6x10 “Wrecked”Episode Rating = 0
In a perverse way, I was kind of looking forward to rewatching this episode, if only to see if I’d still find it as terrible as I have on prior viewings. However, as with “Smashed”, I didn’t feel the pit-of-stomach loathing that this has induced in the past – merely embarrassment for everyone that was involved in it. Whereas I could watch prior weak episodes of “Buffy” and get the impression that they were instances of talented individuals making mistakes, “Wrecked” feels like the product of people who wouldn’t know good television if it punched them in the face. This is essentially an after-school special on the dangers of drug abuse masquerading as an episode of “Buffy”, and if you watch it with your hipster irony glasses on, its magnificent awfulness makes it one the funniest things the show ever did. Of course, ‘so bad it’s good’ isn’t enough to save a story that has a massive, deleterious effect on both the important Willow character and a cornerstone of the show’s universe (magic), meaning that even a solitary pity point becomes out of the question.
What I Liked about “Wrecked”:- Spike has a few lewd-but-funny lines (“You’re bent”/”Yeah, and it made you scream, didn’t it?”), and I loved his response to Buffy saying “last night was the most perverted, degrading experience of my life” being a heartfelt, happy “mine too”.
- The special effects on the magical hallucinations are good, and I liked the shot of Amy disappearing as she walked backwards through the cloak at Rack’s.
- Alyson Hannigan did her best with some exceedingly weak material. She managed to be consistently engaging, though it wasn’t enough to compensate for all of the episode’s problems.
What I Disliked about “Wrecked”:- The ‘story’ is a disaster. Disregarding subtlety, metaphor and originality, the episode instead facsimiles a generic eighties after-school special, and replaces the word ‘crack’ with ‘magic’. Every single thing that happened was a ‘don’t do drugs’ cliché, and the symbolism just kept smashing the viewer over the head. Let’s list the blatant anvils: after dabbling with gateway drugs (oops, I mean magic), Willow is peer-pressured by her bad-girl friend into visiting a pusher; who she has implied sex with in order to get some of the hard stuff. Despite being ashamed the following morning, she’s instantly hooked, and is so desperate for another fix that she drags a young innocent into her addiction. In the process, she almost kills said innocent, which serves as the grand moment of realisation in which she breaks down and admits she has a problem. She finally confesses that “it’s not worth it if it hurts the people I love” and goes cold turkey, being immediately hit by massive withdrawal symptoms. That entire narrative is hackneyed beyond belief, and it’s saddening to think that a show that once played this kind of thing for laughs (“Beer Bad”) is now doing it with a straight face.
- While S6’s handling of Willow and her specific character arc had been poor, it could still have been salvageable - at least until this episode. Unfortunately, the sudden shift to portraying magic as an addictive drug totalled both it and Willow as believable Buffyverse entities. Beyond the huge issue that no prior allusions had ever been made to magic being physically and psychologically addictive, it also demonstrated either a total misunderstanding or blatant disregard for Willow’s characterisation, undoing
five year’s worth of hard work . The entire problem with Willow and magic was that she was insecure and had low self-esteem, and saw it as a way in which she could both prove herself to others and make life easier. Therefore, the problem with magic was Willow’s attitude towards it, and not any intrinsically corruptive properties of magic itself. However, this episode chose to make Willow a passive victim, and dumbed down her motivations from wanting to control the world around her to desiring a quick high. Taking these factors together, this might just be the worst creative decision the “Buffy” writers made.
- Judging by the sad music that played over the scenes of Willow trying (and failing) to magically close the curtains(!) and then her shower of shame after visiting Rack for the first time, I think we were supposed to feel bad for her – but I sure didn’t. The character has become so unsympathetic that my basic reaction to her pain is now ‘cry more’.
- Speaking of music, the majority of the motifs heard in this episode were looped from pieces in S5. It was especially jarring to hear Joyce’s funeral theme play as Willow animated Tara’s clothes.
- Amy’s characterisation is all over the place. At the start of the ep, she’s happy to go home and visit her father (when in the last episode, she was really unnerved by the prospect of doing so), and the reveal that she was apparently a magic junkie in S3 was absurd (was her dyed hair in “Gingerbread” supposed to be a ‘she’s evil’ tip-off?
). As with Willow, her slide from gateway abuse to desperate addict was so quick as to be laughable, and I can’t believe that someone approved the ridiculous ‘breaking into Buffy’s house to steal sage’ scene. I guess showing her waiting in line at the grocery store to buy some wouldn’t have had quite the same impact.
- Buffy has transformed into the melodramatic romance novel heroine she was back in “Goodbye, Iowa” and “Into the Woods”. Her flouncing about and “oh, let me go!” during the collapsed building scene were less Buffy the Vampire Slayer and more Spike the Bodice Ripper, and her general behaviour was over the top. The character could have easily conveyed her disgust without resorting to pouting clichés, and if I’m completely honest, I’d rather the sex-shaming ‘oh my god, it’s wrong because I don’t love him’ stuff was just done away with altogether.
- The new Buffy/Spike dynamic is troubling, but not in the way the writers intended it to be. Ignoring that Spike’s post-“Tabula Rasa” persona is completely inconsistent and out of character with how he was at the end of S5/start of S6 (...actually, that’s impossible to ignore), we’ve returned to the creepy misogyny of “Crush”. With Buffy and Spike, the show is propagating the idea that no means yes (or will become yes if you badger someone enough), and having Buffy be turned on by Spike fondling her when she had explicitly stated her unhappiness regarding sex with him was alarming. I’m also surprised that the writers were so ignorant of Spike’s popularity and James Marsters’ charisma – and as a result, Spike comes across better than Buffy, despite their stated intention to portray him as bad and Buffy as good.
- The dialogue in the Spike/Buffy scenes could have used a re-write. He calls her ‘Slayer’ in every other line, and it’s irritating.
- If Rack’s place is magically generated, couldn’t he at least make it look like something besides a stereotypical crack house?
- Mandraz (the demon)’s appearance was pretty random. The summoning seemed like a contrived way of injecting a monster into the script (itself a plot device to lead to the car crash), and didn’t make sense. Since it wasn’t Willow casting the spells at Rack’s, why did the demon go after her? Was it supposed to have been called during her escapades in “Smashed”? If so, wouldn’t it have been better to have some kind of foreshadow in that episode, or even to make “Smashed” and “Wrecked” a proper two-parter (since they’re pretty much the same anyway)?
- Why exactly can’t Buffy find Rack? You’d have thought that being a Slayer would make her quite in tune with the ‘Big Bad’, and thus able to locate his place. After all, she’s able to do it without issues in “Two to Go”.
- The Buffy/Willow parallel that runs through the episode is overdone (the painful “who are we to be all judgey” chat), and doesn’t really work.
Do I like this episode more or less than the last time I watched it?This episode is still an epic fail, though I give it the teeniest slither of appreciation for its unintentional comic value. By having its attempts at seriousness backfire so spectacularly, “Wrecked” reaches a level of camp that even the cheesiest entries from S1 couldn’t hope to attain, though camp is at least blessed with self-awareness, of which this episode has none. For its terrible plot, character destruction, universe destruction, corny dialogue and utter predictability, I’m pleased to award “Wrecked” my very first zero out of ten, accompanied by a stilted round of applause for its dubious ‘achievement’.
). As with Willow, her slide from gateway abuse to desperate addict was so quick as to be laughable, and I can’t believe that someone approved the ridiculous ‘breaking into Buffy’s house to steal sage’ scene. I guess showing her waiting in line at the grocery store to buy some wouldn’t have had quite the same impact.
There really is no defending the plot here. Though I'll admit I'm intrigued as to how people might attempt to do it.