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“The Weight Of The World” has two major themes which run throughout the episode. The first is Buffy’s struggles with her own thoughts and feelings. After losing Dawn at the conclusion of “Spiral”, Buffy has broken mentally and has entered a state of catatonia. Those of you that watched this episode and thought “what the hell was all that about? That came out of nowhere!” were clearly not paying attention to both this season and the four seasons that preceded it. This episode is called “The Weight Of The World” for a reason. It’s a phrase that Willow uses in her conversation with Buffy. Since being called as the Chosen One at FIFTEEN years old, Buffy has had the weight and fate of the world on her shoulders. She’s supposed to be the only one in the entire world. All the vampires in the world, all the demons in the world, all the apocalypses...her responsibility. Sure, the Watcher’s Council have some responsibility too, but we’ve seen firsthand how little they care about the Slayer and how little support they give her. Plus, let’s not forget, outside of Buffy’s slaying stresses, she’s had a terrible year in general. Let’s take a brief look at her year, shall we?
The season opened with Buffy turning more into a hunter than the Slayer we’ve grown to know and love. She was slowly becoming darker and more like the First Slayer that was introduced to us in “Restless”. She felt like being the Slayer was stripping her of her ability to love and show emotions, so Giles took her to the desert, where the spirit guide (appearing as the First Slayer) told her that death was her gift...not the most inspiring of gifts, is it? Especially when you’re feeling that way already. Her mother spent the better part of half a year battling a brain tumour, which eventually killed her due to complications. Buffy was the one to discover her mother’s cold, lifeless body on the couch, and she was the one who was left to pick up the pieces and try to run a house and take care of a teenage sister. Before that, Buffy discovered that her sister isn’t really her sister, but a six-month-old mystical ball of green energy known as ‘The Key’, and a group of monks turned this key human and crammed it into Buffy’s life so she would protect it from Glory, a Hell God that’s bent on killing her and her friends. The monks violated Buffy’s mind and implanted fake memories so that Buffy would think that Dawn had always been a part of her life. Plus, Dawn is a teenager, so that comes with its own special set of challenges too. Finally, Buffy’s boyfriend preferred the company of vampires towards the end of their relationship and would rather they sucked him than Buffy did. After an emotional fight, she chased after him, only for him to not notice she was there (which is ironic considering he spent half a season complaining that he was invisible to her) and fly away from Sunnydale forever. Oh, plus, Buffy promised her mother (practically on her death bed) that she would always protect Dawn and keep her safe from harm...only to lose her to Glory. Can you see why she’s gone catatonic now?
The other aspect of this episode that’s wonderfully handled is the theme of choices. This episode is built around the idea of choices. Buffy is eventually given a choice by Willow to remain safe in her catatonic state or to go back with her and try to save Dawn. Holy shitballs, what if Buffy never came out of her catatonic state?! What if the rest of the show is taking place inside of her head? I’m gonna be stuck with deep thoughts all day...where was I? Oh, yeah, choices! Ben must make a choice between killing Dawn to stop Glory, helping Dawn escape from Glory, or allowing Glory to bleed Dawn and open the dimensional portals. The Scoobies must make a choice in how to proceed without the Slayer to guide them. Do they try to rescue Dawn or help Buffy? Do they return to Sunnydale or has Glory taken Dawn somewhere else? These struggles and choices aren’t randomly inserted into this episode, they’re there for a reason. The entire point of this episode is to emphasise the struggles that we face internally all the time. The struggles between making the right choice and the easy choice. The struggles between selflessness and selfishness. In this episode, Buffy’s mental struggles are literally taking place inside her own head on-screen, which is kind of badass.
The episode opens on a rather sombre note, with all of the Scoobies confused and directionless following Glory’s appearance, Dawn’s disappearance, and Buffy’s meltdown. Also, bless this show. In an episode that is filled with drama and emotional turmoil, they still find the time to add a little humour through Ben and Glory’s connection (are you trying to tell me there’s some kind of connection between Ben and Glory?). How often do we get to see Spike more knowledgeable than Giles? It also explains to the audience why Dawn forgets the fact that Ben changed into Glory right in front of her eyes in “Blood Ties”. Ben is Glory, Glory is Ben. One doctor, one God, one body, ‘kay?
After the Scoobies come to terms with this fact in an oh-so-hilarious scene, dissention kicks in almost immediately. With Giles injured and Buffy gone, they have no commanding leader. No-one to come up with a plan and set them all tasks...enter Willow.
I love it when Willow takes command because it’s been such a rarity until this point. She yelled at Xander and Cordy to get the hell out of her library back in season two, she scorned Giles and Angel for overworking Buffy in season two, and she’s had another moment here and there, but we’ve never seen a forceful, commanding, awe-inspiring Willow before this moment, in my opinion. It’s a sign of things to come. In the next season, one could argue that Willow is a little too commanding and powerful, but the latter half of this season certainly starts that process.
Willow: “Buffy’s out. Glory has Dawn. Sometime real soon, she’s gonna use Dawn to tear down the barrier between every dimension there is. So if you two wanna fight, do it after the world ends, okay? Alright, first we head back to Sunnydale. Xander’ll take Giles to a hospital, Anya’s looking after Tara, and Spike, you find Glory. Check her apartment, see if she’s still there. Try anything stupid, like payback, and I will get very cranky. Everyone clear?”
When have we ever seen Willow this confident? This powerful? Everyone, including a soulless vampire, follows Willow’s direction without argument. This is the same girl that was bullied at school and was too shy to talk to people when she first met Buffy five years ago. Willow assigns herself the task of diving into Buffy’s mind to try to get her out of her catatonic state. This is very advanced, intricate magic that Willow wouldn’t have been able to do at the beginning of this season. She’s growing damn powerful, damn fast. This episode also enforces the friendship between Buffy and Willow. For the first three seasons, Buffy and Willow had a lot of moments of closeness. One could argue that they were closer than Buffy and Xander. However, I’ve noticed a slight shift over the past couple of seasons, specifically this one. While Xander has been noticing Buffy and Riley’s relationship problems, giving her advice, supporting her while wearing a puffy suit, where has Willow been? Willow is happy and in love and spends most of her free time studying magic. There have been very few Buffy-Willow bonding moments in this season. “The Weight Of The World” shows us that Willow is empathetic, caring, and a great person to have around in a crisis. She supports Buffy and I think being inside Buffy’s mind helped her appreciate Buffy’s challenging life more. Yet, she doesn’t sugarcoat it for Buffy. She tells Buffy that her sister isn’t dead yet, but if Buffy decides to remain inside of her head and feel sorry for herself, she may very well be responsible for Dawn dying. The Scoobies take Buffy’s strength, skill, and ability to win time and time again for granted. They always have. Buffy has always found a way to win. To stop the evil and save the world. She’s lost a few people along the way and relied upon her friends to win sometimes, but she’s always found a way. Willow finally sees the toll this pressure and stress has taken on Buffy. Buffy entered a catatonic state for one simple reason...she failed. For arguably the first time ever, she failed. She lost Dawn. She can’t stop Glory. She can’t win.
Let’s not forget, Buffy didn’t enter a competition to be the Slayer. She didn’t choose this heart-wrenching responsibility. It was thrust upon her. More than anything, I feel season five has been a deconstruction of what it means to be the Slayer. The isolation and pressure that comes with it, the sense of pride that comes with it, the struggles that come with it. Buffy was kicked out of her old high school and labelled a problem child because she was the Slayer and was trying to stop vampires. She arrived in Sunnydale as a retired Vampire Slayer. She didn’t want to fight vampires or demons anymore, she didn’t want the responsibility of being the Slayer to strip anything else away from her life. For five years, Buffy has been desperate for a normal life. We’ve seen her resent being the Slayer, we’ve seen her runaway from being the Slayer (moving to Los Angeles between “Becoming” and “Anne”), but she’s always returned back to it because if she’s not protecting the world, people may die. Inside of her head with Willow, we’re subjected to a few key moments from Buffy’s life. We see Joyce and Hank (oh my God, Hank is back!) return home from the hospital with baby Dawn. This memory is fake and was created by the monks, but it feels real to Buffy. Young Buffy tells her parents that she doesn’t want a sister because they’re going to pay more attention to baby Dawn than her. This is something that we’ve seen Buffy struggle with right until Joyce’s death to a certain extent. Buffy had to be the responsible sibling, while Dawn was Joyce’s “‘lil pumpkin belly”.
We see young Buffy tell Joyce that she will protect Dawn. We see Buffy return to the desert, where she’s informed by the First Slayer that death is her gift. We see Buffy enter her mother’s old room, where a gravestone sits between the rest of the furniture. Willow tells Buffy she’s sorry, but Buffy says not to be sorry because death is her gift. Notice that Buffy, like the audience, believes that death being her gift means that a Slayer is all about death and darkness. Of course, what this actually means is that Buffy’s death will save the world. Buffy herself dying is the gift she has to offer the world in the next episode. We see Buffy pick up a pillow and suffocate Dawn to death because Buffy feels responsible for Dawn being taken by Glory. Why does Buffy feel guilty? Because for one moment, one brief moment in the Magic Box one day, Buffy gave up. She had a moment of weakness and allowed herself to think that she couldn’t stop Glory. She couldn’t save Dawn. In that moment, Buffy feels that she let her sister die...
(c'mon, be honest, who hasn't daydreamed about doing this to Dawn at one time or another?)
Buffy (there are actually two talking): “I felt it. Glory will beat me. And in that second of knowing it, Will, I wanted it to happen.”
Willow: “Why?”
Buffy: “I wanted it over. This is...all of this...it’s too much for me. I just wanted it over. If Glory wins, then Dawn dies. And I would grieve, people would feel sorry for me, but it would be over. And I imagined what a relief it would be. I killed Dawn.”
Willow: “Is that what you think?”
Buffy: “Some part of me wanted it. And in the moment Glory took Dawn, I know I could have done something better, but I didn’t. I was off by some fraction of a second, and this is why I killed my sister.”
ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! You’ve saved the world how many times?! You’ve saved how many lives?! So what if for one second you allowed yourself to think that you couldn’t win? Willow is right, it’s called guilt! Note that Buffy’s first memory inside of her head is from when she was a child. From a time in her life where things were simple and easy. When she didn’t have the fate of the world resting on her delicate shoulders. Buffy was forced to grow up too early. She was stripped of her childhood and innocence while she was still in her mid-teens. Buffy has given up. She doesn’t want the responsibility and the pain anymore. She wants it to be over. I’m going to talk about this much more in my review of “The Gift”, but if this season’s finale was the last ever episode of the show, part of me would be okay with that. Buffy sacrificed herself to save her sister and the world, and she was at peace and happy in her afterlife instead of struggling to stay afloat as a human. It makes her friends tearing her out of her afterlife all the more horrific. They did it for the right reasons, as they didn’t know that Buffy was in a heavenly dimension, but they robbed Buffy of her reward all the same. Her reward of being happy and at peace. Willow offers Buffy a choice: come back with me and try to save Dawn or stay here in Catatonialand and live in the knowledge that you very well may have killed your sister by not trying to save her. Buffy decides to leave with Willow.
Glory: “She’s not supposed to remember that! Nobody should! The cloak between Ben and me is fading! I almost helped her! He...I wanted to. I can’t do this!”
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Ben: “All the blood...I can feel it. Still warm and wet. Glory, oh God, she slaughtered hundreds of men. But I can feel them...breaking.”
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Glory: “I look around at this world you’re so eager to be a part of and all I see is six billion lunatics looking for the fastest ride out. Who’s not crazy? Look around. Everyone’s drinking, smoking, shooting up, shooting each other, or just plain screwing their brains out ‘cause they don’t want ‘em anymore. I’m crazy? Honey, I’m the original one-eyed chicklet in the kingdom of the blind, ‘cause at least I admit the world makes me nuts.”
That speech from Glory at the end is significant as it extends far beyond the Buffyverse and delves into the realms of reality. Humanity can be messed up sometimes and this entire season has been exploring what it means to be a human being. We’ve seen soulless vampires committing selfless acts, we’ve seen former Vengeance Demons trying to adjust to living a human life, we’ve seen mystical balls of energy coming to terms with being a newly made human. Now, finally, we have Ben. A man who’s been fighting the God sharing his body his whole life. Ben has always fought against Glory because he wants to be his own person, his own man. He doesn’t want Glory sharing his body to ruin his life. Glory has never allowed Ben to live a normal, happy existence. We’ve seen him lose his job, which he described as the only thing he’s ever really cared about, we’ve seen Ben wake up in random places in a dress...it’s not been the easiest life for Ben. Now, with Glory’s return home imminent, Ben will fade from existence...or will he? Once Glory offered him immortality and a life without sharing a body, I knew he was going to take it. We once again head back to the notion of choices. Before this episode, one could argue that Ben was a good guy and certainly didn’t deserve to be suffocated by Giles in “The Gift”. However, here Ben chooses himself over Dawn. Himself over the world. This choice leads to Ben being a villain. She offered him a life, an immortal life that was separate from hers, which is the very thing he’s always wanted. Ben made a choice and the next episode is the consequences of that choice. The conversation between Glory and Ben - where Glory is trying to convince Ben - is splendid. It’s edited beautifully, the dialogue is top-notch, and I need to give Michelle Trachtenberg a special mention too. How good is she throughout this episode? She’s such an underrated actress! I guess when people think of Dawn, they think of “get out, get out, get ouuuuuuut!” and not the more emotional moments of Dawn’s character journey. I like that at first Ben was against Glory’s plans. In fact, he was contemplating killing Dawn to stop Glory. The conversation between the two in the alley is rather long, but by the end of it Ben has made his choice. He explains it best to Dawn himself...it’s Dawn or him. He’s choosing himself.
While this episode primarily focuses on Buffy’s catatonic journey with Willow and the internal struggles between Glory and Ben, it does give us one more excellent pairing that we’ve never seen before...Spike and Xander. Sweet mother, mercy. How great are these two together? Sexual tension out the wazoo! They can barely tolerate each other’s company, yet they make a surprisingly good team. They stopped Doc (Doc is back!...Oh, wait, nevermind, he’s dead...oh, wait, nevermind, his eyes just opened as they left the room) and were a valuable part of the Scoobies. There’s just one problem. Xander still can’t seem to remember that Ben is Glory...
Spike: “Found Ben’s room at Glory’s. Didn’t learn much.”
Xander: “Wait, wait, wait...Ben? At Glory’s? You’re saying all this time he’s been subletting from her?”
Spike: “This is gonna be worth it...”
*Spike slaps Xander around the head*
Spike & Xander: “Oww!”
The episode closes with Buffy, freshly out of her catatonic state, ready to save Dawn and battle Glory to the death. There’s just one problem...
Giles: “Dimensions will pour into one another with no barriers to stop them. Reality as we know it will be destroyed and chaos will reign on Earth.”
Buffy: “So, how do we stop it?”
Giles: “The portal will only close once the blood is stopped and the only way for that to happen is, umm...Buffy, the only way is to kill Dawn.”
The episode fades to black.
Quote Of The Episode
Anya: “When did all this happen?”
Spike: “Not one hour ago! Right here, before your very eyes! Ben came, he turned into Glory, snatched the kid, and pfft! Vanished, remember?...You do remember? Is everyone here very stoned?”
*Everyone continues to look at Spike blankly*
Spike: “Ben! Glory! He’s a doctor, she’s The Beast. Two entirely separate entities sharing one body. Like a bloody sitcom. Surely you remember?”
Xander: “So, you’re saying, Ben and Glory...”
Anya: “Have a connection.”
Giles: “Yes, obviously, but what kind?”
Spike: “Oh, I get it. That’s very crafty. Glory’s worked the kind of mojo where anyone who sees her little presto-change-o instantly forgets. And yours truly, being somewhat other than human, stands immune.”
Willow: “So...Ben and Glory...are the same person?”
Xander: “...Glory can turn into Ben, and Ben turns back into Glory.”
Anya: ...“And anyone who sees it instantly forgets.”
Spike: “A Kewpie doll for the lady!”
Giles: “Excellent. Now, do we suspect there may be some kind of connection between Ben and Glory?”
*Spike sighs loudly*
FINAL SCORE: 7.5/10
What are your thoughts on "The Weight Of The World"? Did you enjoy this episode? Dislike it? Let me know all your thoughts in the comments section below!
Everything about this season is epic!
ReplyDeleteOne of my favourite Spike moments with "Is everyone here very stoned?" (So I heartily approve the QOTE). Buffy's catatonia was interesting to watch, seeing inside her head, with Willow working that powerful magick that we will see kicked up many notches next season.
ReplyDeleteGreat review Sir!