crazy how in c2 they'll have three extensive convos checking in with each other while traveling like an hour in-game meanwhile in c3 they've been on the moon for days and still haven't discussed the following:
laudna fucking ate a guy
imogen's mom is a mythical legend amongst the enemy
orym vs. laudna's response to imogen giving into predathos
how did chetney suddenly learn to make hypnotizing toys
delilah briarwood
"some of us are expendable, we should get captured"
anything and everything they said during the trust exercise, including but not limited to:
laudna not being able to distinguish her thoughts from delilah's
imogen's disgust at delilah's inevitable presence
chetney's fear that his new family will leave him
orym's feelings about dorian
fcg relieving stress through murder
fearne's insecurities about their chances of success
ashton's guilt about the shard
and more!
249 notes
·
View notes
One thing that was very interesting to me in this episode is the way Eddie was just... not joking about Buck's love interests.
That stuck out.
Usually when Eddie talks to Buck about his love interests, it's with an edge of fond exasperation, teasing laced around his gently delivered truths, but there was none of that this episode. Buck told Eddie he went to see Natalia and it was like something switched. Eddie's entire affect changed when Buck started talking about Natalia. He went from being loose and easy (as loose and easy as one can get when standing at a grave) to being... not combative, necessarily, but visibly actively not wanting to engage in conversation about her either, and it's not...
It's not even jealousy!! We joke a lot about Eddie and jealousy, but it wasn't that at all. It was a fatigue that comes with silence, that comes with holding your tongue, that comes with keeping secrets. Especially when Buck said that he feels like Natalia sees him. That look Eddie gave him immediately after? That was pure hurt. That was him saying I see you too, I've always seen you. But he can't say that. He can't say that, because to say that would be to say so many other things about the way he sees Buck, and to say so many other things would mean to have to unstick his tongue from the roof of his mouth about the ONE thing he's been holding onto ever since he was shot.
I don't know. I don't know, but I think Eddie taking Buck on a date and I think about how Eddie left his son—his heart—in Buck's care so they could bake cookies together (which becomes profoundly more significant in an episode where Christopher was talking about baking smores with his mom), and I think about Kenny saying Ryan has been doing some very nuanced work in the back half of this season, I'm like
Oh. Oh. I see it, thank you. Loud and clear.
650 notes
·
View notes
I think that Ted is a good episode -- I almost described it as an underrated episode, but actually everyone I know seems to rate it pretty highly – and one that clearly anticipates significant future episodes like Consequences and Dead Things. The character of Ted himself seems like a decent first attempt at the Mayor (my favorite villain in the show); his actual origin foreshadows April and the Buffybot; and Buffy’s fear of what might happen if her mother reads her diary feels like an early taste of Normal Again. And it's honestly unsettling in a way that most Buffy episodes aren't; there's a very visceral clash between Buffy's (and the audience's) genre expectations and all the creepy domestic stuff with Ted, right from the start of the episode.
So there's a lot to like here. But. It's pretty odd that the first of several "Hey, what if a vampire slayer killed a human being? Obviously that would be terrible" episodes aired immediately after What's My Line?, a two-parter in which Buffy Summers rips open a man's throat with the blades of her ice skates, gently kisses her boyfriend while the man bleeds out on the ice and never ever feels the slightest bit bad about it. His death isn't even mentioned again (and, despite the premise of the episode, it doesn’t seem like anybody else is sent to replace him).
Okay, yes, we don't know for certain that the assassin Buffy killed at the ice skating rink was a human, but we do know he definitely wasn't a vampire (we see him walking around in the sunlight and he doesn't turn to ash when he dies), he looked far more human-like than any of the demons we've seen on the show before (and takes the bus to get to Sunnydale, which certainly suggests a lack of any alternate demonic options), and the episode's writers seem to make a deliberate point, after his death, of having Giles tell Buffy that the order of assassins he belonged to definitely does include humans among their ranks. If they wanted us to be sure he wasn’t human, that’s a weird way of doing it.
(Perhaps the clearest argument against the ice rink assassin being a human is the way he seems equally matched in a physical confrontation with Angel, but the show is very inconsistent about whether ordinary humans can fight vampires or how strong vampires actually are. Indeed the second part of What’s My Line? will see Giles himself overpower a vampire, “holding him steady” so that Willow can stake him. He'll also grapple with a vampire later in this episode while patrolling in Buffy's place. Are we to assume Giles isn’t human?)
Even if the dead assassin wasn't "really" a human, Buffy doesn't have any obvious reason not to at least wonder that he might be. The fact she doesn’t, or doesn’t particularly care if he was, is because … well, because What’s My Line? isn't about that.
And yes, Buffy was very clearly acting in self-defense in What's My Line? and I don't particularly think she did anything wrong. A strange guy was trying his best to hurt her, he surprised her in a place she thought she was safe, and if she hadn't had her Slayer strength things would have worked out very poorly for her. But isn't all of that true for Ted as well?
Actually, I think that’s the more serious problem with the episode. Beyond any possible inconsistency with previous parts of canon (obviously you can assume the dead assassin was a demon if you want) there’s a tension between the moral quandary the show wants to raise this episode -- "what if Buffy used her Slayer powers to kill an innocent man?" -- and the fact the writers seem to really not want to show Buffy doing anything wrong, so much so that they kind of forget to make Ted seem anything like an innocent man, even before the big twist.
That is: the show wants to tell us that Buffy has crossed an important moral line and that – if Ted really had been an ordinary human – she’d probably deserve to go to jail for it. That’s why her friends are so concerned with proving that Ted was not an ordinary human, at least that he was “some kind of crook”. It's why they decide she's "cleared" only when they find evidence of the drugs he was feeding them.
Whatever Ted was doing in her bedroom late at night, the show seems to argue that Buffy is the Slayer and as such “had no right” to hit him. ("He started it only works in six year old court," Buffy rebukes Willow later.) Cordelia tries comes to Buffy’s defense by suggesting there should be “special rules for her”, an idea the show (through Willow) shoots down as “fascist”. And all this plays out almost as though Buffy really had just started attacking Ted unprovoked because he was dating her mother and she didn’t like him.
But that isn’t at all what happened. It’s very on brand for Buffy to act as though it is, and to blame herself for something that really isn't her fault, but it’s a little much to expect the audience to agree when we've actually seen the whole thing play out in front of our own eyes. The cops are suspicious of Buffy’s claims of self-defense because she doesn’t have any visible bruises (and because ... they're cops), but we already know she isn’t lying. Her friends should believe she isn’t lying. They shouldn't need evidence of "a history of domestic violence". We already saw him hit her. That's not something you get a free pass for. It doesn't matter if he's not been convicted of doing it before.
And so I’m not convinced at all there’s any need to appeal to “special rules” for Buffy. We see exactly what she did on screen, and I simply don’t think that she did anything wrong. (Well, except confess to the cops.) Even if Ted had just been a normal human, he's a near stranger who surprises Buffy in her own bedroom, proceeds to blackmail her and to announce he’ll have her institutionalized if she doesn’t follow his orders, and who then hits her repeatedly – hard enough to knock her to the ground on at least one occasion. How does that scene play out if Buffy isn’t a Slayer? If she really is just a delusional sixteen year old girl and the diary Ted's gotten hold of describes some sort of fantasy? Not very well for her, I can guess that much.
Of course, Cordelia’s wrong to suggest that “different rules” should apply to Buffy simply because she’s the Slayer, but equally the show is wrong to imply that the ordinary moral rules that apply to everyone somehow mean a teenage girl has no right to protect herself from being physically attacked in her own home. (Or to suggest, as Buffy herself does, that that right to self-defense somehow ends the minute she turns out to be stronger than the guy hitting her was expecting, even if that doesn't mean he stops hitting her.).
What if all teenage girls were allowed to kill any strange men who broke into their bedrooms at night, threatened to ruin their lives unless they did “what I say, when I say” and then punched them hard enough to knock them to the floor? Well, I think that would be pretty good actually. I'm not really sure what the downside is supposed to be.
115 notes
·
View notes