Buffy Came Back Wrong: Bargaining and Afterlife
I've been wanting to do this for a while, but it seemed like too great a task for me to realistically complete. And I initially had planned to finish it before posting but...well, that's just not practical (for one, it would be really, really long). So I'll just set up a tag for it and add to it when I have the time until I complete all the episodes. :)

And for those wondering about the FFL review...I had this project sitting on my hard drive a while. The FFL review is a priority once I get the time to sit down and watch the darn thing.

Okay, Buffy gets a lot of shit for her part in S6. And, yet, most people realize that she is depressed. Although I don't see her depression being described much more than, "She didn't want to be alive", which is true.

But I want to take a more in-depth look at that depression. How it's portrayed in the season. How it affects Buffy's behavior and perceptions. How the other characters react to it. And then her gradual recovery by the end of the season. And the best way I know how to explore that is to just take it one episode at a time.



Of course, Buffy's depression manifests in a myriad of different ways. And my explanation here is wholly relative to my perceptions and experiences, as I found Buffy's struggles mirrored many of my own at the time I watched it. So yeah, it's personal.

Setting the stage here, but at the time I watched S6, I had just been planning to kill myself. Okay, not the vague, "I wish I were dead" type of planning, but the actively suicidal type. I had a date and method set. I had notes written. Everything was planned, and in the month leading up to that day, I stopped living. I ignored bills, ignored friends, ignored work, ignored everything because I truly thought it wouldn't matter. I wouldn't be around next month to worry about any of it.

That was actually a pretty damn good month. There is a great freedom and unburdening when you think that things will be done soon and you don't have to worry about life's responsibilities.

No, the hard part came afterward. When I found I couldn't carry out my plan, I totally fell apart. Because not only would I be around next month, I had to figure out how to live again and start taking care of everything that I had been neglecting. I'm fortunate in that I was able to swallow my pride and ask for help from family.

Buffy finds herself in much the same situation in S6. She'd been done. She'd been free of her responsibilities. The Slaying, the money, the sister...none of it mattered because she was finished. Her struggle in S6 is dealing with the shock of being alive and having to...you know...live.

This exploration is going to try to look at the whole of Buffy's depression in S6, including how it affects her relationships with her sister and her friends. And Spike, who is pivotal to her emotional arc.

Spike represents the death that she was taken away from. The peace. The completeness. She craves him because he makes things "simple". Because it's easier to be with death than it is to try to live with a world that's throwing bills and menial jobs and troubled sisters and troubled friends at you.

Her entanglement with Spike represents her longing for the peace of heaven. It also represents her reluctance to try to be a part of the world. The more she clings to Spike, the more she ignores what's going on.

Dawn represents the exact opposite, though. The MacGuffin who was created wholly to give Buffy a reason to fight last year, she serves as a reminder to Buffy of why she has to live. Buffy will ignore her through much of the season. Buffy's eventual acceptance of her duty to Dawn is essential to her recovery by the end.

And now, let's just go ahead and get to it.

1. Bargaining aka OMGWTF I should be dead!!!!

Well, this is the start of it all. Before we get to Buffy, though, let's take a look at the Buffy-bot.

The Buffy-bot is perky. The Buffy-bot is happy. The Buffy-bot is like a freaking Stepford Wife.

After all, Buffy's in heaven. Her counterpart in the realm of the living displays this contentment and blind cheerfulness in the face of utter badness that is going on.

The demon biker gang heralds Buffy's return and the Buffy-bot's death. As Buffy is pulled from heaven, the Buffy-bot, with her incessant smiles and happy-go-lucky nature, just can't exist anymore.

This episode portrays the complete and utter shock Buffy feels upon simply being alive again. She can't even comprehend what's going on around her. After the blissed out environment of heaven, anything, even standard Slayer chaos, seems like hell.

In fact, her first words in the episode are to ask Dawn if she's in hell. Buffy doesn't know what's going on. She thinks she somehow got booted out of heaven and sent to the Bad Place. Her default has shifted after being at peace. Anything less than heaven, which is all of reality, feels like hell.

This is a feeling that will not go away until near the end of the season. She will go to great lengths to try to recapture that heaven feeling and regain the simplicity of death. She will often do so at the expense of those around her. It's not malicious. It's because she's almost literally out of touch with reality.