Defensiveness and Weird Mixed Signals (Revelations)

The seventh episode in any season is always an important milestone, for while the first third of the season clears up the debris of the previous and sets up the various cogs of plot that will be needed going forward, Episode Sevens are notable for not only being generally very good, but for stretching out themes; telling us what the season is going to be About. One of Season Three’s most prevalent themes is betrayal. Most obviously Faith’s (Consequences), less obviously Giles’ (Helpless), Xander and Willow’s (Lovers Walk), not actually Angel’s (Enemies). Revelations has several big ones, but the first, and that which kicks off the episode’s drama, is actually Buffy’s.

I get why the Scoobies are mad in this episode. For all the discussion we have had about the Scoobies’ arguable mistreatment of Buffy and the dismissive regard the show has towards her perspective post-killing-Angel/post-getting-kicked-out-of-her-house, I think it’s fair to say that Buffy’s concealment of Angel’s return is not a great move on her part. She lies to her friends – and it is a lie, not a mere failure to tell the truth. Note that a major plot point in Band Candy is her lying to both Joyce and Giles about her whereabouts when she is with Angel. Buffy tells a lie, and it does endanger her friends.

Buffy’s justifications for keeping this secret are flimsy. She claims that she planned to tell the gang when she knew why he was back, but she has made no effort to find out this information since Beauty and the Beasts. She claims that their relationship is no longer romantic, but in this episode she is unable to stop herself from kissing him. Her and Angel cannot contain their feelings. Both Oz and Spike next episode make this bluntly clear; they’re not just friends, and any claim that that’s all they are is demonstrably preposterous. The existence of Xander’s Lie does lend greater justification to Buffy’s fears that her friends would want to see Angel dead, but to focus entirely on “kick his ass” would be to ignore that giving up on curing Angel and focusing on kicking his ass was exactly what Buffy herself was doing at that point in Becoming.

This much is true: Angel’s presence in Sunnydale is a potential danger to everyone else in Sunnydale. Angel himself would be the first person to agree. His demonic urges are kept only in check by his soul, and that in itself is not a guarantee. Even if Buffy and Angel were able to contain their passions, the series shows us a deluge of shamans, mystics, dream sequences, empathogenic drugs, and even future love interests that are capable of triggering another bout of soullessness. Neither myself nor the show is saying that Angel should not live, but both of us would agree that his existence is in itself a risk.

Cordelia is tactlessly correct when she points out that this risk mainly endangers Buffy’s loved ones. Though Angel’s ultimate goal last season was the mental torture and ultimate destruction of Buffy, his method of achieving that mainly consisted of killing her friends. Willow, Cordelia and Xander all had their lives directly threatened by him. Giles suffered agonising torture at his hands. This would be enough to justify their fear even without saying Jenny Calendar’s name. It does not undermine the intense trauma that Buffy underwent in Season Two to say that Willow, Xander, Cordelia and Giles also underwent serious trauma. Because of their experiences in the same season, they have valid reasons to distrust Angel, and to be understandably upset at the lies that Buffy has told them.

You know who doesn’t really have a good reason to be upset? Faith.

This is a critical episode in Faith’s journey, and the evolution of Buffy and Faith’s relationship. They begin this episode at the peak of their closeness – at ease in their socialising, harmonious in their slaying, throwing arms around each other, and spending so much time together that Buffy thinks it’s reasonable to jokingly suggest that they might be dating. They end this episode on opposite sides of a door, covered in each others’ bruises, both wanting to reach out but unable to, with their relationship permanently scarred. Their relationship is the central tragedy of Season Three, just as Buffy and Angel’s was to Season Two, and this episode contains it in miniature. They have an incredibly close, mutually beneficial relationship that is destroyed by chance and their own pre-existing traumas. This is the dry run for Faith’s fall, and it’s essential for it that she loses her trust towards Buffy in this episode.

“You know, I never lied.”

Run by Four Star Mary, sung in the Bronze as the opening line of Revelations

This episode makes clear its interest in lies and broken trust right from its opening, and this theme continues throughout the episode – tying together the various threads of Faith’s romantic cynicism, Buffy’s concealment of Angelus, Willow and Xander’s cheating, Gwendolyn Post’s betrayal, and finally the damage done to Buffy and Faith’s relationship. Recognising this theme should not be a revelation to anyone who has seen the episode. What might go unnoticed however is this episode’s parallels to last season’s seventh episode, which was also deeply interested in lies. (That’s why they called it Lie To Me.)

In Lie To Me, Buffy’s trust in Angel is damaged when he keeps the return of Drusilla – a vampiric former paramour who he also murdered – a secret from her. This is paralleled with Ford also betraying her trust, and her being forced to kill him as she and Giles stand over a grave is purposeful foreshadowing for the events of Passion and Becoming. In Revelations, the same events repeat but the roles are shifted around. Faith’s trust in Buffy is damaged when she keeps the return of Angel – a vampiric former paramour who she also murdered – a secret from her. This is paralleled with Gwendolyn Post also breaking her trust, and her crashing through a window as she fights Buffy on behalf of an evil authority figure is purposeful foreshadowing for the events of Graduation Day. The episode even ends with Buffy standing forlornly over Faith, as she lies on a bed. 

Getting Buffy and Faith to this final scene is the entire point of the episode, and yet the lie central to it – the “revelation” that the episode is named for has, at first glance, nothing to do with Faith. She was not there in Season Two. She has no lingering trauma from Angel’s actions. He didn’t try to kill her before, and given that their fight in the mansion lasts less than a minute, it’s clear she wouldn’t be in real danger if he did. Buffy tells her early in this episode that Angel isn’t really any of her business, and she’s entirely correct. Angel has nothing to do with her, and there is no reason why Buffy’s lie should, on paper, affect her at all. 

Yet the episode’s drama hinges on the presumption that it does. This is true on a structural level – the episode is centred around this Lie and its Revelation, and it climaxes with how this Lie has affected Buffy and Faith’s relationship – and it’s also true in-universe. “I know I’ve kept secrets” are the words that Buffy says, and she frames it as an admittance that she should have told Faith – that she owed her the truth and knows she has hurt her by keeping Angel secret. This hurt remains well after this episode – as their relationship is falling apart in Consequences, Faith specifically cites Buffy’s protection of Angel, indicating how much this betrayal still remains fresh in Faith’s mind. 

The show didn’t have to do this. The final scene could have focused on Xander apologising to Buffy, or Buffy making amends to Giles, or any other character who had actual ties to the Angel storyline of Season Two, yet it doesn’t. The “Buffy keeping Angel a secret” subplot climaxes and is concluded with scenes between Buffy and Faith. It’s their relationship that suffers the greatest fallout. Buffy, Faith, and the show itself all seem to think it’s a Big Deal that Buffy kept Angel a secret from Faith, yet it is maddeningly unwilling to explain why it should matter much at all.

Here, I am going to state plainly something that I have danced around in these essays so far, but will not come as a shock to anyone who has followed me from other platforms. This story of Buffy and Faith is, at its core, a love story. It’s a romance. On a subtextual level, this is indisputable fact – the “lesbian subtext” has been intentionally inserted and is part of the story being told. We’ve already seen the “coming out” metaphor being invoked as part of the Slayer journey, the pair going to Homecoming together, the “really, we’re just good friends” line in this episode – all this before Bad Girls really takes the subtext to the next level.

Homosexuality and erotic tension are essential ingredients in this arc. This is a story about lesbianism, as much as Season Two is a story about abusive exes and Season Six is a story about drug addiction. These elements may not be literally present in the text, but the text is still undeniably about these things, and it would be an act of intentional exclusion to analyse the text without mentioning them. This should not be considered controversial, or “shipping goggles” – it’s simply an acceptance of the subtextual language that the show is obviously using.

More up to interpretation is the exact nature of Buffy and Faith’s feelings towards each other within the literal events of the show. There is space to interpret this relationship as a mutually platonic friendship/rivalry, a one-sided crush, or mutually reciprocated romantic love. There is space for all these interpretations because the show intentionally cultivates it. They create ambiguity, and ambiguity invites multiple legitimate readings. The framing of Buffy and Faith as “just good friends” is one way this ambiguity is cultivated, when the same phrase is used by both Willow/Xander and Buffy/Angel, as two pairs of people who are trying to control their attraction to each other, and clearly lying when they claim to be “just friends”. Buffy ends this episode unclear about her own relationship with Angel, and whether or not he is her “boyfriend”. Her relationship with Faith can be characterised with similar vagueries, and this reading is enhanced by Spike’s ‘you’re not friends’ speech next episode, which when you look at the actual words more accurately predicts the direction of Buffy and Faith’s relationship than it does Buffy and Angel’s.

“I wouldn’t use the word ‘dating’, but I am going out with somebody. Tonight, as a matter of fact. […] Really, we’re just good friends.”

Buffy Summers, about Faith, 3×07 Revelations

“We’re, we’re friends. That’s all either of us wants. Nothing’s gonna happen.”

Buffy Summers, about Angel, 3×08 Lovers Walk

“We’re friends. Old, old friends. And maybe we’ve had one or two indiscretions, but that’s all past. Look. We’re just very good friends who like to hang out, and can I kiss your earlobe?”

Xander Harris, to Willow, 3×08 Lovers Walk

“You’re not friends. You’ll never be friends. You’ll be in love till it kills you both. You’ll fight, and you’ll shag, and you’ll hate each other till it makes you quiver, but you’ll never be friends.”

Spike, 3×08 Lovers Walk

However, by far the most clear invitation to interpretation comes in the final scene. Just as Buffy is about to leave, Faith calls out to her, and Buffy turns around. Faith trails off with “Nothing.” Buffy leaves in silence. And that is it. We are never told, or even given a suggestion of what Faith was about to say here, but it was clearly something. This moment is framed as pivotal. It’s a glimmer of hope, a last gasp chance to save their relationship, but the moment is missed because Faith is unable to say something that she clearly wants to say. It is, canonically, a missed confession. She wants to confess something to Buffy that might save their relationship. This confession being an admittance of romantic feelings is a perfectly valid interpretation of a scene that is intentionally left up to interpretation.

I will not say what I think Faith was about to say here, nor will I suggest that there is any correct theory of what it might have been. My fascination with this relationship largely comes from the ambiguities that exist within it, and how much is clearly being left unsaid. This is clearly a romance – romantic tropes are being employed and the subtext is an integral part of the story. There was clearly space within their relationship that a romance could have developed between them. Yet at the same time, it is so obviously, clearly not a romance, because of course it’s not. There was not a chance in hell that Buffy The Vampire Slayer could have had an explicitly queer lead in 1998 and been renewed for another season. This was never going to happen. No romance could ever have blossomed between Buffy and Faith on-screen. The duelling forces of romance being clearly present in the narrative and yet also clearly removed from it creates a tension that dovetails perfectly with the in-universe emotions of the characters who clearly want to say something but can’t, as well as resonating with the wider queer experience of clearly being queer while having that queerness censored and hidden by a heteronormative society. 

I want to take a moment to talk about Xander, who has some interesting things going on. A lot of criticism is levelled at the way he reacts to Buffy hiding Angel – more judgmental than concerned, and as he often is, laced with an undercurrent of authorial misogyny. However, I think there is nuance to be had. Xander’s anger at Buffy’s “intervention” is not the endpoint of his arc, but a beginning that progresses through this episode (which ends with Xander almost-apologising and telling Buffy that he trusts her), and through Amends, in which he actively chooses to help Angel. We are supposed to view his behaviour as wrong here – that’s why he has to make amends in Amends. It is especially interesting to me that after he and Faith find Giles knocked out, he argues that Angel couldn’t have been responsible, and tries to stop Faith going ahead with the “kill Angel” plan. He still accuses Angel of hurting Giles when Buffy asks him what happens later, but also gives her a fair tip on how to save him. His words are vicious, but more so than his actions. 

We should consider how much of his anger here is projection. He is furious at Buffy for keeping romantic trysts that she shouldn’t be having a secret, when he is also keeping his own romantic trysts that he shouldn’t be having with Willow a secret. This is pretty naked hypocrisy, and that’s the point. He is the opposite of Willow, whose feelings of guilt encourage her to forgive Buffy entirely – in keeping with her tendencies to rationalise away any morally ambiguous actions she undertakes. His feelings of guilt manifest in blaming Buffy entirely – in keeping with his tendencies towards self-deprecation and general mistrust in humanity. It’s not a flattering look, but it is an interesting character note.

Xander’s romantic jealousy is noted as an obvious motivator for him wanting to kill Angel. I don’t think that’s his entire motivation. His feelings for Buffy have been waning for a while and aren’t really brought up again in a substantive way, and his argument that “lot’s of dead people constitutes a reason” is not incorrect. However, this element is obviously involved. The show does not want us to ignore it, and we shouldn’t – jealousy is colouring his actions. What’s interesting is that while he does have other reasons outside pure jealousy to want Angel dead, his partner in the Kill Angel plot does not. Faith did not experience Angel’s violence, or have any attachment to the people he killed. And yet, after hearing that Buffy kept him secret, she – not Xander – immediately suggests murder. She ends up ignoring his calls for caution and going off alone. She is more eager to kill Angel than Xander is, despite apparently lacking any of his motivations. The logical conclusion, therefore, is that she must not lack all of them.

“You’re confused, Twinkie. Let me clear you up. Vampire. Slayer. Dead vampire.”

Faith Lehane, 3×07 Revelations

“Right. This is all nobility. This has nothing to do with jealousy.”

Buffy Summers, 3×07 Revelations

While Faith’s attempt to boil her own motivations down to basic slayer-vs-vampire dynamics fits with her general tendency to simplify her worldview as much as possible (“When are you gonna get this, B? Life for a Slayer is very simple.” – 3×14 Bad Girls), it’s actually contradictory to her characterisation elsewhere. She does not have a blanket distaste for demons – we saw in Faith Hope and Trick that she was immediately understanding of Oz, and we will see later how she devotes herself to a half-demon’s mission to become a full demon. And while her eagerness to prove herself to Post is a major factor in her deciding to fight Buffy in the mansion (and is important groundwork for her relationship with The Mayor), it doesn’t explain why she was so eager to kill Angel earlier in the episode. She is deathly angry at Angel’s presence, and heartbroken at Buffy’s secrecy around him, for no reason that makes complete sense. There is an unexplained gap in Faith’s motivations, and it’s a gap that romantic jealousy happens to fill perfectly.

For these reasons and many more, it is common for even casual fans to interpret Faith as having romantic interest in Buffy. There’s obvious space in the show to allow that reading, and so many elements that encourage it. Buffy’s own feelings towards Faith are less obviously suggestive of romance, and it’s less common to interpret her as having feelings for Faith. It is true that there is less evidence here, though I still do read Buffy as having some level of attraction and romantic feelings towards Faith. Again, we return to the final scene, and how Buffy apologises for keeping Angel a secret, and seems to understand that it has specifically hurt Faith, even though that secret should not.

It’s worth questioning why Buffy did keep this secret from Faith. This is another interesting way in which the Buffy/Scoobies split does not map on to the Buffy/Faith split. Buffy has specific motivations for keeping Angel a secret from the Scoobies – guilt over what Angel did to Giles, fear for Angel’s safety stemming from Xander’s Lie. These motivations do not apply to Faith. Buffy has one person in her life who does not have pre-existing opinions about Angel, and yet when the topic of Angel is raised, Buffy is defensive, and resistant to confide in Faith. Yes, Buffy is a secretive person in general, but there is something interesting in how she seems to not want her Angel-world to interact with her Faith-world, as though there is something about those two relationships that she instinctively does not want to confront. 

It’s interesting that in End of Days, Buffy accuses Faith of “defensiveness, and weird mixed signals”, because while Faith is absolutely guilty of both those things, around the time of Revelations it’s actually Buffy who is more obviously exhibiting them. Faith invites Buffy to talk about Angel, and it’s Buffy who gets defensive about that topic. Faith has, until this point, been consistently open about liking Buffy and wanting to spend time with her, and it’s Buffy who’s giving mixed signals. She is apparently close enough with Faith to joke about dating her, but not close enough to confide in. She accepts Faith’s invitation to Homecoming, and then doesn’t show up. She flirts with Faith, while she is secretly meeting up with her ex-boyfriend. All of this is understandable, but from Faith’s point of view, they sure as hell would look like mixed signals.

“When your last steady killed half the class, and then your rebound guy sends you a dump-o-gram? It makes a girl shy.”

Cordelia Chase, 3×07 Revelations

The reason that Buffy would be eager to repress her feelings for Faith – beyond the general fear and compulsory heterosexuality that affects any young queer person – is spelled out in the opening scene (the scene in which the idea of Buffy dating Faith is explicitly touted, no less). Buffy has lingering trauma from her relationship with Angel, and it affects all her romantic entanglements in the future. Here, we are already seeing it affect her potential romance with Faith. She fears that giving into her desires with any lover will destroy them in the same way that she “caused” Angel to turn evil. The tragedy comes in how this understandable reticence is in itself a trap, and that Faith’s eventual turn to evil comes specifically because Buffy won’t give in to her desires with her. 

Ultimately, the reason I interpret Faith as having feelings for Buffy is that I genuinely think it’s the most logical conclusion you can draw from her actions. The reason I interpret Buffy as having feelings for Faith is because it makes the story better. Their story, centering as it does around a protagonist confronting her shadow self, is about temptation, and the subtextual language used makes it a story about lesbian temptation. If we interpret Faith as desiring Buffy but Buffy not desiring Faith, then it becomes a tired, low-key homophobic story about a Good Straight girl resisting the temptations of a Bad Seductive Lesbian. If we interpret Buffy as desiring her back, then it becomes a tragic story of two women dealing with their complicated love for each other. The latter is a more thematically appropriate, and frankly, more interesting story. 

There is a tendency sometimes to view media interpretations as natural phenomena – as things that appear immaculately within viewers, without any conscious thought. I don’t believe that is the case. We might not choose the emotions we feel when consuming a piece of media, but as viewers we are capable of taking on new viewpoints, and consciously comparing them against the text to draw our own conclusions. All interpretations are consciously constructed – which means, they are a choice. The nature of Buffy and Faith’s relationship is left intentionally ambiguous, and though I see it as a romance, you are under no obligation to follow my interpretation. Just as long as we understand that is a choice you have made. It is as much a choice to not see this as a romance, as it is a choice to see it as a romance.

This is really what the Insect Reflection is all about. This project does not exist to recite only the most obvious and uncontroversial interpretations of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This is a project that attempted to link Go Fish to themes of love in 12th century Islamic poetry – we’re not about being correct here, we’re about being interesting. Viewing Buffy/Faith as a romance is invited by the subtextual language, and is perfectly valid given the literal events we see on show. But most importantly, it’s simply the most interesting version of this story, and given the opportunity, I’m not sure why anyone would not choose the most interesting version of a story they could. 

Going forward from here, I will be taking “Buffy/Faith is a romance story” as a base assumption, and it will inform all my future interpretations. That’s why I’m spending so many words in this essay establishing the legitimacy of this reading. It is not an endpoint within itself, but a foundation on which a truly fascinating vision of the rest of the season can be built. You can call it shipping goggles or you can call it queer theory – it doesn’t matter. This is the lens we will use, and I genuinely think it’s the most valuable tool we have in terms of what it brings to the story as a whole.

We are already gaining the benefits of this lens from this episode alone. We have tracked parallels between Buffy/Angel and Buffy/Faith in episodes so far, and this episode continues this trend. Buffy and Faith engaging in “synchronised slaying” is more interesting as a sexual metaphor when you consider how later in the episode, Buffy and Angel engage in synchronised Tai Chi that is obviously meant to evoke sexual imagery. The “good friends” runner that ties the Willow/Xander and Buffy/Angel plots together is enhanced by including Faith as part of these love triangles and considering what it highlights about the way Buffy processes (or rather, refuses to process) her romantic desires. Lie To Me is a fascinating counterpart to this episode in how each of them tackle the theme of honesty, and comparisons are only made stronger by seeing Buffy and Faith as undergoing the same arc that Buffy and Angel did before.

Moreover, it ties the disparate functions of Faith’s character together in a way that no other aspect of her characterisation fully does. For example, in this episode as well as Beauty and the Beasts, Faith has been used to verbalise Buffy’s own romantic cynicism, as she talks passionately about how men can’t be trusted and Buffy should avoid them. In Homecoming and especially Bad Girls, Faith is used to verbalise Buffy’s sexual desire, talking passionately about how Buffy should have sex. These are two symbolic functions that Faith fills within the narrative as Buffy’s shadow self, expressing emotions that Buffy must accept but also not allow to control her. However, they are contradictory within themself – under a strictly heterosexual lens, how can Buffy both engage in casual sex and also avoid men? The only way to square this circle is to move outside the bounds of heterosexuality. Faith’s words have far greater consistency under the interpretation that she is not encouraging casual sex with men – she is encouraging Buffy to avoid men, and have casual sex with her. 

Most importantly of all, this interpretation makes this episode, within itself, a stronger piece of television. Yet again, we must return to the final scene, the denouement of this story. Denouements are vital in tying together all the story’s disparate threads, and cohering them into one conclusive statement. They are the story’s final word, and the part of the episode most likely to stick in a viewer’s head once the credits roll. This episode has many threads, all of which relate to trust and dishonesty – Buffy hiding Angel, Willow and Xander’s affairs, Gwendolyn Post’s betrayal – and chooses to tie them together with a scene between Buffy and Faith. But these threads do not actually relate to each other within the fiction and it does not make sense for these two characters to talk about them interchangeably in the way that they do. The episode needs to end with Faith feeling betrayed for the season’s arc to work, but the only person who actually betrayed Faith is a minor villain who she only shared one meaningful scene with, and who doesn’t have anything to do with Buffy’s lie. This scene does not conclude the main subplot of the season’s first quarter, and it does not set up Faith’s arc in a way that means much to the audience.

Unless you see it as a love story. If you do, then the scene works quite wonderfully. It brings everything the show wants to talk about into sharper focus. Framing this not simply as a falling apart of a friendship, but as a quarrel between lovers, justifies putting the emotional focus on Buffy and Faith. If Buffy and Faith’s story is a love story, then this is a better episode of television. That’s why I think it is a love story – in the sense that love is just outside the story, visible at its edges but unable to penetrate.

It is a tragedy of the could-have-been. It’s about the words unsaid, and the things unacknowledged. In a story about honesty, it is an essential part of the story that the story is never allowed to be honest about. We cannot call what Buffy and Faith share love inside the story, because then the show will be cancelled – the story will cease to exist. It is its own form of self-assured destruction. It is a love that cannot ever be consummated – just like Buffy and Angel, except with the power to reach outside the narrative and destroy the show itself. The show cannot and will not ever be honest with us. All it can do is call out to us, and when we turn to look, say nothing at all, and all we can do is decide for ourselves exactly what has been left unsaid.

* * *

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this piece, please consider supporting me on Ko-Fi!

* * *

Thank you to juanabaloo on Tumblr for her help proof-reading this essay.