Lessons

by Jerry

'Lessons', the seventh season opener written by Joss Whedon, gets the ball rolling on a new season, in the process setting up quite a few of the themes we should be keeping an eye on in the weeks to come.

We open in Istanbul, with a young, athletic, possibly slayer-age woman being chased by mysterious hooded figures. She makes a good effort at escape, but is ultimately dragged down and apparently killed. We'll see no more about this in the episode, but it's the first shot of the season, so I have to think it's important. Perhaps the hooded figures are part of the Council. Or maybe they're Knights of Byzantium. That's near Istanbul, isn't it? We last saw the Council, and first saw the Knights, in season five's 'Checkpoint', an episode that was all about wanting, having, and using power. Which I mention because...

..."It's about power", Buffy says. "Who's got it, who knows how to use it." She's in the graveyard, teaching Dawn the ins and outs of Slaying. "The stake is not the power", Mr Miyagi!Buffy informs her, as they watch a none-too-menacing vampire struggling to escape his grave. He seems polite and Clem-like, and needs Buffy's help (his foot was caught on a root). But once above ground, he shows his menacing colors. Buffy steers him to Dawn, who fights well, given her inexperience and lack of slayer powers. But she misses the heart with her stake (something that seems like it would happen more often), and Buffy has to come to her rescue. We get some sisterly banter (It's like Gilmore Girls, but with more beheadings!), and foreboding talk about what's coming…

…and so we're off to a ribbon cutting, heralding the return of Sunnydale High. "On it's original site!", the new principal proudly announces.

From there, we're into the credits, about which I'd just like to note that seeing Emma Caulfield at her roller-skating, shorts-wearing best 22 times this season is not something I'm dreading.

The credits are over, and Giles is on a horse. I can't say I ever expected to see that - maybe with Firefly and all, Joss got a good deal on horses. Once he's done looking all rugged and manly on his horse, Giles is off to talk to Willow. Willow's looking not-so-happy (as you might expect), but more like Willow than she's been in a while. She manifests a flower from the ground , so we know right off the bat that she's still got the magic, and Giles identifies it as being from Paraguay (he'd win fictional character Jeopardy, as long as that guy from 'John Doe' wasn't allowed to play). We get some George Lucas-style talk about the connectedness of all life and the roots of the earth. And more interestingly, Willow notes that the coven, who've been helping her, fear her power and she wishes they would just take it away. Giles comments that Willow's power is neither a hobby (as it was in earlier years) nor an addiction (the widely unpopular metaphor employed last season). I think it's a bit irresponsible to use the addiction metaphor and then discard it (you don't stop having an addiction), but I'm pleased to be rid of it, so I'll give Joss the benefit of the doubt. It would appear that Willow's situation is now more of a "great power comes with great responsibility" problem instead. So there's that power theme again. Willow reflects on the fact that she's killed people. "Do you want to be punished?", Giles asks (and not in a smutty fanfic sort of way). Willow says she just wants to be Willow, which is real progress, since she spent most of last year trying not to be Willow. "In the end,", he resonds, "we all are who we are. No matter how much we may appear to have changed." If that's a theme of the season, we've got several characters still in need of deciding who they are. But on a more immediate level...

... We cut to Nick Brendon getting out of a car. Actually, I suppose it's Xander, though he doesn't seem to be in his spiffy new suit. Apparently business has been good to him. As Buffy frets about Dawn's pending first day at the new High School, Xander unveils the blueprints he got from working on building it. He reveals that the new location of the Hellmouth is directly beneath the principal's office. They speculate if this means the new principal is evil, or merely doomed, the two possibilities longtime Sunnydale watchers have come to expect. Just before they depart for the school, Buffy gives Dawn a present. We don't see what it is, but Dawn believes it's a weapon.

Xander drops Buffy and Dawn at the school, where, as Buffy is warning Dawn to watch out for invisible people and hyena people and such, they meet the new principal, Robin Wood. Wood seems to mistake Buffy for Dawn's mother, much to her dismay, although it turns out he knows way too much about her to think that. Buffy finds him suspicious, and not without reason, I think.

Buffy wanders the halls as classes start, looking for evil, but initially finding only high school (if that's not evil enough). Then she goes into the bathroom to check herself for "Mom hair", where she finds an odd looking object on the counter. When she picks it up, a zombie-like apparition appears, accusing Buffy of failing to protect her when she was alive. Then another does as well. Then there's a commercial.

Dawn is introducing herself to the class ("I like Britney's early stuff, before she sold out, so mostly her finger-painting" - looks like no cameo by Ms Spears this year), when Buffy barges in to thoroughly embarrass her with her panicky behavior.

Anya (hair very dark, blouse really bad) and Halfrek are having coffee and listening to two very annoying and seemingly in love folk singers. Anya scoffs that the woman will soon be calling on her for vengeance, and Hallie scoffs back about Anya's newfound lameness on the vengeance front. She mentions how ferocious Anya was during their experiences in the Crimean War, which would appear to lay to rest the "Cecily became Halfrek" theory. But now Anya's heart isn't in it. "Waitress downtown, wished her husband was a frog, you made him French!" Tying the scene in to the rest of the episode, Hallie warns that "Something's rising. Something older than the old ones." It's apparently a "bad time to be a good guy". Looks like Anya has some choices on the horizon.

Buffy visits Xander on the job. They talk about what's going on. From there, we cut to Dawn in class. A classmate asks to borrow a pencil, and Dawn gives him one. Upon which he turns into a zombie ghost and tries to shove the pencil through her eye. Dawn freaks out, drawing the attention of the class. And so, we've successfully established how a sixteen-year-old who looks like Michelle Trachtenberg can wind up in the unpopular crowd, where Joss wants all his characters to be. Dawn flees to the bathroom, where things seem a bit mysterious and creepy. She meets another girl, Kit, who's cowering in a stall. They are suddenly surrounded by the zombie-things, and the floor gives way beneath them.

After the commercial, we return to Willow having something like a panic attack, and being comforted by Giles. She apparently can feel what's stirring all the way back in Sunnydale. She explains that the earth is all connected, but it's not all good. She believes the Hellmouth is going to open. And we pan away from Giles and Willow in one of Joss's cool visuals, as the door of Giles house takes the shape of the hole in the floor that Dawn just fell through.

We cut back and forth between Dawn and Kit in the basement and Buffy's next encounter with the slightly mysterious Principal Wood. Dawn and Kit run into Carlos, another student who's found his way into the basement (while smoking - so don't rule out him being evil). They are menaced by the zombie things, who seem pretty resentful about the whole being dead thing. Kit and Carlos have trouble believing what they are seeing is real, but Dawn points out that it's always real, echoing what Buffy taught her earlier. She remains pretty composed, and turns to the "weapon" Buffy gave her earlier - a cell phone.

Buffy is doing her best to get Dawn expelled from Hellmouth High, to the amusement of Principal Wood, when her phone rings (Sunnydale in the wireless age is going to take some getting used to). Making awkward excuses, she leaves the bemused Principal, finds her way to the bathroom, and leaps through the hole in the floor. She's confronted by one of the undead, who accuses her of failing to save him. Buffy's not really buying the guilt trip, a sign that her mental state is looking up this season. Another of the zombie-guys says he'd like Dawn to be his girlfriend. Buffy explains that she's the one who dates the undead, "and they were hotties." The zombies tell her they just want her to leave, but Buffy intuits that they really want to keep her from reaching a door they seem to be protecting. After some jumping and kicking, Buffy reaches it to find out what they were trying to keep her from, and she finds....

...Spike! Well, more or less Spike, with quite a new look (darker and longer and sort of a mess). Buffy asks him if he's real -I suspect she fears he's also among the dead (or in his case, more dead) that she couldn't save. Spike laughs crazily at the question. He cups her cheek rather tenderly, and tells her "duck". "There's a duck?" Buffy replies in confusion, before being whacked on the head by one of the zombies as Spike is a bit too crazily detached to do anything about it. Buffy fights them off and goes into the room with Spike. "Nobody ever comes in here," he says. "It's just the three of us." For the moment, we'll have to wonder about his sanity, or his math. His ramblings have hints of William in them ("I dropped my board in the water and the chalk all ran. I'll surely be caned."). Considering that Spike tried to rape her when last they met, Buffy is relatively concerned about him. She notices cuts all over his chest, and he tells her he tried to "cut it out" (His heart? His soul?).

Dawn calls again, interrupting the reunion to fill Buffy in on where they are. Buffy can't figure out what the creatures are, as they don't behave quite like either ghosts or zombies. But Spike knows. "Manifest spirits controlled by a talisman, raised to seek vengeance." Buffy tells Dawn to find a weapon, and prepares to head out.She asks Spike if he's coming, but he's clearly to crazy to be much help. Still befuddled, though seemingly a bit concerned about him, Buffy leaves to go find Dawn.

In the tunnels, Buffy thinks about what Spike said, and recalls seeing the talisman in the bathroom. She calls Xander to go after it. Dawn, meanwhile, is seeking her weapon. Carlos finds some bricks and Dawn stuffs them into Kit's back, making for a pretty good bludgeony weapon. The spirits surround them, explaining that the three of them were targeted because no one would miss them. "You spend all of your time trying to get out of high school, and now you'll never leave." This is an odd thing to tell kids who've only been in high school for a couple of hours, but it works with one of Joss's themes, that the horrors of growing up don't really have a graduation day.

The creatures attack and Dawn tries out her new weapon, with mixed success. Meanwhile, Xander finds the bathroom, where he tears himself away from admiring the prospective repair work to search for the talisman. Back in the basement, Buffy goes to work with the bag o' bricks. This is a better fight scene than we've seen in quite a while - perhaps there are some new stuntpeople, or maybe it's just a renewed emphasis on proactive Buffy. As the spirits are already dead, they can't really be killed, but she is able to hold her own until Xander can find and destroy the talisman. He does, and the spirits dissipate. Dawn asks Buffy how she knew about the talisman. "There's always a talisman", Buffy replies, apparently preferring to keep Spike's return to herself for the moment.

Back upstairs, Buffy gives Dawn, Kit, and Carlos a pep talk about how they can make it through high school okay if they stick together. There seems to be an intentional effort to set Kit and Carlos up as Dawn's Xander and Willow, so I think we'll be seeing them again. On the other hand, I think if they were going to be a huge part of the show, they would have found some more interesting actors.

As Buffy is fretting about being described by Carlos as the "coolest mom ever", Principal Wood approaches. Noting that Buffy seemed able to reach Kit and Carlos, who apparently have a long history of trouble, Wood offers Buffy a job as some sort of counselor. Buffy accepts, wanting to look out for Dawn and knowing the rest of the students need protecting even more. Or maybe she just wants to be near Spike J

As the show closes, we see Spike huddled in the basement, muttering to himself. He had a speech all prepared, he says, but he didn't get to give it, and now Buffy will never understand. "Of course she won't understand, Sparky" says a familiar voice, as Warren enters the scene, the first of a series of past villains to morph into one another in the scene. It's not clear exactly what's going on, but they all maintain their own distinct voices at the same time that they seem to be speaking as one entity. Warren, with his characteristic misogyny, mocks Buffy as "just a girl, full of sugar and spice and everything useless unless you're baking." Noting that he's more than that, more than flesh, he morphs into Glory, who displays her normal arrogance in noting that her/its name will be on everyone's lips when the time comes, if they still have lips. From there, she transforms into the coldly mechanical Adam, who notes that everything is going according to plan. Buffy's right where he/it wants her, and so is "Number Seventeen". (That would be Spike, who I guess doesn't seem so hostile anymore). Next is Mayor Wilkins, who taunts Spike for believing that getting a soul would fix his problems, noting that "A soul is slipperier than a greased weasel - why do you think I sold mine ?" It's probably worth noting that so far as we know, Spike never met the Mayor, so it's unlikely that this would all be a construct of Spike's mind. And while these first four characters all died in the vicinity of the Hellmouth, our next guest, Drusilla, is still at large. Dru tells Spike that he can never really be his own man, because he belongs in the dark with her (shades of what Spike was telling Buffy last year, and something Spike seems to find particularly painful). Next comes The Master, who announces where we are heading: "Right back to the beginning. Not the bang," (the scientific beginning), "not the Word," (the religious beginning),"the true beginning." And that everyone will learn something about themselves. For Spike, he'll learn "that you're a pathetic schmuck. If it hasn't sunk in already." He mocks Spike for trying to do what's right, just like Buffy. When it really isn't about right or wrong….

…"It's about power" says Buffy, the final morph in the scene.

So what are the lessons in "Lessons", and what do they tell us about where we are headed? The first, obviously, is about power, about having it, getting it, and using it wisely. The second is about identity - if we always are who we are, these characters need to figure out who that is. It's pretty clear that Spike, Anya, and Willow in particular among the characters will be wrestling with this question. And with the apparently slayer-related killing that opens the episode, and the mysterious presence that closes it, it seems like Buffy will be learning some new things about who and what she is as well.

-- Jerry

TOP