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azdak at 10:36am on 29/08/2004 under once more with feeling
azdak at 10:36am on 29/08/2004 under once more with feelingThis part's got it all - magic, sex, death and fire!
First of all: I forgot to mention in my last post the title of the episode. Doh! ‘Once more, with feeling’ is the stereotypical instruction that singers are supposedly given at rehearsals. But that’s enough about theatrical references in the episode. On to Part II!
I’ve decided to limit myself to talking about imagery in just three songs, because everything is so tightly interwoven in this episode that even this modest undertaking will take ages. In keeping with the thoughts provoked by the comments on Part I, I’m going to focus on ‘I’m Under Your Spell’, ‘Let Me Rest in Peace’ and ‘Walk Through the Fire’, and the images of magic, death, sex and, yeah, fire that they contain (you get four images out of three songs because ‘I’m under Your Spell’ and ‘Rest in Peace’ are both packed with impossible-to-ignore erotic imagery.)
Most obviously, ‘I’m Under Your Spell’ takes a romantic trope – being in love is like being under a spell – and develops that, with references to ‘a world enchanted/spirits and charms in the air’, ‘It’s magic, I can tell,’ ‘Your power shone/Brighter than any I’ve known,’ and ‘You worked your charms so well.’ Linked to the talk of magic is nature imagery – fittingly, because, as Xander has just reminded us, witches are all about ‘women power and love the earth’, and so we get references to ‘sun’ and ‘shadow’, ‘moon’ and ‘tide’, ‘willow tree’, and ‘surging like the sea’, all of which can be seen as related to magic, thanks to the Wicca connection of witchcraft with nature (when Willow begins to heal under the care of the coven it is precisely this sort of nature witchcraft that she appears to study). Of course, the magical imagery is not just there to be romantic, in spite of AB’s beautiful voice and the ‘big love song’ melody. It’s packed with heavy duty dramatic irony (dramatic irony means that the audience knows more than the character) – we’ve seen Willow do her ‘Forget’ spell on Tara, we know that Tara is not only figuratively but quite literally under Willow’s spell. In taking part of her memory, Willow seeks to control Tara, to turn her into a malleable girlfriend who will let her do what she likes and continue to approve of her. She has begun a process of chipping away at Tara’s independent identity, turning her into nothing more than a reflection of herself. This is a form of death, to lose what makes you uniquely you and become the shadow of another person, with no free will of your own, no desires beyond those the other person also feels, no conscience beyond that of the other person. In spite of its romantic surface, the song foreshadows this process of Tara’s identity being swallowed up by Willow’s. Before she begins singing, Tara tells Willow that when people look at her ‘I know exactly what they see. You.’ Later, in the middle of her verse of gratitude to Willow for bringing her out of the shadows and into the light, she sings ‘Something just isn’t right’, and later still ‘Nothing I can do/You just took my soul with you.’ The final verse is full of erotic imagery ‘I can feel you inside’, ‘I break with every swell’, ‘Lost in ecstasy’, ‘Spread beneath my Willow tree’, but it is notable that this is all imagery of submission to a dominating power. ‘I can feel you inside’ gives a really nasty hint of just how far Willow is prepared to take over Tara, till there’s nothing much left but Willow, but the other lines also clearly show Tara as passive and submissive in the face of Willow’s power, ‘Wanting you so helplessly’ as she sings. This dominance/submission relationship is echoed by the final shot of Willow leaning above Tara as she floats above the bed. Yes, it’s a neat way of suggesting oral sex, but it also puts Willow firmly in control while Tara just lies there. The position – Willow on top - recurs in 'Tabula Rasa' where, once again, Willow has tried to control Tara by taking memories from her. Willow, it should be noted, doesn’t join in the song. This is no love duet, like Xander and Anya’s, no affectionate squabbling of equals. Willow simply watches and approves, basking in the image of herself that she sees in Tara’s eyes. This is Tara as she wants her, with none of those inconvenient differing opinions or the will to stand up to her.
When Tara picks up the song again after she’s found out about the Lethe’s bramble, it’s evident that she has fully understood the danger she’s in, and this time when she sings ‘I’m under Your Spell’ the audience knows she means it literally. She has to leave, because staying with Willow would mean death. And, indeed, when she returns to Willow she promptly dies (admittedly by mischance rather than at Willow’s hand) and all the dark desire for total control hinted at in ‘I’m Under Your Spell’ comes spilling out of Willow. Of course Joss knew when he wrote the song that Tara was going to die, so this foreshadowing is entirely deliberate.
The second song to link sex and death, albeit much more explicitly, is ‘Let Me Rest in Peace.’ Vampires, of course, are technically dead, although it’s sometimes hard to tell, especially with a vampire like Spike, who eats and drinks and smokes and falls in love and generally seems to have a ‘lust for life’. ‘Rest in Peace’ reminds us that all this is just surface. Underneath, Spike is dead, and the song hammers this home for us. The very first line is ‘I died so many years ago’, then he goes on to sing things like ‘Whisper in a dead man’s ear, that doesn’t make it real’, ‘I’m only dead to you,’ ‘Let me take my love and bury it/In a hole six foot deep,’ ‘Stop visiting my grave’ and of course the refrain ‘Let me rest in peace’, which echoes the traditional RIP carved on gravestones. On top of that, the visual imagery reinforces the language. The song starts off in a crypt, and then moves to a graveyard. Spike lies down on a stone coffin and folds his arms across his chest as if he were lying on a bier. Later he jumps onto a coffin (an occupied one, containing a dead body) and then tumbles off this into an open grave. I hardly need to go on, the death imagery is so abundant. But there is also a great deal of sexual imagery, and the sexual tension between Spike and Buffy is palpable throughout the song. When she first comes in, she makes one of her little Freudian slips that show that when she’s around Spike she can’t stop thinking about sex: ‘What else would I wanna pump you for? (cringes) I really just said that, didn't I?’ Later, as he sings ‘You know, you’ve got a willing slave/And you just love to play the thought that you might misbehave’ he goes down on his knees and his eyes rove over her crotch in an unmistakable fashion. Buffy has to look away at this point, but she still doesn’t leave. Then we have the refrain ‘I can lay my body down/ But I can’t find my sweet release’ and ‘Being with you touches me/more than I can say.’ When Spike topples into the open grave, Buffy falls in after him, and just for a moment she looks as if she’s going to give in to the sexual attraction between them and kiss him. A parallel is being set up here between Buffy’s attraction to Spike and her desire for death. Eros and Thanatos have always been linked, of course, but not usually as literally as in Joss’s tale of a suicidally depressed girl lusting after a dead man.
The connection between Spike and death is continued in ‘Walk Through the Fire’. At one level he’s expressing his ambivalent feelings about Buffy – who has just rejected him yet again - when he sings ‘I’ll save her then I’ll kill her,’ but at another level this is the same kind of warning of danger that we get in ‘I’m Under your Spell’. In embarking on a relationship with Spike, Buffy is choosing death over life, and while in the short term it may actually be good for her (I’ll get on to this in a minute), in the long run she has to free herself from him if she is to return to life, in order to reach the point where she can crawl out of her grave for the second time, and this time really be back. When Buffy finally breaks up with Spike she tells him ‘It’s killing me,’ and I think this is intended as a poetic truth. The salvation from numbness he can offer her is only temporary. It gets her through the next few months without killing herself (‘First I’ll save her’) but once she gets past that point it becomes something that is keeping her from life rather than helping her cling to it (‘Then I’ll kill her’). However, because the story ME is telling is a complex one, the equation isn’t as simple as Spike=dead=bad-for-Buffy. Just as important is Buffy-is-using-Spike=bad-for-Buffy. She acknowledges this herself when she says ‘I’m using you and it’s killing me’. Buffy can’t love Spike (my apologies to Spuffy fans, who obviously have good reasons for seeing this differently, but the more I watch the series the more convinced I become that Spike is right that she doesn’t really mean it when she says she loves him – maybe I’ll get round to writing down my reasons for this some day), and this is reiterated over and over again in OMWF by references to what is real. Spike tells Buffy ‘Whisper in a dead man’s ear/That doesn’t make it real’ and Buffy sings at the end, just before she kisses Spike, ‘This isn’t real/But I just wanna feel’. Already she is using Spike, taking from him the physical feeling she can arouse in her, but giving nothing back.
Let’s go back for a moment to Spike and Buffy in the grave, a moment that encapsulates much of their relationship, as she partly gives in to the attraction between them and then runs off, ‘virtue fluttering’. Notice that, like Willow, she’s the one who’s on top. That means she’s the one who’s in control. This is a pattern that will repeat itself over and over. Right the way through S6 and S7, Buffy (literally) looks down on Spike, from the moment they first meet after her resurrection (usually from a staircase of some sort, because hey, SMG? Short). The first time she ever looks up to him is when he’s burning up in the Hellmouth to save the world, and that’s also the first time she ever tells him she loves him. Through his sacrifice, Spike finally manages to make himself Buffy’s equal. But sexually, as well, Buffy is always above Spike. The only times I can think of when Spike’s on top (but please correct me if I’m misremembering) are in SR and Gone. In Gone, of course, she isn’t actually visible, and in a sense isn’t really there, and in SR Spike is forcing sex on her against her will and so of course takes the dominant position. Apart from these two exceptions, it’s always Buffy on top, and so, like Willow and Tara, we have a couple where one is dangerously dominant over the other, only with this couple it’s the submissive party that’s associated with danger and death.
Since I seem to have got tangled up with Spike and Buffy, I’ll stick with them for the analysis of ‘Walk Through the Fire’. In fact, of course, it’s an ensemble piece that casts light on every character, so I’ll come back to it at a later point, but I think that even if I limit myself to Spike and Buffy for now, this essay is going to be long enough as it is.
The fire imagery is less straightforward than the magic and death imagery, because it serves at least two functions (which possibly meld together). On the one hand, fire stands, as in conventional romantic imagery, for love/sexual desire, as when Spike sings ‘The torch I bear is scorching me.’ On the other hand, it stands for life, for feelings, for the sense of being alive in contrast to the sense of dreadful permanent numbness Buffy mentions in ‘Going Through the Motions’. ‘Walk Through the Fire’ makes that sense of numbness far more visceral, with its images of fire that doesn’t burn and flames that aren’t bright: ‘I touch the fire and it freezes me/I look into it and it’s black./Why can’t I feel? My skin should crack and peel./ I want the fire back.’ There, in a nutshell, is Buffy’s S6 state of mind. She’s come back to life, but she doesn’t feel alive, in fact she doesn’t feel anything, even though she desperately wants to (hence Sweet’s lines ‘She is drawn to the fire [...] She will come to me’). Sweet offers feelings, but at a price. Those feelings will be felt so strongly, so intensely (‘And then that energy starts to come on way too strong’), that they consume the person feeling them. This idea that Buffy is searching for something that can make her feel, that will free her from her numbness, is developed further in ‘Something to Sing About’, when, having compared life to a song, in which she pretends to be happy even though it all seems utterly meaningless, she finishes up begging Sweet ‘Don’t give me songs/Give me something to sing about.’ Buffy isn’t asking for life, she’s already got that; what she’s looking for us a reason to live, and ‘Walk Through the Fire’ suggests that this reason will be something, anything, that can make her feel, whether it be pain or pleasure (‘My skin should crack and peel’). The action of the episode makes it clear where Buffy is going to find her reason to live when Spike manages to interrupt her dance to the death. He tells her ‘You have to go on living/So one of us is living’ (more death imagery, so soon before the climactic kiss – we’re not to be allowed to forget that it isn’t life Buffy is choosing when she kisses Spike, but a life-substitute), but Buffy isn’t too impressed by that argument. What counts for her, I think, is that by grabbing hold of her, he gets through to her, jolts her out of absorption with her own agony. It’s the physical contact that does it, and physical contact is the route she decides to follow, the thing that will make her ‘feel’ even if ‘This isn’t real’.
The irony, of course, is that what she feels may not be ‘real’ for Buffy, but it’s excruciatingly real for Spike. She is drawn to death and darkness and realises that this is wrong, but he is drawn to light and life. She finds him sexually irresistible, but she doesn’t love him. He, by contrast, loves her more than he’s ever loved anyone, ever, loves her in spite of himself, and by virtue (ha!) of that love, is finally able to rise above himself and seek out his soul. And in the end, love destroys him, when he burns up in a pillar of light in the Hellmouth, the last of the darkness scoured out of him. But it’s notable that even in OMWF he wants to be a hero (‘then I’ll save her’), and that he wants this in spite of the part of himself that holds him back (‘I hope she fries, I’m free if that bitch dies’ and the sudden switch to ‘I’d better help her out’). For Spike, too, ‘Walk Through the Fire’ gives us his S6 arc in a nutshell.
First of all: I forgot to mention in my last post the title of the episode. Doh! ‘Once more, with feeling’ is the stereotypical instruction that singers are supposedly given at rehearsals. But that’s enough about theatrical references in the episode. On to Part II!
I’ve decided to limit myself to talking about imagery in just three songs, because everything is so tightly interwoven in this episode that even this modest undertaking will take ages. In keeping with the thoughts provoked by the comments on Part I, I’m going to focus on ‘I’m Under Your Spell’, ‘Let Me Rest in Peace’ and ‘Walk Through the Fire’, and the images of magic, death, sex and, yeah, fire that they contain (you get four images out of three songs because ‘I’m under Your Spell’ and ‘Rest in Peace’ are both packed with impossible-to-ignore erotic imagery.)
Most obviously, ‘I’m Under Your Spell’ takes a romantic trope – being in love is like being under a spell – and develops that, with references to ‘a world enchanted/spirits and charms in the air’, ‘It’s magic, I can tell,’ ‘Your power shone/Brighter than any I’ve known,’ and ‘You worked your charms so well.’ Linked to the talk of magic is nature imagery – fittingly, because, as Xander has just reminded us, witches are all about ‘women power and love the earth’, and so we get references to ‘sun’ and ‘shadow’, ‘moon’ and ‘tide’, ‘willow tree’, and ‘surging like the sea’, all of which can be seen as related to magic, thanks to the Wicca connection of witchcraft with nature (when Willow begins to heal under the care of the coven it is precisely this sort of nature witchcraft that she appears to study). Of course, the magical imagery is not just there to be romantic, in spite of AB’s beautiful voice and the ‘big love song’ melody. It’s packed with heavy duty dramatic irony (dramatic irony means that the audience knows more than the character) – we’ve seen Willow do her ‘Forget’ spell on Tara, we know that Tara is not only figuratively but quite literally under Willow’s spell. In taking part of her memory, Willow seeks to control Tara, to turn her into a malleable girlfriend who will let her do what she likes and continue to approve of her. She has begun a process of chipping away at Tara’s independent identity, turning her into nothing more than a reflection of herself. This is a form of death, to lose what makes you uniquely you and become the shadow of another person, with no free will of your own, no desires beyond those the other person also feels, no conscience beyond that of the other person. In spite of its romantic surface, the song foreshadows this process of Tara’s identity being swallowed up by Willow’s. Before she begins singing, Tara tells Willow that when people look at her ‘I know exactly what they see. You.’ Later, in the middle of her verse of gratitude to Willow for bringing her out of the shadows and into the light, she sings ‘Something just isn’t right’, and later still ‘Nothing I can do/You just took my soul with you.’ The final verse is full of erotic imagery ‘I can feel you inside’, ‘I break with every swell’, ‘Lost in ecstasy’, ‘Spread beneath my Willow tree’, but it is notable that this is all imagery of submission to a dominating power. ‘I can feel you inside’ gives a really nasty hint of just how far Willow is prepared to take over Tara, till there’s nothing much left but Willow, but the other lines also clearly show Tara as passive and submissive in the face of Willow’s power, ‘Wanting you so helplessly’ as she sings. This dominance/submission relationship is echoed by the final shot of Willow leaning above Tara as she floats above the bed. Yes, it’s a neat way of suggesting oral sex, but it also puts Willow firmly in control while Tara just lies there. The position – Willow on top - recurs in 'Tabula Rasa' where, once again, Willow has tried to control Tara by taking memories from her. Willow, it should be noted, doesn’t join in the song. This is no love duet, like Xander and Anya’s, no affectionate squabbling of equals. Willow simply watches and approves, basking in the image of herself that she sees in Tara’s eyes. This is Tara as she wants her, with none of those inconvenient differing opinions or the will to stand up to her.
When Tara picks up the song again after she’s found out about the Lethe’s bramble, it’s evident that she has fully understood the danger she’s in, and this time when she sings ‘I’m under Your Spell’ the audience knows she means it literally. She has to leave, because staying with Willow would mean death. And, indeed, when she returns to Willow she promptly dies (admittedly by mischance rather than at Willow’s hand) and all the dark desire for total control hinted at in ‘I’m Under Your Spell’ comes spilling out of Willow. Of course Joss knew when he wrote the song that Tara was going to die, so this foreshadowing is entirely deliberate.
The second song to link sex and death, albeit much more explicitly, is ‘Let Me Rest in Peace.’ Vampires, of course, are technically dead, although it’s sometimes hard to tell, especially with a vampire like Spike, who eats and drinks and smokes and falls in love and generally seems to have a ‘lust for life’. ‘Rest in Peace’ reminds us that all this is just surface. Underneath, Spike is dead, and the song hammers this home for us. The very first line is ‘I died so many years ago’, then he goes on to sing things like ‘Whisper in a dead man’s ear, that doesn’t make it real’, ‘I’m only dead to you,’ ‘Let me take my love and bury it/In a hole six foot deep,’ ‘Stop visiting my grave’ and of course the refrain ‘Let me rest in peace’, which echoes the traditional RIP carved on gravestones. On top of that, the visual imagery reinforces the language. The song starts off in a crypt, and then moves to a graveyard. Spike lies down on a stone coffin and folds his arms across his chest as if he were lying on a bier. Later he jumps onto a coffin (an occupied one, containing a dead body) and then tumbles off this into an open grave. I hardly need to go on, the death imagery is so abundant. But there is also a great deal of sexual imagery, and the sexual tension between Spike and Buffy is palpable throughout the song. When she first comes in, she makes one of her little Freudian slips that show that when she’s around Spike she can’t stop thinking about sex: ‘What else would I wanna pump you for? (cringes) I really just said that, didn't I?’ Later, as he sings ‘You know, you’ve got a willing slave/And you just love to play the thought that you might misbehave’ he goes down on his knees and his eyes rove over her crotch in an unmistakable fashion. Buffy has to look away at this point, but she still doesn’t leave. Then we have the refrain ‘I can lay my body down/ But I can’t find my sweet release’ and ‘Being with you touches me/more than I can say.’ When Spike topples into the open grave, Buffy falls in after him, and just for a moment she looks as if she’s going to give in to the sexual attraction between them and kiss him. A parallel is being set up here between Buffy’s attraction to Spike and her desire for death. Eros and Thanatos have always been linked, of course, but not usually as literally as in Joss’s tale of a suicidally depressed girl lusting after a dead man.
The connection between Spike and death is continued in ‘Walk Through the Fire’. At one level he’s expressing his ambivalent feelings about Buffy – who has just rejected him yet again - when he sings ‘I’ll save her then I’ll kill her,’ but at another level this is the same kind of warning of danger that we get in ‘I’m Under your Spell’. In embarking on a relationship with Spike, Buffy is choosing death over life, and while in the short term it may actually be good for her (I’ll get on to this in a minute), in the long run she has to free herself from him if she is to return to life, in order to reach the point where she can crawl out of her grave for the second time, and this time really be back. When Buffy finally breaks up with Spike she tells him ‘It’s killing me,’ and I think this is intended as a poetic truth. The salvation from numbness he can offer her is only temporary. It gets her through the next few months without killing herself (‘First I’ll save her’) but once she gets past that point it becomes something that is keeping her from life rather than helping her cling to it (‘Then I’ll kill her’). However, because the story ME is telling is a complex one, the equation isn’t as simple as Spike=dead=bad-for-Buffy. Just as important is Buffy-is-using-Spike=bad-for-Buffy. She acknowledges this herself when she says ‘I’m using you and it’s killing me’. Buffy can’t love Spike (my apologies to Spuffy fans, who obviously have good reasons for seeing this differently, but the more I watch the series the more convinced I become that Spike is right that she doesn’t really mean it when she says she loves him – maybe I’ll get round to writing down my reasons for this some day), and this is reiterated over and over again in OMWF by references to what is real. Spike tells Buffy ‘Whisper in a dead man’s ear/That doesn’t make it real’ and Buffy sings at the end, just before she kisses Spike, ‘This isn’t real/But I just wanna feel’. Already she is using Spike, taking from him the physical feeling she can arouse in her, but giving nothing back.
Let’s go back for a moment to Spike and Buffy in the grave, a moment that encapsulates much of their relationship, as she partly gives in to the attraction between them and then runs off, ‘virtue fluttering’. Notice that, like Willow, she’s the one who’s on top. That means she’s the one who’s in control. This is a pattern that will repeat itself over and over. Right the way through S6 and S7, Buffy (literally) looks down on Spike, from the moment they first meet after her resurrection (usually from a staircase of some sort, because hey, SMG? Short). The first time she ever looks up to him is when he’s burning up in the Hellmouth to save the world, and that’s also the first time she ever tells him she loves him. Through his sacrifice, Spike finally manages to make himself Buffy’s equal. But sexually, as well, Buffy is always above Spike. The only times I can think of when Spike’s on top (but please correct me if I’m misremembering) are in SR and Gone. In Gone, of course, she isn’t actually visible, and in a sense isn’t really there, and in SR Spike is forcing sex on her against her will and so of course takes the dominant position. Apart from these two exceptions, it’s always Buffy on top, and so, like Willow and Tara, we have a couple where one is dangerously dominant over the other, only with this couple it’s the submissive party that’s associated with danger and death.
Since I seem to have got tangled up with Spike and Buffy, I’ll stick with them for the analysis of ‘Walk Through the Fire’. In fact, of course, it’s an ensemble piece that casts light on every character, so I’ll come back to it at a later point, but I think that even if I limit myself to Spike and Buffy for now, this essay is going to be long enough as it is.
The fire imagery is less straightforward than the magic and death imagery, because it serves at least two functions (which possibly meld together). On the one hand, fire stands, as in conventional romantic imagery, for love/sexual desire, as when Spike sings ‘The torch I bear is scorching me.’ On the other hand, it stands for life, for feelings, for the sense of being alive in contrast to the sense of dreadful permanent numbness Buffy mentions in ‘Going Through the Motions’. ‘Walk Through the Fire’ makes that sense of numbness far more visceral, with its images of fire that doesn’t burn and flames that aren’t bright: ‘I touch the fire and it freezes me/I look into it and it’s black./Why can’t I feel? My skin should crack and peel./ I want the fire back.’ There, in a nutshell, is Buffy’s S6 state of mind. She’s come back to life, but she doesn’t feel alive, in fact she doesn’t feel anything, even though she desperately wants to (hence Sweet’s lines ‘She is drawn to the fire [...] She will come to me’). Sweet offers feelings, but at a price. Those feelings will be felt so strongly, so intensely (‘And then that energy starts to come on way too strong’), that they consume the person feeling them. This idea that Buffy is searching for something that can make her feel, that will free her from her numbness, is developed further in ‘Something to Sing About’, when, having compared life to a song, in which she pretends to be happy even though it all seems utterly meaningless, she finishes up begging Sweet ‘Don’t give me songs/Give me something to sing about.’ Buffy isn’t asking for life, she’s already got that; what she’s looking for us a reason to live, and ‘Walk Through the Fire’ suggests that this reason will be something, anything, that can make her feel, whether it be pain or pleasure (‘My skin should crack and peel’). The action of the episode makes it clear where Buffy is going to find her reason to live when Spike manages to interrupt her dance to the death. He tells her ‘You have to go on living/So one of us is living’ (more death imagery, so soon before the climactic kiss – we’re not to be allowed to forget that it isn’t life Buffy is choosing when she kisses Spike, but a life-substitute), but Buffy isn’t too impressed by that argument. What counts for her, I think, is that by grabbing hold of her, he gets through to her, jolts her out of absorption with her own agony. It’s the physical contact that does it, and physical contact is the route she decides to follow, the thing that will make her ‘feel’ even if ‘This isn’t real’.
The irony, of course, is that what she feels may not be ‘real’ for Buffy, but it’s excruciatingly real for Spike. She is drawn to death and darkness and realises that this is wrong, but he is drawn to light and life. She finds him sexually irresistible, but she doesn’t love him. He, by contrast, loves her more than he’s ever loved anyone, ever, loves her in spite of himself, and by virtue (ha!) of that love, is finally able to rise above himself and seek out his soul. And in the end, love destroys him, when he burns up in a pillar of light in the Hellmouth, the last of the darkness scoured out of him. But it’s notable that even in OMWF he wants to be a hero (‘then I’ll save her’), and that he wants this in spite of the part of himself that holds him back (‘I hope she fries, I’m free if that bitch dies’ and the sudden switch to ‘I’d better help her out’). For Spike, too, ‘Walk Through the Fire’ gives us his S6 arc in a nutshell.