So the first 5 issues of Buffy season 8 were The Long Way Home, referring to getting back to Sunnydale at the end as well as Buffy getting back on firmer ground of a sort with beginning to define a Big Bad for the season, defining an enemy to fight.
This next set of stories is called No Future For You. It's about Faith and Genevieve and slayers that aren't operating within the larger Buffy/Giles umbrella organization.
We open up on a v.o. by Faith, who's Batmanning up on the Hope Memorial bridge in Cleveland, Ohio, home of the other U.S. Hellmouth, as referenced in the Wish and Chosen. She's quoting Oh, The Places You'll Go, the Dr. Seuss book that sells out at graduation time. She's not happy in Cleveland. Her mom, when sober, would read it to her as a child. She's feeling very alone, and not in exciting locations.
Robin Wood calls her cell. She flirts a bit but it's business. Robin is running a squad of slayers in town, and they're taking out a nest of vamps. But one of the vampires was a single mom before she was turned, so there's children to worry about. Robin doesn't think the no0bs can handle that, so he called Faith.
She quotes again from the book as she ziplines off the bridge statue and heads off. "You're off to great places...today is your day." Poor Faith. She's not really feeling the connectedness of the great slayer collective either, plus she gets the shit jobs. Where's her Shanshu?
So of course all the kids were turned into mini vamps by their mother, 5 or 6 of them. And Faith has to take them all out. It's beautifully rendered, because we see her surrounded, then the pov pulls back out of the room and you see her silhouette as she begins staking them. We don't see it, just hear the dustings as we pull further and further back until we're out of the home, looking in. Very cinematic.
Faith heads home to her crappy place -- seriously, they can't get her better accommodations? I mean, I'm sure it's her choice, she's become quite the little brood-Angel, but damn. She sinks her stake into a wall full of older puncture wounds as she walks in. And someone asks, "Long night?"
Giles is there, wearing a hideous yellow submarine jumper and drinking the chamomile tea that's about all Faith has in the joint. (Although the design on the shirt, does it look a little like Spike's vehicle at the end?) Giles is making nice, but Faith figures he's here to give her another crap job, so she just asks what he wants.
Giles says he knows Faith was looking into forged passports to get the hell out of this dump (for some reason). He offers her papers and freedom to go anywhere, with a stipend, if she'll do one job for him. Faith doesn't trust the Watcher's Council to agree to anything that would be good for her (for some reason), but Giles basically is the entire Council right now and has the weight to make it happen. Must have some of the resources as well. And what he wants is for her to kill a slayer.
This one is setting up a lot, so it's really wordy, but not a lot actually happens. Giles tells her the deal. There's nearly 2,000 slayers out there now, and not all of them are choosing to use their powers in a good way. There's one in particular that is fated to usher in the end of the world if she's alive at the end of fall (the twilight of summer, you might say). Plus, fall's end, that wording alludes to the Fall from grace as well, which is Faith's whole deal really. But this slayer is not like Faith, wrong-headed but able to be rehabilitated; she has to be killed or we're doomed. Is Faith up to it?
She asks, "Who is this evil bitch?" and we cut to a black-haired aristocratic girl on a horse, saying she should like a puppy. Her name is Lady Genevieve Savidge, Gigi, and she's the daughter of an English duke. She's out with her tutor, Roden, supposedly learning the ins and outs of the foxhunt.
She mentions having nightmares and then senses something. It's a young girl, Roden's fox, a slayer. She was kidnapped for this hunt but fights back, kicking Genevieve and dirtying her shirt. She calls the girl a filthy commoner and backhands the crap out of her, snapping her neck without a thought. Then she's horrified, saying she thought the girl would be her equal in strength, is she not another slayer? Roden says she is, and that makes her first kill all the more impressive. What a jerkface.
Turns out tutor Roden is an Irish warlock who can call upon a couple of impressive-looking gargoyle-type demons to help dispose of annoyances like dead bodies. His book (grimoire?) has the Twilight symbol on it. Not good. Genevieve goes from shocked dismay to anger as she says she's tired of jumping through Roden's hoops and wants what was promised to her. So he's leading her by the nose, convincing her that her new abilities entitle her to something. We'll find out later that he's setting her up to depose Buffy.
Giles and Faith are still in Cleveland, much to Faith's disgust. They're in a big banquet hall with set tables where Giles intends to start her training. Faith doesn't think Giles can teach her much about wetworks (boy, is she out of that loop), but he says if that was it, he'd have taken a rifle and done it himself. The slayer's estate is mystically shielded (by Roden) so the only way to get to Genevieve is by going undercover and getting close to her "through subterfuge and cunning." Which Faith thinks means cunnilingus and she's not going there, thank you. (Leave that to Buffy. Or maybe then Faith will consider it since she likes to "share").
Anyhow, some of the irony cuts and jokes in this one don't quite work for me, but that's cool. Giles needs to teach Faith about high society in Britain, which is going to be a lot of memorizing stuff. Actually, it may not be an area that Faith feels confident, but it's got to be a little nice, training in something like that instead of decapitation techniques for a change.
But Faith is reluctant, thinking she's not the girl for this, and she starts to walk away. Giles says there's a reason why he wants Faith for this and he tries to take her arm. She flashes back to a kiddie vamp calling her a worthless whore and grabs a fork and stabs Giles in the arm. I don't know if one of the vamps actually called her that or she's confabulating, but the point is she still doesn't have a lot of self-love going on. It's about time someone in the slayer organization took some notice of where she's at in the head these days. Yay Giles.
She's instantly sorry about the fork, but Giles is chill. When he examines the wound, she sees his Eyghon tattoo for the first time and is surprised. That's right, she wasn't around in Band Candy; who knows what she was doing that episode, but she wasn't seeing Ripper. And she came to town after Dark Age, so she has no idea Giles is anything like her. He tells her she wasn't the first person to discover rebellion or let innocents be hurt through her stupidity. "You and I aren't so unalike." And he mentions that because of that, they have a greater responsibility to shoulder harsh burdens now. In a story that wasn't all that interesting to me up to now, it was really very cool to see them make that connection. And Faith starts learning utensils.
We flash over to Scotland for a quick not-quite-aside. Xander is trash talking a punching bag in the middle of the night as he preps for "sparring" with Renee. Buffy surprises him and gives him a hard time. He hides his shirtless self behind the bag and denies being anything other than a buddy to Renee.
Buffy can't sleep because of a recurring nightmare. She draws the Twilight symbol on the window and ponders it, saying they don't know its connection to the US Army hostility. They haven't heard from Giles for a few weeks, and Xander has a convoluted babblefest about him being more interested in checking out the new books (slayers) as opposed to the old (Buffy). Not that anybody's checking Buffy out. Again, it just didn't quite work for me; I don't know why. But it's important because it sets up Buffy's problems with Giles that come up later on when she finds out where he's been. They're just not that close anymore. And he's taking upon himself tasks that he doesn't want her to have to handle but not telling her about it. Kind of Lies My Parents Told Me still.
Anyway, Buffy's bad dream is of a creature that looks like a scary gryphon with a snake tongue and green flame mane chasing her. It says, "The Queen is dead. Long live the Queen." Funny that the flames are green, which in the comics is Willow magic, when it's supposed to refer to Genevieve. Maybe there's some leakage in the dream about the future Fray/Dark Willow stuff. Or maybe green just looked cool.
Back to England and a fun meta reference. We see Rose Tyler and the 10th Doctor in front of a telephone booth (red, not blue, probably for legal reasons)! Then we segue into the flat. Looks like a Watcher hangout or possibly -- actually I bet it's Giles' flat, since I think he gives it to Faith later. Full of books and artifacts. Faith has also been learning an accent, and how to swear in British, although that part probably was incidental. He's quizzing her as she comes down the stairs in a formal gown, feeling foolish. Giles looks, looks again and says she's actually "five by five." The end.
Like I said, a lot of setup, introduction of the players. Not much of Twilight other than Roden tying in in some way I don't fully understand. I can't remember all that happens in this section, so I'll have to see how that plays out. This is more about the other arc of the season that has to do with all the activated slayers and the different ways they see what has happened to them and what they choose to do with it. I'm liking all the different perspectives we're getting on that idea.
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