Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 3
© Fox
The Buffy Files: Chapter 3
By: STEPHEN LACKEYReview Date: Sunday, October 29, 2006
I’m pretty obsessive when it comes to viewing television series on DVD. By the nature of my job I have to jump around a bit from one product to another but typically I’ll have a TV on DVD box set filling the gaps of free time. I can do a single disc of a good series in one setting with no problem at all. This can be deadly to a television series though. When you watch a show for just an hour from one week to the next flaws aren’t always apparent, and even if they are most viewers can forgive them if the series is good overall. In my case anyway, watching a series in huge chunks like that can make an emotionally powerful show even more powerful, and that’s the reaction I had to BUFFY season three.
At the end of season two Buffy was devastated, her entire world had come crashing down and she left Sunnydale. Season three starts with Willow, Xander, and Cordy trying to pick up the slack in the vampire killing space left open by Buffy. Buffy moved to L.A. and took a job as a waitress using her middle name, Anne. Honestly I never cared much for Sarah Michelle Gellar, and I think that’s one of the reasons I didn’t watch the series when it originally ran. With season two, and this season I learned a lesson about Gellar; there’s a lot more to her than you might think. Her portrayal of a broken young woman is literally heart wrenching. She just looks drained from her delivery of dialogue to her body language, she’s just moving through her world, not living anymore.
Buffy does eventually come home but, as I have come to expect, nothing comes easy for Buffy. While she is still beaten down from the death at her own hands of Angel, her friends while happy she’s home have learned over the past months to live without her, and they now resent her for leaving them. The episode “Dead Man’s Party” brings it all to a head with Xander; the guy who’s had a crush on Buffy since he met her finally explodes releasing his hurt at her. It’s emotionally draining because you can’t take a side. I understood how Xander felt but at the same time few people could make it through what Buffy went through unscathed.
This season saw the introduction of Buffy’s mirror image in the form of a new slayer, Faith (Eliza Dushku). While Buffy tries to do her work clean and be a good person Faith believes her abilities give her the right to be a bad girl. Faith had a rough childhood and she takes every bit of it out on the vampires she kills every night. The episode “Bad Girls” finds Buffy giving into Faith’s beliefs about being a slayer and cutting lose, stealing weapons from a store and kicking ass while not worrying what it might cost her along the way. Faith’s decisions cost her dearly when she accidentally kills a human while fighting a group of vampires.
The one bad thing about watching these episodes now instead of when they originally came out was that I knew Angel wasn’t dead and gone and sure enough he finds his way back from the alternate dimension he was sent too. Time ran different in that dimension so when Angel returned he had suffered decades of torture leaving him degraded to little more than a monster. Buffy locks him down and works a little at a time to bring him back to himself. After everything Buffy had put her friends through, after everything Angel had done to them, they were shocked at Buffy’s support of Angel. In this season everyone finally realizes, or just accepts who they are and what their destiny is. What’s funny to me is that Willow has seemed like the most awkward member of the group but she’s the only one who has known all along who she is and where she fits in the world although there is a little tickling of a different destiny in a couple of episodes featuring what I like to call Red Kryptonite Willow. Buffy and Angel finally give into who they are and where their relationship can only lead. Buffy learns who she is when she gets accepted into a college outside of Sunnydale but realizes she can’t leave. Xander finds his place in the group during a single night of being left to deal with a group of walking dead when he had come to believe he was useless within the group. Faith gave into her dark side, leaving Buffy and the gang to work for the Mayor, whose real agenda is finally revealed in this season after all the hints from last season.
For me the theme of this season is realization. In this season everyone finally finds who they are. They’re all graduating high school with a solid sense of place. This realization comes at a painful price for Buffy as she realizes that she can never have a real relationship with Angel. As they say sex is only 10% of a relationship when it’s good and 90% of it when it’s bad. It goes beyond sex for Angel and Buffy though. Angel can never have a relationship, a complete one, and due to her calling Buffy may not be able to either. So at the end of the season, after an epic battle with the Mayor, they split forever. After everything they’ve been through the split is painfully simple.
At the end of season 2 I wondered how the series could maintain this level of excellence, but it really did.
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I agree completely with your take on this season, graduation day is very much the theme of this episode, the time where people must go from mulling their options to really coosing their plce and identity in the world.
And again, Whedon does a brilliant job of using fantasy tropes to examine real coming of age issues.
I really love that, Whedon didn't make Buffy's return easy, or put the traumatic events of season two a thing of the past.
Faulkner once said "The past not dead it's not even past." and we see that in the scars each character carried into season 3, brought out especially powerfully in Buffy's return and when they find out she's been sheltering Angel. It would have been easy to keep Giles fatherly and supportive, but was so much better to remind us of how much he personally suffered at Angel's hands.
I also agree that seeing this season in particular on DVD is the best wasy to go. The episodes just flow together so well to advance larger narrative arcs.