The Buffyverse Character Countdown (#23)

#23.

Hero: Riley Finn (Buffy the Vampire Slayer Seasons 4-5)

Riley above Dawn, Whistler, and the Groosalugg! What sort of blasphemy is this?

Before other Buffyverse fans get on their high horses, let me make one thing clear: your complaints with Riley are my complaints with Riley. He’s the most Wonderbread hero in the entire series. His arc is never particularly interesting. His chemistry with Buffy isn’t exactly brilliant. Finally, his actions in Buffy’s fifth season are childish and ultimately present him as a selfish dick rather than a hero. That said, it must be remembered that out of all of Buffy’s love interests, Riley is arguably the healthiest, if only by virtue of the fact that he is human whereas her other two significant others are not. He is undeniably a bland character whose flaws are infuriating, but his genuine acts of heroism throughout the series are redemptive enough to at least get him this high on the list.

Prior to the events of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s fourth season, Riley is a member of the United States Armed Forces assigned to work with the Initiative. For a while, Riley serves as the group’s most elite operative and most competent soldier, taking out demons around Sunnydale. He works extremely well with his fellow soldiers and his commanding officer, Maggie Walsh, yet he does not have knowledge of the Initiative’s sinister intentions: he’s just a soldier following orders. By day, Riley takes on the cover of a psychology TA at Sunnydale University working under Walsh, whereupon he encounters Buffy Summers. The two first meet in that most romantic of college settings, the bookstore, and immediately spark off an attraction that we are near certain is going to pay off somewhere mid-season. And pay off it does. When Buffy and Riley realize that they are both the business of killing demons in the episode “Hush,” they are finally able to communicate their building romantic feelings for each other and become a couple.

The initial relationship between Buffy and Riley is remarkably healthy as compared to Buffy’s previous two relationships with Angel and Parker. Not only is Riley not an insensitive whore like Parker, but he’s also not a vampire who turns evil every time he achieves perfect happiness. He’s the first person Buffy sleeps with in the entire series who actually stays boy her side the next day, a subtle but crucial development for Buffy’s character; her partners’ failings are theirs, not hers. Unfortunately, while the beginning of Buffy and Riley’s relationship is healthy, it’s not exactly interesting. The Riley of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s fourth season might as well be called Wonderbread for his lack of overall intrigue. At first glance, one might be forgiven for calling him a Gary Stu, given that he’s a ripped, militarily-trained, vampire-hunting superman who also has a winning smile and is sensitive to the needs of his girlfriend. The only area where Riley is initially deficient is his vulnerability to being cursed by houses that force people to compulsively make whoopee (reminder: “Where the Wild Things Are” is one of the worst episodes of television I have ever seen). Things are so hunky dory between him and Buffy that’s it’s honestly tiresome to watch. The lack of romantic stakes – a constant source of dramatic tension in the Buffy-Angel romance in Seasons Two and Three – brings down Riley’s character as a whole.

Fortunately for Riley’s character, the cracks in his Captain America-lite exterior begin to show. As it turns out, Maggie Walsh has been secretly doping Riley for the past several months, making Riley dependent on military-grade steroids to keep up with killing average vampires, let alone keeping up with his superpowered girlfriend. Riley’s chemical dependence finally brings about some much-needed conflict into the romantic dynamic, and it honestly works as compared to the stagnating romance of the early season. Riley also faces down his newly zombified best friend in “Primeval,” siding with the Scoobies and rising above his background. He develops an autonomy he does not possess at the beginning of the fourth season, completing a satisfying, if not perfectly developed, character arc.

But that’s not the Riley hated by the fan base… no, that would be the Riley of Buffy Season Five.

For the first half of Buffy’s fifth season, Riley is the uninteresting Wonderbread love interest we grew tired of in the middle of Season Four. He does, however, develop some new character traits that aren’t exactly heroic, for Riley is dangerously insecure and disgustingly jealous. When Riley learns that Spike – a soulless vampire whom an emotionally stable Buffy would never date – has feelings for Buffy, he threatens to kill him. More importantly, Riley finds his manhood threatened after his girlfriend outpaces him in every physical and emotional arena. Buffy’s refusal to confide most of her greatest secrets with Riley also makes him feel all the more useless and inadequate. In his frustration, he pays for vampires to suck his blood in order to feel a rush that Buffy no longer provides him. Worse still, when Buffy confronts him for committing the vampire-slayer equivalent of paying for a prostitute, Riley delivers an ultimatum: either she opens up more to him, or he leaves. This is the point at which every Buffy fan threw sympathy for Riley out of the jet window and watched it shriek off into nothingness.

Given the vitriol against Riley and his douche-y behavior, I’m going to try to present Riley in the best light possible. Despite how disagreeable we might find Riley’s insecurities, they are entirely understandable. Riley has been a soldier and a provider for all of his life; he has followed the “masculine” social script for his entire life and is practically the model of what society says a “good guy” is. And for all of his virtue, Buffy trusts her friends far more than she trusts him. Riley is accurate when he says that Buffy doesn’t trust him with her emotions and her struggles nearly as much as she does with others: she nearly always turns to Willow, Xander, and Giles first. She has perfectly good reasons to do so – these people have been her friends and mentors for years, whereas she’s only known Riley for a year – but Riley feels that their relationship has progressed to the point where he should be her first point of contact. Add on his feelings of inferiority towards Buffy, and one’s got a cocktail of insecurities that need to be addressed. I must stress that to reproach Riley purely for being insecure is entirely unfair.

The problem arises in Riley’s actions. While Riley is entirely justified in feeling the way he does, he is in no way justified in reacting the way he does. Riley could have taken any number of healthy steps to coping with his insecurities: seeing a therapist, exercising more, or, most importantly, being honest and talking to Buffy about his problems. Instead, he practically cheats on her and then presents her with an ultimatum that is entirely unfair. It’s entirely inappropriate and entirely selfish, especially given that Buffy is trying to cope with her mother’s becoming increasingly sick. Riley’s prioritizing his personal needs over those of his relationship with Buffy are truly despicable and hate-worthy.     

So, yes, Riley is a dick. But, it’s his dickish behavior in Season Five that makes him genuinely interesting in a way characters like Dawn are not. Had his deteriorating relationship with Buffy been handled a little more subtly and with slightly better pacing, he actually would have made it higher on this list, as his insecurities make him far more interesting than the dough boy we met in Season Four. But his repulsive actions ultimately do much more to undermine his character than strengthen it, and the writing simply isn’t commensurate with his arc to make the character work perfectly. His one-episode guest spot in Season Six is also infuriating, seeing as he somehow develops a perfect life after leaving Buffy. He’s a character who is very flawed, but I do think his good qualities and actual arc are sufficient enough to earn him this spot. He’s not going to be anyone’s favorite character, but I think it’s unfair to call him the worst hero in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as so many people do.

Villain: Billy "Ford" Fordham (Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 2 - "Lie to Me")

Buffy the Vampire Slayer one-off villains are a funny breed, ranging from the ungodly bad (Moloch the Corruptor) to the ungodly terrifying (Peter Clarner). Unfortunately for most of the one-offs from Buffy’s high school seasons, they very rarely leave a profound impact on the heroes’ development. Despite each villain representing a new part of adult life the Scoobies must come to grip with, it’s rarely the case that the entire worldview of the characters has been shaken by a single monster-of-the-week. Thus, exceptions to the rule like Ford are all the more affecting. Ford is the primary antagonist of one of Buffy’s most important episodes, “Lie to Me”; the encounter with him sets up the primary themes of the second season into motion, and his defeat ushers in a fundamental change in Buffy’s character. Indeed, if not for the events of “Lie to Me,” the result of “Becoming – Part 2” might have been quite different indeed.

Ford is a former classmate of Buffy who re-enters her life after she moves to Sunnydale: presumably, he wishes to spend his senior year in a new neighborhood with friends. The sexual tension between the two is potent in the first half of the episode, as we can tell that Ford had some unrequited feelings for Buffy in the past. We soon discover, though, that Ford’s reasons for moving to Sunnydale are even more sinister than the desire to satisfy a romantic crush. After discovering that he suffers from an acute form of leukemia, Ford realizes that, should he become a vampire, he will never die of sickness. He thus aligns with Big Bads Spike and Drusilla, who agree to turn him so long as he delivers them a Slayer and a whole other cadre of villains on a silver platter. And deliver Ford does: he very nearly sacrifices dozens of innocent lives in order to save his own, betraying Buffy and her friends to the deadliest vampires they’ve faced so far.

The real tragedy of Ford lies not in his backstory but his decision-making process. Ford decides to murder dozens because he feels he does not have a choice; he prioritizes survival to the point where nothing else – morality, friendship, loyalty, basic humanity – matters. In doing so, he willingly becomes an agent of evil, abandoning choice as the locus of human power. By contrast, Buffy, a character defined by her choices, must make a painful choice of her own, beating and ultimately killing a former friend for the good of others. She submits not to her desires but to her higher reason self. Ironically, Ford does get his wish: Spike and Drusilla do turn him into a vampire. Yet he is one of the vampires for whom no sooner does he rise than does Buffy stake him. It’s a painful act for her, yet ironically abrupt for Ford’s inflated sense of self-importance.

Killing the vampiric Ford is one of the harshest and most affecting slayings Buffy performs throughout the entire series. This isn’t just another vampire she’s slaying: it’s someone who was a very dear friend. This death for Buffy is comparable to the death of Jesse for Xander in the series’ pilot, or the slaying of Dawn’s first vampire in “All the Way”: it’s a catastrophic blow to her worldview. Our heroine has already accepted that adulthood is harsh and has consequences, but it isn’t until “Lie to Me” that she realizes that her heart and soul are on the line just as much as her life. As George Washington of Hamilton indicates, dying is easy while living is harder. Yet, in some cases, we must accept lies in order to mitigate the sheer cruelty of the world around us. The slaying of Ford thus leads Buffy to ask Giles to lie to her for the first time in the series, a critical piece of foreshadowing that anticipates the events of the next two seasons.

Ford’s implications for the philosophy of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and his significant impact on Buffy’s character development are strong points in his favor. Unfortunately, Ford’s lack of a real character arc of his own limits his ranking on this list. Even worse is his actual execution – Jason Behr is by no means a bad actor, and his performance as Ford isn’t terrible, but it’s lacking in emotional depth or nuance. He seems to be playing the role out rather than making Ford a deliciously diabolical or truly surprising threat. It’s the writing that supports the character and the episode. Quite a shame, too, as Ford had the potential to be the very best one-off villain in the series.