Buffycast 1-13

This is BuffyCast, episode 113.

Well, well, well, we meet again.

Ravello here, welcome to BuffyCast.

Since last we spoke, I've been enjoying my own personal season six.

How about you?

I'm very happy to be back, and we're going to do our best to shift away from the current

schedule of one new show every financial quarter.

So as always, we thank you for continuing to check in on us.

A couple of items before we begin here.

Some have asked how the BuffyCast holiday party went, and we're happy to report it was

a glorious mess.

Also, we have a couple of plugs for you today.

If you've been listening to our show for a while, you know that one of our listeners

is named Miles.

And he's always been a big supporter of what we do here.

Miles has contributed many great comments, and we're excited to tell you that he now

has his own podcast at RadioFreeSunnydale.com.

He's a great thinker with an interesting take on many things Buffy, so check him out.

Also, another listener named Mike has a website that he started up a number of months ago

that contains a lot of good written material that he's developed about Buffy, and we encourage

you to visit him at...

And speaking of promotion, we want to thank Kalamata for emailing us an article that appeared

in February in the Dallas-Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

It lists five fabulous entertainment options, and they include a new country album, a new

Star Wars computer game, a Monty Python special, a movie in which Tommy Lee Jones makes his

directorial debut, and a Buffy cast.

How cool is that, huh?

Kalamata goes on to ask if this is a good thing for Buffy cast or a bad thing for Tommy

Lee Jones, and I think we all know the answer to that one.

Today, we're looking at the late season six episode, Normal Again, and I gotta warn you

right now that things can get all twisted up when you start talking about these what

is reality stories, so strap yourself in right now.

Normal Again is a great show.

Normal Again is an entry in the Buffy canon that's somewhat similar, I think, to season

three's Earshot, in that Buffy gets infected by a demon, struggles mightily, and learns

a valuable lesson.

In Earshot, she became more attuned to the pain of the people around her, and in Normal

Again, through her hallucinations about her mother, she finds the strength to start pulling

her life together, and it's certainly kind of a mess at this point in the series.

As you know, we take requests for show topics, and I'd say most of those requests are for

discussions of particular characters, but there are a handful of Buffy episodes that

get mentioned frequently.

We were never surprised, I guess, that people wanted to hear about Hush and Once More with

Feeling, and we're not holding our breath for the first email requesting a show on iRobotUJane,

but we were fairly surprised that the number three most requested...

...episode was Normal Again.

I guess this one captured a lot of people's imagination, I think, kind of in a different

way than, say, Hush.

In our Hush discussion, we talked a lot about the story threads and how the episode pushed

along season four's continuity, but Normal Again is much more about abstract ideas.

The emailers who requested the show seemed less interested in any particular season six

storyline than they were in trying...

...to gauge the importance of this particular tale to the Buffyverse.

Some listeners, such as Menachem, just think it's a great episode.

He's also found another use for it and writes,

I love Normal Again because I love the idea that we could all be dreaming, or even better,

be in somebody else's dream.

The Matrix had this great concept, but then, in my opinion, failed to follow through.

Whenever I want to aggravate my sister, I just ask her to prove I'm not dreaming.

Others, such as The Librarian, hate Normal Again with a passion.

The Librarian writes,

This is my least favorite episode.

One I feel tears apart one of my favorite features of the Buffyverse, the commitment

to its own existence.

I think that this is the backbone of what separates it from the movie version.

If the whole show is a fantasy, then the powerful women in it are being represented as a fantasy

in a way which breaks down any feminist values.

The show has.

Why don't you just find my childhood teddy bear, Starlight, tear off his head and burn

it in front of me?

So there really is a great diversity of opinion about this episode, much more so than most

other ones, I think.

What we're going to try to do is try to fit Normal Again into a greater context as far

as the story is concerned, and then we're going to tackle the issue that's on everybody's

minds.

Whether or not the whole series really does take place only inside Buffy's head.

And we'll give you probably about 12 answers to that question.

The Buffyverse is perhaps unique in its willingness to seek out storytelling challenges that most

other shows would cringe at.

My personal view is that there exists in storytelling an unholy trinity consisting of three story

ideas that are all very unsound, likely to fail.

And almost.

Just universally despised.

I suspect you'll find some of them listed at Jump the Shark's website, and for good

reason.

But what's funny is that it almost seems like the Buffyverse has gone out of its way to

take on these evils for no purpose other than to see if these stories can actually be successfully

pulled off.

You have to tip your hat to the bravery involved here.

The first of these three awful ideas is something we talked about in our last episode when we

discussed Dawn and the difficulties involved.

Bringing a new, young, spunky character into an established show on which the regulars have

gotten a little bit older, and how this frequently fails.

As you may recall, we concluded that the Dawn experiment had mixed results, but they were,

I think, much better results than any other show has achieved.

The second arm of the Triumvirate is closely related to the first, and involves the introduction

of a baby into an established show.

Especially in a case where...

...where the milieu of the show doesn't really provide a comfortable fit for the domestic

issues that arise from having a baby on board.

This concept is similar to introducing the cute tween, but I consider it separate because

it's annoying in a different way.

Buffy avoided the baby, but Angel, the series, saw the introduction of Connor.

When it comes to babies, though, sci-fi and fantasy shows have a clear advantage over

other types of shows.

Because they can break glass in case of emergency, and artificially accelerate the age of the

baby, which is usually the only way to save the day.

Here, Angel took his cue from Marvel's Mutant Universe, and we saw baby Connor taken to

another dimension and return as a teenager, in a similar fashion to what happened to the

character Cable in the X-Men universe, although Cable came back much older.

I guess then that Angel managed to introduce both a baby and a surly teen.

Wow, that's not a bit...

And finally, we have the granddaddy of bad ideas, the one taken head-on by normal again.

Deadly not only because it's despised, but because it's the bad idea most likely to be

embraced by us amateur writers.

Few of us will ever be in a position where we feel the need to introduce a spunky youngster

or a baby into an ongoing story, but all of us are in a position to write the short or

long story in which...

It was all just a dream.

The textbook example of the anger audiences often feel towards this sort of thing, as

the librarian also points out, is the infamous reappearance of Patrick Duffy on the old drama

Dallas.

In one of the high turrets here at Castle Buffycast, we have a diverse library, and

we have a book entitled Under the Black Flag, A History of the Pirates by David Cordingly,

because I love pirates.

And promise me that you'll never use that phrase while out on a date.

I'm into plays and hip-hop music.

How about you, Ravello?

I love pirate history.

In his book, Mr. Cordingly informs us that it was the usual practice in Britain and her

colonies to display the bodies of notorious pirates near the entrance to a port as a warning

to seamen.

This is relevant because it's very similar to what your freshman creative writing teacher

will do to you if you submit a story in which it was all a dream.

He puts you out in front of the English building as a warning to the other undergraduates,

and I speak to you from a painful experience.

As a general rule, and with exceptions, people hate the dream story.

And dreams are defined here to include not just actual dreams, but also possible hallucinations,

such as those in Normal again, because they're functionally equivalent for storytelling purposes.

The reason for the hate, I think, has everything to do with the expectations of your audience,

if someone comes to you the storyteller under the impression that you will enable them to identify

with and become a character in a story through their suspension of disbelief you can't pull the

rug out from under them you know it's kind of a curious emotional effect caused by stories

this notion that we should take a front over the fact that a fictional character

who we knew to be fictional should actually turn out to be fictional but that's exactly what

happens when you've lowered your everyday defenses to make yourself vulnerable and allow yourself to

be seduced into pretending you're someone else when you watch or read a story only to be told

it was all just a trick it's hard not to feel foolish even when it's not your fault this is

certainly not to say that all dream stories fail but when they succeed it's almost always because

the revelation of the dream was in accordance with the expectations of the audience before

they walked into the theater

or cracked open the book or because the notion of the dream is central to the premise of the work

a few examples here the matrix here we have a sci-fi tale with a heavy dream component but it's

universally hailed as a great piece of work and rightly so this is partly because it's a science

fiction tale and there's an audience expectation that the fantastical awaits it's certainly a

different expectation than when you turn on say law and order

but i think more importantly in this case the matrix works because the dream facet is central to

the story in fact in many ways it is the story and it isn't just a contrived escape hatch for

writers who couldn't figure out how to get themselves out of the painted corner dream

stories can even to an extent be told in the so-called real world if anyone out there knows

of or remembers bob newhart you know he's an american comedian who had a popular 70s

sitcom in which he starred as a chicago therapist years later after that show was over he came back

in another sitcom completely unrelated and in this one he was a new england innkeeper now in the last

episode of the second show he gets hit in the head and when he wakes up he's once again the

chicago therapist lying in bed next to his wife from the first show and telling her he had a crazy

dream about being a new england innkeeper everyone thought this was very clever and

a good laugh out of it you know so why no outrage over the fact that an entire show was as it turned

out nothing but a dream here again it's about expectation people tune into sitcoms laugh for

half an hour and then usually forget them there's no expectation of a continuing story although some

sitcoms do provide them and there's not a lot of investment in the characters you don't care much

about bob as a person you just hired him to make you laugh you don't become him and

so when it turns out his innkeeper character was a figment of therapist bob's imagination

you smile fail to care and move on now the reason we're talking about audience expectation and

identification is because it can help us to get a grip on why some folks desperately care about

whether buffy the vampire slayer is really just a disturbed girl living in an asylum buffy's a

fantasy show and as such you're on notice that a lot of things can happen but coming

as normal again does towards the end of the show's sixth season i think the expectation

at this point among audience members is that you know okay whatever other weird stuff is going on

in sunnydale at least i know that buffy is buffy and that i can go ahead and become her you know

mentally merge with her or willow or principal flutie or whoever and if you're listening to

our show chances are buffy affected you at this deep level to pull that rug out

gratuitously seems unfair even if the story itself is a fun one to muse over turning now to

normal again as an episode it's another of those episodes that has a commentary this one provided

by the writer and the director diego gutierrez and rick rosenthal in keeping with the other

commentaries on the dvds it's pretty good containing a nice mix of information about

the story itself the directing techniques and of

course the obligatory five or ten minutes of reiterating how professional and great

Sarah Michelle Gellar is to work with. In keeping with our own non-regurgitation policy here,

we won't give you a blow-by-blow of the commentaries, but we will emphasize two

points that Mr. Gutierrez and Mr. Rosenthal make. The first is that normal again takes place at a

time when the members of the Scooby gang are at their absolute lowest. As Willow puts it in the

episode, we've all been kind of slumming and this really is fairly easy to see. Buffy is broken up

with Spike and is feeling the burden of keeping that relationship hidden from her friends while

at the same time experiencing guilt for having gotten involved in it in the first place. She's

feeling not only her misery but the misery of all those around her and so when she fights a demon

that injects her with a poison that causes her to possibly hallucinate that she's in an insane

asylum, this is something of a welcome.

Willow at the beginning of normal again sees Tara talking to another woman and wonders whether

Tara has moved on. I remember they're broken up at this point. And this episode also comes right

after Hell's Bells, so Xander has just left.

The second point that the commentators make is that they tried very hard to make each of the

realities, that is the Sunnydale reality and the insane asylum reality, as real as possible so that

when the story switches to one or the other, there's no reason to think that the one you're

watching isn't the true reality. And if you watch the episode, I think you'll see what they're

talking about.

You really have to admire their craftsmanship here. The very end of the episode is perfectly

noncommittal as far as which reality is real, with Sunnydale Buffy asking for the antidote

and the story switching back to the asylum before we see her taking it. Thus, when we see

comatose Buffy in the asylum at the very end, we don't know whether the scene is taking place

before or after she ingests the antidote. Although our listener Jennifer believes

the final scene proves the asylum world is real because Buffy is comatose and yet the asylum still

exists, we have to note that Buffy is in fact still in the room and who's to say she isn't at

some level aware of her surroundings. And as we said, we don't know when exactly she really did

take the antidote. Additionally, to keep each reality credible, the writer really has to

marshal his best arguments in support of each one, which entails criticizing,

the other world as harshly as possible. And if you watch Normal again after having seen the

entire series, and if you're familiar with the press that surrounded the show during its first

run, then you'll see that a lot of the arguments that Buffy's doctor makes to convince her that

Sunnydale isn't real sound very similar to a lot of the criticisms that dissatisfied folks have

leveled against the show over the years. For example, the doctor points out how absurd

the entire premise of the show is. This idea that Buffy is really a superhero who stakes vampires

and saves the world. This, I think, echoes many of the comments of those who never really gave

the show a chance because of its silly title. And I'm sure you've met some of these people.

Additionally, for those of you who ever tried to get friends into the show but found they were

turned off by the fact that the mythology was well nigh impenetrable, Xander has this to say

about the possibility of Sunnydale not existing.

Oh, come on, that's ridiculous. What, you think this isn't real just because of all the vampires

and demons and ex-vengeance demons and the sister that used to be a big ball of universe-destroying

energy? Our listener Anna also noted this with regards to the fans. The doctor acts as something

of a mouthpiece for late season six fan discontent, saying that Sunnydale used to be

strictly structured with apocalypses and metaphor monsters, and now it's really kind of disjointed

and depressing. I think you've got a good point there, Anna. But I would also point out that while

the doctor's dialogue seems to acknowledge that many fans were unhappy that season six had veered

away from big villains and apocalypses, it's possible that by explaining how things have

changed, the doctor is also maybe trying to indirectly offer a rebuttal.

He says,

You used to create these grand villains to battle against, and now what is it? Just ordinary

students you went to high school with. No gods or monsters, just three pathetic little

men who like playing with toys.

This perhaps is a way for the writers to sort of communicate to the viewers that yes, we

know season six is different, we hear your complaints, but here's the gist of what we're

trying to do, so can you please just roll with it and stop demanding Marty and Sunnydale's

head?

To tie up this notion of the good doctor speaking on behalf of different groups of fans, those

who never got into Dawn can take sadistic pleasure in the fact that the doctor blames

the introduction of Dawn as the event that causes Buffy's world to start unraveling.

He says that Buffy inserted Dawn into her delusion, actually rewriting the entire history

of it to accommodate a need for a familial bond.

But that created inconsistencies.

The Sunnydale delusion started falling apart, and its inhabitants weren't as comforting

as they once were.

Wow, Donnie can't even catch a break in the Asylumverse.

Get out, get out, get out, doc.

As much as I have to admire the lengths to which the people who put Normal Again together

tried to tie it into the Buffyverse in order to make both worlds more credible in this

episode, they did maybe try a little too hard.

And there is some clumsiness that seeps into the presentation, especially in the delivery

of the exposition.

Look at the set-up, for example, of the Asylum world.

A common rule of exposition is to never try to convey information to the audience by having

two characters tell each other things they both already know.

As Stephen King notes, this is the as-you-know-Bob phenomenon that was especially popular in

sci-fi stories of the 1950s.

Well, that's true.

As you know, Bob, we are both scientists who live on a rocket ship and are investigating

Planet X for signs of life.

That's right, Steve.

And as you know, we're not sure what we'll find because we lost contact three years ago

with the last spaceship that we sent to Planet X, which also happened to be carrying your

wife.

In Normal Again, we have Dr. Bob delivering this line to Buffy's parents.

For the last six years, she's been in an undifferentiated type of schizopathy.

And then he goes on, very helpfully, to explain that, and here's the quote, she's created

an intricate latticework to support her primary delusion.

In her mind, she's the central figure in a fantastic world beyond imagination.

She's surrounded herself with friends, most with their own superpowers, who are as real

to her as you or me.

Together, they face grand, overblown conflicts against an assortment of monsters both imaginary,

and rooted in actual myth.

Six years into this ordeal, you might think Buffy's folks are a little more up to speed

on what's going on with her than this.

Another unfortunate byproduct of Normal Again's attempt to fit tightly into Buffy continuity

is that we get characters behaving in really kind of unbelievable ways.

We learn, for example, that Buffy really was in an asylum between the time she saw her

first vampires and the time she moved to Sunnydale.

So, we get to see her as a vampire.

We get to see her as a vampire.

She's a vampire.

Presumably, this would be in the time period between the Buffy movie and the beginning

of the series.

You know, this piece of exposition is meant to strengthen the possibility of the asylum

as the real reality, but Buffy goes on to say that while in the asylum, she stopped

talking about vampires, and her parents just forgot about them.

Now, I kind of thought better of Joyce as a parent, and it's a little hard to believe

that a mother whose only daughter...

spent a couple of weeks in an asylum talking about vampires would completely forget about

it.

When Buffy tells her in Becoming Part 2 that she's a vampire slayer, Joyce, being a pretty

good parent, would probably muse on, you know, vampires, vampires, where have I heard that

before?

As we said earlier, a lot of the listeners who wrote in asked our opinion on whether

Sunnydale was real on its own terms or just Buffy's hallucination.

And the short answer to this question is yes.

What we're going to do is take Occam's Razor and apply it first to normal again on its

own terms, that is, from completely inside the story, and then we're going to apply it

again from outside the story.

That is, we'll apply it to the story as an actual constructed story.

And the fun part is that we can use this one principle and yet come to completely opposite

conclusions.

About the same Buffy episode.

Now, you've probably come across Occam's Razor at some point, but as a refresher, it's a

principle that, in its simplest form, says that if you're trying to explain a phenomenon

and you've got two competing theories, choose the simpler one, the one with fewer assumptions.

Wikipedia has a good example.

After a storm, you notice a fallen tree.

A reasonable hypothesis is that the storm blew down the tree.

This hypothesis requires...

requires one to suspend his or her disbelief very little because storms are more than capable

of felling trees and often do.

A rival hypothesis is that the tree was knocked down by 200 meter tall space aliens.

This hypothesis gives you the same result, i.e. the knocked down tree, but to get to

the result requires many additional assumptions concerning such things as the existence of

aliens, their ability and desire to travel interstellar distances, and the ability to

destroy trees and trees, their desire to knock down trees, etc.

Because each additional assumption could be wrong, the theory with fewer assumptions is

more reasonable to believe.

So, let's apply this principle to normal again, but to do so, I think we first have to apply

it to the series as a whole.

So, let's jump back to Welcome to the Hellmouth for a second.

We enter the series carrying the rules of...

of our own world, and we apply them to Sunnydale in those first few moments that we enter

the series because we reasonably assume Sunnydale operates in the same way that our world does.

Thus, if in the first moments of the series we were to stumble across a dead body drained

of blood with bite marks on its neck, and we were asked whether the victim was killed

by an animal or a vampire, we would choose the animal explanation.

Because it's simpler and doesn't require us to posit the existence of vampires.

But put us in the same scenario after we've seen the opening scene of Welcome to the Hellmouth

in which Darla vamps out, and we will come to the opposite conclusion.

We will conclude that the dead body is probably the handiwork of a vampire, because this is

the simplest and most reasonable explanation.

Therefore, finding a dead body in a town, which has been proven to us, is infested by

vampires.

And so it goes, as each supernatural element of Sunnydale is revealed to viewers.

The supernatural explanation will become the favorite explanation because it is the simplest

and requires fewer unsupported assumptions, given the rules that we know govern Sunnydale.

So when Normal again takes the stage...

We fully believe in the realness, if you will, of Sunnydale, because there is no other reasonable explanation for what occurs in the town that has been presented to us within the confines of the show.

But when Buffy has her first hallucination, and we discover that, according to the story world, she might have been in a mental hospital for six years,

all hell breaks loose.

Now, asked point blank by the writer of Normal again...

To decide whether Sunnydale is real, or just in Buffy's head, if we choose the simplest explanation to explain what we've been experiencing the past six years, we will, naturally, conclude that Buffy really is in a mental institution.

You know, Buffy herself goes through this exact analysis when she's convincing herself that Sunnydale isn't real.

You know, she says,

What's more real?

A sick girl in a...

An institution?

Or some kind of supergirl chosen to fight demons and save the world?

That's ridiculous.

Buffy here is applying Occam's razor, and it's leading her to try to kill her friends.

Thanks, Occam!

So, if we adopt the simplest in-story explanation for what's going on in Buffy as a series,

we would have to conclude that Buffy is probably dreaming the whole thing.

But things haven't gotten complicated enough yet for us,

so now let's step outside the show and apply Occam's razor to Normal again as a constructed story,

and in particular as a chapter in the story that is the seven seasons of Buffy.

If we seek the simplest story explanation for the story,

we must conclude that Normal again is a standalone that is not meant to cast any serious doubt on the existence of Sunnydale on its own terms.

Any other evidence...

Any other explanation leads to madness, and here are the reasons why.

Reason number one.

If all of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is just Buffy's dream,

why does only one episode out of 144 address this critical issue,

and why is there no attempt to develop a storyline involving the real Buffy?

Reason number two.

There is absolutely nothing to gain story-wise by placing Buffy in an asylum,

and everything to lose.

As Anna again says,

the fact that the show really is, or definitely could be, an illusion

lessens the dramatic impact of the problems in the characters' lives.

Yes, it's a TV show, but that last shot seemed to be admitting to the falsity of a willing suspense of disbelief.

Kind of differ with you a little bit on that last point there, Anna,

but I would add to your comments, though,

that...

No writer who ever worked on Buffy would be quick to argue that it was all just a dream.

See third arm of the unholy trinity, Supra.

Reason number three.

And these are the reasons now that I kind of get a kick out of,

and I'm sure that a lot of what we're going over today,

some you may agree with, a lot you may not,

and by God, we want to hear from you.

But reason number three.

If Buffy really is in the asylum,

the entire narrative structure,

flies apart.

The doctor describes Buffy's condition as undifferentiated schizophrenia,

and says that she inserts herself into this Sunnydale world to battle evil with her friends.

You know, the implication here is that Asylum Buffy and Sunnydale Buffy are of one mind,

and it's only during discrete periods,

such as when Buffy was dead between seasons five and six,

that her asylum self is actually able to take over.

So if Sunnydale Buffy and Asylum Buffy are, in fact, of one mind,

it means Sunnydale Buffy can't ever be surprised by anything that happens in Sunnydale,

because ultimately, she's the one creating it all,

including all of the scenes in which she's not present.

The mayor plotting with Mr. Trick, brought to you by Buffy,

who should know that he wants to become a full-fledged demon,

because it's ultimately her plan.

And why so surprised?

Buffy, when Spike takes you to the Flophouse,

where Riley is letting vampires suck his blood.

You know, it was your idea.

And following this even further,

we have Buffy creating Angel,

and in turn, franchising her schizophrenia as Angel the series,

which I think she did a cracking job on,

but I would have reworked that whole part about the Gruselog,

and of course, I would have thought twice about introducing the infant.

Reason number four.

Similarly,

if Buffy is in the asylum,

we get some other really odd narrative gems,

such as in Out of My Mind,

where we have Buffy dreaming about Spike dreaming about Buffy,

or Restless,

where we have Buffy dreaming about Buffy dreaming about Buffy.

And number five here, and last but not least,

if Sunnydale is Buffy's power fantasy in which she gets to be the hero,

I can see where the mayor,

and Glory come from,

but I'm not sure I want to know what psychological needs she's serving

when we have Buffy dreaming about Xander,

dreaming about a three-way with Terra and Willow in the back of an ice cream truck.

So applying Occam's Razor to Buffy as a story,

and to Normal Again as a chapter in that story,

we have to conclude that Buffy did not dream up Sunnydale,

that Normal Again does not represent a major departure

from preceding Buffy lore, and that it does not constitute the single most important episode in

the Buffyverse. It's just a fun one-shot that you can't think too deeply about. Oops, too late.

We want to wrap up our discussion by noting that this episode marks a bit of a turning point

for Buffy. Mike Jern noticed this too. He says, what strikes me as significant is that Buffy

is at the most uneven, depressed, and sad point in her entire life when she dumps the antidote

into the garbage. Yet even at the cement bottom, she is able to scrape herself back up, find

emotional strength, and finally come back into the real world and begin living again. Being at rock

bottom doesn't mean the end, and that's a really positive and powerful message. Yeah, I agree,

and what's especially touching here is that Buffy learns to believe in herself,

um, by relying on her strength that she derives from memories of her mom. Um, her mother tells

her that she's a survivor. Uh, she tells her, uh, she believes in her. She says, you've got a world

of strength in your heart, and you just have to find it again. Believe in yourself. You know,

and because it's coming from Joyce, Buffy does believe, and she tearfully thanks her mom before

leaving the asylum world forever. Um, you know, and perhaps Buffy gained more than she lost,

uh, when she was stung by that demon. Now, if you've got some thoughts on today's show,

uh, please drop us a line at Ravello, R-E-V-E-L-L-O at buffycast.com, or, uh, visit us at the site and,

uh, post on the blog. And next time, we're gonna take a look, um, at more of a theme topic. Uh,

we're gonna ask, uh, what it's like being a guy in Sunnydale. And here the focus is gonna be on

the male gender, uh, what they go through and how they're portrayed. Uh, and, uh, and, and, and, and,

in relation to the ladies. Uh, so let us know your thoughts. Turning now to the mailbag,

uh, some responses to, uh, the Dawn episode. Uh, there are many great, uh, responses on the

message board, uh, incidentally for Buffycast, uh, 1-12, and we encourage you to take a look.

And let's see, uh, Ponzarelli says, uh, he liked our Dawn episode, but we failed to note that

thanks to Dawn, almost half of all Buffy episodes take place in an alternate universe.

What? Uh, his theory is this. Uh, Dawn, as we're told many times, doesn't belong in Buffy's reality.

Uh, because she has such a strong influence on the events in Buffy's reality, uh, we must conclude

that all the episodes after, uh, real me, uh, must by definition take place in an alternate reality

in which Dawn is present. After Buffy versus Dracula, the real, unmodified, official, and

Dawn-less Buffy timeline went off somewhere amongst all the many dimensions, and we the

viewers were left watching a show that takes place in an alternate reality that is no more or less

genuine than the alternate reality in which Buffy never came to Sunnydale as depicted in The Wish.

Uh, Ponzarelli concludes that any future Buffy spinoffs should pick up the so-called

real Buffyverse strand and continue it from Buffy versus Dracula. Uh,

much like Dawn, do you, Fonz? Uh, you know, and speaking of your nickname, uh, I gotta tell you,

we received your email late on a Saturday night when all of us, uh, happened to be here and were

well into cocktail hour, and, uh, we got to talking about, uh, Fonzie because none of us had seen much

of Henry Winkler, uh, since his star turn in, uh, Waterboy, although I understand he has a show now.

Um, and next thing you knew, we'd convinced ourselves that the Fonz, uh, is actually a

precursor of Buffy in the realm of, uh,

of battling supernatural forces. Uh, way before Buffy was fighting the First in Season 7, or

Quellers, uh, from space in Listening to Fear, uh, Arthur Fonzarelli was on the front lines, uh,

taking on Mork from Ork and the son of the devil himself, who was called, uh, Melvin Scratch. Uh,

you Happy Days fans might recall that, uh, Melvin Scratch tried to pull Fonzie down to hell,

uh, but the Fonz defeated him, uh, because of the love flowing through his, uh,

his, uh, Scooby gang. And there, too, you have the parallel, uh, Leather Jacket wearing Fonz and

Leather Jacket wearing Buffy as the leaders, uh, Giles and Mr. C as the mentors, uh, Ralph Mouth,

or should I say Xander, uh, Geeky Richie Cunningham and Geeky Willow, uh, although Richie did get,

uh, chicks in high school. Um, so I guess all in all, uh, Milwaukee, Wisconsin is the, uh,

Sunnydale, California of the 1970s. Uh, moving on, Andrew writes, uh,

I agree with Andrew's statement. I agree with Andrew's statement. I agree with Andrew's statement.

I agree with many of your points and criticisms of Dawn's character, but I also disagree with a lot

of them. Uh, Dawn is a character that is very easy to relate to in the beginning. Uh, then you find

out she was a key and it's not actually real. Even after the end of the fifth season, Dawn

contributes more to the show than I think you give her credit for. Uh, I think that Joss did a good

job of changing the relationship between Buffy and Dawn. Uh, thank you. And thank you, Andrew.

Kiaroran writes, and I'm sorry, I probably,

I'm almost sure I got your name wrong. Uh, your episode on Dawn, uh, while the views presented

were interesting and important thing, I think you forgot was how the characters treated her.

If you really studied how the characters treated her, a better understanding about what really

made her how she was in season six could be made. For example, in the second episode in season five,

you notice Xander treating her like a friend while Anya refers to her as a little girl,

which was mirrored by Riley calling her a kid. Their mom would treat her with kindness like a

friend should. And while Buffy and her do have that classic sibling deal to their relationship,

it is my opinion that after their mom died, Buffy should have started treating her with a bit more

than the sibling relationship vibe that continued on in season six. In short, the difference between

Dawn in season six and the Scooby gang in the very early seasons of the show is that Dawn's

character was almost completely ignored while the Scooby gang were clearly not. Uh, Mike writes,

one flaw with the Dawn character I would like to mention is the actress that played Dawn,

Michelle Trachtenberg. You blame poor scripts for her part on the show, but I think the problem

stems with the writers realizing Michelle might not be capable of much more. Just try comparing

her to early Sarah Michelle Gellar and there's a huge difference. Michelle doesn't seem to have

the capability to appear strong, only weak and whiny. I think they could have cast the Dawn role

with another actress and it may have been completely different. Steph writes, I love your

show. I've been listening to you. I've been listening to you. I've been listening to you. I've been

listening from the beginning and always intend to post a reply but never have before i agree

completely with your assessment of dawn and how she worked in season five and how she failed to

work in seasons six and seven season six was sort of a drag for me because of the dawn character

i work with teenagers and the last thing i wanted to watch when i came home from work was a fairly

realistic portrayal of an aimless and rebellious teenager if i had wanted to see a teenage girl

engage in petty thievery lie to her family and overreact to absolutely everything i would have

stayed at work on tuesday nights t writes in i think your episode on dawn went in a horrible

direction dawn is more than a foil for other characters but a character herself i think you

didn't explore dawn as a character although i do agree that after season five she became in

the words of one buffy recapper shiny mcwhiney p.s learn how to spell pumpkin

hmm

and anna writes i believe dawn forced the scooby gang to grow up before we had seen them in the

trials and throes of adolescence when they left for college grew serious relationships and started

working they were of course adults by the technical term but i think most viewers still saw them as

very young the same people they were back in high school having a younger character reinforced their

age i think dawn was necessary for us to take the scooby's young adult maturity seriously

and for us to also take their growing pain seriously and colleen sent us this email in

response to some listener comments made uh in relation to an earlier episode we did the one

on tara and willow and also kinds of kind of serves as a how buffy affected your life story

as well i was compelled to write in response to rodney's not gay analysis of willow in the email

you read at the end of episode 11 this also ties into your request for stories of how buffy's

affected reflected fans real world lives rodney clearly is analyzing the question of willow's

gayness from the perspective of one who was born that way and never had any doubts quote unquote

under born that way willow he says cannot be gay because she never showed any attraction to any

other female on the show and because she had seemingly satisfying at the time romantic

sexual relationships of some kind with oz and zander

rodney's own

frame of reference to explain the inconsistency is to say that like many gay people she must have

been in deep denial or actually attracted to any and all of the other females on the show but hiding

it from fear or else the willow to our relationship is a fabrication of the writers forcing a clearly

non-gay character into a gay relationship because that's where they wanted to tell a story but not

all of us who appear to be living gay lives were born that way and always were that way i myself

considered myself fully heterosexual for years and happily dated and had satisfying romantic

relationships with men however the person that i eventually fell in love with made a lifetime

commitment to and i'm still deliriously happy with 10 years later happens to be a woman colleen goes

on to say that one thing that many of my lesbian friends disliked about willow and tara was that

they didn't feel enough of a point was made of their lesbianness they weren't political they

didn't march or demonstrate or anything

however this is what i loved about them and the gentle yet firm insistence on their relationship

as one between two people who happen to be in same-sex bodies was the first and so far only

depiction that i've ever seen in any media of anything resembling my own experience of my

sexuality and my history thanks colleen and to those others who wrote in with stories of their

own or vampire song suggestions uh don't worry we'll be hearing from you uh very soon so

join us next time and thanks very much for listening take care