This is the fourth of four essays on Becoming. The first focused on Willow’s arc; the second on the journeys of Angel, Spike and Drusilla; the third on the re-souling debate and Xander’s Lie.
This is the episode where we meet Buffy Summers.
We have seen Buffy, the Slayer, fighting evil for two seasons now. We were introduced to her in Welcome to the Hellmouth, as she introduced us to the show. In Killed by Death, we saw her experiencing some vital firsts: her first brush with the supernatural, her first acts of heroism, and her first experience with death. We got a full non-canonical-but-informative prequel story in 1992. But this episode, right here, is where we finally get it. Buffy Summers’ origin story. This is the start of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
We begin with Buffy, fifteen years old, emerging from Hemery High. This scene opens in Angel’s POV: at a distance, from his vantage point in Whistler’s car – but it soon transitions into Buffy’s POV: close-up, showing her perspective of the watcher giving her the news of her magical destiny (it’s Merrick, but he remains unnamed here, because like Whistler he’s less important than the news he’s bringing to his respective Chosen One).
This Buffy that we see here is just like the version of herself that Buffy describes in Helpless: a lot like Cordelia. She’s airy, popular, surrounded by friends and most concerned about the gossip surrounding the latest school dance. Cordelia is Buffy’s only Shadow Self at this point in the show, representing her pre-Slayer life and the human/Girl side of her personality. Of course the version of Buffy that we see here, free of any destiny, is so Cordelia-esque.
Her other Shadows and Jungian foils poke their heads in too; Buffy’s immediate assumption that Merrick is there to punish her for some lipstick she seems to have stolen evokes Faith’s temptation of Buffy towards her shadow side through casual theft in Bad Girls, as well as Dawn’s entire shoplifting subplot in season six. What we see here is that all of Buffy’s shadows – the representations of her subconscious – are a part of her, and always have been. Some may more directly represent the Slayer side of her, but these aspects always existed, even when she was young and destiny-free.
The freedom she has ends here. Merrick provides her destiny, and he does it by giving her the speech that has preceded most episodes so far.
“In every generation there is a Chosen One. She alone will stand against the vampires, the demons and the forces of darkness. She is the Slayer.”
Rupert Giles, Opening Prologue
“You must come with me. Your destiny awaits. […]. You are the Chosen One. You alone can stop them.”
Merrick and Buffy Summers, 2×21 Becoming
“Who?”
“The vampires.”
Buffy’s story starts with this speech. We begin the story of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, by invoking the beginning of an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The character and the show are, as always, one and the same.
So Buffy the Cheerleader, the Cordelia figure, is immediately thrown into the world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and is trusted to figure it out. We see her in a typical scene – the type of scene that is used to frame like 90% of all episodes: Buffy Summers, in a graveyard, fighting an unnamed vampire. She is given a stake, told ‘hey, you’re the protagonist now’, and the rest is up to her to figure out. And credit to her, she does. After a brief mis-step with the location of the heart, she kills her first vampire. She completes mission one: survive the most basic scene of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She succeeds because this role is natural to her. She was always the slayer. She is meant to be the protagonist; her power is innate.
Back home, we get another classic trope of early Buffy – Joyce dismissing Buffy and assuming she was just out with her boyfriend. She (understandably, to be fair) ignores Buffy’s night of harrowing, life-changing revelations, and treats it as typical, dismissable teen nonsense. We also see something specific to this prequel era of Buffy’s life, that we don’t see in the main timeline: Buffy having to live with two parents in a horrible, disintegrating marriage.
Buffy hears Joyce and Hank arguing, and it is heartbreaking because we can see that this here is the origin of her responsibility complex – her belief that she caused (or at least contributed towards) her parents’ divorce that we discussed in length back in Nightmares. We see that, like the worst insecurities, it’s not entirely baseless. Her parent’s argument is literally triggered by the fact that she was out late, and their differing reactions to that. What we also see – and what Buffy is somewhat blind to – is the ease in which Joyce and Hank slip into an argument, and how obvious it is that the argument isn’t really about Buffy, but about their own dysfunctional relationship. We simultaneously see why Buffy blames herself, and the evidence for why she shouldn’t.
This is a formative trauma for Buffy. It is the ur-breakup; the first romantic disappointment in a life that will be filled with romantic disappointment. It sets her expectations for romance. Buffy has a strong tendency to blame herself whenever a relationship falls apart, and that tendency is formed here, by her parents. She even paraphrases her own father here during her and Angel’s break-up in The Prom. Buffy’s general responsibility complex is near its most intense around romance, and this is why.
“So it was me. I did it.”
Buffy Summers, about Angel, 2×14 Innocence
“You’re right. He’s manipulative and shallow. And why doesn’t he want me. Am I repulsive? If there was something repulsive about me you would tell me, right?”
Buffy Summers, about Parker, 4×03 The Harsh Light of Day
“I just wanna know that there’s gonna be another good one. One that I won’t chase away. […] And the minute after that I can terrify him with my alarming strength and remarkable self-involvement. […] Maybe I could change. You know, I could, I could work harder. I could spend less time slaying, I could laugh at his jokes, I mean, men like that, right, the, the joke-laughing-at?”
Buffy Summers, about Riley, 5×15 I Was Made To Love You
“The last guy I was with, it got really? I behaved like a monster, treated him like crap. But at the same time, I let him completely take me over. Do things to me that… I’m sorry. Wow, I didn’t mean to get all true-confessions there. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
Buffy Summers, about Spike, 7×07 Conversations With Dead People
If Joyce and Hank’s divorce primed Buffy for romantic dysfunction, then her experience with Angel this season makes it an inevitability. There isn’t much that would distort someone’s expectations for romance more than your first love and sexual partner turning evil and killing/torturing your friends, specifically due to you losing your virginity to him. The phrase “rough break-up” doesn’t begin to cover it. This provides Buffy not only with a self-blame complex and permanent expectation of romantic doom, but it also specifically gives her a rather large complex around sex and her own sexual desires – something that will be extremely relevant going forward, especially in seasons three and six.
Buffy’s journey this year is, among other things, all about moving on from a naive perception of love, and not letting herself be consumed by that love. Early on, she was entirely ready to let herself be consumed by the passions of love, to throw herself into the metaphorical fire. She talked about how she only saw Angel in her future, how she was ready to die when he kissed her. Her dark alternate future here is represented by Drusilla, whose individuality and freedom was entirely destroyed by Angel. As we talked about last week – a necessary part of Buffy’s journey is letting Angel out of her heart.
And she does. The cruel thing about this finale is that it opens with Buffy at the end of her arc. She has completed her journey. She made the active decision to kill Angel, deciding she was ready at the end of Passion. In I Only Have Eyes For You, while possessed by James and Grace, she got a goodbye, a final kiss, and pre-emptive forgiveness from Angel for killing him. She starts this episode entirely prepared to receive her damn absolution already. She is ready to kill Angel; she’s just waiting for him to show up.
“I want you to get a message to Angel for me. Tell him I’m done waiting. I’m taking the fight to him.”
Buffy Summers, 2×21 Becoming
And what does she get for the early completion of her arc? Extra time to twist the knife, of course. Remember back at the end of Passion, when we described Chekhov’s Floppy Disk as a ghost; one that will come back to haunt Buffy? Well, it’s spirit-rising time, because something very important is about to happen to Buffy. She seems to sense it in advance – describing a deja vu that compels her to repeat the event. There is something instinctual at play – something drawing her to this moment; a moment that will shape the course of her life.
Her pencil rolls off the desk.
This is one of Whistler’s “little moments”, and just as it shapes Willow’s destiny, it also shapes Buffy. Finding Angel’s cure unpicks all the development Buffy has undergone, and forces her to make an entirely different choice. Where she had made peace with losing hope before, now she is condemned to suffer it. She is forced to decide whether to give him back his soul or not, and to be responsible for the results of that choice. We went into detail on this choice last week, so I won’t rehash it, but the point is that whatever decision Buffy makes at this point, it is no longer clean. Someone will suffer in any eventuality. She has a choice, but she doesn’t have a good one.
This is the first twisting of the knife – of forcing Buffy to suffer the agony of another decison when she thought she had already made one. She has her hope ignited by the ritual, chooses to re-soul Angel, and then has it crushed when it fails, and Kendra dies. She lets go of that hope, prepares again to let Angel go and “kick his ass” – and then, at the last minute, she is yet again thrown into a pit of hope, and forced to make an even more difficult choice.
These patterns repeat for Buffy within the episode, and then repeat outside of it too. This is the first of a trilogy of “Trolley Problem Finales” – Becoming, Graduation Day, and The Gift. In these episodes, Buffy is faced with a very direct choice: a) kill one person that she loves; b) let other people die. Prophecy Girl and Chosen play off these themes too, but these three are the most directly concerned with solving this very clear Trolley Problem.
Buffy describes the sword she will kill Angel with as “a present”, and this is a call forward to her in season five dealing with the idea of death being “her gift” (as well as a call-back to Jenny in Passion describing Angel’s soul as “a present” for him). Buffy kills Faith in Graduation Day with a knife that was literally given as a gift. As with the original philosophical problem, there is no “correct” answer in any of these instances – only the choice itself.
First, she has this one. In order to cement her status as a Hero, Buffy must prove her selflessness. She must show that she is prepared to give up her own happiness in order to protect others. She does this in a way most typical to Fantasy stories – by proving herself a True Knight. This is a motif most heavily employed in season five and The Gift, but it is present here too. Like all True Knights, Buffy receives a Magical Sword – an ancient weapon gifted by a mythical figure – the Only Weapon That Can Slay The Beast. This is another motif that will repeat in Graduation Day and The Gift (and Chosen too, but again a little differently) – Buffy using a Special Magic Weapon to defeat the Big Bad.
“Blessed by the knight who first slew the demon. If all else fails, this might stop it. I think.”
Kendra Young, pulling out a sword, 2×21 Becoming
This motif helps prevent the narrative from slipping into what it is always in danger of slipping into: shaming Buffy for having sex. This season is steeped in themes of virginity, dangerous sexuality, the threat of being consumed by love – all core themes in the gothic tradition that Season Two revels in. As we said in the Innocence essay – it is remarkable, given the facts of the plot, that this season is as non-judgmental towards Buffy’s sex life as it is.
A common trope in fantasy/fairy-tale stories is the power of virginity. A beast that can only be slayed or tamed by someone “pure of heart” (translation in most contexts: a virgin). Becoming invokes this trope when Angelus gives Acathla’s backstory. He was “killed by a virtuous knight” – virtuous here perhaps being used for its archaic meaning: virginal. The fact that Buffy is able to wield the Magical Sword, use it to slay the Beast (a beast created by the loss of her own virginity, no less), and save the world, proves that her virginity – such as a concept even exists – is irrelevant here. She is not made unworthy by sex. She is worthy. Full stop.
Buffy is a show with a relationship to sex that is terminally erratic. It is clearly sex-positive at times and agressively puritan in others. This is something to unpack more going forward, but for a mainstream show in the 1990s, it could be a lot worse. Buffy’s heart is usually* in the right place in regards to sexuality, and it displays its relatively** forward-thinking approach here. Because this is the episode where Buffy Summers comes out.
*I felt there should definitely be a qualifying asterisk by “usually”.
**And one by “relatively”.
Buffy is a deeply queer show. Slayerhood is equivalent to queerness, but beyond that, queerness runs through its veins. I have written extensively on the extended queer metaphor of Buffy, and I am perhaps the 100th person to do so. This scene where Buffy reveals herself as a slayer to Joyce, however, is probably its least subtle use in the whole series. The metaphor is paper-thin. You can see the homosexuality right through it, queer as day.
“Honey, are you sure you’re a Vampire Slayer?”
Joyce Summers, reacting to her daughter coming out as
“I mean, have you tried not being a Slayer?”
“It’s because you didn’t have a strong father figure, isn’t it?”gaya vampire slayer, 2×22 Becoming
That third quote there is especially telling, because on the literal level, it makes absolutely no sense. There is no reason why not having a strong father figure would lead to getting superpowers and being chosen to fight vampires. Those two things don’t even relate. It is, however, a common cliche for intolerant parents to assume, in reaction to their child coming out as gay, that their gayness was “caused” by something identifiable in the child-rearing process. Buffy, the metaphorical queer child, is having to be the informed one in the conversation, explaining basic concepts to her parent. She has to explain that queerness slayerhood is inherent: it doesn’t have a single Cause and it can’t be altered. To quote one Stefani Germanotta – she was just born that way.
“It’s just fate, Mom. I’m the Slayer. Accept it.”
Buffy Summers, 2×22 Becoming
The elastic reality of this situation is played up for laughs initially, but it soon turns serious. Joyce’s refusal to accept who Buffy is transforms into anger, and she directs that anger at Buffy. She puts all responsibility for the way that Buffy is onto Buffy herself. Joyce focuses entirely on her own pain, and ignores Buffy’s. She sees her daughter opening up about a vulnerable part of herself, letting her in on a secret she felt she had to keep – and immediately berates her for not telling her in a way that she wanted.
“Don’t you talk to me that way! You don’t get to just dump something like this on me and pretend it’s nothing!”
Joyce Summers, 2×22 Becoming
Buffy is entirely right in this situation. She doesn’t have time to explain further. She has an apocalypse to stop and, unlike the police and Joyce, she actually knows what she’s doing. She calls out the obvious wilful ignorance that Joyce has employed every time she washed blood out of Buffy’s clothes. Any sympathy that we might have for Joyce having to deal with the sudden revelation of this entire new reality dissipates with her blunt refusal to accept that reality. She asks Buffy to explain further, and then point-blank rejects her explanation. She demands that Buffy “stops”; she tells her that she is insane. She attempts to physically restrain her, and then threatens to kick Buffy out of the house.
“No! I am tired of ‘I don’t have time’ or-or ‘you wouldn’t understand.’ I am your mother, and you will make time to explain yourself.”
Joyce Summers and Buffy Summers, 2×22 Becoming
“I told you. I’m a Vampire Slayer.”
“Well, I just don’t accept that!”
This is no exaggeration of reality. According to a 2012 study[1], there are 640,000 homeless LGBT children in the US alone. 46% of those ran away because their family rejected their identity. 43% were forced out by parents. 32% faced physical, emotional or sexual abuse. This was the reality of queerness just a decade ago – imagine what it was like in 1998? The fact that the next episode – Anne – deals so directly with teen homelessness, only cements this association. This is the tangible threat that homophobia poses towards children, and Joyce here is aligning herself with that threat.
Buffy is not literally coming out as gay here. We will absolutely discuss Buffy’s sexuality more in season three, but here, she is not literally being presented as a queer character here, and Joyce is not literally kicking her out for being gay. But the line between metaphor and reality is razor-thin. This scene at points steps over that line – for comedy, sure, but once you’ve blurred that line, you can’t un-blur it. Even ignoring the queer lens – a parent kicking a child out their house is an abusive act, full stop. And the older I get, the more the pure cruelty of this act becomes apparent.
A defence of Joyce here would be based around the fact that, technically, she doesn’t directly demand that Buffy leave. She issues a threat, and to be fair to her, I do think she meant it idly. But it is entirely reasonable and to be expected that Buffy does not hear it as idle, and so follows it as an instruction. If Joyce did not mean it, then as the adult in this situation, it is entirely on her to clarify herself.
What Joyce does here is give Buffy a choice. Buffy makes it, and walks out of the house of her own free will. But it is absolutely not a good choice. Her choice is to either walk out and therefore not come back, or stay and risk letting the entire world end. A real-world parallel might be an intolerant parent telling their queer child that they have to either stay closeted or leave the house. There’s a choice there too, but a fundamentally unfair one that should never be issued. “You don’t have a good choice but you have a choice” works the other way around too.
Growing up queer and keeping it a secret is an profoundly isolating experience. Being a slayer is even more so. In her speech to Joyce, Buffy gets to the core of that feeling. Slayerhood doesn’t just work as a queer metaphor because of jokes about Slayer Pride Parades, it works because it evokes that same feeling of loneliness.
“No, it doesn’t stop! It never stops! Do you think I chose to be like this? Do you have any idea how lonely it is, how dangerous? I would love to be upstairs watching TV or gossiping about boys or… God, even studying! But I have to save the world… again.”
Buffy Summers, 2×22 Becoming
As the Slayer, Buffy is always alone, but this episode is all about isolating her further; stripping away every comfort she has, every asset, every accoutrement of her life. She is rejected by her family and kicked out of her house. She is expelled from school – her connection to a “normal life” – and as a wanted criminal is effectively expelled from society itself. Her friends are killed, hospitalised, and kidnapped – and the one who isn’t betrays her with a lie. She briefly gains an ally in Spike (at that point “all [she’s] got” as he says), but in the end he abandons her too. She loses everything; she’s all she’s got.
“In the end, you’re always by yourself. You’re all you’ve got. That’s the point.”
Whistler, 2×22 Becoming
If season one was all about Buffy accepting her destiny as the Slayer, then season two is about finding out who she is beyond that. By boiling Buffy down to her essence, the show can challenge her at her core, and force her to make the most difficult choices – not just as The Slayer, but as Buffy Summers.
Remember back in Some Assembly Required, when I told you to put a pin in a certain important line?
“You can’t just give and take lives like that. It’s not your job.”
Buffy Summers, 2×02 Some Assembly Required
And then, after What’s My Line?, we took another look at that pin:
“You talk about slaying like it’s a job. It’s not. It’s who you are.”
Kendra Young, 2×10 What’s My Line?
It’s time to take out that pin for good. This is the core of Buffy’s journey, and a major part of her arc over the entire show. She is learning that The Slayer is not just a job that she is compelled to work at – it’s an intrinsic part of who she is. Buffy does, demonstrably, have the power to give and take lives. She gets to/has to make these decisions. But it’s not because of her job, because being The Slayer isn’t a job. It’s who she is. We are taking away everything else and giving her a terrible choice so we can find out what decision she will make, and that decision is what defines who she is. Buffy’s identity is created not by circumstances, but how she reacts to those circumstances.
“So what are we, helpless? Puppets? No. The big moments are gonna come. You can’t help that. It’s what you do afterwards that counts. That’s when you find out who you are.”
Whistler, 2×22 Becoming
This is where the big tragedy of season two comes to its climax. Everything that has been built up over the season – Buffy’s role as the Slayer, her power over life and death, her desperate clutching to normality, her grand gothic love story with Angel – it all comes to a head, when Buffy lifts up her sword. Just like at the start of the episode, she is ready to kill him. She is ready to swing the sword, ready to pass the sentence, ready to complete her arc and Become.
And the knife twists.
I don’t think my words could do any justice to the raw emotion of this scene, so I’m not going to try. We all know how it goes. Angel’s eyes flash with golden light. He becomes himself again. Buffy cries. We cry. We hear Cristophe Beck’s first haunting notes of Close Your Eyes. It’s too late. Buffy sees the portal open. She realises what she has to do. She tells Angel to close his eyes. She kisses him. And then she kills him.
This scene is cruelty as an art form. It rips away any catharsis we might achieve from seeing Buffy take down the Big Bad. Buffy undergoes mental torture and abuse from Angelus, and it doesn’t matter, because it’s not Angelus she has to kill. It’s the man she loves, who doesn’t even remember what he has done. She gets what she wanted – Angel back – and it only makes things harder. There is no pleasure, no catharsis. There’s just the choice.
“I can deal. I got nothing left to lose.”
Whistler, 2×22 Becoming
“Wrong, kid. You got one more thing.”
Whistler told Buffy, earlier in the episode, that she had one thing left to lose. I’ve seen different interpretations of what this “one thing” is, but the episode actually tells us the answer. It’s not her normal life, or her friends – she’s already lost them. It’s not Spike – he was only ever going to be a temporary ally for her. It’s not Angel, because at that point she didn’t actually have him. There was only one thing that Buffy actually had.
“Now that’s everything, huh? No weapons… No friends… No hope. Take all that away… and what’s left?”
Angel and Buffy Summers, 2×22 Becoming
“Me.”
This is the last thing. Everything has been taken away from Buffy, and in that moment, she uses her isolation as a source of strength. She is reduced to only Me, stripped down to the core of her being, and she finds that core is made of steel. So she finds a new strength within. She is able to fight back, defeat Angelus, bring him to his knees, and is ready deal the killing blow – but she doesn’t get to. The real reason the show took everything away wasn’t to get her to this point of strength. It was to take this away from her too.
Buffy is faced with a choice, and it’s not a good choice. She can kill the man she loves in cold blood, or she can condemn the world to hell. It doesn’t take a philosopher to suggest that killing one to save six billion is pretty comfortably the morally whiter option. But that doesn’t negate the intense emotional strain that simply making this choice, and taking this action, puts on Buffy. And because she has been stripped down to only Me, she knows that it is her who is responsible for the decision. Not anyone else, not The Slayer, but Buffy Summers. Only when you lose everything can you find out who you really are, and she finds out.
She discovers that Buffy Summers is someone who will kill in cold blood, will murder someone she loves. She takes full ownership of that – because of course she does. She’s Buffy Summers, and for better or worse she will take responsibility for everything she can take responsibility for. This goes back to Lie To Me, and her horror, when she delivers those iconic lines, at how Ford is eschewing all responsibility for the people around him. How he leverages his unjust situation to ignore the consequences of his actions. Buffy does not allow herself to do that, ever. She takes full responsibility for her choice here. The fact that it was clearly the right thing to do doesn’t change the fact of her actions. She, Buffy Summers, killed a man.
And it breaks her. You can see the horror of this realisation in her eyes, as she simultaneously knows that she made the right choice, and that she did something she never wanted to do. She never wanted to make these choices. She never wanted to be someone who would kill something she loves. But that’s who she is. Her name is all she has left, and it was Buffy Summers who made this choice.
So she loses it. She makes the choice to lose it. She runs away from home, she abandons all hope of getting back into school or clearing her name of murder. She leaves all her friends without a goodbye. She leaves Sunnydale. By abandoning all that Buffy Summers had, she effectively destroys Buffy Summers. The last thing she had left to lose was herself.
This is another example of what we talked about at the end of season one – the threat of narrative collapse. Something happening in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, after which there can be no more episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. By leaving the Scooby Gang, Sunnydale, the Hellmouth, her destiny, and even her name behind, Buffy invites this narrative collapse. The show requires these elements to exist. As long as these parts of Buffy’s life are absent, no more Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes can occur.
More than that, it is a metaphorical suicide. She abandons her name, and so Buffy no longer exists; she’s dead. As we’ll see again, suicide is Buffy’s default reaction in this kind of situation. When she believes herself responsible for killing someone, she will be driven to kill herself, either metaphorically (here and in Dead Things) or literally (Graduation Day, The Gift). Buffy is the show, and so if she is destroying Buffy, then she is also destroying Buffy. She is ending herself.
This is why it is so important that the next episode – Anne – opens with her fully having abandoned her identity. Buffy is dead and destroyed, and only Anne remains. Whistler’s warning about losing herself was not solely metaphorical – she fully loses her name and with it her identity. She will only be able to become herself again when she reclaims her name, and the name of the show.
That’s next season though. For now, the show has come to an end. Every season finale (other than Four and Six) was written as a possible series finales also, but the timeline in which this was the series finale is probably the saddest. Buffy gets on a bus, and leaves Sunnydale, driving off into the unknown distance. Buffy metaphorically dies. We saw Buffy’s origin story in this episode, and here, we see an end to her story too. It’s over, and the end was not cathartic or pleasant – it was a harrowing, cruel climax to a harrowing, cruel journey, and it has destroyed everything that Buffy held dear. She has nothing; not even herself.
This is the end of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
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Thank you for reading. I hope you all enjoyed Season Two. I will be taking a break for a couple of months before we start with Three. You can see what else I’m up to at herinsectreflection on Tumblr. If you have been reading along for a while, then thanks for your support, and if you’ve only just started then please, enjoy the backlog.
Either way, please consider supporting me on Ko-Fi!
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Insect Reflection 
Wonderfully written. I’m struck by the contrasts between Angel and Buffy with respect to Choice: Angel/Angelus/Liam has Choice taken from him, and Buffy has Choice forced upon her, and they both suffer for it. I suppose that’s also in the vein of the pattern of BtVS playing with gender (especially as to Buffy and Angel) that we saw in I Only Have Eyes For You’s James and Grace, as you discussed: Angel exhibiting what one might call “feminine” passivity, and Buffy exhibiting “masculine” agency.
I can’t untangle this in my mind quite as well as you can, I think, but I wanted to say something about it. (And also to say that these essays are great. I’m enjoying your S3 writeups already, and I can’t wait to dig deeper into Faith, especially.)
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