The Chain. Wow. I don't even know where to begin with this story because it's one of Joss's best in any medium. And almost every word is important, so it's hard not to repeat them all. I also thought I might do it chronologically, to get the history of this girl in order, but the intercuts are so moving, it's hard to rearrange them. I guess I'll just go in story order, and we'll see what happens.
We start with a horned demon named Yamanh, the head of a demon army that's headed to the surface from deep underground. Where underground we don't know. He's holding a girl above his head and saying that Buffy Summers is dead. He raises her high above his head for all his minions to see, and here we get the first example of one of the themes of the piece as he tells them to scream the name of the one who killed the Slayer, let it be known, etc. Yamanh (Yah Mon the Jamaican demon?) is a name that all should remember. There's power in his name.
The Girl: The funny part about all this? I never even met her.
Then a quick cut to a jock looking down and asking, "Who the hell are you?"
So we're obviously seeing a story about the slayer who is one of Buffy's lookalikes, the one who is literally underground, who Buffy mentioned in her first voiceover this season. And we know the name of Buffy, we know the name of Yamanh, but we don't know her name. She doesn't tell us that.
Cut over to a flashback to just before the battle. The girl is talking to a pixie girl who's urging her to leave. She refuses because she's been sent to stop Yamanh from rising to the surface. She might die, but she's staying. Pixie girl says she didn't lay her faerie eggs in the girl's ear canal just to watch her die. Ew. But it's not fatal so whatever I guess. Never trust the sidhe. And the pixie has a touching farewell with the girl, "I love you, Buffy," without ever knowing her name.
The Girl: Here's how it works. You don't get a choice.
Then we're back to a time just before the jock's question, where 3 private school girls are bitching about the fascist regime at the school, gossiping about whose panties were in the utility closet. The depantier himself approaches them, looking for the pantiless one, when suddenly the brunette girl seizes and collapses to the ground as her potential is unleashed.
Cut to Giles saying, "And now I will tell you about the chain."
But first, a beautiful panel of the girl experiencing being a slayer for the first time, flashes of demons haunting the slayer dreams, an upside down chain of girls going back into the mists of time with the scythe floating there too, the girl giving a voiceover about how it felt, how it was different for everyone, but it hit her like a ton of Mike Tysons.
The Girl: The power, the shared memories, the...truth. The unbelievable truth.
Cut to Rona saying that there is no truth.
Then we get a fun commercial with Andrew and Vi (I bet he wrote & shot it). The housewife keeps breaking vases because she can't control her superstrength. Are you having this problem? And strange dreams of girls in the past? (Very much the movie mythology there, since it never really came up a lot in the series. We had prophetic dreams, but not so much other Slayer dreams.) There's a pamphlet you can get about this new condition. Call 1-800-CHOSEN-1. This should have been my first indication that the world of the comics was different from the world of the show in the amount of supernatural knowledge the lay people had, but I kind of glossed over it the first time. But this will tie into the whole Harmony story as well.
Flashing back again to her first days of training, where the Rona and Giles shots are coming from. First she thinks it's a cult, but she can't ignore how it feels to be a slayer now.
The Girl: And truth is, it's not cheesy like the commercial. It's actually amazing.
She continues to v.o., mentioning Giles' visit and what he taught them about their lineage, while at the same time reminiscing about the other Buffy lookalike in Rome, partying it up with the Immortal.
The Girl: You know ironically I'm probably even less famous [than Giles w/his association to Buffy] because of the name.
Then we're back to before the battle. A minion has found the girl. She sends him back to Yamanh with the message: Buffy Summers is coming for him. Using the power of Buffy's name to intimidate the demons.
The Girl: The name. What power. Not the greatest power though.
And we see another shot of her lying on the ground after the spell hit her. Then we're with Giles again, and he and the girl talk about the chain, the connection the slayers have with one another, going back to the beginning. She doesn't give him much space to talk, saying we've heard it and it isn't bullshit, but the words aren't what matters, it's the feeling.
Cut to a mission with 6 slayers and at least 6 vamps. I thought I had spotted Simone in some of the training shots, and it's true, she's on this mission, and as charming as ever. "Just stay out of my way, amateurs." Then there's this cool set piece of the fight, and we see our girl fighting, then a less confident redhead cornered by a vamp. As our girl says we have to focus and adapt and work together (the anti-Simone), she saves Red and takes a vamp bite. Then pulls the vamp off her and throws him onto Red's stake. The cool thing is immediately after 2 of the other slayers are gushing about how awesome it is, but they're talking about Simone, who took out the vamp with a sword and took the sword.
It's a foreshadowing of what we already know is to come, our girl will be fighting the good fight in the shadows, unseen by the others who will attract more attention and acclaim, but being the one who gets exactly why she's fighting and what she's fighting for. As opposed to Simone and those who end up gathering to her, who take sisterhood and turn it into a gang of thugs, using their power however they choose. Our girl is the perfect double for Buffy, the girl who never sought to have her name be the power source it is today, who just fought continually to save the world when very few people knew it.
Anyway, back to the book. Our girl mentions she got a souvenir too, not a sword but a vamp scar. And Red tells her that Buffy's got one too. Then we cut to Rona assigning her the mission. "No one up here can know you're her, no one down there can know you're not." The stakes are high and they're hoping the power of Buffy's name will help keep him distracted from rising all the way to the surface.
Why was she chosen? For this mission, for being a Slayer? Because she's strong enough to handle it? Or expendable enough to be tossed away? I think what we're told is summed up as: the strength of her belief in the rightness of her cause, in the bond they share, in the willingness to sacrifice herself for it if need be. Simone would have declared her true name, unwilling to (as she would see it) "hide" behind Buffy's name, needing to claim power in her own name as Yamanh does. This girl has gone beyond that.
The Girl: The truth? There is no truth. There's just what you believe.
The girl descends into the underworld and is slimed by a giant slug as pixies look on. The slug kills any who don't pass his test. I think his sliming was actually an info transfer. She comes out of it knowing what's up with the faeries and the slimefolk. And apparently they don't get along real well. Our girl, speaking from her own truth, tells them they need to work together to survive the demon uprising. "This is how we live. Together. With each other. For each other." Or she doesn't recognize them as people worthy of her help.
Pixie girl exults that they have the Chosen One on their side, that Yamanh knows enough to fear THE NAME Buffy Summers. Sluggo asks if she will face the blackness and not run to the light, and we flash back to that moment of becoming. And we see our girl snap out of her stupor when she hears screeching brakes. Without a thought, she's pushing her friends and the depantying jock out of the path of an out-of-control semi and taking the hit herself. She didn't need training or lessons, she was a slayer from the second she was awakened. And again we see the jock looking down at this girl who survived and saying, "Who the hell ARE you?"
The final fight. We see her taking on Yamanh as the slugs and pixies and Ravenclan and leafblowers fight demons at her side, together. We see the slayer backup team finally arrive too late. And we see her dead body again on the ground.
The Girl: But that's [who you are is] not the point. There's always a name. Lincoln. Hitler. Gandhi. The name can inspire terror, awe...sometimes great things. But there's millions of people go into making a name. People facing things they couldn't imagine they would. In the moments that matter, even our own names are just sounds people make to tell us apart. What we are isn't that. The real questions run deeper. Can I fight? Did I help? Did I do for my sisters? My comrades, children, slimy slug-clan...
There is a chain. Between each and every one of us. And like the man said, you either feel its tug or you ignore it. I tried to feel it. I tried to face the darkness like a woman and I don't need any more than that. You don't have to remember me. You don't even know who I am. But I do.
Gah! I can't read that without crying for this girl we just met and hardly knew. It's such a beautiful statement of what we should aspire to in life, of recognizing what's important and what really defines us. How many of us will reach the end of our lives and be content with our choices rather than full of regrets?
I don't think this story is hugely about the major arc of the season. It's more of an epilogue or musing on the themes of season 7, some of which were a bit sidelined by the whole fight with the First and everything that led up to it. It's a commentary on the spell cast at the end of the season and its metaphorical meaning.
I know there's people out there who feel the spell was a huge betrayal by Buffy, a girl who would never have chosen to be chosen forcing that choice upon all the other potentials in the world. I understand that reading a bit, although I maintain she never forced anyone to use those powers as a slayer, to fight evil or join the ranks. She merely unlocked the door to the potential already within them; they can use their powers as they wish. They can be superheroes or they can be construction workers or stunt women or whatever they want. The point to me is the metaphor of sharing power, and the idea that, however the power was instilled in the line of slayers at the beginning, it is part of the potentials now, and no shadow men have the right to lock away any part of their potential from them. Just as men never had the right to define womanhood (or manhood for that matter) according to what characteristics or what rights were acceptable for them to have, to show, to choose from.
Here is the fuller explanation of that intended meaning. The rest of the season will explore this idea, so even though it's not a part of the Twilight arc directly, it's peripheral and important. And Faith's story explores some of this as well. The slayers choose to come together to fight evil, to walk their own paths, to use or be used, or to not choose at all. By the end, they choose whether to be alone, to band together in smaller groups, to fight vampires or to try and punish Buffy. The chain seems to be broken. Maybe humans just can't sustain that tug on the chain, that feeling of connectedness to one another, for long. Maybe it is too much of a threat to the status quo if we all act as though we're in this together. And there is still always a them for us to side against.
Another thing I think about in relation to this story is Anne, the third season opener. There the thrust of Buffy's character arc was to reclaim her name and all that it implied, at a time when she was doing her best to hide from it. Again, the power of the name. In that case, not accepting her name for herself was an act that came from pain, from not being able to accept the name of the person who had to do the things she had done and would continue to have to do. She simply didn't want to be that person anymore. In that case, ignoring her name, trying not to give it power (while at the same time giving it total power over her choices) was a sign of weakness, of refusing to know herself. In this story, for our not-really Buffy Summers, ignoring her name, stating the unimportance of her name, was a sign of strength. She was not negating herself by refusing to claim her name, even for posterity. She was accepting that ultimately, she was herself entirely, and whatever sounds people made to identify her were irrelevant to that knowledge she had of herself that was unnameable, the concrete reality of her existence that needed no man-made symbol to signify it.
When we go beyond the need for symbols and signifiers to what is real, that's when we know the truth.
To quote Spike: This is just...neat.
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