azdak

I wasn’t going to write about The Girl in Question because I had nothing to say about it, until a conversation with thedeadlyhook and toysdream crystallised some vague thoughts that had started to occur to me. Thanks guys! Of course, whether or not this is a good thing remains to be seen...


Sylvia pointed out that last week’s episode, Time Bomb, was full of temporal and narrative loops. This week added geographical and psychological loops to the narrative ones. Angel and Spike start the episode by going to Rome to retrieve the head of a demon mafioso and end up back in LA, still without either item. They spend their time in Rome running in circles – the loop leads them back to Buffy’s flat three times before they finally give up and complete the bigger circle that takes them back to LA – in pursuit of no fewer than three McGuffins. The McGuffinness of their ostensible objectives is neatly illustrated by the fact that we never really get to see any of them. The Immortal never appears on screen at all but only in descriptions provided by other characters – in fact, given the flashbacks, it’s questionable whether Angel and Spike have ever actually seen him (possibly accounting for their immunity to his charms, since even the little demon guy admits to being in love with him). Buffy is glimpsed only briefly, as a head of blonde hair being tossed around at a disco - it’s entirely possible that this girl isn’t even Buffy (we all know it isn’t SMG). Finally, the demon head is never seen by the audience either. Spike and Angel peer into the bag holding it, but we only get a head’s-eye-view reaction shot of them, and the one time we do get to see the contents of the bag, it turns out to be a bomb. The McGuffinness of the head is underlined by the fact that the little demon guy who steals it appears to have done so for the sole purpose of distracting Spike and Angel from their mission to prise the Slayer away from the Immortal – the thief is one of the demon clan with a vested interest in getting the head to LA for the proper rituals to be performed, and Signora Bianci makes it clear that the process of ransoming it is just a part of daily life, which isn’t expected to take so long that it will prevent the head reaching LA in time. In fact, she seems to be as much in on the joke as the little demon guy, arranging for the head to be delivered to Angel with a note purporting – possibly truthfully, possibly not – to be from the Immortal. The story, ostensibly about retrieving the head to prevent a major demon turf war, turns out to be nothing of the sort. They started headless, and they come back headless. Nothing has changed.

So what is the story about? The flashbacks suggest it’s about the team of Angelus/Angel and William the Bloody/Spike in their quest to finally turn the tables on the Immortal, who has persistently bested them in every encounter, not to mention being sexually irresistible to ‘their’ women. But in all his glorious OTTness (not only is he sexy, he’s also SPIRITUAL!) the Immortal is an even more obvious McGuffin than the capo di capo, a status that is underlined by the fact that they never once manage to meet up with him to issue their challenge. Our two champions are forced to concede defeat without ever encountering him, just as they were in the flashbacks. Nothing has changed.

What about Buffy? I hear you cry. Surely she’s not just a McGuffin? The episode is even called ‘The Girl in Question,’ for heaven’s sake, and that can’t just be referring to the littlest Burkle. Even if the boys don’t meet her, the episode is surely about how they come to terms with the fact that she’s moved on, that she loves them (both of them) but she’s not keeping her cookies just for them, and if they ever want a chance of being invited to have another nibble, they’ll have to move on too? Well, no. The episode doesn’t actually suggest that either of them manages to move on in their attitude to the love of their life. Angel remains stuck in his knee-jerk reaction of jealous antipathy to Buffy’s current squeeze - it’s how he reacted to Riley, it’s how he reacted to Spike, it’s how he reacts to the Immortal, and I see no evidence that he’s going to react to the next guy any differently. Angel has accepted that he can’t have Buffy, he’s begun tentative relationships with other women, and in that sense he’s already moved on. But he can’t believe that any other man can be good enough for her, can be anything other than bad for her, not even the Immortal, who is a kind of magnified projection of Angel himself (dark, centuries old and straddling the divide between good and evil). He’s never going to feel any differently about her because, well, because she’s Buffy, an argument that Spike totally gets. Spike, too, has already begun to move on. He accepted in Chosen that Buffy didn’t really love him, at least not in the way he wanted; he’s accepted that their ‘relationship’, so crucial to him and to making him who he is today, was to her nothing more than a succession of one night stands (Gloss: ‘Sleeping together is a relationship if you do it often enough.’). He made the decision not to go back to her and stuck to it, only going back on that decision when he thought she was in trouble and needed him. He articulates all this in the episode, and acts on it too, but he can’t stop loving her, and whilst he can handle staying away, he really has trouble dealing with the fact that she’s chosen to be with someone else. Just like Angel, he’s suffering from acute jealousy, though it hurts Spike more because his own history with Buffy was so much more recent, and the pain shows through in moments of seriousness, in the odd look or tone, that coexist with the comedy. When the two of them loop back to Buffy’s flat for the third and final time, they are given a little lecture by Andrew on the importance of change and moving on. The lecture is delivered off-stage, allowing Andrew to undergo his own transformation as he delivers it, emerging at the end in a dinner jacket and with new hair to escort two Italian lovelies to some unspecified festivity. Apparently Andrew is the poster child for change, the perfect illustration of his own sermon – except that the Italian lovelies are not male but female. Had he waltzed off with a couple of brylcreemed studs, it would have been just about believable that he had developed sufficient confidence to finally accept his sexuality (and nothing about him in this episode suggests that he isn’t gay), but as it is, all we see is the same old Andrew, living out a clichéd fantasy. Andrew, the sexual superstud à la James Bond; and Andrew the sage, dispensing wisdom about relationships to two lovesick vampires (evidently giving Angel that lecture at the end of Damage has gone to his head). And so Andrew himself undermines his own moral message: in spite of the new clothes and new language and new lifestyle, he hasn’t changed at all. The final shot is of Spike and Angel back in Angel’s office, sitting on the table together and asserting with a total lack of conviction that they’ve moved on, in fact they’re moving on right now. The camera pulls back on the two of them sitting absolutely motionless, in direct contradiction of their own assertion. Nothing’s changed.

There’s one more aspect of the episode that reinforces the sense of eternal recurrence, of plus ça change, c’est plus de la même chose, and that’s Spike’s coat. The destruction of the duster by the bomb and his subsequent lament about how much it was a part of his identity is at one level a little fanboy joke, picking up on Angel’s observation in WWF that ‘Spike’s not a Nazi, he just likes the jacket.’ Here we have the opposite view – the coat really is invested with significance, it’s Spike’s second skin, it’s who he is (a nod to all those fans who assert that walking around in Nikki’s coat is like walking around in her flayed skin). But on another level, this scene opens up the possibility for change. Finally, finally, the damn coat is destroyed, and all of us who’ve got fed up with seeing it this season can let out a loud cheer – hey, maybe now Spike can try out that 50s Italy look we saw in the first flashback - only to be deflated in the very next shot by the sight of the evil law firm helping him put on an identical new jacket, and adding for good measure that there are ten more hanging in the closet back in the LA branch. Plus ça change indeed.

So if the story very firmly isn’t about Spike and Angel finding closure over Buffy and moving on, what is it about? The answer, I think, is that it is about the relationship between Spike and Angel. This is the one area in which there is definite forward movement, definite progression, even if it’s actually progression backwards, towards a former relationship that went wrong. Throughout the season the two of them have increasingly put their differences aside, and learned to understand and respect each other (as we see at the start of the episode, when Angel’s willing to send Spike on the delicate mission of retrieving the demon head). Spike is becoming more and more Angel’s sidekick, the one who’s got his back, someone to be relied on in a crisis. They save each other’s lives. But the minute Buffy enters the picture, this carefully constructed détente threatens to fall apart. Angel tries to exclude Spike from the rescue mission; Spike makes not very veiled threats. In the disco, both come accidentally-on-purpose to blows. Luckily it turns out that the situation they’re faced with is the only one that could possibly unite them in the teeth of their rivalry over Buffy – a new sexual rival, and one neither of them has ever been able to compete with; not a kidnapper but a boyfriend; someone Buffy snuggles with. Faced with the Immortal’s near-mythic potency, neither of them has a chance, and in the end both withdraw from the field, united by shared misery, jealousy and humiliation. They are no longer rivals but rejected suitors, both in the same boat. The last real reason for discord is gone, and we loop back to the camaraderie of Angelus and William the Bloody, to the mutual affection and respect we saw in the first flashback.

So much for the A-plot. The B-plot picks up the themes of change and constancy as well, though since it isn’t broad comedy but high drama it tackles them rather differently. It also echoes the theme of identity, as raised by Spike’s coat. Illyria wears Fred’s ‘shell’ like a coat, but it turns out that her identification with Fred is more than skin deep. When the Burkles unexpectedly drop in on their daughter, she spares them the grief of learning of her death by doing a near pitch-perfect impression of Fred (only Ma Burkle notices anything different about her, and Pa attributes that to the natural process of growth and change). Afterwards, she claims to Wesley, albeit not in so many words, that she is Fred (‘I love you and you love me’). Wes denies this and says, in words reminiscent of Spike’s command to the Buffybot (‘Just be her. Be Buffy’) ‘Don’t be her. Never be her.’ What I find interesting about this is that Wes, who has not given the impression this season of being a man afraid of telling uncomfortable truths, fails to inform the Burkles that ‘Fred’ is an impostor, that their daughter is actually dead, killed by the demon that now occupies her corpse. Is he simply too much of a coward to face their grief if he doesn’t have to? Or could it be that deep down he actually believes/hopes that something of Fred does still live on in Illyria? The formulation ‘Don’t be her’ is interesting from this point of view. Spike says ‘Be Buffy’, not ‘Pretend to be Buffy’, because he doesn’t want to break the illusion that the Bot could actually be Buffy. Wesley doesn’t say ‘Don’t pretend to be Fred’ because – because? Because he thinks there’s a chance that part of her could actually be Fred? Because, like Spike when Buffy was resurrected, he knows that if even a tiny part of Illyria is Fred then he can’t betray that part of Fred, even if the rest is Illyria. Even a tiny part is Fred enough for him, just as a tiny part of Zombie!Buffy would have been Buffy enough for Spike. This doesn’t mean Wes is crazy or obsessed. I suspect that the Burkles, after that encounter, would also have enormous trouble accepting that Fred wasn’t alive in Illyria - Illyria has her body, her memories, her speech patterns, her emotions, so in what sense isn’t she Fred? To them, I think she’d be Fred-plus-something (I see a parallel here to someone who has been brain-damaged by a terrible accident. The person that survives is and yet isn’t the same person as before, and their relatives feel the same sense of love and obligation to them as they did before the accident. Fred, of course, is Fred plus something rather than Fred minus something, but I suspect the Burkles might feel just as protective of their supernaturally damaged daughter as would the parents of the accident victim). And so, once again, we loop. Fred’s metamorphosis into Illyria turns out not to have destroyed the essence of Fred. Things change, but they remain the same. Moving on is easier said than done.

And when we meet
Which I'm sure we will
All that was there
Will be there still
I'll let it pass
And hold my tongue
And you will think
That I've moved on....

(You know, this is such a ridiculously Spuffy song that I burst out laughing when I saw the video – close but no cigar, Dido).