and I consider myself something of an expert. So when I
say that Billy Fordham is, in my opinion, the most reprehensible
villain, bar none, that this series ever gave us, you can trust that
I’m not just engaging in hyperbole. The Master, Angelus, Spike,
Drusilla, the Mayor, Adam, Maggie Walsh, Glory, Warren, Caleb, the
First--they were all major threats, or allied to major threats, who
represented the culmination of season-long conflicts, and none of them
is anywhere near as despicable as this non-powered teenaged boy named
Billy Fordham. A boy who wasn’t a vampire, or a demon, or an
android, or a god, or the disembodied spirit of evil--he was simply a
boy, with a soul, who did something terrible...who committed a terrible
act of betrayal. I wasn’t moved even a millimeter by his excuses,
or by the way he obfuscated the issue of his cowardly betrayal of a
friend by pretending he was just playacting. While I acknowledged his
plight--Ford is no Eric, he isn’t a caricature; he has a
character-based reason for his actions--I didn’t empathize with
it and it didn’t excuse his actions for me in the slightest.
Every villain has a reason for what they do, a foundation for their
character. The Master wanted power (and he was also sort of a crotchety
old dumbass, but an entertaining one.) Angelus acted out of love: he
knew he loved Buffy and he wanted to destroy that love in order to free
himself from it. Faith needed someone to care for her, and the Mayor,
for all his terrible crimes, needed someone to care for, and his love
for Faith simultaneously showed his humanity and provided the means for
the gang to engineer his downfall. Adam acted out of a twisted inborn
imperative. Glory wanted to return home and, being a god, she simply
didn’t think human beings even had the right to oppose her, to
say nothing of the power. Warren was a small man who hated women and
wanted to prove he could be strong. Willow tried to destroy the world
because she lost her love and couldn’t see herself ever finding
love in her heart again. (If only that were true, I mutter, as I grit
my teeth and think of season seven.) The First, well...was just dumb.
But Billy Fordham was a coward: he betrayed his friends, he arranged
for innocent people to be mercilessly slaughtered, to save himself
pain.
In a lot of ways Buffy Summers was a character on a road with no turns,
her destiny a one-way track leading ever deeper into darkness. But
Buffy tried to turn off that track. Just two episodes ago, in
“Reptile Boy”, we saw Buffy yearning for a regular guy, for
a regular life, and she found that appearances can be deceiving, and
her nice, handsome, wealthy “regular” fraternity guy tried
to sacrifice her to a snake god, and it was her vampire boyfriend who
saved her. In “Halloween”, Buffy got to live a fantasy of
being a normal girl--albeit an eighteenth century, rather hysterical
one--and she nearly got killed by Spike. “Lie to Me” marks
one of the last times Buffy ever tried to have a normal life, one of
the last times she ever really tried to resist her destiny, to turn
away from the shadows. Billy Fordham found Buffy at a time when she was
vulnerable, when she was still recovering from her death at the hands
of the Master and was tentatively reaching out for the normal life she
always coveted, and he teased her with that life. He held open a door,
and before Buffy could step through, he slammed it in her face, and
made Buffy a little less willing to trust. His betrayal was far, far
worse than the knife in the back from the seemingly nice fraternity guy
in “Reptile Boy”, and in a way, it’s the last nail in
Buffy’s coffin. After what Billy Fordham did, Buffy will begin to
accept that she can’t have the things other people can
have...she’ll come in time to accept her lot, and she’ll
let herself fade into the shadows, where she thinks she belongs.
For that, I detest Billy Fordham. For that, he’ll always be, to
me, the worst villain Buffy ever faced...because although he ultimately
lost, he made sure Buffy did too.
