Selfless

by Jerry

In "Selfless", the very promising debut episode by Drew Goddard, Anya's conflicted nature as both a Scooby and a vengeance demon comes to a violent head, forcing her to confront her past and question the true nature of her identity.

At the Summers house, Dawn is helping Willow unpack as she finishes moving back in. She offers advice on Willow's impending return to school. Dawn is a big believer in conformity - "Wear what everyone else wears, say what everyone else says. People may say something to you that you don't understand - just nod and smile." While Willow's not exactly the paragon of self-confidence herself, she gently points out to Dawn that she has been to college before, and knows how to handle it. Buffy and Xander enter, talking about Anya. Xander explains that he hasn't talked to her since the Gnarl incident, and that was all extremely gross business. He wants to call her. Buffy warns him not to get his hopes up. Xander explains that he has no hopes, and considers their relationship done, but he's concerned about how sad she seems. Dawn suggests she should work harder at acting like everybody else, regardless of how she feels. Buffy, the queen of perception, doesn't get a 'sad vibe' from Anya - just a vengeance vibe. Xander, with his own biases, doesn't worry about the vengeance thing - the fact that Anya undid her last spell obviously makes up for the fact that she thought it was a good idea to turn a guy into a giant worm in the first place, right? Xander knows he's the cause of Anya's pain, so he's willing to cut her a lot of slack. "I really think she's coming around," he says.

Suddenly, we cut to what turns out to be a fraternity house, and is currently a scene of bloody slaughter. Guys with gaping chest wounds are sprawled by the fireplace, in chairs, and on the pool table. As the camera pans accross the carnage, we see Anya sitting against the wall, covered in blood, looking shell-shocked. "What have I done?", she asks herself uncertainly.

Credit highlight - Spike in the subway from "Fool for Love". Always good.

Sjornjost, 880: In a grainy visual style distinct from the rest of the episode, we get a look at Anya's original human life as a bunny-loving Scandinavian housewife. In subtitled scenes in what I will heretofore refer to as Swedish, we see Aud (as she was then known) in domestic bliss with Olaf (who we first saw in "Triangle"). He's home from the hunt (a busy day of troll fighting), and hungry enough, he says, to eat babies. As Aud prepares his mead, Olaf notes the suddenly burgeoning number of rabbits in their home. Aud explains that they multiply rapidly, and that she wishes to share the excess with the townspeople, "exchanging them not for goods and services, but for goodwill and the sense of accomplishment that stems from giving of yourself to others." She was a bit more idealistic, and a lot less materialistic way back when. I guess the bunnies are meant to be a symbol of that, and her bunnyphobia a symptom of her vulnerability since. Olaf laughs. "Your logic is insane, and happenstance, like that of a troll", he tells her (he seems to really dislike trolls). Like Xander, he may love her but doesn't understand her, and hurts her in the process. Olaf notes that the bar matrons gossip about her, which draws a menacing glare from Aud. He says that it's not his fault the bar matrons dislike Aud, as "you speak your mind, and are annoying. It's one of the things I love most about you." That would be probably about 40% compliment. Aud asks if Rannveig, one of the bar matrons, was there. Olaf defensively notes he has no interest in Rannveig, as her hips are wide and "load bearing, like a Baltic woman", unlike Aud's ,which are narrow, "like a Baltic woman from a slightly more arid region". Aud is convinced, and explains that she just loves Olaf so much she couldn't live without him.

Back in the present, we see where all that led, as Anya furiously struggles to wash the blood from her hands in a touch of not-so-subtle Lady MacBeth-like imagery.

"I don't trust what I see anymore," we here Spike say in voiceover, and then we cut to him sitting in the school basement. We see Buffy sitting next to him with a look of compassion and concern. Grateful for a sympathetic ear, Spike explains that he's been seeing things. He compares his situation to Drusilla's, although he notes that unlike his situation, what Dru saw made her happy. Buffy wants to help. "I could never ask," Spike replies ruefully. "Spike, it's me. It's you and it's me, and we'll get through this", Buffy replies gently. We hear footsteps, and the real, not-so-sympathetic Buffy appears, clad in black as opposed to the white that her imaginary alter-ego preferred. She tells Spike that he's got to get out of the basement - that there is evil down there, and it's killing him. Spike thinks she's a hallucination as well. She challenges him to prove to her he's got a soul by making something of himself - she is working towards his well-being, but her tone is harsh. "Scream Montressor all you want, pet", Spike replies, a reference to Poe's "Cask of Amontillado". It's not clear who he thinks is walling up who, though. "Get up and get out", Buffy tells him, to which he replies that he's got nowhere else to go.

At U.C. Sunnydale, Willow is sucking up to one of her professors, trying to talk her way into re-admittance. The professor notes that Willow is her best student, so it shouldn't be a problem. Sure, her grades slipped in mid-semester, the professor says, but she aced her finals like magic. Judging by Willow's guilty look, I'd guess she actually aced them BY magic. As the professor is leaving, Willow spies a rather disheveled-looking Anya. She asks what Anya is doing coming out of a fraternity house in the middle of the day. An evasive Anya claims she has a new boyfriend and just finished having lots and lots of sex. Her behavior should be suspicious, but I think Willow always finds Anya's behavior strange, so she's inclined to take that answer at face value until she sees blood on Anya's hand.

After Anya makes her excuses and leaves, Willow goes inside the house to investigate, and finds the bloody carnage. She hears a noise from a closet, where she finds a frantic girl muttering over and over, "I take it back". The girl gradually gets out the story of what happened. Her boyfriend invited her over for what was supposed to be a party, but was actually a ploy to humiliate her by dumping her in front of all his friends (Just a hunch, but I don't think the Mutant Enemy staff includes too many fraternity brothers). Devastated, she yelled out that she wished they could know how it feels to have their hearts ripped out. Willow's a smart girl, so she can figure out the rest. She asks what actually did the ripping. The girl says it was a spider. As Willow asks her where it went, we see the spider loom menacingly over her shoulder.

After the commercial, the spider lunges at Willow. She's able to repel it and launch it out the window using her magic (the first time we've really seen her rely on it since her return), but in the process her eyes go black, and she snaps at the traumatized girl in the process. It sounds like Xander was right with his hammer analogy - the more of her power Willow relies on, the greater her risk of losing control. Since we've been told this season is "about the power", this is presumably an important concept.

Back in Sjornjost, the villagers are comically panicked by an enormous troll ("Run! Hide your babies and your beadwork!"). It's Olaf, of course, and he tries to convince them of that. "The troll is doing an Olaf impersonation!", one of the Python-esque villagers exclaims. "Hit him with fruits and various meats!" Which they do. As wacky hilarity ensues, we see Aud taking it all in. As the grainy film style fades away and the language shifts to English, D'Hoffryn appears at her side. He admires her work, and she matter-of-factly explains how she did it. She doesn't really seem happy about it, but she was hurt by Olaf and felt it was what she had to do. D'Hoffryn asks what Olaf did. "Load-bearing bar matron", Aud explains. They make introductions. "I am Aud", she says, pronouncing it "odd", which she is as well, and apparently always has been. D'Hoffryn explains that isn't her true self. He asks if she's ever heard of his people, the vengeance demons. Aud explains that no one will talk to her, so there's a lot she hasn't heard of. D'Hoffryn offers her a job, and dubs her Anyanka. He says Aud may be who she is, but Anyanka is what she is - her true calling. I'd note that D'Hoffryn really isn't someone I'd rely on to tell me who I am. But Aud finds the idea of vengeance intriguing. "Only for those who deserve it", D'Hoffryn says. "They all deserve it", she answers bitterly. D'Hoffryn dryly notes that's what he was getting at.

Buffy's in her office, balancing a cup of pencils on her head. I guess she's already been on the job long enough to have scared away the students, so she's got some time on her hands. The phone rings, and it's Willow, with news of the spider demon and the slaughter at the fraternity house. "Ripped out the heart ? Oh my God. Hey - did you get that physics class you wanted?" She's queen of compassion as well as perception, it seems.

Anya's back in her apartment with Halfrek, who's gushing over her return to form. Anya's upset, though, and surprised that she is. Hallie's very much the supportive friend, though she's the supportive friend who wants you to become a bloodthirsty killer again. She assures Anya she'll get over it. Suddenly Willow barges in. She orders Hallie to leave, which Hallie does after Anya tells her it's okay. Willow tells Anya she has to stop. Anya brings up the girl's pain, and how the guys got what they deserved. She doesn't entirely believe it even as she's saying it. Willow says she wants to help, and Anya defensively notes that Willow isn't really one to talk. Willow says she hasn't forgotten what she's done, and that she does want to help (in fact, I'd suspect that before her walk on the dark side, Willow probably wouldn't have tried to help, given, for example, her attitude towards Faith). Anya grows more agitated in defending her actions. "I'm a vengeance demon!" she insists, clinging to that as her identity.

Buffy and Xander are out in the woods, hunting the spider demon. Xander explains he was happy to duck out of unpleasant work - he must have one of those Tony Soprano-type construction jobs where they pay you whether you work or not. They find another gutted body - presumably an innocent bystander who goes on Anya's tab without having done anything wrong. They find some icky webbing, and the spider drops from the trees to attack Buffy. It gouges her in the back pretty badly before she flings it off, and it hides back in the trees. Xander is freaked, and wants to put together a more elaborate plan for hunting the spider. Buffy instead just flings her axe into the air, and a dead spider demon falls to earth.

Buffy and Xander return to the house, and Buffy frets about where the demon came from. They see an unhappy Willow in the living room. She explains that she knows exactly where it came from.

It's a bit later, and Willow has done her exposition. Buffy is in the cold emotionless state she sometimes goes to when her job gets unpleasant. Xander is very nervous, worried about what this means for Anya, and how to undo it. Buffy's not too interested in the undoing, only the punishing. "I have to kill Anya", she tells him.

In another flashback, we're in St. Petersburg (Russia, not Florida) in 1905. Anyanka and Hallie are at an elaborate banquet, surrounded by dead Russian nobility. Outside the window, the city is burning. They chat about what they've unleashed - apparently Anya is responsible for unleashing the communist revolution. As they sit in their elegant finery, sipping champagne in their blood-stained white gloves, they chat about what to do next. Anyanka wants to get right back to work. "It's always work, work, work", says Hallie, as a burning man races frantically around in the background. Anyanka doesn't understand - "What else is there?" Halfrek points out the world around them, including the revolution Anya started. Anya explains that the worker will inevitably triumph and bring about paradise on earth (She's really one for fads, I suppose), but she's not really interested in that. "Vengeance is what I do. I don't need anything else. Vengeance is what I am."

Buffy's explaining to Xander that Anya isn't the woman he loved - she's a demon. We've seen considerable evidence that Anya is Anya either way, but Buffy doesn't think so. Xander thinks there are alternatives to killing her. Buffy says she's been thinking about it for a long time. Xander appeals to Willow, thinking there should be a way to undo it. Willow explains she doesn't have that kind of power, and she'd be afraid to use it if she did. Buffy trusts the power she has, though, and she's willing to use it to kill Anya. Xander explains that "when our friends go all crazy and start killing people, we help them", which isn't all that comforting for Willow to hear. To Buffy, it's different. Willow is human, so however many people she skins alive, she's still forgivable. Xander points out that Buffy's a bit more flexible about demons she's sleeping with. Buffy says that isn't relevant, which it really isn't. Anya chose to become a demon. Xander, in addition to still loving Anya, can't forget why she chose that, so he needs to defend her. Buffy plays her "more-righteous-than-thou" trump card, pointing out that she sent Angel to hell even though "I loved him more than I will ever love anything in this life" (Fortunately, Dawn isn't there to hear that even though Buffy was willing to end the world on her behalf, she's solidly in second place. We might have gotten another "Get out, get out, get out!"). Buffy brings up Xander telling her that Willow said to "kick his ass", bringing to light the much discussed lie by Xander, though I think only Willow noticed it. Here we get a Buffy who truly has become what she feared in "Intervention", and what she was in "The Wish" - so hardened by her experiences that she's lost touch with her emotions and can't see alternatives. I don't think the hugely visible scars on her back are a coincidence - this is a 22 year-old woman who's convinced her life peaked when she was in high school, and the damage that her relationship with Angel caused doesn't seem likely to heal anytime soon. Like Anya, she's embraced what she is to the detriment of who she is. "I am the law.", she says. Xander stalks off to look for alternatives, as Buffy gets ready to do some killin'. Willow declines to participate.

As soon as Buffy's gone, Willow pursues her own approach to the problem. She rummages through her stuff until she finds D'Hoffryn's medallion (from "Something Blue"). There's Latin, and the pouring of sand, and D'Hoffryn appears in his pretentious glory, until he recognizes "Miss Rosenberg" and gets to making small talk. "The flaying of Warren Meers. That was water-cooler vengeance. Lloyd has a sketch of it on his wall." Willow insists that's not who she is, even though D'Hoffryn could sense her darker impulses when she was fighting the spider demon. Willow wants to talk about Anya.

At the scene of the crime, Anya is pondering her bloody handiwork when Xander walks in. "I want to help you", he says. "Everyone is so considerate today," Anya notes. "I should have slaughtered people weeks ago." It seems like she probably felt abandoned while the others thought they were giving her space. Xander explains that Buffy is coming to kill Anya. Anya is unruffled by that. "She's coming to try." Anya is trying to cling to her status as a vengeance demon, thinking it's all she's got left. "I have a job to do, and so does Buffy." Buffy enters, telling Xander to get out of the way. He refuses, but Anya, now in gameface, knocks him aside to set up the "High Noon"-style showdown. Buffy swings at Anya with her sword. Anya throws her across the room (she's a lot stronger than we've previously been led to believe). "Are there any friends of yours you haven't tried to kill?" Anya asks. She taunts Buffy when she can, and doesn't press the advantage when she has it. Like Faith with Angel in "Five by Five", she seems to really want Buffy to kill her to end her pain. Unlike Angel, though, Buffy's not too perceptive about where Anya is coming from, so she's got no problem trying to kill her. Eventually, she gets the drop on Anya, and skewers her to the wall. After the commercial, we return to find Xander asleep in a recliner in his apartment. It turns out to be the night before the events of "Once More With Feeling". Xander is muttering in his sleep about wanting a happy ending (so any "Xander was covering for X" conspiracy theorists can probably give up now), as Anya sits on the couch, reading. Anya's a bit concerned about the singing they apparently did earlier. She walks towards the balcony, and we hear singing outside. It would appear that Marti Noxon's Parking Ticket Lady may be the wife of David Fury's mustard man - in fact, she seems to be the one who Got The Mustard In, much to his dismay. Anya closes the door, and turns to see that Xander is now soundly asleep. She begins her song "Mrs", detailing her desire to find herself in her love for him. "I've boned a troll/I've wreaked some wrath/but on the whole I've had no path/I like to bowl/I'm good with math/But who am I?" Her answer at that juncture is that she'll be Mrs. Xander. "Mrs Anya made-up-lame-ass-maiden-name-Harris". As she bursts onto the balcony, she's suddenly in her wedding gown, and we see her at the peak of buoyant, optimistic love...

... from which we cut abruptly to demon-Anya impaled on the wall, the sight Xander sees as he comes to. Of course, we have reason to believe it takes more than that to kill a vengeance demon, and in fact it does. She gasps back to consciousness, commenting that she's forgotten how much that could hurt. She and Buffy go at it again, and Buffy is about to spear her to the floor when Xander stops her. "Stop trying to save me, Xander!", Anya insists. She wants it over, win or lose, and I suspect she'd prefer lose. Suddenly, with a burst of lightning, D'Hoffryn appears. He admires Anya's handiwork. "Breathtaking. It's like somebody slaughtered an Abercrombie and Fitch catalogue." Buffy moves to attack him, but he warns she can't hurt him. D'Hoffryn explains that he's talked to Willow ("I have high hopes for her"). He says Willow thinks Anya would be better off away from the vengeance community. He notes that he already can guess what Xander and "Lady Hacks-Away" want, but he's not so sure what Anya herself wants. Anya is sure - she wants to take it back. She can't live with what she's done, and is willing to do whatever's necessary to make it right. D'Hoffryn notes she's asking a lot, and it won't be easy (he seems like he makes the rules, so it probably could be easy if he wanted it to be). He says that undoing it will require the life and soul of a vengeance demon (if you were wondering, they do apparently have souls). Anya doesn't hesitate - she tells him to do it, certainly welcoming the relief of her guilt, and possibly welcoming the end. Xander tries to intervene, seeking an alternative to Anya's death. "You can't help me," she tells him. "I'm not even sure there's a me to help." D'Hoffryn exacts the price. Halfrek materializes, and D'Hoffryn burns her to a cinder. He explains that he'd rather go for the pain than the kill, and Anya's in a lot more pain this way. Anya protests that Hallie was D'Hoffryn's, but he says he can always get more girls. He's a pretty witty villian, but he's not at all a nice guy. "You're out", he tells her, which I suppose means she's human again. "You should have killed me", Anya tells him tearfully. He explains that there's no need to worry about that because "from beneath you, it devours" ( the Buffyverse's answer to "Show me the money!" or "Where's the beef?"). He teleports out, and Anya walks out of the house mournfully. Buffy urges Xander to follow her, as she will check on the charming frat boys who've rejoined the human race.

Xander finds Anya. He tells her that for all of their baggage together, he doesn't think she should be alone. Anya explains that she needs to be - all her life, she's embraced a person or a cause to give her an identity, and right now, she needs there to be a 'her'. "What if I'm really nobody?" she asks him. He tells her not to be a dope. She's wiling to accept "dope" as a starting point. Anya watches Xander walk off, and moves on herself towards an uncertain future.

While I should probably spend the rest of this write-up gushing about Emma Caulfield, I'll instead try to sum the whole thing up in a pithy sentence or two that makes me look really smart. This episode was about the primacy of who you are over what you are, which I consider a positive message. We saw characters in various stages of that struggle. Dawn, pushing conformity. Buffy, seemingly boxed in by her "sacred birthright" to the point where it gets in the way of her personality. Spike, adrift with no real sense of who he is or what he is. Xander, rejecting his usual black-and-white worldview by following his heart over his prejudices. Willow, accepting the darker aspects of her nature and willing to wrestle with them to do some good. And most of all, Anya, who has spent over a thousand years embracing what she is over who she is, always running from her inner self, only to wind up with that inner self winning an uneasy victory in the end. She still has doubts, and lots of uncertainty in her future, but she's finally decided to embark on the path of becoming a person on her own terms.

-- Jerry

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