THE UNDEAD YET LIVE Part 3

For a change and a wonder, this one, our wrap up, should be relatively short.

This one is about trying to explain, not how vampire metabolism works, but exactly why, when vampires obviously have at least some sort of working simulation of living biological metabolism going on, they are, apparently, completely ignorant that this is so, and nobody else ever notices.

There is an obvious explanation, and it’s one I’ve bitched about at great length before this... Joss Whedon and his writers simply don’t care. Their attitude seems very much to be, they want to produce an entertaining melodrama/supernatural soap opera. They want vampires to be scary and inhuman and alien sometimes, and they want them to function as humans when human function is necessary or desirable to melodramatic necessity at other times. They don’t need no steenking badges, meester, or no steenking explanations, neither... if the fans want explanations that bad, they’ll come up with their own. All Whedon and his crew want, ultimately, is to cash their paychecks and chug some margaritas at the end of the day.

Before I go on with this, I want to take a moment to outline, briefly, the two different sorts of serial melodrama/fantasy fans there are, in this regard. This is important, because Joss Whedon seems to be one sort of fan, and thus, that sort of creator, while I am the other sort of fan and creator, and thus, intrinsically and irrefutably superior to Whedon.

These two basic groups of fans I call ‘continuity buffs’ and their opposite numbers, the It’s Just A Freakin’ Story, Fanboy Society.

Continuity buffs, like me, essentially care about our fictional realities and the imaginary friends who live in them. We like to take our fiction somewhat seriously. Most of us aren’t crazy enough to think that Earth: BUFFY, or the Marvel Universe, or Heinlein’s Future History timeline, are ‘real’ or ‘valid’ in any sense of actually existing out there somewhere in the multiverse, but while we’re watching or reading stuff set in these fantasy worlds, we want to believe in them. We read fiction because we enjoy being taken to some exciting place we can believe is ‘real’ and take seriously, and we like to meet interesting people who live in that place that we can similarly impose some credibility in.

Members of the It’s Just A Freakin’ Story, Fanboy Society, on the other hand, call fans like me ‘continuity Nazis’, and preen and give themselves airs as being just so unbelievably mature, because, yes, they watch SF and fantasy on TV and they read comic books and Robert A. Heinlein, but, nonetheless, they’re grown up enough to understand, as apparently we continuity Nazis do not, that BUFFY is just a TV show, and GREEN LANTERN is just a comic book, and it doesn’t matter whether every tiny little thing makes perfect sense or agrees with every other preceding tiny little thing. It’s Just A Freakin’ Story. And as long as they find it to be a good and entertaining story, well, they don’t care if Superman never in his life behaved so obnoxiously before John Byrne started writing him, or if it doesn’t make sense that Spike says he doesn’t breathe while lighting up a cigarette. It is, after all, Just A Freakin’ Story.

It should go without saying, I loathe these people the way Superman loathes Jimmy Olsen’s signal watch, the way Xander loathes Angel and Spike, the way Tim Drake loathes Jason Todd.

And, unfortunately, Joss Whedon is one of these people.

I know Whedon is one of the It’s Just A Freakin’ Story, Fanboy Society, because, in point of fact, Whedon has given us continuity nuts a workable explanation for all these ridiculous problems and discontinuities in BUFFY and ANGEL. With a smirk and a sneer, he contemptuously tossed us this explanation, as if off handedly lobbing a poisoned milk-bone to an obnoxiously noisy dog, towards the end of the sixth season, knowing full well it would utterly infuriate every single intelligent, thinking BUFFY fan in existence. It’s a cruel, mean, horrible, and utterly unacceptable rationale, to those of us who love BUFFY and who want her world and the people who live in it to be ‘real’ on some emotional level... but, I have to admit, it’s a hypothesis that works really well. I reject it utterly, and think Whedon is a complete asshole for putting it into play, and frankly, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, if this is how Joss Whedon is going to treat his imaginary characters and their fans, then he doesn’t deserve to have any of either. But I have to admit, he’s given us an explanation, and it’s one that works.

Whedon’s explanation is simple, and it’s just about the oldest, most obnoxiously unpalatable cliche there is... BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER is, basically, all a dream.

In point of fact, it’s a very specific sort of dream… a paranoid delusion. As presented by Whedon 2/3s of the way through the sixth season, the truth is simple: Earth-BUFFY, as I’ve referred to it in these articles, does not exist. Buffy Summers is a deranged young girl lost in the throes of a complete schizoid retreat from reality. She’s in an asylum somewhere in California, and her adventures as a vampire slayer are nothing more than elaborately detailed and over-imaginative hallucinations on her part. Everything we’ve ever seen taking place in this show, in the movie, and on ANGEL is an imaginary scenario dreamed up in the depths of Buffy Summer’s psychotic mind.

In some ways, this is a brilliant explanation, because it means all that stuff about the soul and the self and vampire sexuality and even the completely ridiculous magical and technological devices Warren and Jonathan and Andrew all create... doesn’t matter. Yes, it’s absurd that Warren can speed up entropy with something the size of a grain of rice, or build functional slut-bots with artificial intelligences that both the living and the dead can actually have sex with, and that cannot easily be told from real human beings, in his mother’s basement. Yes, vampires having sex with humans is really crazy. Yes, if Jonathan can cast a spell making himself a veritable god, it’s insane that he wouldn’t simply keep casting it every chance he gets, or that Xander wouldn’t steal the scroll from him and cast it his damn self. Yes, all this is crazy... of course it is, because it’s simply a deranged hallucination, and therefore, it doesn’t have to make sense.

Now, I dislike this explanation. It’s the sort of explanation that is very nearly a pulsating avatar of the It’s Just A Freaking Story, Fanboy philosophy. It tells us that, in fact, there is a coherent, consistent explanation for the seeming internal contradictions displayed every week in BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER and ANGEL... and that explanation is, literally, It’s Just A Freaking Story, Fanboy. Or, more literally, It’s Just A Freaking Paranoid Delusion, Fanboy… Get Over It.

One can very nearly hear Whedon laughing in the clear, cruelly strident tones of resident SIMPSON’S bully Nelson Muntz as he wrote this episode. “HA ha!” he sneers, as he types away with idiot cheerfulness, gloating as he willfully shreds the hopes and dreams and joys and emotional investments of a million or more of his greatest creation’s most devoted followers.

However, having said that, I will also say that I think this explanation is about half-right. Which is to say, I think there is, within the fictional multiverse that contains Earth: BUFFY, actually, a Sunnydale Mental Hospital that contains a patient named Buffy Summers, who has paranoid delusions in which she, and her imaginary friends, fight supernatural evil on an ongoing basis, often employing superhuman abilities and mythic weapons in their never ending battle for truth, justice, and the American way.

And I also believe that within that fictional multiverse, Earth: BUFFY also exists, on a nearby parallel timeline. And, over the past six years, somehow the psyche of the Buffy Summers on the one timeline (where she is now completely whacked out and locked up in a loonie bin, which we’ll call, for the sake of convenience from now on, Earth: Crazy Buffy, or just Earth-C) has come into contact with the psyche of her dimensional counterpart, the Buffy Summers on Earth: BUFFY (Earth-B), who is, actually, a Slayer, and who does, actually, battle supernatural evil, along with her frequently superhuman friends and allies.

How this psychic link between two Buffies was forged I haven’t worked out yet (and don’t have to, since BUFFY is cancelled and no one is going to let me write ANGEL). Perhaps some nasty hellgod or powerful demon cast a spell or a curse on the Slayer and it wound up having this effect. Or maybe Crazy Buffy took some bad acid when she was 15, and wound up attuning her perceptions to an alternate timeline where magic actually exists, and her otherdimensional doppelganger is Mankind’s Chosen Champion against supernatural evil. However it happened, the end result is, Crazy Buffy is now psychically linked to Slayer Buffy.

However, this has not resulted simply in Crazy Buffy going, well, crazy. As Egon, Ray Stantz, or even Peter Venckman might inform us at this point, the door swings both ways. The link between dimensions does not simply cause Crazy Buffy to behave in a manner that is, in her own reality context, viewed as completely irrational and outright nuts, it also has a discernible effect on the reality of Slayer Buffy.

In other words, Crazy Buffy’s desires, and emotional biases, and melodramatic needs for romantic mythological figures and themes, have infiltrated and undermined the basic physics and reality of Slayer Buffy’s world.

Prior to the two Buffies’ minds being linked in this manner, vampires doubtless were simply walking corpses, and were entirely horrific and grotesque. Or, perhaps, they had necromantically reanimated but still functional biologies, and they were aware of it, too, and didn’t say stupid things like “I don’t breathe” while lighting up a cigarette.

However, Crazy Buffy perceives Slayer Buffy falling in love with a vampire named Angel, and she wants Angel to be able to have full human sexual/romantic function. So, in a dreamlike way, this change is imposed on Slayer Buffy’s reality. Alternatively, Crazy Buffy sees Slayer Buffy kissing Angel and says to herself, ‘that’s ridiculous, vampires are just walking corpses, that can’t possibly happen’. This alters Slayer Buffy’s reality to the point where vampires and humans believe what Crazy Buffy believes... that vampires don’t breathe and their hearts don’t beat... when, in fact, they do. But since Earth:BUFFY is now under the influence of a whimsical madwoman in another dimension, while the function of vampire metabolism remains the same as it has always been, now, no one notices it.

The whims of Crazy Buffy altering Slayer Buffy’s local reality also explains all that nonsense that Jonathan, Andrew, and especially Warren can do. Crazy Buffy is obviously a Silver Age comic book and SF/fantasy geek; she thinks artificial intelligence and humanoid robots and speeding up time and spells where a nerd can become a superstar to everyone else in reality are cool, so she imposes those bizarre and senseless fantasies on Slayer Buffy’s world. To an extent, everything that has occurred around Slayer Buffy since she became the Slayer has been increasingly tinged by madness over the past several years, as Crazy Buffy becomes more and more drawn into their mutually synergistic psychosis. It started gradually, with Angel declaring “I don’t have breath”, even though he obviously does, and always has, and he probably doesn’t understand why he said that, or believed it, at the time... as in a dream, when we all sometimes say, and do, and even believe things, that on some level, we know aren’t true.

It started with that, but it has since proceeded to truly insane levels of delusion. Angel leaves and goes to Los Angeles. Crazy Buffy hates this development; she was enjoying the whole Slayer/vampire mythic romance thing, so she begins to subtly alter Spike’s behavior so he can be a substitute boyfriend for Buffy. Her first attempt to do this was rather overt, in having Spike and Buffy briefly be mind controlled into falling in love; she then found more subtle ways to effect the changes she wanted.

The point is, eventually, someone on Earth-B would have to discover this psychic link that is wreaking such havoc in their local reality, and do something about it. Angel and his crew might well set out to go to Earth-C and kill Crazy Buffy, to put her out of her misery, and restore Earth-B to ‘normalcy’. Were I writing that story, I would, in the end, have Angel and his gang somehow or other manage to restore Crazy Buffy to sanity. (This would work better as an actual BUFFY story arc, but BUFFY is cancelled, so never mind.) Then we could do the scene where Angel wistfully watches from the shadows as Crazy Buffy, now sane, is taken home by her parents, who on Earth-C, of course, are neither divorced nor dead. (Having Spike watch with some satisfaction as he sees a still living Joyce would be good, although not as good as the wrenching emotions with which Buffy herself... Slayer Buffy, our Buffy... would watch such a scene, while knowing that she herself can never have that ‘normal’ life, and must, now, return to her own world, and her own duties as the Slayer.)

Anyway, that’s my explanation for all this nonsense, for what little it’s worth. It will never be ‘official’, but it incorporates everything we’ve been shown to date, and explains away all the annoying stupidities, not just of the last two seasons, but of every season, while allowing a way to proceed sensibly after the source of the inconsistencies is resolved.

And, yes, now we’re done! No more BUFFY nonsense, at least, for a while, we hope.