Last year while I was in school, I went through the first six seasons of Buffy with a friend whenever we needed to decompress. In a program that was 70% Type A male, it was nice to get a little female-oriented ass kicking in when we could. When we got past Season 5 I warned my friend, who was new to Buffy, that Season 6 was the most universally hated season. As it turned out, we actually liked it quite a bit. Honestly, even when the season originally aired, I wondered why people didn’t like it as much as I did. In the rewatching, I have come to see even more what Joss and company were trying to do.

The typical complaints about Season 6 (which my opponent brings up as well), are Willow’s addiction story line, the crappy villains and the really dark place Buffy went to with Spike. But what I think I appreciated as others did not was the reality: sometimes everything just falls to pieces and you ask yourself: “Where am I going, and why am I in this hand basket?” It’s what people don’t like about those 60’s movies where everyone dies at the end: there’s no light. Buffy always had a light, funny side that was almost completely absent in this season. For me, that spoke to a time in my 20’s where nothing was going right, and I lost who I was. It spoke to that dark part that’s afraid nothing will ever get better.

Buffy sings out her suffering in "Once More With Feeling."

Everyone can talk about the Trio and say how they were lame villains. They were! It’s true! But they weren’t the Big Bad of the season. Darth Rosenberg wasn’t either. The Big Bad was Buffy being ripped from Heaven, Willow losing Tara and going off the deep end (twice!), Xander throwing away Anya because he was too immature, and Giles leaving. And like Season 4, all that mindless personal horror comes together in the end through metaphor. Willow can’t handle how dark reality is, so does the only logical thing: she becomes the darkest thing on the planet. She becomes harsher than reality. Only love and self-sacrifice wakes them up to the fact that life doesn’t have to only mean suffering.

Watching the episodes back to back gave me a new perspective. In terms of the Trio, we see an evolution. They begin as ineffective dorks who replay comic book fantasies. However, when Warren tries to rape Katrina and she calls all the men out, it becomes clear that Jonathan wakes up, Andrew is merely mindless, but I wouldn’t walk down a dark alley with Warren if you paid me. He was scary in a very human way that we didn’t often see on Buffy: totally without conscience, and for no reason. Five seasons of the Master and Glory and their like, and it was Warren, the ineffective geek, who gave me chills.

Spike and Buffy, a destructive relationship -- literally and figuratively.

In terms of the Buffy and Spike relationship, everything made sense to me. It encapsulated so many thoroughly toxic relationships I’ve seen. If Buffy had been raised from the dead and there had been no consequences, people would have complained. Buffy reacting to depression and anger in a way that young women do all the time? By getting into a poisonous sexual relationship with an asshole? People hate it. They hate it the same way people hate their smart, funny, adorable friend dating the creep that cheats on her. That it never makes sense is obvious, but that it also happens all the time is the truth. Joss Whedon and Marti Noxon were just taking a common reaction of depression and insecurity and creating a metaphor. The creep in real life is human. On Buffy, our friend really is screwing a monster. People complained about Noxon’s handiwork in this: I thought it was pretty accurate to the consequences of Buffy’s self-hatred.

I’ll admit, Willow’s addiction wasn’t my favorite storyline. I would have preferred it to be about abuse of power, and it was for a time. Wiping Tara’s memory, putting people in other dimensions, even altering the fabric of life and death were things that signaled Willow’s power trip. Why the writers made Rack a dealer and Willow a drugged-out loser is a little confusing. Perhaps they had written themselves into a corner by making once sweet Willow a power-crazy douchebag? Better to make her an addict? (The large amounts of water she drank for two episodes was over the top. Does magic dehydrate you like a rum and diet?)

The one thing that does transcend the debate about whether she was an addict or an asshole is he common thread was that she was out of control. What speaks to me about her storyline is that sometimes you wake up from a situation and realize that you aren’t the person you wanted to be. That maybe, you don’t even like the person you’ve become. That was Willow in Season 6. The tragedy is that she tried to be a good person, but under pressure reverted back because she couldn’t take life anymore.

Xander saves the world with talk of Kindergarten.

As for the smaller stories of Xander and Anya, Giles, and Dawn, these mirror the horror of the main storylines. They all act out in the only way people do: by moving, by splitting or acting out to get attention. Anything to break through. That Xander saves the world is a reflection of what he’d been trying to do all season: inject reason and stop the hurting.

In any case, I hope that I have convinced you even a little bit that there are layers to this season that should be appreciated. Joss Whedon’s vision was always to use the fantastical as a metaphor for the reality of life. This season reflects back to us the ugliness we see in ourselves: something we don’t always want to see, but it is nevertheless what we occasionally need to confront. 

---

Further Reading

Geek Speak's Buffy the Vampire Slayer review, by K. Burtt

HOME

---