'Buffy' legacy will outlive tonight's anticlimactic finale
May 20, 2003
By Kay McFadden
Times staff columnist
The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.
That's always been the dilemma deliberately presented on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," whose eponymous heroine wraps up her long run of fighting evil at 8 tonight on UPN (KSTW-TV).
It also happens to be the unintended problem with the finale. The Scooby gang is gathered, the Hellmouth is about to be broached and the ante is ultra — no less than the soul of mankind, or at least of Sunnydale.
But the skillful execution and flair that formerly characterized "Buffy" have long since gone by the graveside. Even though the whiz-bang special effects were not in the tape sent to critics, the apocalyptic ending lacks soul. The gang has checked out.
Oh, the irony. For if there is one thing "Buffy" had in the best days, it was inner spirit.
Devoted followers of "Buffy" will not be chagrined by news of tonight's anticlimactic climax. Wise slayerettes knew the day little sister Dawn got added to the plot that the show had jumped the stake.
We still watched "Buffy" because even at its worst, it was an islet of originality in a sea of mundane domestic sitcoms and police dramas. It actually possessed sincere emotion and a moral point of view.
That a high-school girl with a mission to destroy vampires should become the vehicle for bringing some heart and soul to prime-time television seems obvious only in retrospect.
When executive producer Joss Whedon's clever creation arrived on the air in 1996, society wasn't paying much attention to young women. Attitudes have shifted since then, and "Buffy" was a contributing factor.
Its intelligent depiction of an archetypal California schoolgirl struggling to accept her unique burden of duty immediately resonated with the previously neglected audience of teens and twentysomethings. Quite a few older adults liked it, too.
The show's entertainment brilliance lay in using supernatural demons as a metaphor for adolescent angst, and in a superb cast headed by the simultaneously cocky and vulnerable Sarah Michelle Gellar. The dialogue was smart and bracingly hip.
The result wasn't all upside, of course. "Buffy's" big splash helped spur marketers to pursue 12- to-18-year-old females with a ferocity comparable only to Anya's fury over being left at the altar by Xander.
That was a boon to The WB, original home of "Buffy." Encouraged by its success in treating teenagers as full-fledged human beings, the network continued to develop other high-quality, youth-skewing dramas such as "Gilmore Girls" and "Smallville."
However, not everyone has been as responsible. If you want to witness the exploitative aspect of catering to young females, you need only watch UPN's "The Search for America's Top Model," airing right after "Buffy" at 9 p.m.
Despite waning over the last couple of seasons, "Buffy" never became so crass. The plots got repetitive and developed the soapy inevitability that awaits most great TV dramas — witness "The West Wing" — yet our vampire slayer kept her dignity.
The show, like its main character, was conscientious. It strove to impart wisdom without devolving into those death-knell characteristics of preachiness and oversimplification.
As we leave "Buffy" behind, it's worth noting three things we learned from watching:
There are no easy victories. Whether it was inadvertently torching the high-school gym while slaying her first big vampire or losing her great early love, Buffy demonstrated that life is full of hard choices in the pursuit of higher goals.
Be tolerant of human (and nonhuman) frailties, but don't give a pass to bad behavior. Over the years, every one of the show's characters stumbled from grace; some emerged better and wiser, and some simply had to be banished.
The demons are inside us. So are the angels. Above all, "Buffy" demonstrated that good and evil are not free-floating abstractions, but reflections of a complex nature that each individual has a responsibility to shape.
Although roteness has replaced ritual, tonight's ending is a classic reiteration of these lessons.
And whether or not you believe the small band of survivors that gather in the final frame to say, "We saved the world," it was great watching an empowered group of young women — and a few men — who thought such things were possible.
Thanks, "Buffy."