“Are you kidding? His diapers were tweed.”
--Buffy
Nope. Nope, I’m afraid this “Ripper” thing just isn’t working for me.
Astute viewers
will remember that two episodes ago, in “Halloween”, Giles
was given a character transplant operation. The nervous nellie suddenly
revealed a bad boy backstory: apparently he wasn’t always so prim
and proper and tweed-clad. Apparently he had a rebellious youth and
made some questionable acquaintances, one of whom was Ethan Rayne
(Robin Sachs), a sarcastic, conniving rogue whose mere presence in
Giles’ past made Giles seem cooler by association. The fact that
Giles had hung around with a charming snake like Ethan made the whole
Ripper angle more believable, somehow. If Ethan thought Giles was a bad
ass, maybe we should too. Unfortunately, “The Dark Age” has
made me realize that Ethan isn’t enough: he can tell us until
he’s blue in the face that Giles used to be like him, he can be
inexplicably afraid of Giles possibly thrashing him, but the character
transplant operation still isn’t taking as far as I’m
concerned. Giles is rejecting the new organ. This episode could just as
easily have been titled “The Problem With Giles”. Because
there is a problem with Giles, a big one, and this is the episode that
really puts a spotlight on it.
All well-written
characters grow, but they do it organically. Willow is a perfect
example. By the end of season seven she wasn’t anywhere near
where she started out in season one. Witchcraft, gayness, her
propensity for using magic as a drug and taking selfish shortcuts in
all her relationships because she feared conflict--these weren’t
traits anyone could have predicted when watching episode one, but as
those changes came about in her they felt organic; they felt true. (I
would argue that the magic = drugs metaphor in season six was
hopelessly trite and heavy-handed, but Willow as a drug-user is
nevertheless something that feels natural. It’s just unfortunate
the writers didn’t have the courage to leave the realm of
metaphor and actually show her using drugs. Using magic spellcasting as
a metaphor for lesbian sex was already pushing it. Just have ’em
kiss already. And let Willow smoke a joint.) The difference between
Willow and Giles is that the changes made to Willow’s character,
whether or not they had been worked out by the writers from the
beginning or had just been thought up on the fly, all felt natural. But
this change in Giles, this idea that he was once a rebellious bad ass
troublemaker, doesn’t feel natural at all. With this Ripper
backstory added in, Giles as a character just doesn’t hang
together very well. He feels written. He feels constructed, and
embellished. He feels false.
But more on that
in a bit. I’d call this a classic “your mileage may
vary” episode; I didn’t much like it and I was bored most
of the time, but if you’re a particular fan of Giles maybe
it’s a great episode for you. I would argue though that even for
a Giles fan, the episode has some faults that can’t be denied,
and the biggest one is this: it isn’t scary or even vaguely
unsettling, and it really should be. The story is that a demon named
Eyghon is hunting and killing all of Giles’ old friends because
they were a bunch of rebellious hippie sorcerers in their youth and
they used to summon this particular demon into themselves just for the
rush, but one day they lost control and the demon escaped. (Or
something like that; the rules of how this particular
demon works are wonky and contrived specifically for this episode.) The
demon possesses people and when it does they look sort of like zombies,
and then they die (in a puddle of green goo that didn’t look
gooey or gross at all but rather like a bad digital effect) after
they’ve in turned possessed the next person the demon is after.
Or something like that. Suffice to say the story is about a vengeful
demon hunting and killing all Giles’ old friends, and it wants to
kill him next, and that really should make for a creepy episode, and it
doesn’t. That’s actually a weakness for the series in
general: Buffy was so heavy on the comedy and the clever quips that it
often tripped itself up when it wanted to be legitimately scary and
this episode is a perfect example of that double-edged sword.
Giles keeps
dreaming of the ceremony in which he and his friends summoned Eyghon
back in the good old days and in the meantime the demon is killing all
his friends one by one. It kills and possesses someone, travels around
in that body awhile until it locates the next target, then kills them
and jumps into their body looking for the target after that. Eyghon
wants to kill everyone who was part of the original summoning. (Maybe
he didn’t like being used as a means of getting high by a bunch of British hippies.) At the start of the episode Eyghon
has already taken one victim, Diedre--Eyghon possesses her body and
uses it to kill another victim, Phillip. This leaves only two more
targets, Ethan Rayne and Giles. Giles is having nightmares about the
original summoning and I suppose these dream sequences were meant to be
scary--Giles certainly seemed scared when he woke up--but in reality
they’re slightly goofy hodgepodges of bad demon makeup and Pink
Floyd-esque flower-child music as the camera whirls around. Meanwhile
all the people the demon possesses get the glowy light thing happening
with their eyes and the effect remains just as hokey as it’s ever
been in the five-thousand movies and television shows we’ve all
seen it in. When Jenny becomes possessed toward the end she, unlike the
previous two victims, very nearly manages to be creepy--and I give all
the credit to Robia LaMorte specifically because she’s a neat
actress--but then the effect is ruined when they decided to loop in a
male-sounding voice over her dialogue, which is just as hokey as glowy
eyes. So, “The Dark Age”? Not so much with the scares. What
else has it got?
Well...there are
a few decent Scooby Gang scenes. The episode opens with Buffy
“aerobicizing” (her word) in the library to very loud music
while Giles sort of sits there wincing, and that was fun because Sarah
Michelle Gellar is super cute in season two. (“I must have a
beat!” she shouts over the music at the poor henpecked bastard as
he sits there rubbing his temples at the thumping tune.) Meanwhile, Diedre, Eyghon’s
first victim (actually technically his third I think, but those other
two deaths happened in the past) is chasing Phillip, who is desperately
banging around outside the school looking for Giles, but unfortunately
he’s too late because Diedre is a zombie and she wants brains! Or
not. Buffy aerobicizes, Diedre smiles but doesn’t look scary at
all, Diedre chokes Phillip. Phillip dies, and Diedre becomes a
fake-looking puddle of green goo as Eyghon leaps into Phillip’s
dead body and makes with the lame glowy eyes. And while I’m on
the subject of lame effects, they couldn’t have sprung for actual
green goo? How much could it possibly cost? I also liked the next
Scooby scene, when we’re back at school the next day with Buffy
and Willow playing a game called “Anywhere But Here” in
which they fantasize about sexy guys taking them nice places. I’m
disappointed with the blandness of Buffy’s fantasy--a foot massage on the beach from
Gavin Rossdale? Sometimes Buffy really is just a blonde high school
girl from California. Willow’s fantasy of eating ziti with John
Cusack in a restaurant in Florence is a lot more creative. (My fantasy? It
involves Naomi Watts and a gothic mansion. Or Lena Headey and a
boarding school. Okay, I’ll stop now.) Giles strolls by and Buffy
and Willow and Xander ask themselves what his secret fantasies might be
like:
Xander: "Giles lived for school. He's actually still bitter that there are only twelve grades."
Buffy: "He probably sat in math class thinking, 'There should be more math. This could be mathier.'"
Unfortunately
we’re light on fun Scooby Gang stuff this episode: after a scene
at school in which Jenny essentially tells Giles that he’s going
to be getting lucky on their next date, and Giles hems and haws and
stutters and looks like a deer caught in headlights, we’re
whisked right into this week’s adventure, which isn’t an
outright clunker but didn’t scare me or move me or even really
hold my interest, mostly because I didn’t believe the
“Ripper Giles” stuff for a second (more on that in a bit.)
I do want to mention the scene where the cops question Giles in the
library about Phillip’s dead body, and Cordelia walks in and
bitches about how she needs to find a book about computers for the
extra tutoring session Jenny is putting on over the weekend for
the kids who have fallen behind. Being Cordelia she doesn’t
bother to notice that Giles is talking to the police even though
they’re standing right there in their police uniforms and she
just walks all over his conversation. When Giles points out that
he’s busy she asks the detective for help fixing a ticket. The
scene was meant to be funny but it wasn’t; instead it’s
Cordelia once again acting in a way that no other person on Earth does
and it’s artificial. Cordy can be funny, but not when she’s
shoehorned in like this. She comes across as so asocial that
her behavior is little more than parody.
Giles identifies
Phillip in the morgue and we see that he has a tattoo on his arm, a
tattoo that we soon find out Giles shares. In the meantime Buffy was
supposed to meet Giles that night at the hospital because it’s
the hospital’s monthly blood delivery and the vamps around town
see it as a free meal, but Giles doesn’t show, even though he had
reminded Buffy earlier of how important it was. (A bit of a plot hole
there; Giles wouldn’t have normally accompanied Buffy for this
sort of thing. But the writers needed some way for Buffy to understand
that there was something wrong with Giles. I’ll let it pass.)
Angel does show up, however, and--good Lord above--he actually throws a
punch or two as some vamps try to make off with the blood. Probably
because the vamps were disguised as doctors and Buffy had remarked a
moment earlier that they were cute, and Angel got all jealous and
wanted to show off because he should be the only cute vampire. (Just
wait until season six, Angel. Things are gonna get worse.) Buffy and
Angel have sort of a moment together, but not enough of one for me to
be entertained. Buffy shows up at Giles’ place after that asking
him where the hell he was when she was fighting for her life against
cute doctor vampires and he looks hung over. He shoos her away, and
it’s all very un-Gileslike behavior and now Buffy is officially
on the case. She may have bland Gavin Rossdale fantasies but when
something’s amiss and the game’s afoot Buffy is a hound on
a scent. Phillip, now a zombie (or possessed by the demon, whatever)
escapes from the morgue looking for more yummy brains!--I mean, for the
demon’s next victim, while Buffy visits Jenny’s Weekend
Remedial Computer Class for Dumb People the next day (Xander, who is dumb, and Cordy, who just doesn't like paying attention,
are the only students, while Willow, who always brings the teacher a shiny apple, is Jenny’s teaching assistant)
to ask if anyone’s noticed anything off about Giles. He looked
like he had been drinking, Buffy mentions. (Good Heavens!) But nobody
has noticed anything off about Giles, and Buffy heads to the library to
call him, just in time for Ethan Rayne to try to push a bookshelf on top
of her. He’s the next intended victim, you see, because of
course, being sly and chaos worshipping and sort of evil (but always in
a rather good-natured way) Ethan was in the little group that summoned
the demon back in the summer of ’69 or whenever it was. Buffy
captures Ethan and calls Giles, who is still sort of drunk and beard
stubbly and hung over but is also gravely concerned at the prospect
of Buffy possibly being in Ethan’s clutches. Buffy isn’t concerned, probably because she sees all British people as
interchangable. Giles nevertheless decides to dash over there in a
hurry just in case Ethan is fatally snide at Buffy. Phillip chooses
that moment to attack--it turns out the tattoo is sort of like a homing
beacon for the demon and all the people who summoned the demon have
it--and Buffy kicks him into the library cage. (Why does the library
have a cage? And why does anyone think that rickety little thing is
sturdy enough to hold a monster? Werewolf Oz, Vampire Willow, Hyena
Xander, they’ve all been locked in that cage and they all acted
like it was Alcatraz. But just look at the thing. One good kick could
knock it down.) Giles finally arrives, Ethan calls him
“Ripper”, and Giles sort of half-throttles him a little,
and I guess we’re all supposed to think it’s cool. Also,
Ethan mentions that he’s been in town since
“Halloween”. (The lease hasn’t expired on the costume
shop. It’s somehow appropriate for this show that a bad guy of
Ethan’s potential power has been hanging around town right under
the gang's noses, in the lair they found him in before, and no
one ever went back to check.)
But meanwhile
Phillip decides I’m right about the cage and he kicks the door
right open. Good for you, Phillip. You're
not an interesting monster at all but at least you don't take shit from
that cage. Unfortunately it slams into Jenny and knocks her
unconscious, and in another
plot hole--a fairly large one, but par for the course for this
series--we learn later that Eyghon can possess a body when it’s
either asleep or dead. Jenny is unconscious on the floor after the cage
door hits her, Phillip collapses into a puddle of fake green goo after
Buffy
kicks him a few more times, and Giles helps Jenny up, clearly seeing
that Jenny’s unconscious. And he doesn’t make the
connection? It never occurs to him that when Phillip collapses into goo
he might have just jumped to Jenny? Giles is supposed to be the expert
on this particular demon, he’s the one who originally summoned
it. Oh, well. Giles leaves with Jenny and shouts at Buffy and everyone
else to butt out, because he’s Ripper and being snippy at
people is just cooler. Ethan leaves too, by sneaking away during the
fight, because he’s Ethan and he really is cool, in his own
dastardly way.
Obviously the
thing to do next is hit the books and magically find every single thing
there is to know about Eyghon even though the library has hundreds of
these occult books and they’re all very long and none of the gang
has even heard of this Eyghon person until just now, because that
always works, and it works here too. But not before I get one more
entertaining scene out of this episode: after “researching”
for awhile (which means she sort of randomly pages through books
knowing that she will magically stumble upon whatever info she needs)
Willow magically finds enough info on Eyghon to make Buffy decide to go
looking for Giles again. After Buffy leaves, Willow and Xander and
Cordy go on “researching” to hopefully find a way to
kill Eyghon, but Xander and Cordy are doing their “we’re
interested in each other sexually so we pretend to fight instead of
flirting” thing. Willow yells at them to get back to work.
Actually yells. A big, bitchy take-no-prisoners drill sergeant
“HEEEYYYYYYYY!!” I liked that. When Buffy isn’t
around Willow is in charge because, really, who else is there?
(Certainly not Xander, who is even more a waste of time now that
he’s begun fixating on Cordy.) Willow had to basically take
charge during “Reptile Boy” and “Halloween” and
I’m glad she’s becoming comfortable with the role. (And
what do we call that? Organic character development.)
Unfortunately
that’s it for me being entertained. The rest of the episode is
Buffy solving the mystery of Eyghon, which would have happened a lot
faster if Giles had just bothered telling her what the hell was going
on in the first place instead of posing for the cameras with his new
beard-stubbly tousled hair bad boy look for most of the episode. Buffy
arrives at Giles’ place, fights off Jenny, who is now, to
Giles’ surprise even though he should have completely seen it
coming, possessed by the demon, and Giles finally breaks down and tells
Buffy what she needs to defeat Eyghon, as well as revealing his bad boy
past. As proof, back in the library Xander treats us to an old
photograph he dug up in Giles’ office of a young Anthony Stewart
Head in a leather jacket, playing a guitar. (Sid Vicious he
isn’t; he looks positively cherubic in the pic. Chubby cheeks,
winsome smile, not even a hint of Ripperness.) Buffy then strolls over
to Ethan’s “secret” lair, the costume shop he’s
apparently been hanging around in for two weeks now, and Ethan promptly
clubs her on the back of the head, ties her up and gives her the Eyghon
tattoo while getting rid of his own with sulphuric acid, so the demon
will kill Buffy instead of him. (“You know, I hope you’re
not taking this personally, Buffy,” Ethan tells her as he gets
ready to tattoo her. “I actually kind of like you. It’s
just that I like myself a whole lot more.”) Compare and contrast:
Anthony Stewart Head in the photograph smiling goofily while holding a
guitar, versus Robin Sachs smiling sardonically while holding a
tattooing needle to Buffy’s neck. Who’s the bad ass?
Eyghon shows up
in Jenny’s body, goes straight for Buffy, and as they fight Giles
rushes in and tries to convince Eyghon to take him instead, while Buffy
tries to save him. This would all be very touching if this episode was
handled better, if Eyghon was actually frightening at all and was
actually presented as a major threat, but instead it’s by the
numbers. Speaking of by the numbers, Angel barges in at that moment,
followed by Willow and Xander and Cordy, and he attacks Eyghon,
throttling the demon (which, remember, is in Jenny’s body.)
Eyghon is forced to jump into Angel’s body--Willow magically
found out while randomly flipping pages of random books in the library
that Eyghon needs hosts who are either unconscious or dead, and vampires count as dead--and then,
in an ending that’s just a little too tidy, the demon inside
Angel “battles” Eyghon and destroys it, as Angel’s
face begins morphing and we actually see the demon Angel carries inside
him--it’s an ugly scaly thing with horns. But how did Willow and
Angel know this would work at all? How did they know Eyghon
wouldn’t have destroyed the demon inside Angel, and then they
would have had an evil Angel running around? (Ahead of schedule.) How did they know the
demon in Angel would fight Eyghon? How did they know Angel would be
able to get the upper hand on Eyghon when it was in Jenny’s body,
forcing it to jump? How did they know Eyghon would even jump into a
body that already had a demon inside it in the first place?
“I've had
a demon inside me for a couple hundred years just waiting for a good
fight,” Angel informs us. “Winner and still
champion,” Buffy says with pride. And that might actually be my least
favorite moment of the season thus far. Buffy has actually seen the demon
inside Angel now and she’s acting like it’s just another
day at the office. At that moment, for the very first time, I actually
thought of Buffy as a freak--a strange, sad girl who has completely
lost touch with her humanity, and now consorts with monsters. Thinking
of the night of passion she’s eventually going to have with
Angel, the word “bestiality” came to my mind. The demon
inside Angel isn’t a human being. It’s an animal, a scaly,
horned beast--a thing. And Buffy wants to have sex with it? Buffy’s got a monster inside her too, and
it appeared, at that moment, just as grotesque to me as Angel’s.
But as sad and
outrageous as that scene was, it wasn’t my primary problem with
this episode, and believe me, the idea of Buffy feeling more
comfortable in the company of monsters than she does with human beings
is a point that will come up in later reviews. I have two major problems with
this episode--first, it just wasn’t scary and the story needed to
be scary in order to work. Robia LaMorte was almost creepy in places
but the other two characters who were possessed by the demon
weren’t even remotely creepy, and that worked against the episode.
The idea of Giles being hunted by a monster that has killed his friends
and is now after him because of reckless actions he took in his youth
was a rich vein that could have been mined for some genuine horror and
it wasn’t, not at all. Partly the script is to blame--far too
much time was spent on Giles posing for the camera and feeling mopey
and having goofy 1970’s dream flashbacks when it would have been
more profitably spent having our characters being hunted by the demon
and being forced to fight back. The demon should also have been much
more powerful; there is never a moment when we don’t know for
certain that Buffy could dispatch Eyghon in a straight-up fight. The
only reason she doesn’t is that Eyghon is inhabiting Jenny.
There’s no sense of jeopardy, and therefore no horror.
But the big
problem here is Giles. Or more specifically, his character transplant
operation which just didn’t take. I write Buffy fanfiction as you
probably know, and one of the downsides to that is you start to
perceive flaws in the canon versions of the characters that you never
noticed when you were merely a fan watching the series. You start to
think about how characters could be improved. It makes for good fanfic
but unfortunately it can also damage your appreciation of the original
work, and that’s exactly what’s happened with me.
Especially regarding certain characters, and Giles is at the top of the
list. I’m sorry, but this stuttering guy who plods around in
tweed suits frowning about hip hop music and monster truck rallies and
making indignant speeches about how books are awesome just
doesn’t strike me as a guy who used to be a rebel back in the
day. Take the scene where Jenny has some fun with him early in the
episode. She thanks him for lending her one of his books, and then
leads him to believe she dog-eared some of the pages and underlined
some passages, and Giles stutters and squirms so much
you’d think he’d come face to face with a vampire. For
God’s sake Giles, will you remove the pipe from your ass?
I’ve had a look at some Buffy shooting scripts and Giles’
stuttering isn’t on the page, it’s something Anthony
Stewart Head adds in himself, and the problem is that it isn’t an
actual stutter--Giles isn’t supposed to have a stutter--but
rather it’s simply Head’s way of communicating Giles’
discomfort in certain situations. Which is all well and good for season one Giles, but
don’t then try to tell us in season two that this uptight, prissy guy who fawns
over his book collection, allows a bunch of teenagers to walk all over
him and looks as twitchy as a junkie in rehab at any given moment is also secretly an awesome bad ass, because it just
doesn’t work. Episode after episode, Head has overplayed Giles’ genteel Britishness
and his discomfort around the Scooby Gang’s California antics to
the point that it simply isn’t possible for me to ever see Giles
as a confident man of action, much less a brooding bad boy type who
resorts to physical intimidation around someone like Ethan Rayne.
And in fact
Ethan Rayne was the last nail in the “Ripper Giles"
coffin for me. I don’t at all think it’s impossible for a
person to be British and urbane and still be formidable; I don’t
think a tough character needs to be a thug. If you’ve read my
stories you’ll know I created a British character who does
quite well for herself in the toughness department while still being a
class act. I just think Anthony Stewart Head doesn’t pull it off,
probably because the idea of “Ripper Giles” didn’t
exist when Head first got the part so he didn’t see any reason to
play the character as if he had that kind of a past. But Robin Sachs
definitely pulls it off. Watch Robin Sachs in this episode. Watch his
interaction with Buffy, not just what he says but the way he holds
himself--the way he stands, the way he smiles. He runs away when he has
the chance because it’s the smart thing to do when you’re
up against a Slayer, but he never once seems afraid. No stuttering, no
hesitation. He just acts. Even when he’s captured by the gang he
lounges around like he hasn’t a care in the world. But he’s
no thug either--he’s witty, urbane, classy. (Okay, and also
snide.) Now imagine Robin Sachs being cast as Giles instead of Anthony
Stewart Head way back in “Welcome to the Hellmouth”. Take
away the backstabbing weasel aspect of Ethan Rayne but leave the rest
of that character intact and make it part of who Giles is when Sachs
plays him. Leave Sachs the rough edge he sometimes gives to his pithy
quips. Leave him his sarcasm and his sense of amusement when things
become dangerous. Instead of Giles’ ubiquitous tweed suits that
make him seem so repressed that he looks positively constipated, let
Sachs
wear the Ethan Rayne wardrobe instead--slacks and silk shirts,
confident and expressive. Give him a sportcoat to go with it,
unbuttoned. No vest, no tie. He’s fit, he’s sexy, he exudes
confidence and charm and swagger but also great intelligence. Now this
is a Giles I could’ve believed had a Ripper past. Seriously,
think about it. Picture Robin Sachs as Giles in “Welcome to the
Hellmouth.” Change the dialogue around a bit: instead of the
petulant nagging that Head’s Giles resorted to in his early
interaction with Buffy, let Robin Sachs’ Giles give as good as he
gets when he comes up against Buffy’s California brand of
sarcasm. “You’re like a textbook with arms,” Buffy
quipped to Giles in that episode as they stood in the balcony at the
Bronze looking down at all the dancing kids, and Head’s Giles
looked about as comfortable as a fish in a frying pan. “And
you’re an undisciplined little girl who knows nothing whatsoever
of the world and hasn’t long to live in it if you don’t
prick up your damned ears and listen to what I’m telling
you,” Sachs could have quipped back, while looking perfectly at
ease as he always does, and without stuttering even a little bit.
Wouldn’t it have been neat? In fact it could have led to a whole
new Buffy/Giles dynamic. Maybe Giles wouldn’t have been swept
aside so easily. Maybe Buffy would have actually listened to him once
in awhile instead of walking all over him. I think it would have been
much more interesting, and certainly a hell of a lot more entertaining
for me to watch. Oh, well. That’s why God created fanfic.
And don’t even get me started on Xander.
