Of Ends and Endlessness

So I've been thinking a lot lately about the last episode of Buffy. (Now, while I firmly believe that Buffy is the greatest television show of all time, this is not the post where I will defend that point. I don't have that kind of time today.) I'm not actually a fan of the final episode. I can kind of see where they were trying to go with it, but I thought that it fell really short when compared with the rest of the series, and ultimately it left me sad not only that the series had ended, but also that this episode was the last experience I would ever have of it.

Here isn't really the place to go into full detail on that either. Although I will say that the lack of mourning for Spike, the compression of mourning for Anya into one tossed-off "That's my girl" from Xander, the complete waste of time on an in-joke so obscure that all the dedicated fans I know missed it (the Trogdor joke - the only non-fan in the room for the finale had to explain it to us) - suffice it to say that the only thing that kept me from hiding in my room and bawling inconsolably afterward was the fact that I had thrown a party to watch it and my guests were still in attendance.

But all of those minor annoyances aside, I still had a major problem with the big spell. You know the one - Willow sits on the floor with the legendary Slayer scythe in her lap and pulls all the power she can handle to modify the ancient spell that creates and activates Slayers. Connected through the scythe, she holds on long enough to activate every potential Slayer currently on the planet - girls as young as eight or nine up through teenagers. As the show puts it, every girl who might have been a Slayer now is a Slayer. (The show's mythology was always a little vague on Slayer creation - it's hard to say what the earliest age it's possible to identify a Potential is, and there's also no information on at what point you presumably age out of the possibility. I'm assuming the spell did not also activate women in their thirties and beyond, who might have been Slayers if the current Slayer when they were fifteen, say, had died.)

To be honest, I wasn't initially that bothered by the spell. I thought the episode spent a little too much visual time on it (there was one recurring shot in particular, of a girl batting in a softball game - please, just hit the damned ball already!), but in general it seemed a fairly ingenious solution to the hordes of demons the Scooby Gang was facing. What bothered me came later, when a friend told me that Joss Whedon had explained that the spell was supposed to symbolize the final step in Buffy's journey to adulthood - the realization that she is not the only Chosen One, simply one of many, and that her life, no matter how heroic and dramatic, is not the center of the universe.

Which, let's face it, is hugely depressing. The idea that the final step to growing up is, essentially, realizing that you just aren't all that special, horrifies me. I agree that the life-or-death self-centeredness that is the hallmark of adolescence must eventually give way to a more nuanced and inclusive view of the world, of course. And I do occasionally marvel at how little time I spent thinking of others as a teenager. But that ending still seems to take it a step too far. Because if you're not the star of your own life - if you don't get to be the Slayer or the Princess or the Jedi Knight - then you're just a number, living out your tiny life alongside the billions of other tiny lives, lost forever in the vastness of the universe. If that's adulthood, I decline.

But what got me thinking about this was the endless go-round of everyday adulthood. The constant cycle of bill paying and grocery shopping and laundry and everything else. Especially lately, as I've had to deal with getting slightly older on all fronts: socially, where many of my friends are getting married and one pair even managed to buy a house; financially, where I've discovered that saving for retirement is what you get to look forward to even before you've paid off your student loans; and biologically, where I'm having to start taking into account things like maybe I should start wearing sunscreen every day if I don't want to look like my grandmother by the time I'm forty. Which is all pretty depressing in its own right. And I got to thinking that maybe Joss was right after all, that you do grow up and settle down and settle for what you've got.

So I was depressed by my tiny life and the tiny events that could eventually be expected to parade through it (if I could ever scrape together the funds to finance any of them): wedding, house purchase, children, vacations, etc. Until, thankfully, I remembered something that happened on another Joss Whedon show, when Angel had an epiphany.

"If there is no great glorious end to all this, if nothing we do matters... then all that matters is what we do. Cause that's all there is. What we do, now, today."
Angel, Epiphany (2:16)

Angel was both an adult and a hero, and this sounds like a pretty good philosophy to me. What you do every day matters, at least to you and the people around you. It matters a lot, in fact, even if all you do is all you can do in your tiny life, even if you're not a Slayer or a vampire or a Jedi Knight. And if that doesn't make you the hero of your own story, then I don't know what does.

I grew up with Buffy - went to high school in Southern California the same years she did and graduated college a week before the final episode aired. But it looks like I can't follow her to adulthood (a metaphor which actually works really well, as her story continues in comic book form, which I don't read as I can't seem to connect to the medium). I've graduated to Angel instead. Guess now I know why I moved to Los Angeles.