7.05 Selfless

[Clare]

7.05 Selfless - Episode #127
Anya has a crisis of conscience after a wish she grants leaves twelve fraternity boys dead.

Review (also post a score out of 10) and discuss this episode.

[partcynic]

7x05 “Selfless”

Episode Rating = 2

If “Lessons” and “Same Time, Same Place” were weighing in on the side of ‘S7 might be good’ while “Beneath You”/”Help” suggested ‘it’ll be a mess’, then “Selfless” was the point at which equilibrium was lost and a bad year started looking more likely. Suffering ever since it lost Joss as showrunner, the series no longer seems to be able to juggle drama and comedy with the finesse it once possessed, and in its attempt to produce an Anya equivalent of “Fool For Love”, “Selfless” threw everything it could at the viewer. Unfortunately, the writing was so uneven that it ended up being an unconstructive, slapdash composite of silliness and heavy-handed melodrama, which lurched back and forth between tones without ever making a settled compromise. Worse still, in its attempts to develop Anya, this ep actually did the opposite; driving the final nail into the coffin of her consistency and believability. She’d been unravelling slowly but steadily ever since S4 – and after this, there was nothing left.

What I Liked about “Selfless”:

- Emma Caulfield did a good job throughout, and managed to be convincing in her portrayal of Anya’s turmoil. It’s interesting to see that she’s perfectly capable of handling more dramatic material, which makes me wish that the writers have given her something meatier to do during her four year run (not that her comedy skills are bad, but why not capitalise on your actors’ full ranges?)

- The early shot with the murdered frat boys and the subsequent pan to a blood-covered Anya were effective, as was her breathless “what have I done?”

- I have a lot of problems with the flashbacks, but parts were funny in their sheer ridiculousness (the villagers’ reactions to finding out Olaf’s a troll; Anya responding to D’Hoffryn’s “What did he do?” with “a load-bearing bar matron”), and the continuity references were neat. It’s slightly intriguing that Anya wasn’t always frightened of bunnies, and her former fondness for communism contrasted well with her present love of the free market. Admittedly, these things were more like clever asides in a comic book than good writing, but I appreciated the attention to detail.

- I loved the cut from Anya happily singing in the flashback to being impaled on the wall. It was the most jarring and effective one we’ve had since “The Body”.

- I haven’t been fond of all the cutesy, comedy vengeance demon stuff, so it was refreshing to have D’Hoffryn be nasty and evil again. It’s good to have a proper reason to fear him, and I enjoyed both his comment on Willow and Warren (“that was water cooler vengeance”) and his excellent quip about the frat boys (“it looks like somebody slaughtered an Abercrombie and Fitch catalogue”).

What I Disliked about “Selfless”:

- As I said in the introduction, this ep cemented the destruction of the Anya character. While you can’t really take S3 into account when looking at her development as a whole (back in “The Wish” and “Doppelgangland”, she was intelligent, slightly creepy, showed understanding of social mores, and spoke fluent, non-stilted English – all of which mysteriously disappeared a few eps into S4), the person she is here isn’t even consistent with the strange, unable-to-understand-reality figure she was from “The Harsh Light of Day” onwards. Throughout the past three seasons, we’ve had multiple instances of Anya not fitting in because she was an ex-demon (that’s even stated outright in several episodes). However, now it turns out she was just a strange person all along. If that’s the case, we should have been told that right from the start; as it is, it messes up much of her character growth.

- The idea of featuring scenes from Anya’s past was good, but the execution left a lot to be desired. For all of the time spent on them, we learnt almost nothing new, and they seemed content to just point at “Triangle”. What’s more, little of what we were shown tied in to Anya’s character development in any meaningful way – the sudden suggestion that she lacks a sense of self struck me as abrupt (she seemed just fine in S3...), and it comes across more as a tool for giving the character something to do than a legitimate attempt at giving her layers. And if this desire to cling to whatever comes by has been driving her behaviour throughout her existence, surely we could have had some foreshadowing regarding it before?

- Why was Aud ostracized by the villagers when they all spoke and behaved as “strangely literal[ly]” as she did? In addition, when we first saw them together, why were Aud and D'Hoffryn speaking in American English, when that language didn't exist at the time (and the show went to all the effort of subtitling the Swedish dialogue earlier on)?

- Dawn's ‘do what everyone else does’ talk to Willow was unfunny and unrealistic, and Alyson Hannigan overdid her ‘happy’ acting on Willow’s back-to-school cheerfulness.

- I thought that the girl who played Rachel was unconvincing, and the script’s explanation for her wish was confusing. It seems that for some reason, Anya was randomly at the frat house (or nearby) and heard Rachel make her wish; consequently deciding to grant it. There’s nothing in the dialogue to suggest that Anya met her or tried to goad her into saying something, which is inconsistent with how we’ve seen her work in the past. I guess we just have to assume that she was in the right place at the right time, and had excellent hearing.

- Why did Anya choose to punish the frat boys by summoning a dangerous demon that could break loose and kill innocent people? Couldn’t she have just made them rip their own/each other’s hearts out?

- Willow’s ’reversion’ to her dark self when she cast the barrier spell was silly, and tossed in for a cheap shock.

- The Buffy and Spike scene in the basement was gratuitous. I know James Marsters is a contracted regular, but if there’s no role for him to fill within the episode, he shouldn’t be in it. And did Buffy really think that shouting at a deeply disturbed man would get him to leave the school? Suggesting he go was fine, but her delivery was way off.

- Sarah Michelle Gellar’s acting is getting steadily worse. She turned out low quality performances in “Beneath You” and “Help”, and she’s just as flat here. She’s barely trying during the Buffy/Xander argument, and wears the same bored, grim look on her face in every scene.

- Speaking of the argument, it was terribly handled. We first had the bizarreness of Xander chastising Willow for not telling them about Anya when they’d only just met up (what was she supposed to do? Teleport to the woods?), and then Buffy’s overdone “I have to kill her” speech. I didn’t buy her argument that it was the only way (has no-one ever spoken with Anya and found out how she lost her powers the first time?), and neither she nor Xander bothered to address the specific issue at hand; instead choosing to rant at each other like spoiled children. The stream of ad hominem attacks got tiring, and came across as being contrived for the sake of ‘drama’.

- It was cute to bring up Xander's lie in “Becoming”, but it’s something that should have been dealt with in S3. The reference was also irrelevant to the plot of not only this episode, but all of the subsequent ones. If it was never going to amount to anything, why bother raising the issue?

- Why does Willow still have D’Hoffryn’s amulet? Wouldn’t it have been cleared away in “Gone”? (Sure, she had magical items concealed around the house until “Older and Far Away”, but why would she have kept that, of all things?)

- The Buffy/Anya fight was slow and dull, and when did Anya learn martial arts? It was also weird that Buffy decided to make the frat house her first port of call (wouldn’t going to Anya’s apartment be the most obvious option?), and had apparently walked through town with a sword in plain sight (remember how she used to have a bag, or how in “Becoming” she at least wrapped something around the blade to try and disguise it). And she has the sword because.... why, exactly? She knows (from “Older and Far Away”) that it won't hurt a vengeance demon, so why bother? Was she fighting to buy time? What was the point?

- Anya’s song was okay, but not up to the quality of those in “OMWF”, and it introduces continuity issues into that episode (such as Anya asking if only the Scoobs were implicated when she'd heard the mustard people singing).

- The roles of vengeance demon necklaces shouldn’t have been ignored, especially since both Anya and Halfrek are clearly wearing them when they’re chatting (before Willow comes in). Given that Anya knows that destroying her necklace will undo her wishes and strip her powers away., why doesn’t she consider it? And if her power centre had moved to something else, we really needed to be told what it was.

- Halfrek’s death was a non-event. For the dramatic climax of this ep to have emotional impact, you had to care about Halfrek and what she meant to Anya. I didn’t, so the scene meant nothing to me (now, if D’Hoffryn had killed Xander; that would have been something). Still, it’s nice that we won’t have to see that annoying character again.

Do I like this episode more or less than the last time I watched it?

Sadly, I liked it less. While I want to give some kudos for the obvious effort that went into “Selfless”, the final product is just a glaring example of what happens when you emphasise spectacle over substance. For all of the flashbacks, singing and angsting, there was very little content, and I really shouldn’t be coming out of a character expose having learnt scant new information about its centrepiece. On top of the pre-existing weaknesses, we also have to address the problem that none of the subsequent episodes dealt with what was brought up here, so it may as well have not happened (which consequently means that the entirety of the Xander/Anya break up was for nothing). None of this is conducive to a memorable, engaging or interesting episode, so all I can give “Selfless” is a disappointing two out of ten.