Kly's thoughts on "Lies My Parents Told Me"

OR:

Spike Becomes His Own Man, Just In Time For The Showdown - Break Out The Champagne!

***

Okay, let's see: who lied in this episode?

Spike's mother-turned-vampire.

Giles.

Wood. Wood's mother. ("You know I love you." Did she?)

Willow (by omission). Anya. (by omission.)

***

Who doesn't lie?

Buffy.

Spike.

This won't be the first parallel between them in this episode.

***

I thought this was a fantastic episode.

SPIKE

I never wanted Spike to be a wimp. In fact what I thought while watching this episode, when Spike finally comes to terms with his vampire mother's attempt to destroy him, was - Spike at last! THIS is the real Spike, vampire and man. Was I expecting him to be a sensitive intellectual brooder who wilts at an unkind word? Was I expecting him to be a pacifist, someone to call if I needed someone to get weepy or get whaled on? Was I expecting him to always be a nice guy - when faced with someone who not only tried to kill him but wanted to torture him first? Who TRIED to turn him into a monster?

Now that we're seeing close connections between the two shows I think that's an interesting parallel in fact. Angelus tries to turn Faith into a monster by telling her that's what she always was. Wood tries to turn Spike into a monster - destroy everything he has fought to become, in order to kill the monster he was. Who's the real monster here? Angelus, obviously; Wood, obviously. Anyone who tries to turn you into a monster is a monster.

We'll come back to this.

***

Speaking of monsters in men, here's another Angel/Spike parallel: the little speech Spike gives Wood, saying "I just want you to know that I've got my free will back. I'm not under the First, or anybody. I'm my own man. I wanted you to know that - before I kill you."

This is the same speech Angel gives Wesley before he tries to smother him: "It's important you know that. This isn't Angelus talking. It's me, Angel. You know that, right?"

So what's the difference between Spike and Angel? Spike let Wood live of his own free will - in fact what he was proving, to Wood and to himself, was that he could kill Wood if he wanted to.

But Angel had to be pulled off Wes.

***

Spike's speech from another angle - this whole episode tells me that it's not All About Buffy. It's All About Buffy - And Spike. There are two protagonists now.

So what is the significance of the line "I've got my free will back ... I'm my own man"? I think it's seen in the next scene, where Spike tells Buffy - as he walks off into the night without waiting for her - that he let Wood live this time; gave him a pass, because he'd killed his mother. But he doesn't get another chance.

Why does this matter? Because he IS his own man now. He's making his own moral decisions, and not waiting for Buffy's approval.

And what does Buffy do? She backs his play. For a long time Spike's had Buffy's back. Now Buffy's got his too.

But my point is that it's Spike's call. This story has two narrators now.

***

THE STORY; OR WHY I'M NOT GETTING PAID THE BIG BUCKS TO WRITE FOR ME

When Wood first showed up I imagined that Wood would try to kill Spike - well, that had to happen - and I thought that Spike might be so overwhelmed with guilt at having killed his mother that he'd want to let him. And then Buffy would Prove Her Love by not letting it happen.

Man, am I glad we got a better story than that! Instead Wood tries to kill Spike and thanks to the destruction of Spike's self-esteem by his demonic mother all those years ago, he nearly manages. Nothing to do with guilt; as Spike says, Nikki was a Slayer; I was a vampire; that's the way the game is played. Spike - the whole Spike - feels no more guilt about his past. That was then; this is now. I was a monster then; I'm different now.

But his ability to put it behind him comes at the same moment as his finally realising that it was the demon, not his mother, who said those things. And Spike is capable of being a good man - and even as a vampire, has always been capable of love - because his mother loved him. (Now there's a family value.)

So we have a multi-layered story. Sure, Spike killed Wood's mother. But the real problem is that his own mother nearly destroyed him. Once he's dealt with that, he is a "free man". Free to defend himself, his self-esteem restored; free to choose whether or not to kill, rather than having the choice forced on him either by the First or by his unfettered demonic nature.

My suspicion is that at least one of these writers has at some point in the past had a decent therapist, or at least knows how the process is supposed to work. Because this whole episode was about Spike's therapy and integration of his whole psyche.

But back to the main contrast between my imagined version and what we actually got on-screen. Buffy runs to the rescue, but she doesn't have to save Spike - because Spike has got his act together and already saved himself. Is, in yet another way, his own man now. He is no longer Buffy's to save; he's his own responsibility.

This is a whole lot better than being all about Spuffy - this is all about SPIKE. A much more redemptive story!

***

SO WHAT ABOUT SPUFFY?

Can't have a love story without two equal partners, and I think as a result of this episode that that's what we now have. So the last episode before the five-episode finale next month is one that firmly establishes our two, Buffy and Spike, as two protagonists. I don't think this is an accident.

Interestingly, Spike has given up hope. As he explains to Wood: all Slayers are loners; surround them with people, they're still alone. So Wood's mother didn't love him. But if Wood's mother, the Slayer, couldn't love her own son, what does Spike think the chances are that Buffy could ever love him? Zero, I think. Not - now - because he's beneath her; but because she's a Slayer, and Slayers work alone.

Oddly, my sense was that he seems to accept this, loves her anyway, isn't expecting a return, isn't being a mawkish wimp about it either. He respects her just as she is and will help her as best he can. He doesn't expect her to change.

Riley and Angel both loved a fantasy girl they constructed around Buffy. Angel constructed a "normal girl" who could have a normal life if only he ran away. Riley constructed a warm-hearted, open, affectionate, girlie girl who was all about the Mission - as long as she was about him first. Spike loves the woman in front of him, and doesn't expect her to change.

Like Riley, he doesn't think she loves him; unlike Riley, he isn't going to run away because of that. Angel thought it was possible for her to have a "normal life". Spike knows it's not possible, and will help her have the best truly weird life she can. All without expecting reciprocity, beyond, I think, a certain respect.

And she is certainly giving him that respect. When she saw Wood's state she accepted what Spike said without scolding or second-guessing him. (And then, as I said, backed his play.) She speaks of him as the best warrior they have. She trusts him, she believes he can be a good man, she's unwilling to leave him chained.

But more - she has a bit of a blind spot about him; Giles is right. She named, in her list of expendables, everyone EXCEPT Spike. When she realises Giles is stalling her so Wood can kill Spike she runs off without a second's hesitation - stake and move on, as Giles told her long ago. When Spike cries out in pain she runs and holds him in front of everyone in the basement. There's more between them now than there ever was when she was bonking him.

She's not admitting to anything beyond "he's an excellent fighter and we need him." But, for me, this is okay, primarily because it's okay with Spike. He doesn't expect more from her. She's the Slayer, the girl with the mission, and he'll stand by her and be her right-hand vampire if that's what she asks of him. He respects her task.

(Perhaps this is the moment to mention that my own personal feelings for Spike are of the warmest nature, and never more so than after seeing this episode. What a mensch!)

So the setup, as we head into the finale, is, Spike: his own man. Buffy: the girl with the mission. Do I suspect we're going to get more than this? I certainly do.

Do I think that Spike is right, and Slayers can't really love anyone? I think this is a problem Buffy's been wrestling with for a long time, and the answer is no. Spike is wrong. And I think he's going to find this out.

Oddly enough it's not just Buffy's behaviour towards Spike that makes me think this. It was her courtesy towards the vampire she was killing as she talked to Giles. She now recognizes her foes as persons. Persons she has to kill, but persons. This is a short step from recognizing her friends as persons too.

***

Now for the other guys. First, an ominous note - the Potentials all whinging about how they don't feel safe with Spike in the house. Frankly they shouldn't feel safe with KENNEDY in the house; Spike is no longer an issue. But I expect that this animosity is going to come up again; Kennedy is highly manipulatable; I'm wondering if we'll see a stake-Spike-in-his-sleep attempt by Kennedy sometime soon. Since Spike seems to be extremely important to the First.

But as for the other ones (and what was that thing Anya was wearing on her head?)

***

WOOD

He isn't cured yet. Spike has come to terms with his past; Wood hasn't. Wood's mother may have loved him some, but she loved the Mission more. (A lesson to all of us who think we can have jobs and children too. Bad career girl! Back in the kitchen! Get those shoes off! Your children will grow up warped because you Did Not Truly Love Them! ... ahem ... sorry, I've been reading Anne Crittenden's book "The Price of Motherhood" and it's got me all riled ...) Buffy's told him she's chosen the vampire over him - he's expendable, Spike isn't. She is thus the second Slayer in his life to choose to dance with Spike over loving him.

Do I think this will turn out to be an issue?

Do I think the First is done with Wood?

Let me put it another way: do I think Wood is on a redemptive path? I've seen no sign of it. Spike has his own story now; Wood is a prop whose function is to show how far Buffy has come - in her own life, and compared to previous Slayers. I am expecting more trouble from Wood.

To quote Wood: "He's a vessel of evil, a tool the First can use against Buffy." Here as so often, the abuser names himself.

But saving the worst for last:

***

GILES

Someone pointed out earlier, in "First Date", that Giles is failing to communicate. In "Lies My Parents Told Me", he does much worse - he uses a pretense of communication, of fatherly concern, of good advice, that's actually only a stalling device. All the "good advice" he's pretending to give Buffy is actually only an attempt to keep her away from Spike long enough for Wood to kill him. He does this because he does not trust Buffy's judgment, and because he does not like Spike (though he's never admitted this). He lies for her own good. Or so he tells himself. Buffy's attitude throughout the conversation seems to be "but why are we going over this? We've talked about this before". None of his comments are new to her - though her assertiveness probably is. But of course he isn't giving her advice at all; he's just recycling old bits of advice to slow her down.

He is quick to accuse Buffy of letting personal feelings sway her; but perfectly happy to ally himself with Wood's much less admirable personal feelings, because they happen to be useful to his own aims. He has allied himself with a "vessel of evil, a tool of the First". Giles, like Wes, like the Men, does NOT grasp that you cannot do evil that good may come.

As he himself proves later on, by lying to Buffy and betraying her for what he perceives as the good of killing Spike.

Giles is so keen on killing Spike - so willing to be tempted, swayed by that tool of the First, Wood - that he doesn't even trust the magic he brought back with him, the Babbleslug or whatever it is. He tells Spike that it takes time to work and he has to co-operate. And in fact it does take time to work; and it does work; but Giles didn't give it that time. He just handed Spike over to Wood to be slaughtered. He was so keen to see Spike dead that he decided not to give the therapy a chance.

Of course he's blind to his own motives here. Other people have personal motives, but Giles is convinced that he's objective.

So what's going on here? First, since this whole season is a reprise of the themes of previous seasons, to see how Buffy deals with the same issues now that she's older and wiser, this episode is obviously a visit to the ground of "Cruciamentum". Once again Giles fails Buffy and shows himself unworthy of her trust. He has built himself painfully back up, in the past, but I'm not so sure she will trust him again, this time. (I wouldn't.)

Second, the mention of Dawn, of Buffy now being willing to sacrifice people to save the world, points to a revisiting of "The Gift" in the finale - as we've been expecting all along. It also reminds us of the phantom Joyce's comments to Dawn in CWDP. In the finale, is Buffy going to have to sacrifice the person that matters most to her - Spike?

I don't think so actually. But I think we're supposed to wonder and worry about that possibility.

But the mention of "The Gift" reminds us also that in that episode Buffy wouldn't let Dawn die and wouldn't kill Ben - but Giles was ready to kill Dawn, and did kill Ben. Here, for the same reasons, Giles is trying to kill Spike "for her". Giles thinks these are equivalent actions - kill someone who isn't a threat now, because someday they may be. But on that argument we should just off the whole race at once, because all of us are capable of doing enormous harm.

Giles, we are reminded, is a pragmatist. And, we are now shown with a more powerful example than Ben, that is the wrong thing to be. Giles, like Wes, is trying to train his former Slayer to be a pragmatist too. To do evil, that good may come. He is wrong.

Buffy is absolutely right to shut him out in the last shot. He has revealed himself, in this episode, to be untrustworthy, an evil counsellor, and unable to see that he's wrong. If I were Buffy I wouldn't want him in my house. In some ways I'm sorry it was only her bedroom door she shut.

***

BEDROOM DOORS

On the other hand, I think it's extremely significant - and positive - that the bedroom door is the one Buffy shut in Giles' face for several reasons.

a) it's the same one Spike shut in his demon-mother's face (figuratively). Both of them had to walk away, sever themselves from, the demonic words of their formerly beloved parent. The parent is ignoring the child's proper boundaries, and this transgression is cast in both cases in incestuous terms. In Spike's life, the boundaries are not just esteem, but sexuality. (Oh, man, did my "Buffy's Oedipus Complex" paper just get a huge boost, I remark in passing!)

But in Buffy's as well, the marks of emotional incest are there. Giles is the father who does not want to let go of his daughter to a mate - the man who will not exchange his daughter in marriage because he needs her too much himself. These figures litter Greek myth and world folklore - or rather, their bodies do. Their motives are always, in myth, overtly or implicitly incestuous. In the end, in myth, the daughter has to deny her father's hold over her, and control over her sexuality (her bedroom), and run away with the prospective son-in-law.

So suddenly I'm realising that both Spike and Buffy, in this episode, refused their opposite-sex parents' transgression on their boundaries; refused to participate in emotional (or other) incest. Spike staked his mother when he saw what his unwillingness to let go had made of her.

Buffy closed her bedroom door to Giles. He no longer has control of her sexuality.

Which means, to me,

b) that when Spike finally knocks on that door, it's not going to stay closed. Because at long last it is in Buffy's control to open it, or not, as she sees fit. Spike, in this episode, became his own man; Buffy became her own woman.

***

And one last note:

***

DUBIOUS PARTNERS

The Potentials, and Anya, and Giles, are all convinced that Spike is getting a special pass from Buffy, admission to the inner sanctum, a threat to all their lives, etc etc, because of his Special Relationship with Buffy. Oh, sure, nobody SAYS she's bonking him, but everyone knows she used to be, and everyone figures she's till got the hots for him, and they all think that this is skewing her judgment about him, and she's forgetting about the Trigger, about how manipulatable he is by the First.

They're wrong about this. (Which is why, I remark as an aside, I'm glad that Buffy DIDN'T say she loved Spike, in this episode - because if she had said that it would have made Giles, Wood's, everyone's suspicions that her personal feelings were clouding her judgment seem perfectly true.) Buffy has feelings for Spike but that's not why she trusts him on her right hand.

But in all this focus on Spike, everyones' missing the REAL dubious partner - the one who consistently misinterprets the use of power, the one who's getting a free pass into the inner sanctum, the one who knows so little she doesn't even know she's ignorant, the one who thinks she's the next Slayer, the one who has manipulated herself into a position to do serious damage to the good guys by weaselling her way into the bed of a member of the Inner Sanctum.

Spike isn't the dubious girlfriend - Kennedy is. And I think the parallel is being deliberately induced (and that it's no accident that nobody's even hinted this about Kennedy. Yet.)

Well, tune in the finale, a month from now ...