“You can’t fight death.”
This episode opens with Buffy pursuing a vampire on a regular patrol, while visibly hampered by disease (the flu, as we quickly learn). She insists that she can fight, that she must fight, because she can’t handle the idea that someone might die as a result of any inaction by her. She is traumatised by Jenny’s death, and in true Buffy Summers fashion, pre-emptively blames herself for any death that Angel may cause. The episode later spells out that death and disease are possibly the only things that Buffy cannot fight, but Buffy is insisting on both. She refuses to accept her own human limitations in regards to her illness, and refuses to accept the truth about people – that sometimes they die.
Here, season two continues its design of following major events in the main plot with Monster of the Week runarounds that deal metaphorically with the fallout of said event. Phases and Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered were the show’s response to Innocence – following the dissolution of the show’s main romance with the construction of two new ones. Killed by Death is its response to Jenny’s death, following her murder with a story about Buffy fighting a villain referred to as Death itself.
It’s a beautiful idea. Death, as the episode itself says, is one of the few things that Buffy cannot fight. When the show returns to killing off more major characters – with Joyce, with Tara – it will return also to this theme of death being inevitable: a concrete object that cannot be stayed or evaded. This is one of the most important tools in Buffy’s arsenal. The inexorability of death is something that grounds this story about a superpowered teenager fighting monsters/demons/magic robots in a real and tangible world. It is deeply appropriate that Buffy’s (and Buffy’s) first major brush with is followed by a story about death, and grief, and how neither can be stoppered from its source.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work at all.
The first problem is the simple fact that Buffy does defeat Death in this episode. Giles’ statement that “death and disease are perhaps the only things that Buffy can’t fight” is met with a response from Willow: “But we live on a hellmouth”. Because of this premise, the concept of death can be given physical form and defeated. The very premise of the show allows Buffy to fight and defeat death.More than that – it demands it. The structure of Monster Of The Week television requires that at the end of 45 minutes, the monster is defeated, and so if that monster is the metaphorical incarnation of death, then by jove the hero is going to kill death.
She defeats death through the power of disease – intentionally inflicting flu germs on herself so that she can see Der Kindestod. She uses one thing she is not meant to be able to fight in order to defeat the other thing she supposedly cannot fight. There are a notable trio of episodes that deal with Buffy becoming sick in some way: Killed by Death, Earshot, and Normal Again. All three fall in very similar places in the season (either the seventeenth or eighteenth episode). All feature Buffy collapsing and later being bedridden, in typical un-Buffy style. And most importantly, in all three the presence of the sickness grants Buffy sight of things previously unseen.
In Earshot, the demon infection gives her the ability to read people’s thoughts, and see their inner truths. In Normal Again, she glimpses an entirely new reality that is (regrettably) implied to be the real world. In this episode, being sick allows her to see Der Kindestod, to view death itself.
This is an old trope in folklore and fantasy and we see it from Odin cutting out his eye to Bran Stark falling from a tower. Physical suffering opens their Third Eye, and through it they glimpse the true nature of the world. This third-eye view is what gives Buffy the power to defeat death. She is able to defeat it by witnessing it, by visually acknowledging its existence. Just like in Prophecy Girl, she can beat Death by accepting death.
But therein lies the problem. Buffy can defeat “death”, but she still can’t actually defeat death. Jenny died last episode and she is still dead. Nothing will bring her back. If this episode is supposed to be about Buffy accepting Jenny’s death, then it doesn’t work, because she doesn’t accept death, she beats death. It is a metaphorical victory, but a hollow one. Her killing Der Kindestod doesn’t change her choice not to kill Angel, and it doesn’t bring Jenny back. It is a retreat into a comforting story, rather than a confrontation of the fact that Jenny is gone.
Perhaps this is intentional, meant to highlight Buffy’s remaining naivety and childishness. It’s possible, but I think this would be a redemptive reading that would require active creation by the watcher, and is not born from the show. Unlike Passion, which undercut Buffy’s hopelessness with the (false) hope of Jenny’s floppy disk, this episode does not undercut its hopefulness. It ends with a drawing of Super-Buffy standing victoriously over Death, drawn by a child who we must assume has also survived. It’s pretty straight-forward as a story, which is not bad in itself, but relatively disappointing in comparison to the show’s more interesting later explorations.
When the show revisits the idea of illness allowing people to see the true form of things in season five, with the mentally ill seeing Dawn as The Key, it is alongside the story of Joyce and her brain tumour. This revisits the idea of Buffy being unable to fight death and disease, but this time it doesn’t allow her the easy escape. She tries to conjure up a Monster Of The Week to fight, but she can’t. It’s far more mundane than that, and it is a story that grounds the entire series in something more real, and more powerful.
The second problem is Celia.
Celia is Buffy’s cousin, who died in hospital at the age of eight. We see flashbacks of Buffy and Celia playing together, indicating that they were fairly close – friends as well as cousins. Joyce specifically references their closeness, and explains it as the reason for her lifelong fear of hospitals. This is a formative moment for Buffy.
Or it should be, at least.
As a rule, Buffy does not delve much into the family trees of its characters. This is a show that builds its emotional core upon the Found Family that the Scoobies form together, and so in order for that Found Family to mean something, the show must keep the biological family far off screen.
Every parent in the series can be simply summarised as a) awful, b) dead, or c) completely absent. We get single-episode glimpses into Xander’s family and Willow’s mother. Tara has her awful family visit in an episode entirely built to prop up the Found Family. Jenny has only her late Uncle. We never see Cordelia’s, Oz’, or Anya’s family. Giles never seems to mention any family members whatsoever. Even Buffy herself has only Joyce and an absent (increasingly so as the show continues) Hank. No Aunts or Uncles, no other cousins, no grandparents – none are even mentioned. With the exception of Angel (whose sister only comes into existence in his own show) and Buffy after season five, every single one of the main characters appears to be an only child.
Statistically this is insane, but it is a perfectly legitimate writing decision. A characters’ family does not have to be relevant for a character to be complete, and the general absence of traditional family for most of the characters lends credence to why they are drawn to this Found Family. When a family member is included in the story, it is usually only for some specific and direct purpose – to expose Xander’s fears around becoming like his father, to show the lack of attention that led to Willow’s low self-esteem. There’s nothing wrong with this approach. But what it does do is put Celia in a very distinct and select group of characters.
The show’s general lack of focus on family raises questions that are impossible to satisfactorily answer. For a start – who exactly is Celia? We know she’s a cousin, but via whom? Is this Joyce’s niece, daughter of her hypothetical sibling? If so, how hard must this be for Joyce, to have her own niece die so young? Even if we assume she comes from Hank’s side of the family, it is hard to imagine a universe where Celia’s death is not a major tragedy that scars the Summers family for years. And yet, it visibly doesn’t. This wouldn’t be a problem – we could simply assume that the family wasn’t that close and it was a sad but not majorly relevant event – except that this episode puts such emphasis on Celia, and Buffy’s closeness to her.
There are exactly two instances where the show flashes back to Buffy in her childhood, where we see a version of Buffy not portrayed by Sarah Michelle Gellar. The second is in Weight of the World, where we and Willow see the moment that Dawn is brought home from the hospital. Despite technically never having happened, we understand that this is a formative moment for Buffy. This is the first moment in her life she took responsibility for another human being. We can see, when Little Buffy asks if she can “take care of [Dawn] sometimes”, the nexus event of Buffy Summers. From this point stems her compulsive responsibility, her hero complex, her need to protect Dawn above anyone else. This is her origin story.
The first instance is in this episode, and it too can be seen as an origin story. In the first flashback, we see Buffy and Celia playing together, and Buffy is acting as ‘Power Girl’, a DC Comics superhero who made her debut in 1976. Buffy is performing the role of hero years before she is assigned it, indicating that being a superhero is not something that was designated to her when she became the Slayer, but is something intrinsic to Buffy Summers. This is the earliest point in Buffy’s timeline (of what we see) in which she is a superhero.
Later in the episode, it is revealed that Celia’s death did not come from illness, but that she was a victim of Der Kindestod. Buffy was present for Celia’s death, and so that moment becomes not only something that would be deeply traumatic for any child, but also Buffy’s first brush with the supernatural. She doesn’t know it at the time, but this is the first demon that Buffy faces, and she fails. She doesn’t know what to do, and can’t fight it. Every demon she kills, every civilian she saves – they are a counterpoint to this moment. This is Bruce Wayne in Crime Alley, this is Uncle Ben, this is the destruction of Krypton.
And yet, it’s not. This moment does not matter outside of this episode. Neither Celia nor the Kindestod are mentioned again. Buffy’s fear of hospitals was not relevant when she visited one in Nightmares (even though that centred around a dying child and therefore you would assume would be especially triggering for her), and it won’t be relevant any of the times that Buffy will visit a hospital later.
This episode is built like an origin story, but it plays like a Monster Of The Week. It cannot escape its isolated status. This is the type of episode that was more common in the era when 22 episodes of television would be produced and aired almost immediately after, all written by different people. In this era, it is more common for backstories and revelations to be introduced in one episode, and then scrubbed away in favour of a different one elsewhere. It is the type of episode that makes a good argument in favour of the modern Netflix-style of television, where 8-10 episodes are planned, produced, and edited to form a coherent whole long in advance.
There are many ways to headcanon and explain away why Celia is never mentioned again, if what you care about is continuity unto itself. That’s not the problem for me. The problem is that it lends this episode an intense disposability. The Celia subplot is meant to lend weight to the episode, but it ends up making it feel lesser.
We talked up at the top of the essay about how this episode is metaphorically about dealing with Jenny’s death. Buffy suffers a loss, and then in the next episode battles a physical manifestation of Death. We are invited to assume that everything in this episode is subtextually about Jenny. There are moments that connect in this way, like when Joyce lends Giles her sympathies (describing her and Giles as “close” as she does so – the same word she uses to describe Buffy and Celia). Or Buffy defeating the Kindestod by snapping its neck – the same method that was used to kill Jenny.
However, the Celia story overwhelms and distracts from the Jenny story. It is presented as important enough in this episode that we should read Buffy’s defeat of “Death” as her metaphorically getting over her trauma around Celia, not Jenny. It adds a second, unnecessary subtextual layer that obscures the character who actually matters, and who we actually care about. It is unnecessary, and weakens the story rather than strengthens it. Celia’s existence makes Jenny less relevant in a story that by all rights should be about her.
The script for this episode was originally written for season one, and was only moved to season two after the first was cut down from thirteen episodes to twelve. Ignoring for a moment how this episode existing in this form so close to Nightmares would be even stranger, it does make a lot of sense. This episode feels like a season one script. It’s got metaphorical purpose and some strong monster design, but it is overly invested in the backstory of a side character, and had a distinct ‘Early Instalment Weirdness’ flavour common to shows that have not quite figured themselves out yet. This was written for the not-yet-baked Buffy of season one, and not the refined concoction it is becoming.
The season-one-ness of this episode is apt, because the issue with Celia’s character are deeply familiar. They are the same issues we saw in the first episode, with Jesse. There we saw another death of someone close to the Scoobies – apparently Willow and Xander’s only other friend. It should have been a formative moment for them, and his lack of relevance ever again indicates that it clearly wasn’t.
In a way then, it’s appropriate that Celia is a stand-in for Jenny in this episode. We talked in the last essay about how Jenny inhabits a curious position in Buffy history, as the first major character to die, the first significant loss for these characters and for the fans, and yet she disappears from acknowledgment after season three. It should have been a formative moment for many characters – and arguably, it is. We can see the impact of Jenny through Gile’s despondency and lack of future romantic entanglements, in Buffy’s guilt complex, in Xander’s hatred of vampires, in Willow’s magical curiosity. Yet she retracts from the narrative, becoming almost as much a curious entity/non-entity as Celia or Jesse.
Buffy herself is in her adolescence, and this episode highlights the ambiguity of that stage in life. Early on, she is aligned with the children, who can see the monster that adults cannot. This is later explained to not actually be true (it’s sickness that grants visibility of Der Kindestod, not childhood), but the sense of alignment remains. She empathises with the child Ryan, and affirms his childish-but-true belief in the existence of monsters. In the closing scene Buffy indulges her childish side by lying in bed and having her mother wait on her with specially curated PB&J sandwiches. And yet at other times she is aligned with adulthood – taking on a specifically protective and authoritative role over the children at the climax. She straddles the gap between childhood and adulthood, fluctuating between being able to see the monster and not seeing it. As quoth Ms. Spears, she’s not a child, and not yet a woman.
The same can be said of the show itself. This episode indicates its own childishness. A more mature show might double-down on the fact that Death cannot be fought, but this episode allows Buffy to fight, and defeat it. There are many demons in Buffy’s rogues gallery that evoke fairytales in the Grimm’s sense, and Der Kindestod is one of them, sitting alongside the Gentlemen, Gnarl, and the ‘Hansel and Gretel’ of Gingerbread. This episode evokes fairytales in the Disney sense. It allows a simplistic, comforting worldview where, yes, monsters are real, but it’s ok because Buffy exists to fight them. It buys fully into Giles’ lie from Lie to Me. Here, the bad guy is distinguished by his literal black hat. Buffy does defeat him and save the day. Nobody dies, and everyone in this episode lives happily ever after. Jenny who?
There is a lot of talk about Innocence being a transformation point for the series; a point where it “grew the beard” and became the mature, deep piece of media we recognise it as. Killed by Death I think shows that this is not true. There was no transformation point. Innocence was simply one episode among many that indicated the show’s growing maturity. This reflects Buffy’s journey, and it reflects reality. There is no nexus event for maturity. There is no transformation point at which a child becomes an adult. There is no moment where we ourselves become mature, where we become complete and free of flaws. It is a constant, iterative process, full of missteps and backslides. Life has no “grow the beard” moment. We are never done baking. We are never complete.
Neither is Buffy.
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Insect Reflection 