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Buffy 7.17: Lies My Parents Told Me
Determinism versus free will.
Self-awareness versus repression.
Individual rights versus the greater good.
Oh, and the Oedipus complex.
Whew.
The Buffilosophers and Buffademics are going to have a field day with this one.
I don't even know where to begin.
Let's start with: who knew Spike had a mother?
I mean, of course he had one, but on a show where most characters' parents are as nonexistent as those of the Peanuts gang, it's not something we've ever been encouraged to think about. (Do Willow's parents even know that she almost destroyed the world?)
So, Spike sired his mother. That's kind of creepy.
The child is father of the man, of course, although I doubt this is what Wordsworth had in mind.
There's always been something erotic about siring a vampire, which makes for some fascinating Oedipal complications here. That old folk tune had such great power over Spike because he was repressing something about his mother. But what exactly was he repressing? The fact that he sired her? The fact that he staked her? The fact that he wanted her? All three? He's certainly more efficient than Oedipus, who wanted to kill his father and marry his mother; Spike just rolled them into one.
My god, he'd be a therapist's dream.
Except he's got that nifty jewel thingy. Where can I get me one of those? It would have saved me so much time and money.
And yet, as Giles pointed out (more on him below), it wasn't enough for Spike to know what the trigger was. He'd still have to do most of the work himself, which is not easy for a being who's not particularly self-reflective.
And which
self are we talking about, anyway? It's been stated several times in the Buffyverse that when you become a vampire, you literally are not the person you were before; your body has been taken over by a demon. That would explain Spike's mother's transformation. When she became a vampire, she was freed of the shackles of human emotional conflict. No longer a prisoner of her natural maternal feelings, she was free to treat her son how she'd always wanted to.
Conflicting emotions are what make us human. Lucky soulless vampires. They don't have to deal with that.
Souls seem to cloud our judgments, don't they? Spike's mother claimed that she could see things so much more clearly once she was a vampire. Spike's repressive subconscious didn't exist as a useful tool for the First until Spike regained his soul. And who psychoanalyzed Buffy in "Conversations With Dead People"? A vampire.
Pesky things, these souls of ours.
(I do want to point out that despite the fact that a vampire is not the same as its human forebear, Spike seemed to have just as strong feelings for his mother as William did. Then again, he could have been driven more by the vampiric urge to sire, rather than by filial love.)
To refer to the title of the episode, the lie Spike's mother told him was that she loved his poetry and was content to have him around. But there was another lie, albeit one that Spike told himself. He'd always believed it was his mother who had turned on him, when it really wasn't his mother at all; it was the demon inside her. Furthermore, there was no need for him to feel shameful at having bitten her; after all, he, too, was a vampire, and that's what vampires do.
That's what Spike tells Robin, in fact. Slayers and vampires both have a job to do. Slayers slay; vampires sire. These are their fates, their natures. I was thinking about Nikki's death and Spike's mother's death on the one hand, both by vampires (by the same vampire, in fact), and, on the other hand, Joyce's death, by an aneurysm. When you think about it, these are pretty similar -- they're both forces of nature, just doing what they're meant to do. An aneurysm doesn't have a soul, either.
Spike's back in full control of himself now. The chip's no longer preventing him from violence. The trigger's no longer compelling him to it. And he has a soul that lets him make moral decisions.
Which is why it was so chilling to think that despite all of this, he was
still going to kill Wood.
Just because you have a soul, doesn't mean you'll do what's right.
(By the way, I loved the whole chip-soul-trigger bit in Wood's office. "So the military gave him a soul?" Hilarious. I love it when the writers make fun of themselves.)
Poor Robin could never accept that his mother was driven by her nature. We can't choose our parents, but we're compelled to want something from them, no matter who they are. We want their unconditional love and their undivided attention. And it's their job to give it to us. If they can't, maybe they should think long and hard about whether parenthood is a good idea for them. We thought it was rough for Buffy to be a slayer and hold down a job at the same time? How about being a slayer and
taking care of a kid? By yourself? A slayer having a child is almost as inconceivable as -- well, as a vampire having a mother, perhaps. Did Nikki know she was a slayer before she had Robin? If so, what did she do when she was pregnant? Did the Council have a maternity-leave program? Maybe she didn't learn she was a slayer until after Robin was born. Maybe her predecessor stayed alive for a long time. That would make more sense.
"The mission is what matters." Which mission? The mission of slaying? The mission of motherhood? Unfortunately for Robin, his mother believed in the former more than in the latter. This was her lie to him -- that slaying was what mattered most, was what
had to matter most. The truth is, she was wrong. If she'd told him the truth -- that she was wrong in abandoning him to her mission -- then maybe he wouldn't have stored up so much anger over the years.
Buffy knows the truth. In fact, she's confounded conventional wisdom time and again. Slayers must be alone; slayers must put their mission above all else; slayers must follow rules. But Buffy's never believed in conventional wisdom, traditions, or proper procedure. Both the Council and the Initiative came to learn that.
And yet it was unsettling when Buffy told Giles that, if she had to do it over again, she'd sacrifice Dawn to defeat Glory. Is this foreshadowing? "When it's hard, Buffy won't choose you." (Unless that's another lie my parents told me.)
But I didn't really believe it. A few weeks ago, in "Get it Done," Buffy made clear that she's not going to take the dark path. And when she realized Giles was deceiving her, she ran off to save Spike, whom she cares about deeply.
Giles, Giles, Giles. We saw both sides of him last night: good old Stuffy Giles, with his little anti-library tirade at the beginning (and that was cute, by the way); and the cold, calculating Ripper, willing to do what needs to be done (just as when he killed Glory by killing Ben).
I was angry at Giles, and deeply disappointed in him. How could he be so cold? How could he allow Robin to kill Spike? And yet, from Giles's point of view, it makes sense. Spike's a vampire, and he's a liability to the group. So Spike has a soul? He's still a vampire.
I was wondering afterwards if Giles had somehow been possessed by the First, corporeally. Depending on whom you believe, Spike is either the group's strongest liability or its strongest asset. If he's no longer susceptible to hypnotic suggestion, then he's not going to be very helpful to the First anymore. The First tried to kill Willow because it was wary of her; is it now wary of Spike as well? Makes you wonder.
It's not clear what Buffy's thinking lately. Did she run off to save Spike because she cares about him, or because she thinks he's their strongest warrior? "The mission is what matters." She believes that, as she told Robin. But it's up to her to decide what's most important to the mission. And sometimes she'll decide that what she feels is more important. Again, there are no hard and fast rules for Buffy Summers. Never have been.
The lie Giles told Buffy -- because it was "Lies My
Parents Told Me," not "Lies My
Mothers Told Me" -- wasn't that a general must be willing to sacrifice everything for the mission to succeed. The lie he told her is that the mission is important above all else.
Buffy believes differently.
So perhaps there's a corollary to the
Buffy Paradigm.
Yes, it's true, you should be prepared for the mission ahead.
But if you're going to have to kill those around you -- those who don't deserve to die --
In other words, if you're going to have to compromise your morality as a human being --
Then maybe the mission isn't worth it in the first place.
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