Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Headscratchers/Season 1

Headscratchers for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Spoilers abound.

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Jesse - Lest We Forget

• Why is Jesse never mentioned or even alluded to ever after he dies? I mean, the implication is that he, Xander, and Willow had been best friends for a long time and yet no ever talked about him even a few episodes after his death.
  • Sunnydale Syndrome: when you live in that town you get used to putting the random, inexplicable, and/or violent deaths of people close to you firmly in the past.
  • They're not gonna grieve forever, eventually they move on. After all, Joyce and Tara weren't talked about for long after their respective deaths. Of course, the real reason he isn't mentioned is because of writing. The audience barely knew him, and thus didn't really care when he died. The characters will care, but having them cry over somebody the audience doesn't care about usually results in Narm. As a Fan Wank, presumably they do all crying off-screen.
    • That's a good point, but not really what I was asking. Joyce and Tara were both talked about after their deaths, but Jesse isn't mentioned ever, even as a casual reference. For example, when Angel lost his soul (only a season after Jesse's death) Xander never said anything like "I had to kill my best friend but Angel gets a free pass?" which seems like a pretty in character thing considering he brings up Angelus when Buffy goes to kill Anya.
  • Yeah, I was just thinking about this. It's like Jesse has experienced an odd form of Brother Chuck.
  • Angst? What Angst?
  • Every time Xander and/or Willow mentioned something about their pre-Buffy past, it seemed quite odd that they didn't bring up Jesse, given that he should have been a huge part of their past.
    • It's possible, (and possibly implied) that while Xander and Willow had been best friends since kindergarten, they'd become friends with Jesse maybe as late as high school. This would explain why he doesn't really feature in their recollections.
  • Not really an explanation, but it's worth noting that it's probably because of this that our friends over in L.A. continue to mourn Doyle long after he's dead and gone.
  • Doyle isn't comparable. He had several episodes of characterization and a very dramatic send-off. Jesse was written into the pilot solely to be immediately killed.
• There's actually a trope for this: Forgotten Fallen Friend.

Pack Lunch

• In the first-season episode "The Pack", Giles and Xander reveal to the audience that Xander remembers everything from being possessed by hyenas. Xander wasn't the only one who got possessed-- which means the evil clique at school still remembers being turned into hyenas and eating the principal. This is never dealt with.
  • If you got possessed and committed cannibalism against your will, would you go around yammering about it all the time?
  • Xander has also become immune to Sunnydale Syndrome, the others on the other hand presumably forgot it the way people forget being attacked by vampires and demons
    • Except that "The Prom" references "hyena people!" so someone clearly remembered it.
      • Since it doesn't seem terribly likely that the events we saw in "The Pack" were connected to hyenas by people other than our heroes, one wonders what happened off-screen in this episode (or between episodes) to lead to that outburst.
  • There isn't really a good way to deal with it. Offscreen, those kids are probably going to need massive amounts of therapy for the rest of their lives to come to terms with what they did under the effects of hyena possession. Sucks for them, but short of cutting to scenes of psychiatric treatment in the middle of random episodes later on, there really isn't anything we can do for them.
• There's also the fact that hyenas are matriarchal, and females are sexually aggressive while males are not. So basically, one of the female Bad Kids should have been in charge, not Xander. That, or Xander was possessed by a female hyena spirit.

Does the Master Have a Soul?

• In the second episode of the first season the Master uses strange expression: "My blood is your blood, my soul is your soul." But at every point after this it's made clear that no vampire save for the two special cases has a soul of any kind.
  • "Of any kind" is a bit of a presumption. Presumably, what the Watchers and the Kalderash call a "soul" is a slightly different thing to what an ancient vampire calls a soul. Clearly the vampire has some kind of animus, defined by most in-show sources as a demon but doing the exact same job as a human soul. The Master could have said "my demonic spiritual essence is your demonic spiritual essence", but "soul" rolls off the tongue better and is, from his perspective, just as accurate.
    • Wouldn't "spirit" be just as good?
  • IIRC, the official Whedonverse definition of a vampire is a human whose soul has been kicked out and then had their corpse possessed by a specific type of demon. Presumably, that demon is the soul and he doesn't have his human soul anymore. OTOH, it would be pretty interesting to find out that, at some point, someone tried to neuter him by giving him back his mortal soul... only to find out that it didn't even slow him down for a second.
  • He could simply be referring to the soul he once had.
    • Both of these last two fall through, though, because he says this line while painting a symbol on Luke's forehead that allows the Master to absorb the power Luke gains from those he feeds on. Even if someone had resouled the Master, the odds are pretty far against the same thing having been done to Luke. And there just doesn't seem to be any point in talking about joining souls that are no longer part of them.
    • By the way, the "re-ensouling-not-giving-a-nice-guy" kind of happened in Angel, season 1, episode 14 "I've Got You Under My Skin".
• Although, it would explain the oddities of his line like higher immunity to sunlight (seen with a few of them), keeping their humanity (Spike, even if he tries to bury it alot), unmatched evilness (Angelus) and more.
• Given the way the vampire demon thing seems to bond with the corpse it's possessing, basing its personality on it and so forth, it's likely that the vampire considers the vampire demon thing to be its soul, separate from the body, but they still refer to the body as themselves. Like we do, we consider our soul and body together to be us. I mean, you could make the case that people are bags of meat possessed by a human soul thing. It only makes sense for a vampire to call the part of him that is his metaphysical self his soul.
• The Master and his Order are basically a weird vampire cult. The bit about souls is just flowery language.
• He's not just speaking prose; he's incanting his ritual. The joining he's performing is a spell, and there's no reason to assume that the spell was written explicitly for vampires. "My blood is your blood, my soul is your soul," is a pretty vague incantation that could potentially mean any number of things apart from the "When I drink blood, you get stronger" usage the Master and Luke performed. The wording actually sounds like a lower-scale version of the Captain Planet spell for defeating Adam. It might just be that the Master recited "My soul is your soul" because that line is simply part of the incantation, and nothing more.

Continuity in "Angel"

• Several continuity puzzles in "Angel" (i.e. Buffy episode 1:7):
  • The first time Buffy sees Giles after fighting The Three, he has just spent hours reading up on them; why?
    • She probably called him from home while Joyce wasn't listening.
      • They're three of the Master's known followers, and apparently dangerous ones. He's just got to their entry in The Big Book of Vampires.
  • That same day, why does everyone expect Angel to spend all day in Buffy's house, rather than slipping out when there's no chance of meeting vampires?
    • He can't go out between sunrise and sunset. The rest of the day, Joyce is around.
    • Yeah, but no one but him knew that. They didn't find out he was a vampire until he left that night.
      • Also, they probably figured that the dude's infatuated with Buffy, enough to either wait for her or to spend all day going through her stuff.
      • Or that he's in danger of retaliation from the Masters's followers, so hiding at the Slayer's house is the safest bet, especially for a wounded guy.
  • Why does Darla change from a blue CHSGU to a red CHSGU on her way from Angel's apartment to The Bronze?
    • Maybe she stopped for a bite to eat, then went, "You know, I like your shirt. Yoink!"
  • Why does Buffy change from a black coat to a blue coat on her way from the hospital to The Bronze?
    • You know the answer.

Book Cage

• In season 1 "The pack" why to they have a jail cell in the school?
  • The shooting script refers to it as a "steel-mesh book return cage".
  • Yeah, it's a cage typically used for storage. Naturally meant for storing books and inanimate objects, but in Sunnydale it has other uses. It comes in quite handy further in the series.
  • Besides, no one goes into the school library; Giles was shocked when Owen came in to check out a book.
  • Actually, my question is, how did Buffy manage drag Xander unconscious through the school without anyone noticing?
    • It was during class period so nobody's going to be moving around to see, and Sunnydale High, in keeping with their otherwise abysmally low disciplinary standards, apparently has no hall monitors.
    • Not to mention that this place is the trope namer for Sunnydale Syndrome. Anybody who did happen to see Buffy dragging an unconscious Xander through the hallways probably just went 'OK, not my problem, and I'm getting out of here while its still safe'.
    • For that matter, as Buffy and Xander are known to be friends, its entirely possible that anybody who did see her would assume that he'd gotten hurt and she was trying to get him to the nurse's office.

Teacher Deaths

• Mr. Gregory and the principal died and their bodies were found in school. You'd think that that would be enough to close the school for at least a few days. But no, the bio teacher's death results in bio being cancelled for a period and the principal being eaten in his office results in a teacher's meeting, while the school should have been immediately evacuated and at least closed for the rest of the day if there's some kind of man-eating group of something on campus. That's gross negligence.
  • They pretty thoroughly cover in season three that Sunnydale has a very literal disease where they block and just charge forward. Considering how much stuff goes down in plain sight, like the attacks at the Bronze, in the Harvest and again in Dopplegangland, and a troll later than that. Zombies at Buffy's party. Whether it's just that people have trained themselves to accept death and charge forward or if it's a spell cast by Mayor Wilkins similar to Glory's, it's established very quickly that in Sunnydale dead people happen.
  • To quote Snyder: "Nobody's died at my school! ...This week!"
  • To quote Oz talking about the school paper: "I usually go straight to the obits."
  • I always figured that much of Sunnydale's population was quietly aware of the supernatural, but just kept going about their everyday lives because hey, what else are you gonna do (especially when the Mayor and Wolfram & Hart can suppress any sensational news stories)? After the fiftieth inexplicable death, anyone who hasn't already left town would keep on going with their daily lives.

The Bronze

• In episode two, a Friday, the Bronze is stated to have no cover on Fridays. So why is the bouncer shown receiving and counting cash from patrons as they enter?
  • Bribes for letting underage kids in?
  • Even without a cover, there could still be an entry fee.

Buffy's Death

• If Buffy actually died, how was Xander able to revive her just using CPR?
  • The simple answer is that prophesies lie. The Master puts it rather well when he tells Buffy that if she hadn't come he couldn't rise. Literally her original plan of screw that send someone who isn't prophesied to die plan would have at worst gotten someone else killed but wouldn't have let him rise. Whatever the parameters of the prophesy were apparently being unconscious and not breathing was sufficiently close to death to satisfy the spell.
  • OP here. Apparently "sufficiently" close to death is enough to call up the next slayer (Kendra) then?
    • Clearly it was. It's possible that the Slayer Spell might activate from certain near death situations. It wouldn't surprise me in the least to find out that Faith's coma qualified as close enough to dead to have activated a third slayer someplace. I know if I was a Shadow Man I wouldn't want there to be no Slayer because the one fell asleep and couldn't be awakened, which without modern technology is pretty much death anyway.
      • Well, we find out that Faith's coma did not call the next Slayer. Apparently the vital signs actually have to flatline to trigger it. As for the problem of 'what did they do in primitive eras if the Slayer was permanently incapacitated but not dead', there is a very simple and ruthless answer to that question -- cut her throat and wait for the next one. The Watchers are the people who came up with shit like the Cruciamentum, after all. They're cold enough to do it.
  • The prophecy says that she will die, not that she will stay dead. People have been recuscitated from clinical death before... and in the Buffyverse, with the right magic its actually possible to raise someone from the dead even if they've been dead for months. Just ask season 6 Buffy.