For a minute there, Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 looked like it would end just like every other season has: with Buffy and her intrepid Scooby Gang staring the end of the world in the face and finding a way to save the day.Except it didn’t.
It couldn’t. This time was different. You could feel it coming several issues before the crescendo. This wasn’t just another Big Bad looking to unravel all the good in the world. This was a Bigger Bad, the Biggest Bad, a whole new savage universe fighting its way through the fabric of existence to consume the universe we know, the one we’ve watched and read and dreamed about for almost fifteen years now. The Whedonverse was coming apart at the seams.
Whedon and company fought a different kind of battle with Season 8. Their imaginations were the only limitation. They took Buffy, Willow, Xander, and the gang into territory where the TV series couldn’t possibly go, because they could. And why not? Buffy deserves an epic, and she got one. Season 8 was four years of massive battles, shadowy villains, sad goodbyes, heaps of blood in various colors, and a whole lot of changes for Dawn.
But where do you go from there?
Giles is dead. The magic has been sucked out of the world. The power that so defined Willow from Season 4 onward is no more. Angel is a shell of his former self. The Slayer army is reduced to a horde of Buffy haters. As Season 8 ends, there is only Buffy against the world, leaping across rooftops as if they were gravestones, back in the cemetery of real life.
We all know (or at least, we all should know) that Joss Whedon could have spun a tale on an even grander scale for Buffy Season 9. Of course he could. This is the man who’s killed his heroine twice and brought her back, sent Los Angeles to a hell dimension and closed a Hellmouth with the help of a surly antihero named Spike. You know he could have dug in, called down the thunder and delivered Buffy and friends into yet another battle for the fate of reality filled with demon hordes, transdimensional sex, and mojo that would turn your hair white.
Season 9 will take a harder road—a stripped-down, back-to-basics road. Buffy is roaming the night with nothing but a stake in her fist again. The Scoobies have real jobs and rent to pay. The Buffy series earned its stripes on the potent metaphor of high school as a demon-infested trial by fire before venturing into bigger supernatural threats and loftier paranormal concepts. With Season 9, Whedon is stripping away much of the otherworldly, and what’s left behind is the daily struggle. Work all day, patrol all night. Fight evil, one wretched vamp at a time, and try to make it through.
It might seem like a step backward, but there’s more at work here than just a back-to-basics approach. Season 8 left us with a few hints of something big ahead for Season 9, and it seems obvious that Buffy won’t just be left to the same simple battles of her early years forever. This is Buffy, after all. Nothing is ever simple. Now it’s about rebuilding, about learning to fight the good fight all over again. It’s about searching for that old magic.
If Joss Whedon has taught us anything, it’s that there’s always magic left.
—Matthew Jackson
Join the Conversation on Twitter #MyBuffyLife
Read our other guest Blogs by:
Allison Ferland