Eliza Dushku

The teeming masses have spoken

Right. I can see from the several thousand people who have written me about it, you want to know about the Jensen arc.

Remember the basic mythology: two warring powers of Fate, one of whom offers selected souls a chance to return and live again. Now, we don’t know which power is the "good" one, if we assume there is a good one; the power behind Tru clearly doesn’t make this offer to everyone who ever dies, or even everyone who ever died violently. That power has an agenda of its own, to shape human fate in a certain way, and the threads it pulls are in service of that. The individuals who are saved have roles to play in their lives that will send history off in new avenues. All that being said, the power Tru works for does offer more than its opposing force does; it offers a choice to those it selects.

Jensen dies. The audience point of view is not privileged to see what happens to his soul (for lack of a better term) next. But we know he never "wakes," he never asks Tru for help. Either his soul never had that door opened for it — never had the chance to return — or he refused it. In which case, his soul’s gone on to wherever souls might go.

Tru, however, saves him just the same, when her day rewinds. When Jensen’s dead body lies in front of her she doesn’t know the truth, that he’s already gone — though she may have some suspicions that what she wants to do is wrong, or dangerous; Davis suggests as much to her. But she’s had enough of losing people. Enough of rearranging her life for some power she can’t understand. She makes her own decision and it’s to stay awake as long as it takes, because if Jensen won’t ask for help, someone else eventually will; and she’ll save them both. The hell with Fate.

But Jensen’s soul is already committed — it can’t return, but his body, memories, and the habits of his personality continue after the time he "died." The idea was that over the course of the arc we would gradually see anomalies of character develop — unsettling moments, as the imprint of Jensen’s personality disintegrates, at the same time it becomes fascinated with death, in an almost wistful way. This would be pretty damned creepy, coming as it does alongside Tru’s growing physical intimacy with him. Jane Espenson wrote a beautifully disturbing scene that I’m sorry you’ll never get a chance to see — on one level, it’s just Tru and Jensen talking on the sofa during a movie, and on another level, oooooh.

As the arc plays out, we hear the jarring comments he’ll occasionally make, the way the things that used to mean something to him — like his need for his father’s respect — are just no longer vulnerabilities. We see scenes that suggest a growing involvement with violence, in an unsettling but ambiguous way, so Tru can’t be sure it’s there or not. Till one morning Tru wakes in bed with Jensen and goes about her day, which rewinds over the murder of Jensen’s father. Just before the rewind she learns that not only did Jensen do it, he’s been behind a string of recent killings (born of his fascination with learning about the thing he’s apparently been barred from — i.e., death). She rewinds — and wakes up in bed next to him, knowing now that he’s a monster.

And that she created him. This was once a young man who won her with his generosity and understanding, his good humor and sweetness. He’s still bright, he’s still clever, there’s no evidence against him. And he’ll be creating a lot more victims, starting on this rewind day with his father — unless she takes the responsibility for putting an end to him. So she finally turns to the person with experience in ending people’s lives: Jack.

That’s the basic arc; it would have brought you about halfway through the season. There were plans for the second half, partly based on the fallout from all this, but as you weren’t left hanging in the middle of that arc, it’s not as urgent.