Adam and Riley are having a chat.
Apparently professor Walsh put a behavior modification chip in his chest?
Spike: So it's chips all around is it then?
Adam's plan is to trap demons, humans, and Slayer alike in the Initiative and use their
corpses to create more Adam's.
At Casa De Giles the Scoobs are experiencing the fallout from the previous evening.
The awkwardness is palpable and Tara politely smiling through it, adorable.
But I think the intense 'morning after' sensation the scene leaves you with is a testament
to that wonderful final scene in the Yoko Factor - both hilarious and painful.
Xander is struggling to find the motivation to get out of bed.
I absolutely love this overhead shot as Anya considers his nakedness.
So they all think you're a lost directionless loser.
PSHT...get over it.
Anya you can't just psht that stuff away?
Why not?
Cause I think maybe they're right.
I like that.
And what it has to say about how the barbs that generally stick with us - the insults
that hurt the most are the ones that validate insecurities we already have in ourselves.
The power and dignity to withstand ridicule is mostly found through mastering and understanding
your own heart.
Buffy wanders into Adam's lair which is filled by MANY pounds of monitors.
None of which I think were compatible with that teal G3 Power Mac.
That lack of realism really undermines the pathos and themes of this episode for me.
In a secret lab in the initiative we discover that Adam has turned Maggie Walsh into a fraken-drone.
Along with "who cares."
I wonder if
This was all how she planned it.
Except SHE thought she'd be alive.
Is the writer's saying This was our ORIGINAL plan for the ending except we thought Maggie
would be monologuing now instead of GI FrankenJoe.
WOH.
That is one painful looking circumcision.
Spike accidentally reveals to Buffy that he knows she and Willow had a falling out...a
scene he wasn't present or privy to.
This causes Buffy to reunite the team.
They figure out Adam's carnage plan.
Does anybody else miss the Mayor?
I just want to be a big snake?
All season Xander.
All...season...
Back at the lab Franken Forrest and Riley get reaquainted.
You don't get it brother.
You don't have a choice.
Your will belongs to us now.
Those of you playing along with Buffy Guide Bingo, I hope your ears just perked up.
More on that in a moment.
She's coming.
I can feel it.
During a rewatch we did with the community, someone was wondering at Adam's powers.
How he could see through Jonathan's spells and how he can sense Buffy incoming here in
this scene.
T'would be interesting if parts of him were from a seer like Drucilla.
Maybe a side effect of the assembly that Maggie wasn't aware of.
The Scoobies devise a plan for attacking Adam.
SO no problem, all we need is combo slayer Buffy.
Buffy's Slayer strength.
Giles' multilingual know how.
And Willow's witchy power.
As they descend into the Initiative, Willow, Buffy, and Xander makeup after their dramatic
first year in college.
Xander, you know we love you right?
We TOTALLY do.
...oh God.
We're going to die aren't we?
The Initiative captures the gang.
Adam locks the base down and releases the monsters.
As Forrest and Buffy face off.
Riley cuts into his pectoral muscle to remove a...mind control chip...before beating Fraken
Forrest (despite freshly gimped chest) who waas just defeating his super-powered girlfriend?
...k.
"Shut up Finn...watch me kill your girlfriend."
And, while the other Scoobs sit around and execute a spell, Buffy faces off with Adam.
Combo-breaker Buffy is the best Buffy.
Right before the gang gets slaughtered Spike comes to the rescue.
He probably just saved us so we wouldn't stake you right here.
Well yeah.
Did it work?
Well everything is alright and we all get to be not staked through the heart.
Good work team.
There is an incredibly odd edit here where it seems like we might get a Buffy action
montage and instead it hard cuts.
This roundtable of people we've never met polishes off the season arc with what is essentially
just exposition shorthand.
The last throes of a bizarrely uneven season.
And with a cut to static, Season 4's main arc comes to a close.
It feels abrupt and a little lacking in emotional catharsis, save for the elevator scene, but
plenty of that is still to come with the dazzling Restless,
There is, a lot of wonderful and a lot of It was...it was okay...it was fine.
I was just waiting to watch Buffy punch Robo Zip drive in the face some more.
We've spoken at length this season about how The Initiative represents institutionalized
identity.
The trick here is that the season hasn't strictly been talking about military institutions,
although the Initiative certainly provided a framework for examining the trappings of
homogenized identity.
But the season has actually been loaded to the brim with groups that ask for conformity
and submission, including college itself.
Remember the poster game, in the Freshman and what it said about the cliches of the
college identity??
"Score one for Klimt."
Or the round table of pseudo intellectual bros from Beer Bad.
Or the gentleman, who together formed their own dark and terrifying hive mind.
Or the wicca group that patronized Tara into submission.
In Superstar everyone in town conforms to Jonathan's desires.
And in the final two parter, Adam reveals that Walsh's last stage for the Initiative
was to break everyone into parts and reassemble them into one common, uniform shape, ultimately
monstrous for not being individual.
"Once everyone is special, no one will be."
The very name Initiative was no doubt a joke by the writers as the dictionary definitions
of the term are the exact opposite of what The Initiative was meant to embody:
the ability to assess and initiate things independently.
the power or opportunity to act or take charge before others do.
Within the show's central metaphor of progressing through adolescence then, Buffy's defeat
of Adam is a symbol for her rejection of conformity.
This is not, however, an argument for an Into the Wild style pursuit of isolation.
In the previous episode I made the comparison between what Forest called family, and the
Scoobies.
One is a family created by an institution that emphasizes conforming to their ideals…
"I am how they trained me."
And the other is chosen.
In fact, the final showdown emphasizes that Buffy needs the people she loves in her life,
in order to become her best self: Maximum Combo-breaker Buffy.
And I've shown the spell scene previously as the most explicit example of each Scoobies
metaphorical relationship to her.
And together, they summon what translated from Sumerian reads as 'Primeval one.'
Slayer.
Adult.
And in this case magic defeats technology.
I noticed a few comments in my previous video from people who bristled at the magic vs tech,
feminine vs masculine idea.
But, as my friend Mark Field points out in his book, Myth Metaphor and Morality in Buffy
the Vampire Slayer, it's important to point out that when we talk about these things we're
not talking about a person's sex or gender but conventional inherited or imposed ideologies.
As I pointed out, Giles is as tech inept in as they come.
And Professor Walsh is the creator of The Initiative.
It's not about boys vs girls but, as a feminist parable, Buffy is at least partially about
celebrating feminine identity.
We've covered what went awry this season outside of the show's control but there
are a few things to mention.
Season 4 has been cribbing from Frankenstein and some it's motifs.
The most obvious reference, other than the fact that Adam is a big mess of body parts,
was when he came upon the child in the forest which...I mean, who lets their kid play alone
in a forest in Sunnydale?
This wasn't in Shelley's book but in the 1931 classic film in which the monster runs
into a little girl who isn't afraid of him.
When he runs out of flowers to throw into a lake he tosses the girl in instead and she
drowns.
More directly, in the original book, the monster says to Dr. Frankenstein, "I ought to be
thy Adam."
With Frankenstein, the season had incredible potential to make literary connections to
it's bedrock of philosophy that had been built up to this point, and some of the themes
still work.
In Season 4, every one of the Scoobies is experiencing a crisis of identity.
Buffy wondering what in her drives loved ones away.
Giles facing parental obsolescence.
We've been over it.
Frankenstein had to wonder at what and who he was.
Problem is, Adam pretty much gets his answer early on
"What am I."
"You're a monster."
"I thought so."
- and then sits around until the final few episodes.
Shelley's Frankenstein contains themes of family, lost innocence, the toxic effects
of isolation on the human heart.
But most of those themes spring from the relationship between Frankenstein and his monster.
And once Maggie was out of the picture it seemed like the writer's weren't sure
what to do with Adam until the end.
Even then we find him monologuing about mother and her plans.
I think the necessity of Maggie Walsh to making all this work never feels more apparent than
it does when shes a speechless zombie and Adam is giving us a crash course in why show
don't tell is a thing.
For comparison, consider Faith and the Mayor.
In season 3 I argued that the mayor was a little impenetrable as the Big Bad.
Entertaining, certainly, but lacking in complexity or humanity.
And, from her first patrol with Buffy, the ragin Slayer's arc felt like a bit of a
foregone conclusion to me.
But, once Faith and the Mayor were in each other's orbit their loving relationship
created warmth and empathy for them, even as that very thing allowed them to hide in
each other's darkness.
Another issue was Riley and how much of the broad dramatic strokes of this season's
a rc were channeled through him rather than any of the Scoobies.
Buffy struggled with the idea of conformity briefly in The I in Team but then, at the
heights of bad-assery said to Walsh.
"You really don't know what a Slayer is.
You're about to find out."
Seemingly then Buffy has been pretty solid since that episode.
And in The Yoko Factor, there isn't a section where Spike drives her from the Scoobies,
but instead drives the Scoobies from her.
And so here in the climax, most of the significant thematic lines get delivered to Riley.
And the problem is, the writer's of their own admission struggled with how to make Riley
(a Clark Kent character) interesting.
Mostly he's either too much on the Scooby side, or so on the Initiative side that it
makes him look stupid and petulant.
"Maggie's dead.
Happy now?"
He doesn't seem to have an underlying personality or pathology of his own, other than "Nice
Guy."
Consequently, when he cuts into his whatever...so that he can stand up and whatever….we just….whatever.
Simple comparison: Take all that away, and what's left?
- ME.
And I'm not saying these themes had to be threaded through Buffy to make them resonate.
What if, at the end of Season 3, Xander, unsure of what to do after High School HAD enrolled
in the military?
Because of the residual military knowledge left over to him from Halloween, he was fast
tracked through basic.
And, being a resident of Sunnydale likely familiar with the supernatural, was put on
deployment for a special program called The Initiative.
Then Xander is the one torn between two worlds.
Xander is the one chipped by Walsh.
And Xander is the one who finds his individuality again right before Buffy faces off against
Douchenstein.
I'm reaching here and obviously a number of details would need to be adjusted but it
would still work, and, be justified by the previous seasons.
Though that would still leave a more nebulous problem I had with the Initiative itself and
that is that their portrayal on the show lacks ANY sense of authenticity whatsoever.
Authenticity is a difficult thing to quantify.
More of a gut feeling really.
You just know it when you see it.
And the Initiative never felt like actual military.
Something more of the Bad News Bears variety.
That underlying sense of camp or silliness to them sapped coupled with the lack of a
captivating avatar for us in Riley, eventually lead to me just being kind of bored with any
scenes that had anything to do with the them.
Counting the seconds until the next Scooby scene.
Spike and Riley's chips were a metaphor for what the Initiative does to the individual
and their individually finding ways to defeat it were both a statement about how essential
identity will always find a way.
"You feel like an animal...savage the land."
But I yearned for a bit of the old ultraviolence and some of the Kubrickian commentary.
Still though, even if the themes got a bit jumbled up and the plot accidentally backed
the wrong character, Yoko Factor and Primeval are incredibly entertaining.
And what IS here feels smart, if just a little unearned.
Rushed and unfinished The final scene of Yoko factor was well-written
and I love the poetic parallels of the Scooby gang being dismembered, and then reassembled
in Primeval as something more than the sum of their parts.
Kind of like Adam.
Even if the theme of alienation within the team that caused the schism in Yoko factor
hadn't been particularly well developed since Fear, Itself.
But even if it rushed to us there, Primeval restores some of the intimacy and love between
the Scoobies that has felt absent at times this season.
The scene with Xander and Anya in bed together exudes a warm glow, and the elevator shaft
hug feels like it shakes off a lot of the inertia and rust the show has developed this
season as everyone floundered at a distance from each other.
"Giles get down here!"
HOORAY.
They love each other again.
Now let's go magic gourd the hell of that asshat Adam.
Even if Season 4 has felt hollow dramatically in comparison to the previous, it has still
been damned entertaining.
This is, taken as a whole, probably the funniest season in the entire series.
And, I have to say that, in spite of it's struggles Season 4 was thematically ambitious,
perhaps even above and beyond what's come before.
It's just that when theme flows through characters we love it can feel powerful and
intimate.
When it flows through those we don't it can creak and feel as mechanical as...well...Adam.
And Restless, the episode that follows, which Whedon referred to as his coda, strips away
all of those mechanical elements.
If season 4 is an exploration of the identity that the world tries to hoist upon us, Restless
is about how we see ourselves.
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