Both Buffy and Faith are superheroes (or Nietzchean Ubermenschen, if you want to go that far...) For Faith, this means that the normal rules don't apply to them - if a few innocents get killed along the way, well, its all for the greater good, you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, etc. It's the same philosophy that leads from Marxism to Leninism to Stalinism: those who protect the people from the "demons" are entitled to a few privileges.
Buffy takes the opposite tack. Not only does she reject Faith's amorality, she also rejects the Watcher's council's bureaucratic moralisms. While they tell her she must work alone and in secret, she involves the rest of the group, in a more-or-less democratic way, with her activities (which has been the key to her surviving long past the average slayer) These last two shows have been a sort of test for Buffy, a tempting from "the dark side", if you will. I don't see them as being "moralistic", however: that implies the didactic tone of an after-school special. Rather, they have been moral in the deepest sense: showing good people struggling to make the right choices in an uncertain world.
I'm probably thinking about this too much, but Buffy is that rarest of shows, one that makes you laugh and cry and THINK about it afterwards. Not bad for a series on a second-rate network based on a truly awful movie...
Jim Baird
>I have been watching this new plot twist with both fascination and
horror.
>the Faith/Buffy thing is about a raging conflict between appetite and
social
>conscience -- this in a real-life cultural climate where both are
totally
>suspect. (Faith, of course, is appetite, she loves sex and food and
killing
>vampires; Buffy is cautious about everything, thinks she hates killing
>vampires and just does it to save the world)...Faith for a moment
convinces
>Buffy that she can enjoy herself *And* save the world (not to mention
things
>got pretty lesbo-suggestive between the two, which had to be punished,
>perhaps, since this is prime time TV and these are teenagers)...and
then all
>this horrible stuff happens. it's taking a more moralistic tone with
this
>story line than it has in the past, which I hope isn't permanent. but
damned
>if I'm going to be missing any of it, it's so good. ambivalently
addicted,
>Liza
>
>
>>Oh, and BTW, "Buffy" has just jumped a quantum level or two in the
past
>>2 weeks, as slayer #2 (it's a long story), Faith, accidentaly kills a
>>human and sends the whole show into much darker terrain than ever
>>before.
>>
>>Just one teeny tidbit: Buffy confronts Faith as being in denial about
>>what she's done, and Faith counters that Buffy's the one in denial,
who
>>needs Faith to act out what she's afraid to. Buffy doesn't respond
>>verbally at all, instead her body language shows how torn she is by
what
>>Faith says.
>>
>>This is nothing new, folks. When McCarthyism almost totally shut down
>>substantive political discourse, there was a veritable explosion in
pop
>>culture--some of it due to blacklisted writers under psuedonyms, to be
>>sure, but certainly not all.
>>
>>I wouldn't exactly compare "Buffy" to "The Twilight Zone", but then,
>>Sterling never did succede with anything that took a lot of time and
>>careful crafting, as a series does. Both shows have a surface
>>appearance that belies their seriousness, just as the politics of the
>>world around them had a surface appearance that belied their absurdity
>>and tragic silliness.
>>
>>(Snitchens DEFINITELY included.)
>>
>>--
>>Paul Rosenberg
>>Reason and Democracy
>>rad at gte.net
>>
>>"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"
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