In X-Men 2: Fievel Goes West, the mum says to her kid, who is a mutant, “Have you tried not being a mutant?” This is a terribly clever and original use of subtext by director Bryan Singer, because it’s like mutants are sort of like gays, and Bryan is “one of them”, if you can follow my clever and original subtext.

But it wasn’t remotely original because as any fule kno, Joyce says exactly the same thing to Buffy in Season 2′s Becoming (Part 2).

Buffy has been metaphorically gay for ages, because Joss Wedon himself is metaphorically gay. He’s married to a lady, and all that, but you know that see-through plastic girl’s backpack that Dawn has in Once More With Feeling? That belonged to Joss. And in any case, that was musical theatre. We all know what that is Hollywood secret code for, don’t we? Fancying boys.

Forget Willow and Tara moving that coke machine using only the power of their tits. For the most lesbific storyline ever, I’d go for Season Three.

Never mind how in Revelations Buffy teases her friends by talking about how she’s seeing someone and turns out to be Faith. It all goes completely gay in Bad Girls, which starts with Buffy and Faith having a flirty chat about how are both “Slayers” – not like anyone else - and they “get off” on slaying. Buffy is coy about this, but Faith accuses her of playing Miss Goody Two Shoes. Faith is basically saying, “You love it really, don’t you, you dirty cow.” Then you’ve got the bit where they do a bit of slaying together and then go for a boogie together at the bronze. They’re surrounded by men but those men don’t stand flippin’ chance with them.

And you’ve got the bit where Faith huffs on the window and draws a heart in it – because she and Buffy are in love! Ah, no, then she draws a stake through it. She’s just inviting Buffy to go slaying with her. But that’s just another word for fiddling with each other’s parts until they go off, clearly.

But such people are fools. Dawn is excellent for at least three reasons.

1. The audacity of her introduction.

References to the arrival of Dawn occur as far back as season 3, but the problem to be solved was that of dropping a new character into the show, a new core family member that had never even been mentioned in four years except in those obscure references to “Little Miss Muffet”.

The practical foundations were laid in Season 4′s Superstar. The episode begins with an altered premise for the whole show, different rules (even different opening titles), and no explanation for the viewer, crediting us with the intelligence to hang in there for half an hour with no one to hold our hands and talk us through what has happened. Jonathan is in charge now, deal with it. This is the kind of thing that “network executives” always say you absolutely cannot do, because the audience just isn’t that clever.

Slowly Jonathan’s spell begins to unravel, but not before we’ve started to seriously enjoy discovering how each familiar character has been affected by it. By the end of that one episode, everything is back to normal, but we’ve learned to cope with an almost total disorientation caused by a magic spell, in which everything we thought we knew is in now doubt.

The difference with Dawn’s arrival is that there are three whole episodes where there is almost no acknowledgment that they’ve fucked with the premise of the show, and yet it keeps going. It’s a miraculous combination of disorientation and seamlessness. This is clearly excellent.

2. Makes a mockery of the notion of “canon”

To the genuinely autistic, enjoyment of a fictional television show consists of classifying posited facts and events according to whether they are canonical (they are true, or they happened) or otherwise. A typical example is the issue of Faith’s last name, which is never mentioned in the the whole of the TV series, but is in some shitty book that the show’s writers never read, much less had any input into.

Who cares? The whole pointless business of arguing over which year Anya stopped being a communist is rendered utterly ridiculous by the fact that the TV series itself has two very different but equally “official” versions of its history prior to Season 5: the one we saw, without Dawn in it, and the one that all the characters remember.

It’s no good saying that Buffy discovers the “truth” of Dawn’s invention in a magic spell. The point is that the spell is so perfect and all-pervasive in its effects, changing everyone’s memories of the past, that it effectively changes the past. The ultimate authoritative account of Buffy’s life should be her own autobiography; and what would she write down, lounging in her apartment in Rome after Season 7?

As if to deliberately indicate the dual reality of the show’s history, the original writers played with this concept in their scripts for the still-to-be-made animated spin-off show. This would be set in the early years of High School, and yet Dawn would feature in it. It’s an account of those times, as if told by someone who was there (and thus they have the modified memories).

Therefore it’s probably naive and simplistic to talk about “modified memories” in any case. What if the memories with Dawn in are the truth, and the story that Dawn was only recently created was the lie? What if the first five years of the show were an unreliable account, an unprecedentedly long mislead?

The more good-humored fans tend to play along with this duality, and it was a long-running gag on some Buffy forums to confuse newcomers by reminiscing about old episodes as if Dawn had appeared in them.

The really, really stupid fans reacted to the early episodes of Season 5 by suggesting that a huge “continuity goof” had occurred. According to Himiko, an unusually sane regular on alt.tv.buffy-v-slayer:

The real shocker to me was how many viewers carried on about the “continuity” problem: “hey, Buffy doesn’t have a sister. The writers don’t know what they’re doing.” Some never did catch on that this was a plot point, not a mistake, until the denoument.

Yes, you read that right. There were people at the time who thought that the writers had simply forgotten that Buffy didn’t have a sister in the previous four seasons.

Forums and newsgroups attract the kind of person who is seemingly in love with the idea that their own notion of where a show should be going is unassailably correct, and if they ever appear to be wrong then the explanation is simple: the show’s actual authors have simply made a terrible mistake. Wurst episode evur.

3. Represents adolescence

The experience of becoming an adult is strange, because it involves one individual (the child) vacating a body so that another individual (the adult) can take up residence.

The new occupant feels as if she has little in common with the previous one. She inherits all the memories of that previous existence, but they now seem faraway and false. Looking back at her old diaries, the new adult can barely believe it was she that wrote all that silly junk (it wasn’t – it was just a kid). They don’t seem like real memories. It’s as if they happened to someone else.

A kid is a blob of energy, with no strong connections to the world, just flitting around in it, having fun, but with the potential to turn into a real person, a far more complicated thing.

This is what Dawn is all about.

1. Woman-of-color Uhurah detects a disturbance on her short range scanner.
2. Kirk asks her to bring up whatever-it-is on the ship’s widescreen LCD.
3. It’s some-kind-of energy field floating in space. Spock suggests it could be ominous, or failing that, mysterious.
4. It gets on the ship and TAKES OVER SCOTTY’S MIND. Scotty is now evil, but he still looks exactly like good old Scotty. How freaky is that, mo’ fo’?
5. Scotty gives Bones a kiss. Scotty falls over and says “Where am I?” He’s okay, but now Bones is evil, because, like, it JUMPED INTO BONES (this is different from jumping on bones).
6. Etc.

The advantages of this story template are plentyfold:

• The bad guys are played by the normal cast members. No need to phone around the casting agencies trying to find a journeyman hack character actor who can pull an evil face and will probably turn out to be a dead loss.
• No need to ask make-up to “design” another rubber alien mask with tentacles. No special effects at all, in fact, just one picture of a mysterious energy field floating in space (and possibly something sparkly around the mouths when the bad character kisses its next victim).
• The actors love it, because the whole miracle is achieved only by the noble art established by Thespis of Icaria in which a humble darling lovely actor speaks great lines and holds the very beating heart of the audience in their hand, forcing them to credit the incredible.
• Best of all, the viewing public wins also. Because Scotty and Bones go way back together, or something, and it’s so gripping to see Bones meet evil Scotty – oh man, he’s going to be so confused by how strangely his old pal is acting!

This theme is regularly made use of in Buffy, often with tremendous artistry, by writers who are wielding the tropes of their chosen medium as if they were pulling solid gold out of their arseholes. And sometimes just in a really average way, but with a few good jokes dotted about.

It’s not always an evil thing that possesses one character after another; sometimes it’s a body swap between two characters, or it’s an evilness that picks a character and stays with them for the entire episode (or longer). The point is, the usual cast of players is re-deployed as different characters, or on radically different variations on their usual characters.

Here’s a quick rundown, just for fun – a “fundown”, if you will:

Season 1

Witch – Amy swaps bodies with her mother – a bit tenuous as Amy isn’t a regular cast member, but she would go on to appear in every season except 5.

The Pack – Xander is inhabited by a hyena and – key point – treats Willow very badly.

Season 2

When She Was Bad – this doesn’t really count because Buffy is just being an arse, not actually actually possessed.

Halloween – Buffy turns 18th century while Xander goes commando (but not in the sense of wearing no underpants, sadly, though you do get to see him not wearing very many clothes at all in Go Fish).

Bad Eggs – Giles is possessed by… erm… an egg.

Innocence – Angel turns bad, and stays that way for nine episodes. Willow tragically loses several tropical fish.

Bewitched, Bothered And Bewildered – several regular female characters succumb to a love spell.

I Only Have Eyes For You – a couple of ghosts take over Angel and Buffy.

Season 3

Band Candy – Giles and Joyce turn into teenagers and have sex on top of her car.

The Wish – Xander and Willow get to be vampires, while Buffy gets to be grumpy. See also Doppelgangland, of course.

Amends – Buffy’s hairstyle appears to be under some kind of dreadful curse.

Gingerbread – Joyce falls under the influence of the Daily Mail.

Season 4

Beer Bad – Buffy is oddly exempt from the forehead makeup that all the less important actors have to wear.

Something Blue – Buffy and Spike, etc. This reminds me, I ought to do a post about foreshadowings.
Who Are You? – Buffy and Faith swap bodies, and guess how badly Faith-as-Buffy treats Willow and Tara? If you answered “fairly” or similar, you may have a gold star. Both slayer-actresses have a good time mimicking each other’s mannerisms and accents.

Season 5

The Replacement – bit of an oddity, this one. Two Xanders, and a mislead suggesting that one of them is evil, but it’s actually two actors (they’re twins), so this doesn’t quite count. But otherwise it would look like I’d forgotten about Season 5.

Season 6

After Life – only very quick possessions here, just long enough for the nasty thing to overhear useful information before sodding off to take advantage of it.

Tabula Rasa – everyone’s memory is wiped, so they get to play a naive, simpler version of their usual selves.

Normal Again – aside from the twist that we never really find out which version of reality to trust, this is a fairly normal possession episode, as the main character turns on all the other characters one by one.

Villains – Willow is effectively possessed by magically-enhanced grief, turning into an utterly different character.

Season 7

Him – shameless (yet entertaining) revisit of ‘Bewitched…’ which is even referred to in the episode by way of apology.

The Killer In Me – In this episode, Willow is played mostly by Adam Busch (usually Warren), who does rather an excellent job.

So there we have it.

Note that there is no episode in which the possessing influence jumps directly from one character to another in the classic way. However, there is a somewhat crappy Angel episode (Lonely Hearts, Season 1) where that happens. And a pretty good straight body-swap in Carpe Noctem from Season 3.

Well, there is a problem with Buffy The Vampire Slayer, one that presents a barrier to many would-be (or rather, wouldn’t be) fans of the show. That problem is Buffy herself. To grossly oversimplify the problem: she’s not a nerd.

It should of course be understood that “nerd” is not an insult; the nerds long ago inherited the Internet and are well on their way to inheriting the entire earth, and this is a good thing. Go nerds. But in the strange dimension that is the American High School, not so far removed from the wild plains of the Serengeti where upright humanity evolved, this truth is concealed by the existence of “popular” people: popular males are good at sport and humiliating people, and popular females are good at shopping for clothes and humiliating people.

They are not quite like human beings, these popular people. They are not subject to the stress of potential failure that real human beings have to face. Everything comes easy to them. They have superpowers.

Buffy’s core sidekicks are certainly not popular. When we first encounter Willow, she is undoubtedly wearing clothes bought for her by her mother, and Xander has never successfully humiliated anyone.

The true measure of popularity in the early days of the show is a character’s relationship with Cordelia, who is undoubtedly as popular as it gets. It emerges in Season 2 that Willow founded the “We Hate Cordelia” club, appointing Xander as treasurer. Cordelia lives to pour humiliation on the heads of nerds like Willow and Xander.

So how does Buffy fare in her first encounter with Cordelia? Very well. Buffy has many superpowers, and this is one of them. She passes every test Cordelia throws at her, and is instantly admitted to the popular club. This is enough to make any normal human being suspicious of her. And then, get this… she snubs Cordelia!

She was once, like Cordelia, obsessed with shoes. Only on finding herself thrust into a supernatural occupation she didn’t ask for does she develop any depth. The earliest depiction of her in the series is a flashback of her sitting on the steps of her original high school, licking a lollypop seductively and quite obviously thinking about shoes. In Season 3′s ‘Homecoming’ she spends an episode trying to revert to type, to out-Cordelia the competition.

It’s not clear whether she had any moral compass before her first encounter with vampires; there were no good or bad people, only good or bad handbags. No serious problems existed in her life. She effortlessly attracted a circle of “friends” and passed all her tests – all the important ones, anyway.

For a TV show created by a male nerd, and written by nerds both male and female, it is a bit strange that the central figure is such a bottomless howling void of shallowness. She is partly a fantasy figure, the carefree, popular girl who, in the nerd fantasy, takes pity on the nerd and lowers herself to spending time with them. The writers and the audience (all of them complete nerds) secretly love this idea, while ultimately finding it as unbelievable as Willow does when Buffy first says “Hi!” to her. The biggest nerd in the history of the show (and thus its true hero), Andrew, appeared in Season 6, but he was initially an unattractive personality and morally vacuous. The writers of the show are nerds, but they found it easiest to create a nerd by placing him with the pathetic bad guys. The truth is, even nerds hate nerds until they get to know them.

She may also be a half-arsed attempt to appeal to exactly the type of person she typifies, drawing in a wider viewing audience. But this probably never worked. The writers were always more comfortable spoofing her trivial fashion-related tendencies rather than attempting to take them seriously, and even the female writers would have to go to Joss for assistance in producing convincing dialogue about designer clothing labels.

But leaving aside these external forces, the effect of all this is that, throughout the series, a huge gulf separates Buffy from the other main characters. They are more like lowly work colleagues than friends. They regularly refer to each other as “best friends”, but this is never anything other than mystifying, even jarring. “In what parallel universe,” the enthusiastic viewer ought to shout back at the screen, “are you even remotely best friends?”

Buffy is the alpha female, the queen bee, and her sidekicks are the satellite clique that she dominates. Xander and Willow both idolize her, and though they don’t talk about it much, they also deeply resent her (Xander because Buffy never takes him seriously, and Willow because Buffy lures Xander away only to reject him). Even leaving aside her Slayer abilities, Buffy is already socially superhuman compared to her sidekicks, and this drives a permanent, mostly unspoken, wedge between them. Check out the scene in Season 3′s ‘Bad Girls’ where Willow offers Buffy a slightly pathetic spell, and is hit by the sudden realization that Faith and Buffy are the in-crowd, whereas she is not, and has never been, “in” anything at all, not even the communist party. Willow’s journey to the dark side starts in the very first episode, the moment she meets Buffy.

And we are left in little doubt as to what Buffy has graciously given up so that she can save lives. In Season 3′s ‘The Prom’, we get the first inklings of her martyr complex, where she makes a really big deal out of the fact that her own life – the one she rightfully deserves for being the popular type – is denied her due to her calling, that she lays down her having-a-life for her friends, and she gets a tiny gay umbrella as a symbol of all this.

Buffy is not like Spider-Man, the ordinary nerd whose superpowers grant him the ability to achieve great things in a social world he could not otherwise navigate with any confidence, and she is not like Superman, the alien being who has to learn to disguise himself as a human. In High School terms, she is a socially successful human being who, on being granted superpowers, loses nothing except some of her need to be socially successful, and so uses a group of nerds to provide herself with a connection to pure humanity.
She needs to put her roots somewhere. She chooses raw, unprocessed and unthreatening humanity-mud.

Clearly there is a huge gap in the market for this kind of thing. In fact it’s a wonder that no one has thought of making a website on this subject before. But at last this discrepancy will be thoroughly dealt with.