Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Alright folks, it’s confession time. Ready?

I like "Buffy vs Dracula." I think it might even be the best season opener the show ever did.

There, I said it. Phew. Feels like a weight off my chest.

So anyway, I’ve had a bunch of thoughts on it knocking around in my head for some time, so given the latest developments of the comics I thought I might as well rewatch the episode and philosophise on them.

Antiquated and Obsolete; Dracula vs Buffy

The episode opens by setting up what will prove to be the central theme of the entire season, that will culminate with Buffy sacrificing herself to save herself: Buffy vs the Vampire Slayer. Buffy’s in bed, restless, Riley asleep beside her. Buffy gets up. Without a word, she gets dressed, goes out, hunts down a vampire, kills it, goes back to bed and falls asleep in Riley’s arms. The Slayer and the girl coexist – but not without friction. When they try to have an ordinary picnic the next day, their attempt at a normal(ish) life is interrupted not only by Buffy’s supernatural strength destroying their means of entertainment

RILEY: Buffy slayed the football.

but also by the arrival of what we soon learn is THE vampire above all others – and as is customary, he arrives in a thunderstorm. (I’m sure if the budget had allowed, we would have seen a ship wash up on the beach with the whole crew dead and rats pouring ashore.) Count Dracula’s in town.

In a way, though, that’s almost by-the-by in this episode; because BtVS was never a show about the supernatural – it was a show about what it meant to be human, using supernatural elements for illustrations. In addition to the opening scene, there’s the scene with Willow and Giles.

WILLOW: No. It’s fine. It’s just, you’ve been Mr. Project all summer. You know? Labeling the amulets and indexing your diaries. I draw the line at making giant rubber band balls. That’s when you’ll just have to get a life. GILES: That’s what I’m trying to do, actually, is, um, get a life. WILLOW: It might go better if you left the house.

"Get a life" seems like a theme here. Season 5 is the season in which Buffy really starts having trouble with being the Slayer. Throughout the whole season, every character is consistently shown to be at least two seemingly contradicting characters; we have Suave!Xander vs Scruffy!Xander in "The Replacement", we have Spike and William in "Fool For Love", we have Dawn as both girl and key, Giles as both father figure and watcher... and obviously, Buffy as both Buffy Summers and Buffy The Vampire Slayer. It’s the season where we hear talk of death wishes, of hearts turning to stone, where even the Slayer is powerless when it comes to saving her mother. It’s the season where the clash between the human and the supernatural not only without, but within Buffy seems to become irreconcilable; where the stakes become so high that she’ll have to choose one side or the other – and finally does.

BUFFY: I knew ... what was right. I don’t have that any more. I don’t understand. I don’t know how to live in this world if these are the choices. If everything just gets stripped away. I don’t see the point.

It may or may not be a coincidence that when Dracula calls her "killer," she’s wearing the same red leather pants she wore when she went to murder Faith. Plus, of course, it’s a pretty iconic image; two seemingly irreconcilable versions of the same myth meeting up on a graveyeard in California...

DRACULA: We’re not going to fight. BUFFY: Do you know what a slayer is? DRACULA: Do you? BUFFY: Who are you? DRACULA: I apologize. I assumed you knew. I am Dracula. BUFFY: Get out!

(It’s hardly an accident that Timur Bekmambetov’s film adaptation (or at least the international cut) of Sergei Lukyanenko’s supernatural thriller Night Watch includes a TV playing that very scene of "Buffy vs Dracula" right before the film starts expositioning on the nature of light vs dark and how everyone has to choose sides themselves. Iconic indeed.)

Anyway, "Buffy vs Dracula" is, for all its metaphorical angles (and more on those in a minute), primarily a comedy episode. It’s very difficult for it NOT to be one, considering how Dracula comes across when you insert him into the Buffyverse.

Bram Stoker originally published Dracula in 1897 (exactly 100 years before BtVS went on the air) and while it wasn’t the first vampire novel, it quickly became the vampire novel. Thanks to the success of the book, the play, and the occasional movie (IMDb lists 167 titles with the word “Dracula” in them) Dracula has pretty much become the definition of a vampire, and his rules (as Spike points out in this episode) mostly apply to all other bloodsuckers too. Every vampire story to follow it – and every adaptation of Dracula itself, from Max Schreck to Elizabeth Kostova - may play with the myth that Bram Stoker established, make fun of it, subvert it, invert it, pervert it, reinvent it, amp it up, play it down, parody it, play it straight, modernize it, take it back to basics, build on it, scale it down, fictionalize it, claim it as historic facts, or even try to ignore it completely – but if you scratch long enough at any Western vampire story from the last century, you’ll find some version of Stoker’s evil count grinning at you, still recognizable despite all the attempts to remake him. (Dracula himself, of course, is a heavily remade version of the real Vlad Tepes – allegedly, Stoker found the name in a book and thought “meh, it’ll do.”) Tvtropes.org calls the phenomenon “our vampires are different” and points out that "a show will usually address the baseline rules even if they’re not enforced." That is to say, you’re free to invent your own vampire mythos, but much like Buffy spends a substantial portion of “Buffy vs Dracula” claiming to NOT be under Dracula’s thrall you’re still trapped by him, because you’re going to have to establish that vampires in your canon don’t fly/are invisible in mirrors/dress in long black coats/talk with a funny generic European accent/lust after English virgins/etc if you want people to accept them as vampires.* Which the Buffyverse did years before Dracula turns up.

BUFFY: I looked around, but soon’s they got clear of the graveyard, they could have just, voom! XANDER: They can fly? BUFFY: They can drive. XANDER: Oh.

And vampires in the Buffyverse are different. As monsters go, they’re pretty much ordinary people plus fangs, 86 the soul, with all the same hangups and individual traits as anyone else. They’re not larger than life, the creepy foreigner looking to seduce innocent women and destroy society like Dracula was; they’re very much real, very much IN the world, and the people who still see them as these immensely powerful, mythical, long-lived, lonely Dark Ones... well, they don’t fare so well; watch "Lie To Me." BtVS didn’t invent that kind of post-modern vampire - the tag line for The Lost Boys pretty much summed it up 10 years earlier – but they carried it to a logical conclusion far, far away from the castles of Transylvania.

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