Buffy 4.13: "The I in Team"
Written by David Fury
Directed by James A. Contner
In which Buffy joins the Initiative, which leaves Willow feeling abandoned, but when her questions and influence on Riley get troublesome, Walsh conspires to take Buffy out of the picture…
Status Report
The main theme of the fourth season was self-identity, and how assumptions about oneself can be challenged when life brings about change. One of the biggest changes in the life of the typical American is the end of high school and the beginning of college, when freedom becomes as much a curse as a blessing. Critical assumptions about the world are revealed as illusion; what seems stable is revealed as fluid. Buffy has struggled to find herself in this new world, and as a result, as changes rip through the lives of her friends, she’s not as connected to their problems and passions as she had been.
The beginning of the episode encapsulates where the season has brought the characters thus far. Giles’ personal situation and isolation was dealt with in the previous episode, but the rest of the Scooby Gang is no better off. Xander is still searching for some sense of direction, and his more immediate need for a career has isolated him from Buffy and Willow. Equally, his relationship with Anya has caused friction, since she is not socially aware in any sense.
Willow has been in something of a funk ever since Oz left, and though they have tried to be patient, their own issues have prevented her from turning to them for comfort. With Buffy falling deeper and deeper into her relationship with Riley, Willow doesn’t have the pseudo-sister to share discoveries with anymore. When she does try to get the gang back together and revive the old bonds, Buffy is still too wrapped up in Riley and the Initiative to see Willow’s loneliness.
Buffy has never had the chance to share her life with someone like Riley, and considering how her Chosen lifestyle makes it hard to make real connections with people, she craves the attention and validation that he provides. She wants to fit into his world, and at first glance, the Initiative looks like a good fit. The problem, of course, is that the Initiative involves military personnel and what’s meant to be military discipline and tactics. Buffy has already rejected outside authority, and while Riley is also looking at her with eyes of love, Professor Walsh has every reason to be concerned about Buffy’s pliability.
Spike is also finding it hard to adjust to his new reality. As Giles points out, Spike has a rather unique opportunity to do something more with his existence, especially since he enjoys the work of beating down demons so very much. Of course, this is odd coming from Giles, given how Giles has plenty of reason to question even Angel’s mission for redemption. Spike doesn’t have a soul, so the idea of a “higher purpose” doesn’t mean a damn thing to him. At least, not at this point, because he hasn’t become obsessed with Buffy enough for it to become a source of meaning.
Nearly every scene, especially in the beginning, becomes an exercise in defying assumptions. A line of dialogue is tossed out, and the assumed meaning is quickly dispelled by the revealed context. For all that, some of the lines don’t make sense, or don’t match what the budget was able to provide. Buffy’s reaction to the Initiative, for instance, is rather more impressive that the real thing.
The episode begins steadily enough, but once Buffy is within the Initiative, things begin to advance very quickly. In this case, it’s a little too quickly. It’s almost as if Joss came along, after fixing the Doyle/Wesley problem on “Angel”, and realized that the plot wasn’t progressing enough. Given the glacial pace of the beginning of the season and the lack of follow-through after “The Initiative”, it feels like several episodes are packed into this one hour.
Buffy is run through the orientation in haphazard fashion, which doesn’t quite mesh with the idea of the Initiative as a covert military operation. However, there is reason to think that Walsh wanted to get her hands on Buffy quickly for personal reasons, all of which are related to the purpose of Walsh’s project from the beginning. Buffy, after all, is a young woman with plenty of personal presence and physical ability. She has all the potential for leadership that one could ask for, but none of the discipline and drive to apply it.
As later episodes would reveal, Walsh’s project within the Initiative has everything to do with creating, through conditioning and biological modification, the perfect demon-killer. Riley and the other commandos were an earlier phase of Walsh’s project: conditioning to follow a strong female leader without question, drugs to enhance physical strength and endurance. That gave her the army necessary to capture demons.
Dr. Angleman (think Mengele) was brought in to implement a behavior modification program, which also meshed with Walsh’s doctoral expertise and desire to eliminate the demonic threat. But he also was willing to implement the next phase: not just using demons against each other, but melding the superior strengths of human, demon, and artificial intelligence into the most effective demon-killing machine imaginable.
Walsh’s goal, of course, is to lead her creations in a war against demons, once and for all. Walsh would see the Slayer as a useful tool, but only as a means to an end. With someone like Buffy, however, Walsh would be threatened, because the behavior modification given to Riley and the others would, under the right circumstances, undermine Walsh’s authority. Riley is the leader of the commandoes, and Buffy has already begun to replace Walsh as an object of devotion. Buffy is also capable of providing “positive reinforcements” that Walsh cannot provide. So for Walsh, the question is whether or not she can control Buffy or, in lieu of that, retain control over Riley.
Meanwhile, Willow is becoming more and more conflicted. She wants to hang out with the old gang, but given their set of priorities, it’s come down to making appointments and hoping everyone shows up. At the same time, Tara (who, this early in, still has major self-confidence issues) wants to spend every possible moment with Willow. Suddenly the Scooby Gang is getting in the way of her new relationship.
The writers reinforce Willow’s feelings of abandonment during the scene at the Bronze. Xander is more interested in making some money than quality time, and Buffy shows up with an entire goon squad trailing behind. It’s no wonder that Willow would much rather be spending the night making magic with Tara! It gets a lot awkward when Buffy basically tells Willow that she’s replaced the Scoobies with a tactical team, and when Buffy seems to get annoyed with Willow’s legitimate concerns.
One thing that is a bit annoying (and this is true with many other series with similar concerns): isn’t it rather conspicuous when every single commando’s pager goes off? It’s like when someone trying to sneak up on a suspect has their incredibly loud cell phone start ringing at maximum volume. Yes, it’s to let the audience know that the pagers/phones are active, but it makes no sense from the perspective of the premise. Wouldn’t a covert operation either use all vibrating pagers, or at the very least, make sure only one person’s pager goes off audibly?
The briefing scene is most obviously designed to highlight Buffy’s inability to fall in line (thus forcing Walsh to deal with everything she bashed Giles about in “A New Man”), but there are also some other important elements covered. The idea that the commandoes are mentally conditioned to obey orders without question, even for clarification, is reinforced. Riley picks Buffy as his second-in-command over Forrest, which begins to set the two friends at odds. And perhaps just as importantly, Angleman and Walsh don’t seem to care about the demons’ goals or the big picture; it’s all about Adam and their little project.
Spike gets a little bit of action in this episode, but it actually ends up causing a minor continuity glitch. Spike seems to have no problem fighting the commandoes, where earlier in the season, he clearly had trouble fighting anyone human. One could rationalize this based on the fact that the commandoes have been altered through drugs and conditioning, but that doesn’t track with the overall treatment of his implant.
In a scene that actually presages Faith’s return later in the season, Buffy and Riley end up fighting the Polgara, only to find themselves incredibly turned on when it’s all over. Buffy always seemed to reject the idea that Slaying was a good reason to unleash all kinds of primal urges, but she certainly gets into the spirit in this episode. More importantly, it firmly established that Buffy is making quick strides in becoming the top woman in his life (no pun intended). What’s interesting is that Buffy is searching for some sense of who she should be, and it’s taking her down the same path that Faith took way too far. The difference, of course, is that Buffy has a support system, and thus Buffy achieves (eventually) a more robust sense of personal balance.
So much happens in the first half of the episode that it actually might have been better to expand on the concepts thus far and save the rest for another episode. This is largely because too much happens in this episode; by the time one reconciles a piece of information, it’s already two steps further in the plot thread. As such, character dynamics change a lot faster than they have all season, especially in terms of Buffy’s relationship with Riley.
Despite not caring much about the Initiative’s goals in the first half of the episode, after sleeping with Riley, she’s suddenly far more worried about it. It’s hard to imagine that it’s just because they want Riley to take a daily regimen of supplements. She comes right out and asks about “314”, despite the fact that if it is something she’s not supposed to know, she’s placing Riley in a highly compromised situation. Symbolically, it works because she’s forcing into the same isolation from his old friends that she has unknowingly chosen for herself.
The reference to “314” is designed, however, to prompt Walsh into eliminating Buffy and her ability to derail the Project. This is a rather abrupt and poorly conceived solution. For one thing, Walsh is supposed to be the authority on the subject of behavioral conditioning. She’s just discovered that someone has gained knowledge of a secret experiment from an unknown source within the Initiative. Does she try to capture and interrogate Buffy, or even use behavioral modification techniques to force Buffy into her mode of discipline? Nope…she just wants Buffy gone.
Also odd is the fact that Xander, calling on some slight remnant of his “military training” from “Halloween”, is that only one who realizes that the device shot into Spike’s back (through his duster but not his shirt, apparently) is some kind of tracer. Considering that most of the audience probably figured it out before Xander, it’s rather bizarre to think that none of the others watched enough film and television to recognize what a tracer is. It also doesn’t make sense for Giles to worry over Spike’s welfare in terms of how much damage is done when taking the tracer out; Spike could quickly heal from a good old-fashioned gouging. (But then, the drama at the end of the episode wouldn’t make sense.)
After a short moment to reinforce the divide growing between Buffy and Willow (each spending the night with their respective new relationships, further suggesting the future for Willow and Tara), Buffy is called in for her suicide mission and Willow is called to help protect Spike from Riley. It doesn’t take long for Walsh’s betrayal to make itself plain, but at the same time, it only exposes how little Walsh and the others understand what “Slayer” means.
Walsh compounds her many other silly mistakes by then assuming that the lack of information from the heart monitor means Buffy is dead. For one thing, it’s rather obvious that if the camera with the biometric sensor is no longer on the person who was wearing it, the heart rate would drop to zero (among other things). Why wouldn’t Walsh know this about the equipment she was using? Especially given what she knows about Buffy and her combat skills?
She doesn’t even bother to turn off the monitors or camera feed before talking to Riley, which just makes no sense at all. Considering that this was supposed to be some kind of contingency plan, prepared in advance, Walsh acts like the whole thing was made up as it went along. It provides a nice visual when Riley watches Buffy appear in the camera, thus exposing Walsh’s lies, but it’s just plain bad writing.
If only to give the writers more time to work out the logic of the story, the episode should have ended with Walsh watching Buffy and Riley in his bed, saving the story to this point for another full episode. Instead, they compound the problem by capping off a ton of quick-fire plot points with a sudden twist: Adam skewers Walsh as he says his first word. Just like that, the season arc begins to really kick in, but at the same time, the audience is left with an awful lot of plot progression to digest.
In essence, this episode is the beginning of a process necessary to get the season arc moving again, since it went nowhere fast for the first half of the season. Unfortunately, as the writers themselves would admit, the result was a situation that they found hard to resolve. Joss had given them the character arcs, including the road map of “Fear, Itself”, but the plot arc didn’t flow nearly as well without clear direction. They wanted the shock of Adam killing Walsh so he could become the Big Bad, but his motivations were unclear with a driving force. The writers eventually worked it out, but as they have often accepted, the road getting there was messy.
Memorable Quotes
WILLOW: “You know how it is with a spanking new boyfriend.”
ANYA: “Yes…we’ve enjoyed the spanking.”
BUFFY: “Tell me about your night.”
WILLOW: “Well, spent most of it at Xander’s teaching Anya to play Poker.”
BUFFY: “That sounds like fun.”
WILLOW: “Yeah…except for the Anya part and the Poker part…”
WILLOW: “Everyone’s getting spanked but me.”
BUFFY: “What?”
WILLOW: “Uh…nothing…”
RILEY: “Hope you don’t mind us tagging along.”
WILLOW: “No, no, of course not. The more, the…more…”
BUFFY: “Don’t worry…I’ve patrolled in this halter many times.”
WILLOW: “Did it work? Is the atmosphere ionized?”
GILES: “I’d venture ‘yes’…”
BUFFY: “If you think that’s enough to kill me, you really don’t know what a Slayer is. Trust me when I say you’re gonna find out.”
GILES: “As long as the Initiative is on operation, it’s not safe for you here.”
BUFFY: “No…it’s not safe for any of us.”
Final Analysis
Overall, this episode is really a tale of two divergent frames of mind. The first half develops the plot and character arcs in a logical progression; the second half betrays character integrity in the name of plot expediency. The result is an episode that covers way too much and asks the audience to accept way too much getting there. The writers themselves admit that they had a hard time getting out of this mess.
Writing: 1/2
Acting: 2/2
Direction: 2/2
Style: 1/4
Final Rating: 6/10
Directed by James A. Contner
In which Buffy joins the Initiative, which leaves Willow feeling abandoned, but when her questions and influence on Riley get troublesome, Walsh conspires to take Buffy out of the picture…
Status Report
The main theme of the fourth season was self-identity, and how assumptions about oneself can be challenged when life brings about change. One of the biggest changes in the life of the typical American is the end of high school and the beginning of college, when freedom becomes as much a curse as a blessing. Critical assumptions about the world are revealed as illusion; what seems stable is revealed as fluid. Buffy has struggled to find herself in this new world, and as a result, as changes rip through the lives of her friends, she’s not as connected to their problems and passions as she had been.
The beginning of the episode encapsulates where the season has brought the characters thus far. Giles’ personal situation and isolation was dealt with in the previous episode, but the rest of the Scooby Gang is no better off. Xander is still searching for some sense of direction, and his more immediate need for a career has isolated him from Buffy and Willow. Equally, his relationship with Anya has caused friction, since she is not socially aware in any sense.
Willow has been in something of a funk ever since Oz left, and though they have tried to be patient, their own issues have prevented her from turning to them for comfort. With Buffy falling deeper and deeper into her relationship with Riley, Willow doesn’t have the pseudo-sister to share discoveries with anymore. When she does try to get the gang back together and revive the old bonds, Buffy is still too wrapped up in Riley and the Initiative to see Willow’s loneliness.
Buffy has never had the chance to share her life with someone like Riley, and considering how her Chosen lifestyle makes it hard to make real connections with people, she craves the attention and validation that he provides. She wants to fit into his world, and at first glance, the Initiative looks like a good fit. The problem, of course, is that the Initiative involves military personnel and what’s meant to be military discipline and tactics. Buffy has already rejected outside authority, and while Riley is also looking at her with eyes of love, Professor Walsh has every reason to be concerned about Buffy’s pliability.
Spike is also finding it hard to adjust to his new reality. As Giles points out, Spike has a rather unique opportunity to do something more with his existence, especially since he enjoys the work of beating down demons so very much. Of course, this is odd coming from Giles, given how Giles has plenty of reason to question even Angel’s mission for redemption. Spike doesn’t have a soul, so the idea of a “higher purpose” doesn’t mean a damn thing to him. At least, not at this point, because he hasn’t become obsessed with Buffy enough for it to become a source of meaning.
Nearly every scene, especially in the beginning, becomes an exercise in defying assumptions. A line of dialogue is tossed out, and the assumed meaning is quickly dispelled by the revealed context. For all that, some of the lines don’t make sense, or don’t match what the budget was able to provide. Buffy’s reaction to the Initiative, for instance, is rather more impressive that the real thing.
The episode begins steadily enough, but once Buffy is within the Initiative, things begin to advance very quickly. In this case, it’s a little too quickly. It’s almost as if Joss came along, after fixing the Doyle/Wesley problem on “Angel”, and realized that the plot wasn’t progressing enough. Given the glacial pace of the beginning of the season and the lack of follow-through after “The Initiative”, it feels like several episodes are packed into this one hour.
Buffy is run through the orientation in haphazard fashion, which doesn’t quite mesh with the idea of the Initiative as a covert military operation. However, there is reason to think that Walsh wanted to get her hands on Buffy quickly for personal reasons, all of which are related to the purpose of Walsh’s project from the beginning. Buffy, after all, is a young woman with plenty of personal presence and physical ability. She has all the potential for leadership that one could ask for, but none of the discipline and drive to apply it.
As later episodes would reveal, Walsh’s project within the Initiative has everything to do with creating, through conditioning and biological modification, the perfect demon-killer. Riley and the other commandos were an earlier phase of Walsh’s project: conditioning to follow a strong female leader without question, drugs to enhance physical strength and endurance. That gave her the army necessary to capture demons.
Dr. Angleman (think Mengele) was brought in to implement a behavior modification program, which also meshed with Walsh’s doctoral expertise and desire to eliminate the demonic threat. But he also was willing to implement the next phase: not just using demons against each other, but melding the superior strengths of human, demon, and artificial intelligence into the most effective demon-killing machine imaginable.
Walsh’s goal, of course, is to lead her creations in a war against demons, once and for all. Walsh would see the Slayer as a useful tool, but only as a means to an end. With someone like Buffy, however, Walsh would be threatened, because the behavior modification given to Riley and the others would, under the right circumstances, undermine Walsh’s authority. Riley is the leader of the commandoes, and Buffy has already begun to replace Walsh as an object of devotion. Buffy is also capable of providing “positive reinforcements” that Walsh cannot provide. So for Walsh, the question is whether or not she can control Buffy or, in lieu of that, retain control over Riley.
Meanwhile, Willow is becoming more and more conflicted. She wants to hang out with the old gang, but given their set of priorities, it’s come down to making appointments and hoping everyone shows up. At the same time, Tara (who, this early in, still has major self-confidence issues) wants to spend every possible moment with Willow. Suddenly the Scooby Gang is getting in the way of her new relationship.
The writers reinforce Willow’s feelings of abandonment during the scene at the Bronze. Xander is more interested in making some money than quality time, and Buffy shows up with an entire goon squad trailing behind. It’s no wonder that Willow would much rather be spending the night making magic with Tara! It gets a lot awkward when Buffy basically tells Willow that she’s replaced the Scoobies with a tactical team, and when Buffy seems to get annoyed with Willow’s legitimate concerns.
One thing that is a bit annoying (and this is true with many other series with similar concerns): isn’t it rather conspicuous when every single commando’s pager goes off? It’s like when someone trying to sneak up on a suspect has their incredibly loud cell phone start ringing at maximum volume. Yes, it’s to let the audience know that the pagers/phones are active, but it makes no sense from the perspective of the premise. Wouldn’t a covert operation either use all vibrating pagers, or at the very least, make sure only one person’s pager goes off audibly?
The briefing scene is most obviously designed to highlight Buffy’s inability to fall in line (thus forcing Walsh to deal with everything she bashed Giles about in “A New Man”), but there are also some other important elements covered. The idea that the commandoes are mentally conditioned to obey orders without question, even for clarification, is reinforced. Riley picks Buffy as his second-in-command over Forrest, which begins to set the two friends at odds. And perhaps just as importantly, Angleman and Walsh don’t seem to care about the demons’ goals or the big picture; it’s all about Adam and their little project.
Spike gets a little bit of action in this episode, but it actually ends up causing a minor continuity glitch. Spike seems to have no problem fighting the commandoes, where earlier in the season, he clearly had trouble fighting anyone human. One could rationalize this based on the fact that the commandoes have been altered through drugs and conditioning, but that doesn’t track with the overall treatment of his implant.
In a scene that actually presages Faith’s return later in the season, Buffy and Riley end up fighting the Polgara, only to find themselves incredibly turned on when it’s all over. Buffy always seemed to reject the idea that Slaying was a good reason to unleash all kinds of primal urges, but she certainly gets into the spirit in this episode. More importantly, it firmly established that Buffy is making quick strides in becoming the top woman in his life (no pun intended). What’s interesting is that Buffy is searching for some sense of who she should be, and it’s taking her down the same path that Faith took way too far. The difference, of course, is that Buffy has a support system, and thus Buffy achieves (eventually) a more robust sense of personal balance.
So much happens in the first half of the episode that it actually might have been better to expand on the concepts thus far and save the rest for another episode. This is largely because too much happens in this episode; by the time one reconciles a piece of information, it’s already two steps further in the plot thread. As such, character dynamics change a lot faster than they have all season, especially in terms of Buffy’s relationship with Riley.
Despite not caring much about the Initiative’s goals in the first half of the episode, after sleeping with Riley, she’s suddenly far more worried about it. It’s hard to imagine that it’s just because they want Riley to take a daily regimen of supplements. She comes right out and asks about “314”, despite the fact that if it is something she’s not supposed to know, she’s placing Riley in a highly compromised situation. Symbolically, it works because she’s forcing into the same isolation from his old friends that she has unknowingly chosen for herself.
The reference to “314” is designed, however, to prompt Walsh into eliminating Buffy and her ability to derail the Project. This is a rather abrupt and poorly conceived solution. For one thing, Walsh is supposed to be the authority on the subject of behavioral conditioning. She’s just discovered that someone has gained knowledge of a secret experiment from an unknown source within the Initiative. Does she try to capture and interrogate Buffy, or even use behavioral modification techniques to force Buffy into her mode of discipline? Nope…she just wants Buffy gone.
Also odd is the fact that Xander, calling on some slight remnant of his “military training” from “Halloween”, is that only one who realizes that the device shot into Spike’s back (through his duster but not his shirt, apparently) is some kind of tracer. Considering that most of the audience probably figured it out before Xander, it’s rather bizarre to think that none of the others watched enough film and television to recognize what a tracer is. It also doesn’t make sense for Giles to worry over Spike’s welfare in terms of how much damage is done when taking the tracer out; Spike could quickly heal from a good old-fashioned gouging. (But then, the drama at the end of the episode wouldn’t make sense.)
After a short moment to reinforce the divide growing between Buffy and Willow (each spending the night with their respective new relationships, further suggesting the future for Willow and Tara), Buffy is called in for her suicide mission and Willow is called to help protect Spike from Riley. It doesn’t take long for Walsh’s betrayal to make itself plain, but at the same time, it only exposes how little Walsh and the others understand what “Slayer” means.
Walsh compounds her many other silly mistakes by then assuming that the lack of information from the heart monitor means Buffy is dead. For one thing, it’s rather obvious that if the camera with the biometric sensor is no longer on the person who was wearing it, the heart rate would drop to zero (among other things). Why wouldn’t Walsh know this about the equipment she was using? Especially given what she knows about Buffy and her combat skills?
She doesn’t even bother to turn off the monitors or camera feed before talking to Riley, which just makes no sense at all. Considering that this was supposed to be some kind of contingency plan, prepared in advance, Walsh acts like the whole thing was made up as it went along. It provides a nice visual when Riley watches Buffy appear in the camera, thus exposing Walsh’s lies, but it’s just plain bad writing.
If only to give the writers more time to work out the logic of the story, the episode should have ended with Walsh watching Buffy and Riley in his bed, saving the story to this point for another full episode. Instead, they compound the problem by capping off a ton of quick-fire plot points with a sudden twist: Adam skewers Walsh as he says his first word. Just like that, the season arc begins to really kick in, but at the same time, the audience is left with an awful lot of plot progression to digest.
In essence, this episode is the beginning of a process necessary to get the season arc moving again, since it went nowhere fast for the first half of the season. Unfortunately, as the writers themselves would admit, the result was a situation that they found hard to resolve. Joss had given them the character arcs, including the road map of “Fear, Itself”, but the plot arc didn’t flow nearly as well without clear direction. They wanted the shock of Adam killing Walsh so he could become the Big Bad, but his motivations were unclear with a driving force. The writers eventually worked it out, but as they have often accepted, the road getting there was messy.
Memorable Quotes
WILLOW: “You know how it is with a spanking new boyfriend.”
ANYA: “Yes…we’ve enjoyed the spanking.”
BUFFY: “Tell me about your night.”
WILLOW: “Well, spent most of it at Xander’s teaching Anya to play Poker.”
BUFFY: “That sounds like fun.”
WILLOW: “Yeah…except for the Anya part and the Poker part…”
WILLOW: “Everyone’s getting spanked but me.”
BUFFY: “What?”
WILLOW: “Uh…nothing…”
RILEY: “Hope you don’t mind us tagging along.”
WILLOW: “No, no, of course not. The more, the…more…”
BUFFY: “Don’t worry…I’ve patrolled in this halter many times.”
WILLOW: “Did it work? Is the atmosphere ionized?”
GILES: “I’d venture ‘yes’…”
BUFFY: “If you think that’s enough to kill me, you really don’t know what a Slayer is. Trust me when I say you’re gonna find out.”
GILES: “As long as the Initiative is on operation, it’s not safe for you here.”
BUFFY: “No…it’s not safe for any of us.”
Final Analysis
Overall, this episode is really a tale of two divergent frames of mind. The first half develops the plot and character arcs in a logical progression; the second half betrays character integrity in the name of plot expediency. The result is an episode that covers way too much and asks the audience to accept way too much getting there. The writers themselves admit that they had a hard time getting out of this mess.
Writing: 1/2
Acting: 2/2
Direction: 2/2
Style: 1/4
Final Rating: 6/10
posted by John Keegan | 12:24
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