Ok, so having trouble coming up with the titles right now...
Today was gorgeous. I spent half the morning lolling around in bed with the windows open, enjoying the sunshine. (Waiting for Tommy to leave the house so I could finish watching the episode of Buffy he interrupted last night). I watched Hush yesterday, which is possibly the scariest episode since Xander and Cordelia smooching. There was something about those Gentlemen gliding about that triggered a deep childhood fear… and who hasn’t had nightmares where they try to scream and no sound comes out?
Ok, so any Buffy analysis I do is going to be soooo out of date, but bear with me. And no spoilers, I’m only up to This Year's Girl (I can’t believe my supplier left me stranded halfway through a two-parter!)
Buffy is starting to get a little confusing. In the beginning, there were vampires, and they had no soul, they were evil, Buffy killed them. And Angel was a vampire but he had a soul so nobody killed him. Fine. But now… there’s Spike, who seems to be capable of expressing guilt, fear, pain, happiness, even affection. In fact, he’s acting remarkably human. Ok, so where I’m up to he can’t bite anyone, but that shouldn’t mean he stops being evil. And anyway, the human-like attitude started long before he got neutered. So what’s up with that? Why isn’t anyone staking him? Could it be because he’s not actually evil through and through? And if not, then what about all the other vampires getting staked. Maybe if we knew them for more than an episode we’d find out that they actually had feelings we could relate to.
Or maybe not. I’m tired, it’s late, brain addled. And I miss Oz. He comes back, right? And he falls in love with Spike, and… oh, nevermind.
Posted by Fionnaigh at August 19, 2003 12:19 AM'Hush' is so creepy! Easily the best ep of Season 4, and the first Buffy episode I ever rewatched.
Are you watching Angel too?
Posted by: Cathy at August 19, 2003 04:15 AMOh, I want to see the one where Oz comes back and falls in love with Spike!
Posted by: iona at August 19, 2003 09:07 AMThe ethical question of vampires and demons is an interesting one. It looks to me as if vampires are simply people without consciences. They retain all their other personality traits, just without the safety catch. Most people have the potential to carry out and enjoy evil acts, to a greater or lesser extent, but don't do so, or even want to do so on a conscious level, because they know it would be wrong. On becomming a vampire, they cease to care whether their actions are wrong or not. So the change in someone's personality when they become a vampire can be drastic or minimal, depending on how repressed they were. Angel is one of the more extreme examples of a person with very strong sadistic tendencies that are kept thoroughly repressed by a very strong conscience while he has a soul. Whereas Spike doesn't seem to have been repressing much in the way of a dark side - he retains his mortal romantic tendencies, and simply becomes more of a party animal. He's out to have fun, and the casualties are more or less collateral damage. And the librarian-type vampire who got burned by the judge probably wasn't repressing anything as a mortal... I expect he killed only to feed, when he remembered, and had no interest in tormenting humans at all. I don't think Faith would change much if she became a vampire.
It's ethical to kill regular vampires because if not killed first, they'll keep killing innocents for ever because they need to drink blood to survive and at best they have no guilt about doing so. Spike is a special case, since though he's still a nasty piece of work he isn't a danger to others so it's a lot harder to justify killing him. In theory, it might be more ethical to simply chip all vampires just like Spike, but there are obvious practical difficulties in doing so.
Angel (the series) gets really confused over the whole "are demons inherently evil?" thing. Not to mention The Powers That Be who seem to be suddenly unquestioningly accepted as the ultimate force for good despite never having been heard of before.
Posted by: darthsappho at August 19, 2003 03:11 PM