The Buffyverse Character Countdown (#14)

#14.

Hero: Joyce Summers (Buffy the Vampire Slayer Seasons 1-5)

… my heart hurts.

Discussing Joyce is honestly quite difficult, for, as was the case with Jenny, most discussion of her character almost completely revolves around her departure from the series. It’s an event so seismic that nothing in Buffy the Vampire Slayer quite affects the audience on nearly the same scale. While, in my opinion, “Passion” is the greatest episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, there’s no question that “The Body” is the most groundbreaking and challenging episode of the series. Yet to restrict all discussion of Joyce Summers to her death is a disservice to her as a character. For Joyce is a very rare sort of hero in Buffy the Vampire Slayer: she’s a good mom and a good person.

Joyce is the rare hero on Buffy the Vampire Slayer who excels because of her lack of development. Much like Giles, Buffy’s foster father figure, Joyce has experienced almost all of her development off screen. We know that she’s a divorcee… and that’s about it. While we’re able to glean that Joyce was a bit of a wild child from the effects of Ethan Rayne’s chocolates in “Band Candy,” we otherwise know very little about the person she was prior to the events of the series. What we do know is that Joyce is at once highly protective of and dedicated to her daughter. While she’s often extremely hard upon Buffy and her slaying life in the first two seasons of the show, once she comes to terms with her daughter’s identity, she’s nothing less than entirely supportive. Indeed, even in her harshest moments towards Buffy in the events of the Season Two finale, her frustrations and even the harsh ultimatum she gives to Buffy are wholly understandable. After all, she’s dealing with a daughter who has accidentally blown up a high school, killed one of her dates (though he did turn out to be a robot), and fought vampires behind her back, risking her life. Who wouldn’t get a little pissed off?

Joyce is a mother to the entire Scooby gang (excepting Giles, of course: the two of them slept with each other while under the influence of Ethan’s munchies). Willow’s absent-minded yet religiously draconian family represses her magic and her aspirations alike, whereas Xander’s parents are almost wholly abusive and hazardous to his health. It’s no wonder that the two of them love the far more forgiving and supportive Joyce as if she were their own mother. Heck, Joyce is a good mother even to the magical collection of energy manifested into human form that is Dawn – a daughter who was literally retconned into her life. Joyce is also a model member of her community, curating an art museum and keeping up good contacts with her neighbors and friends. And, in spite of all her care for her children, she still has time to catch up on her favorite soap opera, Passions, and share that enjoyment with Spike!

This brings us to Joyce’s role on Season Five… <sigh>

Many people have said that Joyce’s death in the final minutes of “I Was Made to Love You” was a shocking development. To that episode’s credit, the reveal of her body is undeniably unsettling, and the wait between the first airing of that episode and the airing of “The Body” must have been torturous, but let’s not kid ourselves: we knew this moment was coming. Season Five was the single darkest season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and we’d had signs of Joyce’s illness throughout the entire season. Furthermore, given that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a song about maturing into adulthood, it’s only natural that a child will, at some point, have to face one of the most difficult moments of her life in the death of a parent. Buffy has nearly come into her own as an adult by the midpoint of the season, and there remains only one tie to the high school self we remember from the first three seasons: Joyce herself. From a narrative standpoint, there really was nothing more Joyce could have done for the story. Yet that narrative necessity doesn’t make her death any less painful for our main characters, and, by virtue of their suffering, the audience. While the audience doesn’t miss Joyce even to the same extent as characters like Jenny Calendar, there’s no doubt that this death is more affecting for the main cast. 

Joyce might not be a tremendous force of personality, a gallant figure who stands up in the face of evil, or the most complex character in the cast, but she’s an endearing and heartfelt presence and character. She’s the classic model of how a good person, as opposed to a great person, can be a hero in her own way, and Buffy and her friends are reliant upon her as a grounding presence for the narrative and their lives. She’s quite possibly the model for all of television in terms of handling character death, and she’ll forever live on in the hearts of Buffyverse fans.

Oh, and she hit Spike with an axe one time.

Villain(s): The Watchers' Council (Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 3, Angel Season 5)

Time for a more controversial choice for this list… in more ways than one.

There are, in some small corners of the Buffyverse fandom, a few scattered supporters of the Watchers’ Council. After all, the Council does have very good intentions: ridding the world of bloodsucking, soulless vampires is pretty much a unilateral good. Moreover, its network certainly makes its members more efficient at striking baddies down than most any other force on the planet; let it not be said that bureaucracy does not have its uses. And yet, in spite of these factors, we must address the Watchers’ Council for what it is: a patriarchal cabal that uses the power of young women to purge the world of what it perceives to be evil while affording their charges no choice or autonomy, artificially establishing rules and limitations that jeopardize their health and happiness. It instrumentalizes women, reducing them to little more than their superpowers. The Council is a dangerous force that jeopardizes its own standing as a “heroic” force to the point where it's little more than a gathering of closeted misogynists.

In one of the hallmarks of Season One’s badness, Buffy’s initial hesitance to accept a Watcher in the events of “Welcome to the Hellmouth” is treated as a mistake. Doesn’t a budding superheroine need some guidance. Fortunately for the spirit and morals of the series, Joss Whedon adds the nuance his plot needs in order for it to be philosophically valid. For it turns out that Buffy does not so much need a Watcher in order to succeed – she just needs Giles. It’s his individual guidance, care, and attention that matters, as he actually bothers to forge a relationship with her beyond that of mere teacher. Once we encounter the other members of the Watchers’ Council, however, we soon realize that most Watchers aren’t nearly as kind or as empathetic as Giles. Kendra’s unseen Watcher trains her to be a vampire killing machine who is near incapable of forming true friendships. Moreover, Faith’s first watcher is apparently somewhat incompetent, dying at the hands of Kakistos, a vampire whose only real advantage was enhanced durability. For all their talk of their necessity, Watchers are quite expendable. (Perhaps their shoddy training explains why Giles gets knocked out so much…)

Yet the Watchers’ Council’s presence grows steadily more sinister throughout Season Three. The first signs of peril emerge in the form of Gwendolyn Post, a renegade Watcher who claims to be the Council’s replacement Watcher for Faith. Post earns Faith’s trust only to betray her by seizing the magical Glove of Myhnegon for herself and nearly murdering her own ward… it’s only thanks to Faith and Buffy’s quick thinking and reflexes that Post doesn’t come to take over Sunnydale and turn the Slayers into piles of ash. Post’s treachery introduces a few crucial developments: not only does it further isolate Faith from the group and set up her downfall in the middle of the season, but it also forces the audience to question why Gwendolyn went rogue in the first place. Might it be that she is dissatisfied with the way the Watchers’ Council plans to save the world and wants to fix it in a way that she sees fit?

In “Helpless,” we start to see the truly dark side of the Watchers’ Council. To assert its power, the Council regularly performs a ritual known as Cruciamentum upon the Slayers: they put Slayers into a hypnotic state, drug them so that their superpowers fade, and then trap them in a cage with a vampire to see if they can survive. This exercise is framed as a “coming of age” ritual, but its real purpose is far more sinister. It’s been well-established in the series that few regular people, if any, stand a chance against a vampire. Moreover, the audience realizes that Slayers tend to be high school girls, far more pliable and malleable to the Council’s interests than their college-age and adult future selves. Let no mistakes be made: the Cruciamentum is little more than a cult of ritualized murders bathed in the language of tradition. Buffy’s is especially harrowing, given that she’s pitted against the truly psychotic vampire Zachary Kralik, a monster so terrifying that he could have been given his own spot on the list, were it not for the fact that he is the mere instrument of the Council’s overall will. Season 4’s “Restless” expands upon this danger, showing how the Watchers’ Council has been thwarting the powers of the Slayer and warping them to its own ends for hundreds of years.

The analogy of the Watchers’ Council is abundantly clear: they are “the patriarchy” incarnate. While, in real life, claiming that a cabal of men scheming to subordinate the women of the world to men’s will exists is suspect, the Buffyverse presents us with a group whose overt intentions are as such. In a more realistic sense, the Council represents sexist traditions that have functioned, in effect, to subordinate women whose only defense for their perseverance is the appeal to tradition. When that fails, the only appeal the institution can turn to is a flimsy appeal to utilitarian morality; change would cause too much harm to be warranted. Nearly all of these arguments are pure hogwash, debunkable after a mere six minute of debate, yet they do persist. The Watchers’ Council is every sea-lioning, dogpiling, gish galloping, and gaslighting sexist exchange you’ve ever witnessed.

Yet the Watchers’ Council’s evil doesn’t merely extend to the women it enslaves. Equally nefarious is its effect on the men within its structure. In the Angel episode, “Lineage,” we finally get to explore Wesley Wyndam-Pryce’s life in the Watchers’ Council prior to his arrival in Sunnydale, and we quickly realize why he was such a foppish and preening figure in the early days of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Wesley’s disapproving father is about as “perfect” a Watcher as the Watchers’ Council has ever produced, yet his modus operandi is shaming his son at every turn, making him feel dehumanized at every turn. It is clear that the Watchers’ Council forces its men into a very strict masculine script from which any deviation is treated with humiliation and condescension. It is from this culture of shaming that Wesley, whom we come to know as one of the most emotionally articulate and complex characters in the entire series, transforms from his true self into a cartoon cut-out of British pretentiousness.

The culture of repression and subjugation that the Watchers’ Council perpetuates is one of the most noxious and terrifying components of the Buffyverse. It’s little wonder that Buffy turns on them so quickly and Wesley chooses to shoot his father once the person whom he really cares about is threatened. Their outstanding influence over the lore of the entire franchise is such that they might have been worthy to enter the top ten. Unfortunately for the Council’s ranking on this list, the individual members of the Council we meet are largely uninteresting. Quentin Travers, the only member of the Council who truly represents all that they are, is about as one-note and uninteresting as characters on Buffy get. Moreover, the Council ends up departing in a puff of smoke as Caleb blows up the main members off-screen; it would have been truly interesting to see their antagonism with Buffy and the Potentials as both tried to fight the First in Season Seven. With these factors in mind, it’s hard to justify giving them a spot in the top thirteen. But that doesn’t in any way diminish their truly horrifying accomplishments and nature.